onsdag den 10. juni 2015

Danske Carroll-links (Alice-føljeton d)

Uklart om Lewis Carroll har læst Niels Klim, men han havde muligheden for at gøre det og kombinationen af omstændeligt-falde-ned-i-hul og spise-kage forbinder sig så fint - har virkelig ingen fået øje på det før - med Alice:

"Modern science fiction provided Carroll with a more recent set of narratives to play with, because pltos in which characters fell to the centre of the earth, og discovered strange new civilisations underground, were increasingly popular in the nineteenth century. Earlier examples had included Ludvig Holbergs utopian satire Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground (an English tranlastion was published in 1845), which begins when the hero´s rope gives way and he falls into an abyss, although he still has enough time to take a cake out of his pocket and eat it; and Jacques Casanova's five-volume Icosameron (1787), notable chiefly for a creepy plot that features twelve-year-old twins who marry and procreate, and multicoloured hermaphroditic dwarfs who feed by sucking on each other's breasts."

Et andet dansk link, ikke direkte til Alice. ("these ideas" er ideer om omskiftelig alders-identitet):

"Other kinds of writing offered Carroll tempting opportunities to play with these ideas. In january 1867, he read The Fountain of Youth (af Frederik Paludan Müller! LB), a Danish fairy tale published by Macmillan that had been reviewed alongside Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in The Scotsman at the end of 1866 and that carried a full-page advertisment for his book. The story revolves around a gnarled Spanish solider who follows Columbus to America, 'the distant land of gold and wonder', and there finds 'fountain of life' in which wounds are healed and withered flowers borught back to perfumed loveliness. After taking a dip in the fountain, he sleeps for several days, and on awakening discovers that he has been restored to his youthful prime, although with predictably unhappy results: his children fail to recognize him, his wife rejects him, and he realizes that although many people dream of housing a young heart in an old body, this trick does not work the other way around. Recoiling in horror after becoming 'a stranger to himself', he is forced to wait for his blooming exteriot ro catch up with his crabbed insides."

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