Sylvie and Bruno

(The following is a re-posting from the April 27,2012 entry for the Thirty Poems in Thirty Days thread.)


If you’re anything like yours fooly and find that you seldom get to go out and have any fun, allow me to offer a suggestion. The next time you find yourself in a melancholy mood, try lifting your spirits with a healthy dose of Lewis Carroll. No, I don’t mean the two classic Alice books. I mean Sylvie and Bruno. You can read the complete novel right here on the LitNet.

Lewis Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898), considered Sylvie and Bruno to be his masterpiece. Never mind Northrop Frye’s opinion that a writer is a poor judge of the value of his own work– in this case, Dodgson may have been right. I know I didn’t laugh aloud at Alice in Wonderland nor its sequel, but this one had me chuckling, giggling, roaring, and any other adjective describing a response to comedy.

I've read some online treatises which subject this tour de force to the painful treatment of deconstructionism: while some make a couple of good points, scholarly articles all but ignore the overall hilarity. I found Sylvie and Bruno to be a linguistic romp, free-wheeling, disjointed, and digressive as Tristram Shandy, while subtly concealing slyly insidious observations about politics, urban and country society, and religion. Philosophy, especially Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, falls prey to the satiric treatment; the author, who had already earned great esteem for his scholarship, even pokes fun at his own field of mathematics. Once again I greatly regret that decades ago I never paid attention in math class; if nothing else, it would have allowed me to “get” more of the mathematical jokes. But Sylvie and Bruno is not entirely set in the humdrum workaday world; several madcap scenes occur in a topsy-turvy fairy land.

The unnamed narrator, smart and at times densely naive, presents the title characters, a delightful couple of children – or are they? The little girl, capable of charming the bejeezus out of everyone with whom she comes in contact, is sensitive and sweetly-sentimental, yet witty enough not to be cloying, as Oscar Wilde famously found Little Nell. Her brother, Bruno, who goes to great lengths to avoid doing schoolwork, is a major source of pratfalls and unintentional bon mots, his verbal humor delivered with a slight speech impediment.

Other characters include a pair of brothers who are mid-level government officials, one of whom attempts to finagle himself into becoming emperor. Throw in a couple of addle-brained professors, a commitment-shy bachelor doctor and his supposed lady love--a couple whom the author employs to mock the romances common in Victorian novels as well as its implausible conventions (such as the narrator suddenly having to rush out of town “on business,” not to return for a month.) A number of minor characters round out the cast, notably the fat, spoiled “Uggug,” a name with which few, if any, of Dodgson’s young readers would have experienced the shock of recognition, let alone the embarrassment of identification. Similarly, there is a brief appearance by a pompous ambassador announced as “His Adiposity, the Baron Dopplegeist.” The book will make you "chortle" (a Lewis Carroll nonce) with one-liners as funny as you’ve ever heard in a Marx Brothers movie.

Highly recommended for any reader who loves words as much as he or she loves a good joke.

Gotta be worth a read then :D

It looks like a lot of fun, Auntie.

Interesting. I shall take a look. I'm not a great fan of Alice, but I like his poetry

It was kind of rough going, at least chapters 1 & 2. Books simply aren't written this way anymore, which is to say, really, with each passing year it gets harder to read a book like this.

As for a math joke, the way he described pseudo-Sylvie's face (as hidden behind a veil) was funny in mathematician's kind of way-- a blank ellipse lacking even foci to suggest mouth and nose.

However, there was something quite insightful in the author's introduction:

"Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature--at least I have found it
so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it
comes is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is,
when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up,
and to write any amount more to the same tune."

-- Charles Dodgson







J

I don't really understand why it was hard going, Jack. Is the syntax? The full-bodied sentences? The supernal intelligence? I'll have to check itout, but, like prendrelmick, I prefer the poetry. Or at least Jabberwocky, which is a favorite of mine.

Did not get Jabberwocky at all. Read the Alices but was rather disappointed. I think I liked the movie better, though I did like the pig baby part and the pepper song. I was going to read Sylvie and Bruno, but I got intimidated by the math stuff and decided not to.

I just finished chapter 7 where My Lady and her husband the Vice-Warden are showing off their son, Uggug, to the Baron. It's pretty good. Better than Alice so far.