Nonsense and Food

Food is a motif that occurs frequently within the genre of nonsense literature, and is particularly prevalent within the works of canonical nonsense writers such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who are considered to be the founding fathers of the genre. However, since this is an emerging area of literary study, there is much debate amongst academics regarding what constitutes a definition of nonsense. Therefore, a universal definition of the term nonsense is not available, but instead it is open to interpretation. Terry Eagleton has argued that: ‘if there is one sure thing about food, it is that it is never just food. Like the post-structuralist text, food is endlessly interpretable, as gift, threat, poison, recompense, barter, seduction, solidarity, suffocation.’[1]  In order to explore the theme of food within nonsense texts, this anthology will focus on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, two of Edward Lear’s limericks, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and finally the banquet scene from Guillermo del Toro’s Pans Labyrinth. Within the aforementioned texts the reference to food can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so therefore is in-keeping with Eagleton’s statement. Since nonsense texts tend to be difficult to comprehend (one of the common definitions of nonsense is that it ‘defies sense’[2]), nonsense is arguably ‘endlessly interpretable’, just like Eagleton states that food is. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why food in particular lends itself to this genre. Food plays a fundamental part in everybody’s everyday life so is inextricably linked to notions of class and cultural rituals, as well as often having erotic or religious connotations. Like Alice, many of us take a ‘great interest in questions of eating and drinking.’[3]

Firstly, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, references to food are made towards the end of the opening chapter, in one of the novel’s most iconic scenes. After shrinking due to drinking a bottle labelled ‘DRINK ME’ (p. 13), Alice discovers ‘a very small cake, on which the words EAT ME were beautifully marked in currants’ (p. 14.) I think that Carroll intentionally selected an item of food which is evocative of the heroine, which possesses feminine traits. As a young girl Alice should be ‘small’, sweet and pretty, the latter of which can be linked to the cake’s aesthetically pleasing presentation. It is also significant that Carroll selected an item of food which is considered to be a treat, rather than an everyday staple such as bread, thus adding to the temptation. Since a cake is a luxury food item, and due to the decorative nature of this particular cake, it is a type of food one would associate with the middle class, which reflects Alice’s identity. As Hugh Haughton states in the introduction to the novel: ‘the fictional Alice measures herself by her superior knowledge and social status’ (p. xli.) Although Alice encounters an identity crisis throughout the novel, her dress and speech suggest her (at the very least) middle class social status.

Additionally, the language used in ‘EAT ME’ (p. 14) is performative, and Alice conforms to this command, which is reminiscent of advertising ploys used to persuade potential consumers to purchase food. Alice’s hunger is not mentioned, but rather she is eating because she has been instructed to do so by the narrator, and is therefore being controlled by Carroll as opposed to acting with agency at this point in the novel. In this chapter the heroine is presented as a consumer. Within the concluding sentence ‘she set to work and soon finished off the cake’ (p. 15), the use of ‘work’ makes eating appear like a task, or something which she is forced  to do, whilst the inclusion of ‘anxiously’ (p. 15) in the previous paragraph further stresses that this is not a pleasant process, but on the contrary is laborious. Lisa Coar argues that: ‘it would appear, at times, that Carroll forces Alice to eat in order to feed his own hedonistic hunger for imposing patriarchal punishment on greedy little girls.’[4] Perhaps Carroll intended that Alice’s extreme growth be considered a type of disfigurement, or a source of shame, in order to dissuade her from needlessly consuming calorific food. This would be in-keeping with the attitude towards food and females in Carroll’s era, because ‘in Victorian society, food and femininity were linked in such a way as to promote restrictive eating among privileged adolescent women.’[5] Ideally, girls were expected to have small appetites, and consumption of food to excess was perceived to be an unfeminine trait.

Also, Alice says: ‘she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way’ (p. 15.) This emphasises that the happenings in Wonderland are peculiar, thus drawing attention to the fact that this text belongs in the genre of nonsense literature, and also shows how Carroll is subverting the conventions of the real. Although this extract does not mention Alice’s enormous increase in size, the beginning of the following chapter describes this. The fact that the consumption of the cake causes Alice’s growth is interesting, because although consumption of food is necessary in order for a child to grow, Carroll has taken this concept and exaggerated Alice’s growth dramatically, thus taking it into the realm of the absurd. This is in-keeping with the characteristics often associated with the nonsense genre. Haight asserts that absurdity is a keynote of nonsense as a literary form, [6] and Alice’s extreme fluctuations in size are certainly absurd.

