Philosophy of Nonsense

The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781134902408
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

'Jean-Jacques Lecercle's remarkable Philosophy of Nonsense offers a sustained and important account of an area that is usually hastily dismissed. Using the resources of contemporary philosophy - notably Deleuze and Lyotard - he manages to bring out the importance of nonsense' - Andrew Benjamin, University of Warwick

Why are we, and in particular why are philosophers and linguists, so fascinated with nonsense? Why do Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic books? This amusing, yet rigorous new book by Jean-Jacques Lecercle shows how the genre of nonsense was constructed and why it has proved so enduring and enlightening for linguistics and philosophy.

1

THE LINGUISTICS OF NONSENSE

INTRODUCTION

It is a vexed question whether rules of grammar, or linguistic laws, describe properties of a language, or of all languages, which are real, that is which have real existence in language or in the mind-brain (to speak like Chomsky), or whether they are only theoretical constructs. The epistemology of linguistics, as of all other sciences, has its realist, and its constructivist, versions. Thus, whether the four levels at which we have accounted for ‘Jabberwocky’— phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics—are natural, or real, levels, or only figments of the linguist’s fertile imagination, is a hotly debated point. Although I sympathise with the constructivists, I do not intend to enter the field. What interests me is that nonsense texts treat those levels as natural. The texts can be easily analysed along such levels because they seem spontaneously to conform to them. And the numerous intuitions about language which authors of nonsense express, in their rare moments of reflection or in their abundant practice, confirm this—the texts not only conform to the levels, they play with them, or play one against the others, as if they were natural objects. I shall attempt to show this by reading another nonsense poem.

In the Gloaming

The twilight twiles in the vernal vale,

In adumbration of azure awe,

And I listlessly list in my swallow-tail

To the limpet licking his limber jaw.

And it’s O for the sound of the daffodil,

For the dry distillings of prawn and prout,

When hope hops high and a heather hill

Is a dear delight and a darksome doubt.

The snagwap sits in the bosky brae

And sings to the gumplet in accents sweet;

The gibwink hasn’t a word to say,

But pensively smiles at the fair keeweet

And it’s O for the jungles of Boorabul.

For the jingling jungles to jangle in,

With a moony maze of mellado mull,

And a protoplasm for next of kin.

O’ sweet is the note of the shagreen shard

And mellow the mew of the mastodon,

When the soboliferous Somminard

Is scenting the shadows at set of sun.

And it’s O for the timorous tamarind

In the murky meadows of Maroboo,

For the suave sirocco of Sazerkind,

And the pimpernell pellets of Pangipoo.

James C.Bayles¹

The most striking aspect of this ballad is that, in spite of its rather banal title, we do not understand much, and feel that its inclusion in an anthology of nonsense verse is entirely justified. There are two obvious reasons for this incapacity to understand—the semantic incoherence of the text, and the presence of coined words. At first sight, coinages seem to be particularly abundant, to the point that the semantic gaps defy interpretation. We shall never know what a snagwap or a gumplet is. But if we look at it more closely, the situation is not as simple as it seems. We must remember that for the meagre 20,000 words that a cultivated English-speaker knows, there are a million and a half in the largest dictionary of the language. As a consequence, not all the apparent coinages—apparent, at least, to this reader—are true inventions. Thus, ‘snagwap’ is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but ‘gumplet’ is, or at least ‘gump’, a dolt. The Somminard does not appear to exist, but if it did it might well be soboliferous (from latin soboles, bearing shoots). The use of false coinages is traditional in nonsense, from Lear’s spurious Indian poem, ‘The Cummerbund’, where the innocuous silk waistband, rarely seen nowadays except at Cambridge May balls, becomes a damsel-devouring monster, to Mervyn Peake’s

Of crags and octoroons,

Of whales and broken bottles

Of quicksands cold and grey,

Of ullages and dottles,

I have no more to say.²

Even if we disregard the false coinages, truly invented words are numerous in ‘In the Gloaming’, and they are of two kinds. Some, like ‘mellado’, are exotic: they boast of their alien origin, they obtrude. Some, like ‘gibwink’ or even ‘prout’, are more timid: they make an attempt at integration, they would like to pass for native creatures by conforming to the phonotactics of the English language. In other words, coinages naturally fall into the same categories as actually existing words. Some are simple and English-looking, and modestly conform to the Fowlers’ rules (‘Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance’),³ while others are linguistic immigrants.

