{"id":125,"date":"2010-03-25T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-25T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carrollmyth.wordpress.com\/?p=125"},"modified":"2010-03-25T15:37:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-25T15:37:00","slug":"rejecting-apology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/2010\/03\/25\/rejecting-apology\/","title":{"rendered":"Rejecting Apology"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America’s <\/a>newest <\/a>blog<\/a> entry is all about Contrariwise!<\/p>\n

This blog doesn\u2019t regularly deal with certain questions<\/em> (italics mine, as was the rest of that sentence.) And the new LewisCarroll.org\u2019s FAQs<\/a><\/strong> don\u2019t go there. Contrariwise, Mark Burstein usually starts his question-and-answer sessions with: \u201cThe answers to the first two questions are \u2018No, he wasn\u2019t\u2019 and \u2018No, he didn\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The LCSNA doesn\u2019t shy away from these bothersome issues even if they\u2019re occasionally bothered by them. However, there are reputable places on the internet specializing in debunking Carroll myths. For instance CarrollMyth.com<\/a><\/strong>, which offers various levels of depth depending on how long your myths want to spend being debunked. That user-friendly and\u00a0aesthetically-pleasing website is run by Karoline Leach, author of In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: The Myth and Reality of Lewis Carroll<\/em> (Peter Owen Ltd., 1999, $29.95). There\u2019s also a new blog: carrollmyth.wordpress.com<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, that’s praise indeed, and we send our sincere thanks to the LCSNA bloggers for so generously giving us the space. We have also linked to you.<\/p>\n

Tangentially though, in conjunction with something a commenter here said the other day, the reference to ‘certain questions’ has got Contrariwise thinking.<\/p>\n

Suppose you give a false alibi to a man in order to get him acquitted of a crime you know<\/em> he probably commited \u2013 if it later turns out he didn\u2019t do it after all, does that make what you did right?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it does, does it? And that\u2019s the weird problem at the heart of Carrollianism right now, that I think needs to be looked at.<\/p>\n

People have been denying Carroll was a pedophile, either in thought or action, for as long as \u00a0other people have been saying he was. They were the Apologists (Hudson, Green et al) , as opposed to the Freudians (Florence Becker Lennon, Taylor Potter etc). They firmly asserted Carroll\u2019s innocence whenever and whereve they could, but does this mean they were necessarily right to do so?<\/p>\n

Thing is, if we\u2019re honest we have to admit that, prior to the release of Carroll’s MS diaries in 1969, the only rational, objective thing to think about him, based on the fragmentary evidence available, \u00a0was that he was a desperately disturbed incipient sexual deviant. Yes, we now<\/em> know\u00a0 it was a simplistic, even entirely false image, but the point is no one knew it then<\/em>.\u00a0 In fact Green, Hudson, Reed and others had all written books that described\u00a0 – even actively invented – a man who was a\u00a0 blatant deviant in all\u00a0 but name. So when they and all the other Apologists denied Carroll’s pedophilia, they were effectively saying\u00a0 “yes<\/em><\/strong> this man avoided adult life and adult women, yes<\/strong> he lost interest in girls after the age of puberty, yes<\/strong>,\u00a0 he took dodgy nude pics of children \u00a0that would have shocked his society, <\/em>and\u00a0 umm…yeees,<\/strong><\/em> he may<\/strong> have sort of fallen a bit in love with at least one 11-year old child, and been banished from her presence\u00a0 by her family, but, oh, come on, he was nice<\/strong>, he wrote a lovely story, so, y’know, let’s just ignore all that stuff which probably wasn’t as bad as it seems.’ <\/em><\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t defence, it\u2019s\u00a0 evasion. Ok, it wasn\u2019t their fault that, due to the unavailability of so much major evidence, \u00a0this was the best they could do, they were still offering a queasy sort of alibi for a man they were forced to assume was\u00a0 probably guilty, and just because we now know he probably was not<\/em> guilty at all, doesn\u2019t change the fact that this is what they\u00a0 were doing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that surprising that so many people \u00a0were totally unconvinced, is it? They saw it for what it was \u2013 a\u00a0 well-meaning pretence.<\/p>\n

The LCSNA blog that features us is headed “Special Report: Was Lewis Carroll a gay Mormon and were the Alice books written by J.D. Salinger?”, referencing some of the many stupid things that have been said about Carroll over the years. It’s a joke, but in its way it makes exactly the point Contrariwise is trying to make.\u00a0 Because those things aren’t ‘myths’ are they?\u00a0 They’re just loony ideas no one has ever taken seriously.\u00a0 The point about the myths we are concerned with (his child-obsession, his avoidance of adult society, his passion for Alice Liddell),\u00a0 is that\u00a0 they were promulgated by serious Carroll scholars and believed\u00a0 by\u00a0 everyone until very recently. The notion of the man as a pedophile arose out of these myths as an inevitable, and\u00a0 very reasonable\u00a0 conclusion. It couldn’t, and can’t be just laughed off as ridiculous,\u00a0 and taking that line is just Apology again. No one will take you seriously if you sell the image that has been sold\u00a0 for so long and simply ask people to take your word that\u00a0 – honestly\u00a0 –\u00a0 he wasn’t what you are obviously painting him to have been.<\/p>\n

If we really want to clear his reputation, or at least get closer to the truth about him, then we first have to accept this uncomfortable truth, that it was\u00a0 Carroll scholarship itself that\u00a0 created the myth, and Carroll scholarship that has to acknowledge what it unintentionally did before any real progress can be made. We think it’s important\u00a0 for Carrollianism to differentiate between those past\u00a0 and inappropriate\u00a0 Apologists and today’s attempt at rehabilitation. Because they are fundamentally different.\u00a0 Hudson, Green et al were not debunking myth when they declared\u00a0 Carroll ‘innocent’, they were just offering an emotional plea for forgiveness or understanding, or at any rate silence, or alternatively trying to use ridicule to obscure the uncomfortable reality of their position.\u00a0 Their stance was at best questionable.\u00a0 They offered no data\u00a0 because they had none. But now we do<\/em>. It’s evidence that is being adduced to clear the man’s reputation, not dubious special pleading, and we think it’s in the interest of Carrollianism and Lewis Carroll himself to make that much clear.<\/p>\n

So, we suggest, the major Carroll-sites should start a ‘Myth’ section – not for the age-old knee-jerk rejection of the all-too-plausible but nasty, but for a serious rebuttal and reassessment based on the new data unearthed by recent writers. One that makes it clear there\u2019s no whitewash or evasion, but a simple statement of\u00a0 facts that can lead people to their own conclusions. We suggest\u00a0 dealing anew with those ‘certain questions’, because now you actually have the solid evidence to answer them as truthfully as will ever be possible.<\/p>\n

Above all,\u00a0 we think Carrollianism needs to never again find\u00a0 itself saying\u00a0 anything that translates as \u201cgosh can\u2019t a guy use little girls as substitutes for women without being a pervert?\u201d<\/p>\n

Because, no. He can\u2019t. Not even if he is nice. Not even if he is\u00a0 Lewis Carroll and wrote a wonderful story.<\/p>\n

We have to realise that would-be ‘child-lovers’ look to the image of Lewis Carroll for affirmation\u00a0 and when anyone who writes about Carroll seems to be in any way condoning, eliding, excusing his supposed\u00a0 romantic ‘child-love’ they see us offering\u00a0 just exactly that affirmation. None of us want to be\u00a0 Apologising for pedophilia, but unless we firmly face up to what we are dealing with, that is what we\u00a0 can end up doing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America’s newest blog entry is all about Contrariwise! This blog doesn\u2019t regularly deal with certain questions (italics mine, as was the rest of that sentence.) And the new LewisCarroll.org\u2019s FAQs don\u2019t go there. Contrariwise, Mark Burstein usually starts his question-and-answer sessions with: \u201cThe answers to the first two questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17WIo-21","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/contrariwise.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}