Moreover, Alice’s physical growth due to the consumption of the cake can be viewed as a metaphor for her emotional growth. Alice develops significantly throughout the book, and I believe that her shrinking and growing in size represents how the process of growing up is not linear, and that on certain days you may feel more mature than others. Alice’s appetite may also represent her sexual desire; throughout the novel Alice is constantly consuming, yet her hunger never seems to be satiated. This suggests it is not food which she requires in order to satisfy her voracious appetite, but rather it is her sexual appetite that needs to be fulfilled. Since Alice is about the beginning stages of the protagonist’s development into womanhood, in addition to belonging to the genre of nonsense literature, it could also be classed as a bildungsroman.

A substantial number of Lear’s limericks in A Book Of Nonsense deal with the subject of food. Although food is not always depicted negatively in his limericks (for example, in certain limericks food acts as a remedy), the extracts I have selected are concerned with the dangers of food when taken to the extreme. In the ‘Old Man of Calcutta’, food is consumed in excess, because Lear writes that the old man ‘perpetually ate bread and butter (line 2.)’[7] This in itself is nonsensical, because the concept of somebody constantly consuming bread and butter is an impossibility. Moreover the concluding two lines ‘till a great bit of muffin, on which he was stuffing/Choked that old man of Calcutta’ (lines 3-4), contradict the previous lines, because a muffin is not bread and butter. This can be associated with religion, because within the Christian tradition gluttony is considered to be one of the seven deadly sins. In the Bible it is warned that those who are gluttonous will suffer the repercussions: ‘for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and drowsiness will clothe them with rags’ (Prov. 23.21.)  It was generally considered that by consuming excessive amounts of food, you take away resources from those in need of food, who will go hungry whilst others grow fat. There is a clear moral message, or warning in Lear’s limerick, which is not to be greedy. The protagonist is given the worst form of punishment for his excessive eating: death. The use of the pejorative adjective ‘horrid’ (line 4) suggests that there may be a link between overconsumption and immorality, because his overeating is the only information we are given about the old man, so we cannot assume any other reason for him being described as ‘horrid’ (line 4.) Moreover, Lear’s accompanying illustration showcases the enormous size of the food that the old man is consuming, as well as his obese form. Also, the old man’s extravagant clothing (the buttoned waistcoat, shirt and smart trousers), indicate that he is wealthy, thus suggesting that there is a correlation between excessive consumption and the higher classes, which links back to the earlier discussion of class in Alice.

However, as previously stated, Lear is not criticising food itself; another of his limericks is concerned with the perils of not eating enough. ‘The Old Man of Berlin’[8] has a form that is ‘uncommonly thin’ (p. 77), which the accompanying picture illustrates. It depicts a long, narrow, fragile looking man, who, due to his small size, gets ‘mixed up in a cake/ So they baked that old man of Berlin’ (lines 3-4.) This concept is absurd, and the illustration exemplifies the absurdity, because the man, although narrow is still of such a size that the bakers would notice him entering the cake mixture. Moreover, it is ludicrous that the old man has his mouth open during this process, so presumably could have shouted in protest about the impending prospect of him being baked alive. The image also reinforces gender stereotypes about cooking because it is three women who are baking the cake, so suggests that a woman’s role is within the domestic sphere, which is in-keeping with the patriarchal society of Lear’s era. However, conventional notions of gender and power are subverted here, because the female bakers cause the death of the old man.

It is the events in Lear’s limericks which tend to be nonsensical, rather than the incorporation of nonsensical language such as portmanteau words or neologisms, although he does occasionally use words which do not make sense in the given context. Although on the surface this is a comical limerick, it carries alongside it the serious message that not eating enough can cause death. Ideally, with respect to eating, one should find a balance between the ‘Old man of Calcutta’ and ‘the Old man of Berlin.’ The ‘old man’ features frequently throughout Lear’s limericks, and since children are his target audience it adds to the humour that they are reading about the eccentricities of adults, who are supposed to be mature and sensible.

