"Is nothing sacred?!"

This cry went up in a class this week.

We were using Alice in Wonderland as a springboard text to discuss other things, but there was some serious objection to 'studying' (that is, rigorous questioning, finding out, and thinking about) a book that people had read as young (ish) children. The idea behind the objection, I think, was a horror that the original childhood impressions of the magical tale might be overwritten with the intrusion of adult eyes; the child's brain had been put in a sparkly pink box (or perhaps a more fitting slightly sinister one, given the weirdness of Alice) and was Not To Be Touched.

The Annotated Alice text exacerbated this problem - it's a fantastic and eclectic peering at Carroll's stories through every conceivable kind of eyes - the historical, the mathematical and physical, the cultural, the literary, the adult...But this was, it seemed, just too much information; too intrusive, too questioning, too learned and - God forbid! - perhaps even reading too much into the stories. Hang on a minute, isn't that the line Literature students (of all levels of experience and competence) walk along all the time? But because this text was in some way held sacred, because of childhood experience, the tolerence level dropped completely - 'You are not touching this text, this memory', Tolerence hissed, 'It's mine. My precious...' (Gollum was there too).

I have to admit I was irritated, because - when it comes to the study of Literature (and other things) - I do not think that anything should be protected from questioning. Nothing is sacred when it comes to academia (however microscopically tiny that academia might be). I'm here to ask questions, and to keep on answering them until something relents, or I realise it's a stupid question, or I die. I am not here to pussy-foot around people's fluffy constructions of what they think a book was about once. That is not at all interesting.

There is something intensely annoying about Arts students (in this sense, Literature, Music and Art) who will only go as far as - or are content to stop at - a feeling about something. I'm not denying that certain arts can make humans react in an emotional (or irrational, though I'm not using those two things synonymously) way, but I am saying that that is absolutely not what studying the arts is about. Or, if it is, I'm definitely doing the wrong thing. The absence of a desire to scrutinise is incomprehensible, to me, in people who are otherwise enviably bright. If they want to hold onto a cute idea of what certain texts are, it's perhaps questionable whether they're studying the right subject. Or maybe I'm studying the wrong one. Why not give Lolita or Bleak House to a kid, ask them what it's about, and leave it at that? Because that doesn't work. Et voila, nor does that attitude to Alice. Grow up - or at least be open to the possibility that there might be a giant rabbithole even in adult life.