It now appears that my two obvious reasons for our incapacity to understand reduce to one: semantic incoherence. One can never be certain that the ‘coined’ word one discovers in a text does not have existence, and conventional meaning, in a larger dictionary or a specialised jargon. The frontier between coinages and normal words is uncertain, and it is notoriously difficult to commit a ‘barbarism’ in English. In the case of our poem, this mixture of true and false coinages, which is more perverse than in ‘Jabberwocky’, results in semantic undecidability. We imperceptibly go from metaphors, like ‘azure awe’, which in spite of their exaggerated nature possess partial coherence and allow for pragmatic calculus, to the semantic void of coinages. Even if the image evoked by the ‘limpet licking his limber jaw’ is ludicrous (pleasantly so), it does allow me to understand the line. Whereas, when I read about ‘the snagwap sitting in the bosky brae’ (I have no objection to the brae being ‘bosky’, but I still do not know what a ‘snagwap’ is), I find myself like the gibwink, who ‘hasn’t a word to say’. In fact, the passage from semi-coherent metaphors to downright incoherent nonsense is hardly noticeable. Metaphors in this text are self-destroying because they exaggerate one of the characteristics of all metaphors, their blatant falsity. Awe is not naturally ‘azure’, nor is the sirocco ‘suave’. This exaggeration tends towards paradox, or the random filling of syntactic positions, as embodied in true coinages. The tendential passage from metaphor to semantic void is, I believe, characteristic of the whole genre.

There is another aspect of the text that ought to attract our attention, although it is not as obvious as the first: the syntax is entirely correct. There is no chaos at this level. Not only is the syntax correct, but it is also by no means elementary or childish. The ballad form of the poem might lead us to expect a dominance of paratactic devices. Indeed, the ‘And it’s O for…’ leitmotiv belongs to the tradition of oral poetry. But apart from lines 14 to 16 (‘For the jingling jungles…’), there is little paratax. Grammatical links, words like ‘and’ and ‘when’, regularly recur, and the text as a whole tends towards hypotax. The paratactic ‘and’ is sometimes caught in a network of clauses, and the hypotactic ‘when’ explicitly introduces subordination. Of course, poems syntactically more complex are not difficult to find, but this incipient attraction to hypotax is interesting, because it illustrates the moment when, or rather the logical point where, nonsense goes from the transcription of oral popular literature to a form of written high literature. We understand why, if such is the evolution of the genre, syntactic regularity, or even conformism, is of the essence.

The poem is not only syntactically, but also prosodically, regular. It is composed of iambic tetrameters, with a rather high proportion of anapaests, as appears in line 4:

This regularity is also an important feature of the poem. All the more so as it is not restricted to prosody, but is increased by the obsessional recourse to alliteration. As appears in the case of the limpet, alliteration paradoxically compensates for semantic incoherence and induces it. It compensates for it because it provides a structure which allows the reader to cling to a formal regularity when he or she is semantically lost. It induces it because the real mode of composition of the line is the semantically random but alliteratively constrained filling of syntactic positions. In other words, the text has adopted Swinburne’s method of composition — the poem is an obvious parody of his style—to extreme and excessive lengths, to the point where the metaphors dissolve and sense disappears. Swinburne himself was, of course, perfectly capable of doing the same thing, as appears in his self-parody, Nephelidia:

From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,

Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float.⁴

And since intertext compensates for the absent semantic structure, we may also note that the poem’s lurid exoticism, as in Lear’s ‘Cummerbund’, mocks the fake local colour of Anglo-Indian poetry. Three lines from Kipling’s ‘Christmas in India’ will suffice:

Dim dawn behind the tamarisks—the sky is saffron yellow—As the women in the village grind the corn,

And the parrots seek the river-side, each calling to his fellow.

In this analysis of ‘In the Gloaming’, a principle of composition has emerged, which we shall consider as characteristic of nonsense writing. The lack of structure at one level (here, the semantic level) is amply compensated by an excess of structure at other levels (here, the syntactic and prosodic levels). Lack of sense here is always compensated by excess or proliferation of sense there. This, which is the central paradox, or contradiction, of the genre, we shall explore by methodically going, as announced, from one linguistic level to the next.