Although Pan’s Labyrinth is much darker than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, both contain fairy tale like elements, and there are numerous parallels between the two heroines Ofelia and Alice. Both Alice and Ofelia are young girls who enter a subterranean world and embark upon a journey of self-development, encountering strange animals or creatures along their way. I believe that due to the multiple similarities between Pans Labyrinth and Alice (which is a canonical piece of nonsense literature), combined with the fantastical underworld that Ofelia explores, which defies logic with its magical nature, means that this film can be classed as nonsense. Before the second task, Ofelia is instructed ‘not to eat or drink anything during her stay.’[9] This has Biblical allusions to Genesis and the Garden of Eden, where Eve is told not to eat the forbidden fruit. Just as Eve succumbs to temptation and eats the apple, Ofelia eats a grape from the banquet, despite the fact that the fairies actively attempt to prevent her from doing so. As in Eve’s case, whose consumption of the apple leads to the fall of man, so too does Ofelia’s act of disobedience have disastrous consequences. After consuming a grape, the monstrous pale man is awakened. As punishment for Ofelia devouring two of his grapes, the pale man consumes two fairies, in a scene which evokes Francisco Goya’s painting entitled ‘Saturn Devouring His Son.’[10] The death of the fairies is significant, because it could symbolise an attempt to end Ofelia’s obsession with reading fairy tales; at the beginning of the film Ofelia’s mother tells her ‘you’re a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense’ (3 minutes 28 seconds.) This is an example of how some people perceive the definition of nonsense to be pejorative, an insult even. Dryden goes so far as to argue that ‘the realms of nonsense are the dumping grounds for literary failures’ (Hugh Haughton Introduction p. 4), which seems peculiar now considering the popularity of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 150 years after its publication.

Not only does the food in the food in this scene relate to religion, but it can also be linked to issues of class and fascism. Pans Labyrinth is set during the Spanish Civil War, which was a time during which the poor were starving and food had to be rationed. The pale man’s table is laden with a huge assortment of luxurious, fresh food items such as meat, fruit, cakes and wine; it is a feast. Although alluring to the hungry Ofelia, the fact that all items of food are differing shades of red is ominous, because it pre-empts the blood that is about to be spilled. This scene mirrors the dinner scene in the ‘real’ world which comes directly before it. The pale man is sat at the head of the table, just as Captain Vidal is, which is suggestive of his monstrous nature. Indulging in a banquet and hoarding food whilst the poor are starving is indicative of Vidal’s cruel, selfish nature. Connections can be seen here with Lear’s ‘Old Man of Calcutta’ limerick, because both that and Pans Labyrinth deal with the theme of greed, and in both cases the consumption of excess food is associated with negative character traits.

Finally, within Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’[11] food plays a pivotal role, and it is the consumption of the goblin men’s fruit which is the catalyst for the traumatic events that occur throughout this narrative poem. The use of ‘Come buy our orchard fruits’ (line 3) can be linked to the performative ‘EAT ME’ (p. 14) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. ‘Come buy’ is repeated twice in the fourth line and this persuasive language, as in Alice can be likened to advertisement and a consumer culture. Food is seen as a commodity, and the goblins use appealing adjectives in order to entice the maids to purchase their goods. For example, the goblins employ phrases such as ‘plump unpeck’d cherries’ (line 7) and ‘pomegranates full and fine’ (line 21.) The language used to describe the fruit is highly sensual, such as ‘plump’ (line 7) and ‘full and fine’ (line 21), with the suggestive shapes evoking images of the female body. ‘Peaches’ (line 9) have a fleshy texture, ‘cherries’ (line 7) are often used to symbolise virginity whilst ‘unpeck’d’ (line 7) emphasises purity and ‘ripe’ (line 15) has sexual undertones, suggesting a woman’s sexual maturity. The line ‘taste them and try’ (line 25), especially when coupled with ‘figs to fill your mouth’ (line 28), could be interpreted as having sexual connotations, perhaps alluding to oral sex, whilst the juices of the fruit may symbolise bodily fluids. When uttering the latter phrase aloud, the vowels mean it is necessary to open your mouth into an ‘o’ shape, which mimics the action required to consume the fruit. Eating and sex are activities which share similarities: they are both fundamental to survival, can both be pleasurable and engage the same senses of sight, taste and touch. The lines ‘sweet to tongue and sound to eye’ (line 30), explicitly appeal to the senses of sight and taste, whilst the carefully constructed sonic quality of the poem appeals to the ear. The alliterative quality coupled with sibilance, and the arrangement of spondees and trochees makes the goblin’s words themselves have a sensual quality.

