Aventures d’Alice au pays des Merveilles

First edition of the French translation, by Henri Bué.

A precious copy: that of Jacques Lacan, who later gave it to his daughter, Caroline.
The copy had previously belonged to Sidney Williams, the first bibliographer of Lewis Carroll (A Bibliography of the Writings of Lewis Carroll, London, 1924). His private library label appears on the front endpaper, referencing the copy as no. 51.

This is the foundational book behind the “mirror stage” and the theory of the image developed by Lacan in 1936. His daughter Caroline, born the following year, was given “Image” as a third given name — an unmistakable reference. She died accidentally on 30 May 1973 in Juan-les-Pins, struck by a car driven by a drunk driver.

The theory of the image known as the “mirror stage” originated in a lecture written by Lacan at the end of 1935, which he delivered the following year in Marienbad at the international psychoanalytic congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, a few months before Caroline-Image’s birth. He would continue to rework this concept throughout his life, eventually incorporating it into the broader concept of the imaginary.

It is hard not to see the many connections between the mirror theory and Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece: through Alice’s father, Carroll suggests, as Lacan would later argue, that “the real is the impossible” — the impossible of poetry that underlies everything. Tim Burton’s film adaptation, which draws heavily on Lacanian theory, makes this explicit from its opening scene: young Alice, terrified by the characters she sees in her dreams, asks her father, “Am I mad?” “Yes,” he replies, “completely bonkers, but all the best people are.” The psychoanalysts of Lacan’s Cercle Psychanalytique de Paris were not mistaken in this connection: on 29 April 2010 — twenty-nine years after Lacan’s death — they unanimously awarded Tim Burton the first Prix de Psychanalyse Lacanienne for his film.

In defining the mirror stage (from the Latin mirare, “to look at with wonder”), Lacan describes primary narcissism, that unique and magical moment when, facing the mirror, the child grasps itself in its singularity — an impregnable fortress, the same one that the honorable mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson reinvented in his fairy tale, using his extraordinary imagination and, above all, his magic door, to pass through the mirror into another dimension.

Lacan treated Carroll’s work as a time machine, an instrument of prediction and a magnifying glass: “It is psychoanalysis that can best account for the effect of this work,” he declared in 1966 on France Culture, on the occasion of the centenary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland: “it is an enigmatic work insofar as it produces an unease from which a singular joy arises, and insofar as it holds a considerable grip on its reader without evoking notions of tragedy, destiny or youth (…) That is precisely the secret, and it touches on the purest network of our condition as beings: the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.” For Lacan, only his discipline could unlock the mystery of the work, notably by invoking the “theory of the subject,” which explains how Lewis Carroll, by addressing a little girl, can reach us all: “it is because Alice embodies a negative entity bearing a name I need not pronounce here if I do not wish to lead my listeners into ordinary confusions (…). It is not without significance that Alice appeared at the same time as The Origin of Species, of which she is, so to speak, the opposite. The epic register expresses itself as idyll within ideology. The correlation of the drawings, about which Lewis Carroll was so meticulous, foreshadows comic strips” (Jacques Lacan on Alice in Wonderland, France Culture, 1966).

Lacan had already addressed the subject of Alice some years earlier, notably in his Seminar VIII: “Swift and Lewis Carroll are two authors to whom, although I do not have time to comment on them in the ordinary course of things, you would do well to refer, for you will find in them much material bearing very closely — as closely as is possible in literary works — on the theme I am currently closest to [namely, the ‘symbolic function of the phallus’]” (Séminaire VIII, 1960–61, Seuil, 2001, pp. 297–298).

Jacques Lacan almost certainly owned this copy while composing his mirror theory in the 1930s, before giving it, in the fifties or sixties, to his daughter.

The half-title bears the ink-stamped ownership mark “Caroline.” After her death in 1973, the copy returned to the psychoanalyst’s library.

On the work:

On 4 July 1862, Lewis Carroll was still only the Reverend Charles Dodgson, a lecturer at Christ Church College, Oxford, when he went boating on the River Isis with the Reverend Duckworth and the three Liddell sisters — Charlotte, Edith and Alice. During this ten-kilometer outing, Carroll improvised a story to entertain the girls. Two years later he presented Alice Liddell with an illustrated manuscript of the story under the title Alice’s Adventures Underground. Three years after that, in 1865, Macmillan and Co. published the first edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, illustrated by John Tenniel. Tenniel, a self-taught illustrator, had joined the magazine Punch in 1850 as a draftsman and caricaturist. The woodcuts he produced for Alice are among the masterpieces of book illustration, so closely bound to Carroll’s text as to be inseparable from it. The collaboration continued for the subsequent Alice books: Through the Looking-Glass (1870) and The Nursery Alice (1890).

This first French edition, translated by Henri Bué and published by the same publisher, appeared one month after the German edition of the text and reproduces all the engravings of the English edition. The translator was the son of one of Lewis Carroll’s Oxford colleagues, a professor of French. Henri Bué faced considerable difficulty producing a sensible translation faithful to the spirit of the text, especially for the wordplay and numerous songs.

It met with only limited success compared with the rediscovery of Alice fifty years later by the Surrealists, and particularly by Louis Aragon, whose 1929 translation of The Hunting of the Snark opened the way to an entirely different reception of the work and brought it into the collective imagination. “The two Alices are not books for children but rather the only books for which we become children again,” as Virginia Woolf put it. Jacques Lacan would later take up the story.