PHONETICS

In my analysis of ‘Jabberwocky’, I have already used a typology of imaginary languages, borrowed—or rather adapted—from the seminal essay by Etienne Souriau, which dates back to 1965, ‘Sur l’esthétique des mots et des langages forgés’.⁵ Charabia, it will be recalled, is the name I give to the coinage of ‘regularly’ invented words, baragouin the playful imitation of a foreign tongue, and lanternois the proliferation of obsessional phonemes. Charabia concerns langue coinages, of which ‘In the Gloaming’ offers a superb instance in the first line:

The twilight twiles in the vernal vale

The verb ‘twile’ does not exist—but this sad fact does not prevent us from being aware that it is a verb, and knowing exactly what it means. The coinage conforms not only to the phonotactics, but also to what we might call the morphotactics of English. Lanternois, on the other hand, refers to idiosyncratic, or parole coinages, in which the speaker’s instinctual drives are more directly expressed, and the unconscious returns in the guise of linguistic symptoms. They are not frequent in nonsense, but they are prevalent in the delirium of mental patients or in glossolalia. Their theory is adumbrated in Fonagy’s essay on the instinctual basis of speech sounds.⁶ Sounds represent—‘embody’ might be a better word—instinctual drives. Like drives, which Freud describes as being on the frontier between soma and psyche, they have a somatic aspect, and a psychic one, in that on the one hand they can be made the bearers of intentionality while on the other hand they can cathect affects. Lastly, coming as they do from one of the orifices of the body, from a sphincter, they can easily be eroticised and made, by metonymy or metaphor, to represent various erogenous zones and the pleasures there produced. Thus, Fonagy has fascinating pages on the ‘vulgarity’ which ordinary speakers ascribe to certain sounds, a vulgarity due to the metonymic association between the position of the organs of speech during their production and that of the other orifices of the body.⁷ We understand why we may call the coinages of lanternois symptomatic. Here is an instance of lanternois in our corpus: the main character in one of Lear’s ballads is called the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.⁸ What I find most interesting in this name is the accent on the last syllable, a typographic sign banal in Italian but exotic in English. That it expresses the exotic nature of the bearer of the name, who lives ‘on the coast of Coromandel, where the early pumpkins blow’, is certain—but here the exotic becomes personal, as the accent must be taken for what it is, for instance, in Italian, a mark of phonetic stress, giving the name a trochaic rhythm:

And, of course, the repetition of the same cluster of phonemes

is a characteristic of the lanternois one encounters in child language, with its duplicated syllables as in ‘gigi’ or ‘namby-pamby’. That the name also expresses one speaker’s phonic fantasies is made apparent by another coined word, in one of Lear’s nonsense letters to his friend Evelyn Baring, ‘abbiblebongibo’, in which the same phonemes are obsessionally disseminated.⁹

Although it would be of greater interest to the psychoanalyst, lanternois is rare in nonsense. So is, for that matter, the deformation of the speaker’s language which is a characteristic of comic literature. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Pat the lizard, who is employed by the White Rabbit as a gardener, is a character out of a comic novel:

‘Now tell me, Pat, what’s that in the window?’

‘Sure, it’s an arm, yer honour!’ (He pronounced it ‘arrum’.)¹⁰

As we can see, the distortion is only allowed in parenthesis, as a curiosity, after it has been ‘normalised’ in the text. Carroll’s use here is no different from Dickens’s or any other mimetic novelist’s, except that it is rather more timid, and more respectful of ‘correct’ language. It is not even entirely coherent, since ‘yer’ is allowed within the text. The whole thing does not go beyond a rather limited use of a widely accepted convention. Again, we find that, surprisingly, the author of nonsense is, as far as language is concerned, something of a conformist.

The form of imaginary language that prevails in nonsense is charabia. Nonsense does not invent words at random. It exploits the possibilities offered by the phonotactics of English, i.e. the rules governing the possible combinations of phonemes. The meaningful combinations of phonemes, in other words morphemes, do not exhaust the possi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Reading Nonsense Reading
• 1 The Linguistics of Nonsense
• 2 The Pragmatics of Nonsense
• 3 Nonsense and The Philosophy of Language
• 4 The Polyphony of Nonsense
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index