Contemporary readers would perhaps gain more pleasure from this list, because it contains a plentiful variety of exotic fruits, and as Victor Roman Mendoza notes, ‘1859 proved a particularly low-yield year for fruit harvesting in England, and so “fresh fruit would indeed have been largely the stuff of fantasy.”[12] There are similarities between fantasy and nonsense, because both are distinctly separated from the real. Examining the topic of nonsense further, Margaret Reynold writes: ‘If the semiotic is ‘the nonsense woven indistinguishably into sense’, then Rossetti’s nonsense story makes sense and the surface-sense of her best-loved poems may be nonsense.’[13] I believe that the latter part of this is an apt description of Goblin Market, because although one could take the poem at face value as being merely about a girl who consumes fruit, I think that such a reading disregards the true ‘sense’ of the poem. Without delving deeper into the symbolism of the fruit, the poem makes little sense because there is no justification for the poem’s narrative events.

In conclusion, the introduction to this anthology explores some of the various ways in which nonsense texts employ food as a motif.  Since the nonsense texts discussed (aside from Pan’s Labyrinth) have been written primarily with the intended audience of children, the numerous references to food is understandable, because it is something which all children can relate to, as it forms a part of their everyday routine. As we have discovered throughout this exploration, food is laden with symbolism, and can be considered in relation to sex, religion, class and consumerism, amongst others. Even within a single text, the trope of food can be interpreted in numerous ways. For instance, within the extract from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, food can be viewed in terms of sexual desire, class and as a commodity. Intertwined amongst the analysis of food are references to possible ways in which to define nonsense, and some of its common characteristics. However, the purpose of this introduction to the anthology of nonsense texts is not to reach a definitive conclusion with respect to what constitutes nonsense, but rather to analyse the role of food within nonsense texts, and inspire the reader to consider whether they would classify the selected texts as belonging to the genre of nonsense.

[1] Sarah Shieff, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Fairytale Food’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 32.2, (2014), 68-84 (p. 68).

[2] Hugh Haughton, The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry ([n.p.]: Chatto and Windus, 1988), p.2.

[3] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, ed. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2009), p. 23.

[4] Lisa Coar, ‘Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: The Victorian Woman’s All-Consuming Predicament’, Victorian Network, 4.1, (2012), 48-72 (p. 57).

[5] Carole Couniha, Penny van Esterik, Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 168.

[6] M.R Haight, ‘Nonsense’, Brit J of Aesthetics, 11.3, (1971), 247-256 (p. 247).

[7] Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. by Vivien Noakes (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2001), p. 74.

[8] Edward Lear, The Complete Book of Nonsense and Other Verse, p. 77.

[9] ‘Pans Labyrinth’, dir. by Guillermo del Toro (Warner Bros, 2006), 56 minutes, 23 seconds.

[10] Figure 1

[11] Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’, Poetry Foundation, (2015) <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262&gt; [accessed 10 January 2016] (para 1. of 29

[12] Victor Roman Mendoza, “Come buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, ELH, 2006 Winter, 73.4, (2006), 913-47 (p. 923).

[13] Margaret Reynolds, ‘Speaking un-likeness: The double text in Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’ and ‘Remember’’, Textual Practice, 13.1, (2012), 25-41 (p. 35).

Bibliography

Primary

Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, ed. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2009)

Lear, Edward, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, ed. by Vivien Noakes (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2001)

‘Pans Labyrinth’, dir. by Guillermo del Toro (Warner Bros, 2006)

Rossetti, Christina, ‘Goblin Market’, Poetry Foundation, (2015) <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262&gt; [accessed 10 January 2016]

Secondary

Coar, Lisa, ‘Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: The Victorian Woman’s All-Consuming Predicament’, Victorian Network, 4.1, (2012), 48-72

Couniha, Carole and Esterik, Penny, Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997)

Haight, M.R, ‘Nonsense’, Brit J of Aesthetics, 11.3, (1971), 247-256

Haughton, Hugh, The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry ([n.p.]: Chatto and Windus, 1988)

Mendoza, Victor, “Come buy’: The Crossing of Sexual and Consumer Desire in Rossetti’s Goblin Market’, ELH, 2006 Winter, 73.4, (2006), 913-47

Reynolds, Margaret, ‘Speaking un-likeness: The double text in Christina Rossetti’s ‘After Death’ and ‘Remember’’, Textual Practice, 13.1, (2012), 25-41

Shieff, Sarah, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Fairytale Food’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 32.2, (2014), 68-84

Nonsense Anthology Extracts

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, ed. by Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2009), pp. 14-15.

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I’ll eat it,’ said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!’

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, p. 77.

‘There was an Old Man of Calcutta,

Who perpetually ate bread and butter;

Till a great bit of muffin, on which he was stuffing,

Choked that horrid Old Man of Calcutta.’

Edward Lear, The Complete Nonsense and Other Verse, p. 74.

‘There was an Old Man of Berlin,

Whose form was uncommonly thin;

Till he once, by mistake, was mixed up in a cake,

So they baked that Old Man of Berlin.’

 The banquet scene, ‘Pans Labyrinth’, dir. by Guillermo del Toro (Warner Bros, 2006), 56 minutes-62 minutes, 21 seconds.

Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, Poetry Foundation, (2015) <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174262&gt; [accessed 10 January 2016] (para 1. of 29)

Morning and evening

Maids heard the goblins cry:

“Come buy our orchard fruits,

Come buy, come buy:

Apples and quinces,

Lemons and oranges,

Plump unpeck’d cherries,

Melons and raspberries,

Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,

Swart-headed mulberries,

Wild free-born cranberries,

Crab-apples, dewberries,

Pine-apples, blackberries,

Apricots, strawberries;—

All ripe together

In summer weather,—

Morns that pass by,

Fair eves that fly;

Come buy, come buy:

Our grapes fresh from the vine,

Pomegranates full and fine,

Dates and sharp bullaces,

Rare pears and greengages,

Damsons and bilberries,

Taste them and try:

Currants and gooseberries,

Bright-fire-like barberries,

Figs to fill your mouth,

Citrons from the South,

Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;

Come buy, come buy.”

Appendix

Figure 1

Francisco Goya, ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’, An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Art <http://www.19thcenturyart-facos.com/artwork/saturn-devouring-his-children&gt; [accessed 12 January 2016]

 

DERRIDA AND NONSENSE: OPPRESSION, SUBVERSION AND THE ANIMAL

There is no single, universal definition for nonsense literature, therefore, this anthology will not attempt to argue one. Rather, it will draw on the subversive qualities that nonsense literature engages with and explore the emancipatory nature that proceeds this in order to transgress the hierarchy between the human and animal that exists within the social world. By drawing upon Jacque Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, a Derridean reading will be conducted upon the works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Wallace Stevens, in order to explore the oppressive nature of human systems that perpetuate the oppression of the animal. By exploring how the animal is subordinated, the emancipatory nature of nonsense literature that deconstructs the hierarchy between animal and human will also be examined.

Nonsense implies that there is no meaning, however, nonsense literature relies upon the presence of meaning as ‘a thing cannot be absurd if it is entirely without meaning’[i]. The presence of meaning, the resonance of the rational world and the ordered systems it is built upon, conflicts with the absence of meaning that determines nonsense literature. This conflict causes tension to arise between meaning and non-meaning, in which a space is created for the reader where nonsense can exist. This nonsensical space is a space ‘where anyone can laugh at and question dominant society because the critical gaze is deflected from the other to the self and dominant social attitudes and conventions’[ii]. The ‘other’, often being the animal, finds emancipation from the system that oppresses them within this transgressive space. While the human is displaced from the dominant centre to the one under the critical gaze, the human systems and hierarchies are transgressed and subverted.  Lehman states nonsense as ‘a parody of standing on-its-head of the strict and rational world’, it is this subversion of the rational world that can empower and free the animal[iii]. Derrida draws upon the man-made distinction between the animal and the human, shaped by ‘human’ systems that dominant the social world, and calls for the deconstruction of the hierarchy, displacing the human from the centre of the world. Through exploring Nonsense literature, Derrida’s argument can be drawn upon to display the oppressive systems and beliefs that dominate the social world. Through a Derridean reading of extracts from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Owl and the Pussy Cat and Botany Nonsense 1 by Edward Lear and A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts by Wallace Stevens, the subversive qualities of nonsense will be examined in relation to the animal.

Derrida depicts one of the key distinctions between humans and animals as nudity. The animal holds a ‘property unique to animals, what in the last instances distinguishes them from man, is their being naked without knowing it’, whereas the human is fully aware of their nudity[iv]. The ‘bottomless gaze’ of the naked animal, that is ‘wholly other’, causes shame to arise within the human as it ‘offers the abyssal limit of the human’, an insight into the animal in the human.[v] It is the very act of the human dressing oneself that rejects the nudity and otherness that exists within, thus denying the connection to the animal.  In clothing the animal, the boundaries between the animal and human become blurred.  Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tenniel’s illustrations clothe the animal, bringing the human and animal together. Tenniel’s illustrations of the animals are portrayed to the reader as ‘real’, as if it were a subject of scientific study[vi]. Tenniel draws upon the scientific and rational system of the animal, one of the human systems that succeeds in categorizing and oppressing the animal, and transgresses this system by clothing the animal. In the clothing of the animal, the animal is humanised and empowered. This is evident within the illustration of the White Rabbit [Fig. 1][vii]; dressed in human attire- such as a pair of gloves, a waistcoat and a pocket watch- conflicting with the scientific, realistic illustration and thus becomes a nonsensical character that transgresses the scientific concept of the animal. In clothing the animal, the animal has an implied awareness of its nudity, a quality that is connected to the human: ‘a property to man’. This awareness of nudity is an extension of an awareness of the self within a social, human world. By empowering the animal, the distinction between the human and animal becomes blurred enabling the subversion of the power hierarchy. Furthermore, the nonsensical clothing of the animal brings the human under a critical gaze in which the very action of clothing oneself is mocked.

Derrida argues that it is not only nudity, but the human act to name the ‘animal’ that is key to the subordination. The naming of an animal is ‘an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give another’, and thus the authority to silence and call upon the animal, a call of property over the animal[viii]. Carroll creates a space ‘where things have no meaning’ within the woods in Through the Looking Glass. [ix] This becomes a literal space of nonsense with the transgression from the human system of language as both the nonhuman and human remain nameless. It is in this nameless state that both the nonhuman and human no longer exist within a hierarchy based on the binary opposites. It is through this nonsensical space that Alice is denied the ability to name herself and name the nonhuman. The transgression from the human system of naming renders Alice unable to identify herself as human, and to identify the Fawn as animal. This enables an interaction between the two, ‘Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn’, which subverts the hierarchy by presenting them as equals. Once outside the non-meaning woods, the appellation of names is re-established; ‘I’m a Fawn’ and ‘You’re a human child’, causing the dear to return to a position of vulnerability, thus reinstating the power relationship between human and animal. The creation of a nonsensical space enables the system of naming to be subverted and transgressed freeing the animal from oppression and depicting the human system as an institution of hierarchy.

Edward Lear, a natural history illustrator, subverts this hierarchy through the naming of his illustrations in Nonsense Botany 1. Combining the presence and absence of the language system creates a sense of tension between meaning and non-meaning, presenting a ‘fuzzy image, a feeling of sense’[x]. The naming of each illustration, such as Manypeeplia Upsidownia [Fig. 2][xi] and Piggiawiggia Pyramidalis [Fig. 3][xii], uses ‘dog-Latin’, an imitation of Latin, in which the language system is drawn upon and then transgressed through the absence of meaning. The nonsensical space created through the tension between meaning and non-meaning in the language system allows space for the meaning of the illustrations to transcend the rational world. It is within this space, that the hierarchy of man and animal is subverted. Manypeeplia Upsidownia illustrates the disempowered human that is hung from the dominant plant, a symbol of nature, in which both the physical size and subordinate position demonstrates the subversion of the hierarchy. The inversion of this system enables an inversion of the hierarchy, in which the human system of naming is used against itself.

Derrida puts forward his concept of ‘Limitrophy’, in which the limits of what we call ‘human’ and what we call ‘animal’ are based on an ontological misinterpretation of what it is to be human and to be animal.[xiii] Derrida states that ‘all that differentiates humans from animals is man’s violent use of language to subjugate and categorise all non-human living things under one single word: animal’[xiv]. Within Edward Lear’s The Owl and The Pussy Cat, limits between the animal and human are challenged and transgressed.[xv] The courtship between the Owl and Cat transgress the limits of their species, in the deconstruction of the prey and predator boundary. Lear creates a nonsensical space, ‘they sailed away for a year and a day, / To the Land where the Bong tree grows’, that frees the courtship from the imposed limits of the animal and enables them to go ‘hand in hand’.[xvi] The animal courtship conforms to the literary romantic notion of courtship, with the romantic imagery of ‘the moon, / the moon, the moon’ and the focus upon the musical seduction, ‘The Owl looked up to the stars above, / And sang to a small guitar’[xvii]. This courtship subverts the human idea of romance, in which the animal infiltrates the human boundaries. Lear’s nonsensical space enables boundaries to be transgressed and re-established, disrupting the distinction between human and animal whilst freeing the animal.

Furthermore, Lear continues to transgress the limits that are imposed upon animal and human, by human systems, in blurring the boundaries between the male and female gender within The Owl and The Pussy-cat. The gender of the Owl and Cat continually change depending on each verse and situation.  Initially, the gender relationship is established as Owl, the active male, and the Cat, as the passive female; ‘The Owl looked up to the stars above, / And sang to a small guitar,/…”What a beautiful Pussy you are!”’. However, the implied gender shifts within the next verse as the ‘Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!/…Let us be married!’, in which the Cat insinuates a masculine identity by conforming to romantic conventions of the active male proposing marriage and with the feminine description of the Owl. In drawing on romantic literary conventions, Lear highlights the assumed gender boundaries. However, the gender of each character continually changes in the nonsensical world, thus it can be suggested that Lear depicts gender as a fluid, unstable construction. In transgressing the gender boundaries, and blurring the male and female together, gender is depicted as another construction of the human, social world.

Derrida argues that the boundaries between animal and human stem from the Lacanian philosophy that states animals and humans as two different beings due to man’s access to a language system, a language system that excludes the animal and deprives them of language. This exclusion from the human language system refuses the animal access to an autobiographical system that enables the animal to determine itself. The ‘autobiographical self’ is a subject’s ability to access to a system in which they can transform their traces of existence into a sense of the self through language. By excluding the animal from the language system, it denies the animal an ability to access the ‘autobiographical’ self and thus makes the language system exclusive to humans. The nonsensical space enables the animal to respond and use language, thus creating a sense of self. Carroll’s wonderland in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland allows for the animal to speak and respond, and even renders Alice unable to respond within the nonsensical language system[xviii]. This is evident within the interaction between the Caterpillar and Alice. The Caterpillar has the ability not only to respond, but to question Alice and her identity: “Who are you…What do you mean, Explain yourself!” While the Caterpillar is able to identify itself through speech, Alice is rendered unable to due to the exclusion from the language system, in which her response of ‘You are Old, Father William’  is deemed as ‘not right’[xix]. This loss of language extrapolates to Alice’s loss of her identity and self, ‘I hardly know Sir, just at present… I think I must have been changed several times since then.’[xx] This interaction is one that depicts a power relationship, in which the Caterpillar becomes the dominant due to the access to language, thus gains access to an ‘autobiographing’ of the self.

While Carroll’s depiction of power relationship between the human and animal is explicit, Wallace Stevens’ poem A Rabbit as a King of Ghosts implies a power relationship between animal and human through the ‘the oxymoronic image’[xxi]. The duality between reality and human imagination creates a similar nonsensical tension between reality and a nonsensical world. The ambiguous ‘shapeless shadow’ of the rabbit and the aesthetically exaggerated ‘fat cat, red tongue, green mind’ represents the prey and predator as a symbol of the hierarchy and threat inflicted upon the animal. The ‘monument of the cat…forgotten in the moon’ insinuates the overarching violence of the dominant figure, yet the rabbit is able to subvert the violence by placing the cat at a distance. In this subversion of the hierarchy, the subordinated rabbit is empowered. This is indicated as ‘the whole night of the wideness of night is for you,/…You become a self that fills all four corners’, in which the animal accesses the self and presents it to the reader. Once the presence of the dominant prey is diminished, the Rabbit is able to not only become empowered, but to engage with a sense of self that is denied as subordinate. [xxii]

‘The question is not to know whether the animal can think, reason, or speak, …the first and decisive question would rather be to know whether animals can suffer’, while nonsense literature explores the systems that subordinates the animal, it looks to the violence and suffering inflicted upon the animal[xxiii]. In comparison to Lear and Carroll, Stevens’ poem shares the distinct child-like undertone, in which a transgression back to the child is implied through the Rabbit’s vulnerability by evoking to the night and fear of the presence of the evil figure: ‘the cat forgotten in the moon’. Furthermore, the continuous use of personal pronouns-‘you’ and ‘self’-connects the reader to the animal, allowing the reader to attune to the animal’s fears, oppression and perspective. In bringing the human reader and the animal together, uniting them in their fears, