Hare Hare Here Hare: A Study of Absurdity and Identity in Lewis Caroll Wonderland

Hare Hare Here Hare - experimental book. In Tomasz Gwinciński’s extraordinary work, we are drawn downwards and inwards through realms of shifting images and woven mysteries—a descent into an alternate Wonderland where the familiar assumes forms strange, and the strange grows hauntingly familiar. Gwinciński begins by assembling a gallery of phantasms: photographs, obscure graphics, and dreamlike paintings, each reimagining Alice’s adventures not as children’s fable but as something closer to mythic archetype—a procession of characters whose very identities dissolve and reform at the whim of his interpretive gaze. And into this vision, Gwinciński pens an essay as if in counterpoint, delving into Carroll’s heroes and heroines, plumbing the depths of their strangeness, their shifting selves, their impossible longings. Yet this creation is not merely of images and essay; it is a polyphony, a chorus of strange voices. Gwinciński turns next to fragments of Wittgenstein’s journals, to his letters, interleaved with the utterances of Wiktor Segalen, a friend who moves across these pages like a shadow. Here, the world of Wonderland, and the world of language, conspire to yield secrets. We learn that Alma, Wittgenstein’s obscurely cherished fiancée, is less woman than cipher, her name an anagram for *Laam*, a cryptographic system of mirrors, fragments, and reversals. Segalen himself is one with Alma, an embodiment who pens eerie verses in which Hamlet, that most melancholy prince, is imagined as a raven circling the ancient stones of Huelgoat forest. This collection becomes then not merely a narrative, nor simply an assemblage of essays and images. Rather, Gwinciński offers it as a portal through which we glimpse the nature of reality itself, elusive and half-shadowed. Like Carroll’s mirror, this Wonderland reflects only to distort, reveals only to conceal. In Gwinciński’s hands, language itself is a phantom, a chasm of infinite regress—each word opening into another, meaning becoming memory, and memory flickering into dream. A strange cosmos unfolds here, half-lit by language and haunted by all that lies beyond it, a liminal and liquid place where one cannot distinguish between the self and the shadow, nor the dream and the waking world.