As I revisited this interview that the author Marie Darrieussecq gave me on 24 October 2024 for *La Libre Belgique*, I found myself falling down a rabbit hole once more.
Not just any rabbit hole. Alice’s. We think we know it because Disney has repainted it in blue and white, because a rabbit is running through it, late for a meeting, because a cat is smiling as it vanishes into thin air, and because teapots there create social dynamics rather akin to the end of a banquet among distant cousins. We think we’re entering a wonderland. We forget that the first thing Alice does there is to fall.
A long time.
A very long time.
It didn’t take Marie Darrieussecq long to clear up the misunderstanding. Alice in Wonderland, she said, is a nightmare. A deeply unsettling nightmare. Fortunately, a very funny one. It was all there. Not the usual misinterpretation that turns Lewis Carroll into a purveyor of charming oddities for children in long socks, but this more unsettling truth: the absurd makes us laugh because it is threatening. Buster Keaton falls. Charlie Chaplin nearly gets run over. Alice drinks, eats, shrinks, grows, gets lost, is told off, and finds herself at the mercy of powers that speak a language of which she knows every word but no longer any of the rules.
It’s a children’s book, of course. And therefore a terrifying book.
I’m not sure whether the interview had been planned this way from the outset, but it very quickly took on the form of a mirror. Marie Darrieussecq was talking about Alice, and something about her kept reappearing in the reflection. Not in the form of a pointed confession, the sort you wrap in tissue paper before placing it delicately on the table. Rather, through subtle shifts. Sleep. Anxiety. Substances. Metamorphoses. Little girls. Adults. Language. The body changing size. Food. The fear of being poorly received. The need to speak out anyway.
She had just translated Alice. She was quick to point out that she hadn’t become a specialist in Lewis Carroll. She had become a specialist in the text of Alice. The distinction is crucial. We’d always like to think that translators have slept under their authors’ beds, rummaged through their pockets, inspected their wardrobes, and drawn up a list of their neuroses, fantasies and socks. Darrieussecq, for her part, brought everything back to the text. Carroll, deep down, interested her less than Alice. The man himself even seemed relatively secondary to her: a mathematician, a logician, a bachelor, an enigmatic figure – perhaps not all that fascinating. The book, however, held its ground. And that is perhaps the finest definition of translation: not bowing down to the author, but persevering with the text.
It recounted the choices, the trade-offs, the necessary sacrifices. Tove Jansson’s illustrations were taken from the Finnish translation; some of the drawings were based on puns that didn’t exist in French. So we had to negotiate. Preserving the meaning, preserving the sounds, preserving the form, but above all preserving the humour. Carroll’s extreme humour. A porpoise could become a sperm whale if the sperm whale allowed for a more French-style pun to emerge. There are forms of fidelity that involve a degree of betrayal. Long-standing couples know this. So do translators.
What struck me most of all was the link she drew between Alice and sleep. In Pas dormir, Darrieussecq had written about insomnia; in Alice, she returned to that unstable, hypnagogic realm where one is not quite asleep, not quite awake, but already at the mercy of images. Healthy sleepers spend a few seconds there before drifting off. Insomniacs, however, remain there. They enter, leave, return, wake up, and start again. “No sleep, only dreams,” wrote Kafka. She said she didn’t understand that sentence until she herself became an insomniac. Unfortunately, from then on, she understood it all too well.
In this book, Alice is not a little girl sleeping peacefully at the foot of a tree. She is a child trapped in the unstable mechanics of dreams. She chases the rabbit as one chases an image that slips away the moment one thinks one has caught it. She falls into a land where everything resembles logic, but where logic has taken the wrong medicine.
Perhaps that is why Darrieussecq spoke so eloquently about the book. She wasn’t commenting on it from the outside. She recognised its mood. That blend of anxiety and precision, of nightmare and comedy, of inner terror and words that go off the rails. For her, Alice ceased to be a Victorian trinket and became a survival guide to the land of adults. It’s a splendid turn of phrase.
Who can claim to be an adult?
The adults in Alice are those bizarre, dysfunctional creatures who explain to the child that everything is normal, that everything is in order, that everything is working as it should – even as they’re making a complete mess of things. They scold, reprimand, command and threaten. They impose etiquette, and etiquette becomes a system of assassination. The Queen wants to chop off heads. The Rabbit is a panicked little clerk, a swaggering courtier, head of the lackeys, a servant who torments his own servants. The Caterpillar becomes ‘Mr Caterpillar’, a little homunculus perched on his mushroom, eight centimetres of smugness and hot air. The Cheshire Cat, perhaps the only one to understand the system, escapes decapitation because his head is already separated from his body. This is, of course, very convenient.
In this world, Alice learns to disobey.
This is where the book becomes political, not through its message, but through its structure. Darrieussecq saw it as an anti-educational manual. Not a tale to teach little girls how to behave properly at the table, but a book to arm them. Alice grows bolder. She becomes increasingly fearless, or rather, increasingly unafraid of the creature. In court, she grows, stands up straight, becomes a giant, looks at the mad adults and ends up saying, in essence: none of this makes any sense. The emperor has no clothes. Or rather: Wonderland is mad.
I love this idea of Alice as a child who speaks the truth. Not the pure child, nor the cute child, nor the decorative child whom the Victorian era wraps in veils of a transparency that is at times unsettling. The child who sees. The child who understands that the rules are absurd, that those in power are ridiculous, that language lies, that size matters, that politeness can be a weapon turned against oneself, and that one day, one will simply have to stand up.
Alice is so profoundly English.
We can then understand why Darrieussecq was keen to preserve Alice’s British character. Not to ‘Frenchify’ the nursery rhymes, not to replace tea too hastily with a republican herbal tea, not to transplant the child into a setting that would suit us. Alice is English, Victorian, caught up in a world of queens, etiquette, twisted nursery rhymes, logic puzzles and hushed cruelties. To move her would have dulled the nightmare. A nightmare needs its original setting.
The conversation then veered towards substances, and there again Alice became less a character than a disturbing sister. She drinks, eats, measures out, adjusts, grows, shrinks, starts again. A small sip, a small bite, a little higher, a little lower, a little bigger, a little smaller. Darrieussecq spoke of our relationship with quantity with an almost comical frankness, precisely because she wasn’t trying to make herself likeable. All addicts know this, she said, in essence. All those who haggle over the dose. Alcohol, food, sport, deprivation, excess. Alice thinks she can solve her problems by eating and drinking. Anyone who has never believed that should be immediately appointed Minister of Health or expelled from the human race.
Is Alice approaching the dark, glamorous 27 years of glam rock?
Perhaps the most accurate thing about this conversation was that nothing ever became a burden. Anxiety didn’t stop us from laughing. Patriarchy didn’t stop us from talking about sperm whales. Insomnia didn’t stifle humour. Marie Darrieussecq could talk about Winnicott, Dolto, Kafka, Tarkovsky, Virginia Woolf, Ovid, Truismes, Mary Shelley, and then immediately switch to a rabbit you’d want to stuff full of Xanax and Lexomil. It is a great literary quality: knowing that the tragic need not take on a sombre tone to be heard.
There was also, in her approach to translation, something very reassuring. Writing a book, she would say, involves drawing it out of oneself, sometimes with pain. Translating, on the other hand, means starting from material that is already there. The book already exists. All you have to do, she said, is knit it together in another language. A modest image, yet an accurate one. You’re not building a cathedral. You’re knitting. But anyone who has ever seen a stitch slip knows that a catastrophe can arise from almost nothing.
Traduire Alice, c’était donc tricoter un cauchemar drôle.
To find in French the equivalent of what, in English, whistles, cuts, falls, swells, shrinks or goes off the rails. To accept that there is a loss, but to make up for it elsewhere. In “Off with their heads”, she could hear the whistle of the blade. In French, ‘qu’on leur coupe la tête’ doesn’t sound quite the same, but the word ‘coupe’ has its own brutality, and the guillotine still lurks in our national imagination, slightly annoyed at not being mentioned more often in polite conversation.
As I bring this interview to a close, I’m not sure I’ve really found Marie Darrieussecq. Not directly, at least. Rather, I have rediscovered a way of reading. Reading in defiance of compulsory enchantment. Reading Alice not as a museum of wonders, but as a training ground for anxious, insomniac, hungry, rebellious, unwelcome little girls – those who are too tall, too short, never quite the right size for a world that isn’t either. Reading Carroll without exonerating him out of admiration, nor overwhelming him out of laziness. Reading into the text what still resists: a child learning not to obey.
This is perhaps what Darrieussecq does best. She shifts books into their zone of unease. She does not explain them to the point of making them docile. She restores them to their strangeness, then settles into it with a sort of nervous calm. In her hands, Alice was no longer a little nursery heroine. She became a miniature insomniac, a panicked logician, a survivor of a poorly laid table, a child who stumbles into the language of adults and discovers that it does not hold water.
Wonderland does not exist.
Or perhaps it does, for those who sleep well. For the rest of us, there remains this funny nightmare, this school of disobedience and metamorphosis, this book in which we learn that sometimes we must grow up all at once to tell the powerful that they are delusional. Alice falls. Alice eats. Alice drinks. Alice is afraid. Alice doesn’t always understand. But Alice ends up standing tall. And, in the end, perhaps that is what Marie Darrieussecq was really conveying: not a little girl’s dream, but the moment when she ceases to be its victim.
Alice in the Land of Neuroses – our original article in La Libre Belgique, paywall.
I have a copy of the book which I’ll give to anyone who emails me saying they can’t afford it but promises to read it and lend it to someone who will, in turn, lend it on.
Marie Darrieussecq: in terms of how enjoyable she is to interview, a solid 8 out of 10: approachable, answers the questions, doesn’t have a scripted set of responses. Just the right amount of chattiness. Very pleasant. Supremely intelligent, with a wonderful radio voice.
