Katie Roiphe, Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell (Dial Press, 2001)
"But that was the beauty of it -- it was only the idea of someone."
So thinks Charles Dodgson in Still She Haunts Me: A Novel of Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. I managed to read this fictionalised view of authorial alchemy in about twenty-four hours. It is riveting and harrowing. It is a novel of subverted desire turned fiction: a paedophile writes a child's novel. It creates an answer to the question many readers have had about the bizarre Wonderland novels Charles Dodgson wrote, a question which usually runs something along the lines of, 'how on earth!' or 'did he make all that up from his head?'
Roiphe reverses the process of biographical criticism, generating an imagined Dodgson, and then gleaning from his imagined life the elements which inspired his fiction. She melds history and vision to create a monstrous psychoanalysis of a taboo sexuality. And, as is so often the case for those Victorian writers, it works incredibly well.
In other words, Roiphe climbs into the skull of a sensitive, neurotic artist, and then essentially re-enacts the spiral movement of his thoughts trying to emerge from his being. She explores Charles Dodgson's unhappy childhood, creating journal entries, letters and those small yet significant spots of time which over years of stifled non-communication are magnified into Freudian-sized issues.
A glimpse of his sister naked becomes his only emotional association with female intimacy and happiness. His father's oppression becomes his modus operandi, and so he hides desire from himself until he cannot look at it in any other way than from a distance. Roiphe interprets Dodgson's stammering impediment as a manifestation of his choking spirit, and his love of photography, especially of photographing Alice, as an externalised mechanism of erotic distancing. And so the book is full of moments of stillness, and of Dodgson's attempts to create stasis in Alice, whose vitality he can love only when it is thrice removed from himself: by the lens, by dimension, and by time.
The axiom which preserves Roiphe's premise is Ann Carson's precept of desire: "Conjoined they are held apart. The third component [desire] plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates . . . The difference between what is and what could be is visible." So writes Roiphe of Dodgson, "To be stuck in a state of almost having. To remain in motion, going toward her and she toward him, though they are never going to reach each other. They are like Zeno's famous paradox. . . ."
Roiphe interprets the classic fantasy tale Alice in Wonderland in the same way she does his photography. As Dodgson becomes more frustrated with his situation, he mars his photographs of Alice and feels a sense of relief from the abuse to his own creation: self-flagellation and also a sort of voodoo-doll-esque punishment of the one who has inadvertently and capriciously inspired his suffering.
When his subverted imagination goes subterranean, it is easy to understand, within Roiphe's construct of who Dodgson was, why he subjects the fictional Alice to admonitions against growing up, to humiliating reversals, and to tyrannical yet nonsensical monsters. Written down, the idyllic afternoon tale he once told becomes, against his desire, but at the real Alice's insistence, frozen and removed from himself like one of his photographs. It becomes the darkened reflection of his mind's twisted reflection of Alice.
It's beautiful prose, but pretty gruelling subject matter. I came out of the reading dizzy, and thinking only a scholar such a Roiphe could have written it -- with the temerity and psychological realism which belong to modern novels, and the warping, bubble-universe relativity which is the post-modern tendency.
Now that I see how the Wonderland novels might have been germinated, I ask myself a new question, of Roiphe: how on earth--how dare she--did she make all that up from her head? And the only answer I can think of is, she dared to write a novel about a paedophile writing a novel because there are no easy answers. The Dodgson of her novel is no more to blame for writing what was inside him than she. A writer reflects and alters all this is in and around them.
It's rather an intimate thing for other people to read what comes from one's head; it requires bravery and cunning all at once. How challenging it must have been for Roiphe, to expose her mind about another writer to readers. To enter and not enter his world, to create a world of her own, and yet not her own. Dangerous, disturbing, depressing. But in the end, as she writes, that is the beauty of it -- it is only the idea of someone.
