Charles Dodgson and Salvador Dali: a collaboration that would be surreal … logically so. Under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Dodgson wrote the masterpiece Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Under his own name, but more familiarly just called “Dali”, the painter produced some of the most fantastic art of his age. And their connection included mathematics.

In 2015, a special edition of the Dali Alice was published in a condensed and more accessible size. Included were two essays discussing Dodgson and Dali and their many artistic similarities. Mark Burstein’s essay about the two men starts with a particularly appropriate quote about the similarities of their works: “art incorporating rebelliousness, revolution, paradox; distortions of space and time, logic, size, and proportion; disbelief in conventional reality; assimilation of dreams, wordplay, and the ineffable nature of childhood” (vi). Furthermore, a definition of surrealism – a movement that began after Carroll’s death – can be retroactively applied to Alice in Wonderland. While Carroll considered himself a member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement (ix), many surrealists have viewed him as a muse to the surrealist movement, paying homage to his writing with a wide variety of artworks.

Surrealism is defined as a “means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world” (Britannica). I believe this definition perfectly describes the Alice in Wonderland story, in particular, the first page of the novel:

“Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations? So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid) whether the pleasure of making a daisy chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking up the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her. There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought it over afterward it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat pocket or a watch to take out of it…” (Carroll 11).

Where Carroll’s surrealist expressionism was limited to his fairy tale of Alice in Wonderland, surrealist artists more overtly “sought outrage and provocation in their art and lives and questioned the nature of reality” (viii). Carroll and Dalí also had similar creative processes: Carroll’s initial telling of the story felt “automatic and effortless”, which is reminiscent of the surrealist practice of “automatism” in their writing and drawing: they let the subconscious guide the artistic process (vii).

There is a possibility that Salvador Dalí may have influenced the 1951 Walt Disney adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. For eight months, just after the end of World War 2, Dali was a resident at the Walt Disney studios, his time coinciding with the start of production on the cinema version of Alice. Furthermore, there are undeniably surrealist elements pervading the animated classic: most notably, Alice falling down the rabbit-hole past warped Victorian-looking interiors (xi).

Works Cited

“Introduction.” Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – 150th Anniversary Edition. Ed. Mark Burstein. Princeton: Princeton U Pess, 2015. Vi-Xxviii. Print.

“Surrealism”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 13 Apr. 2016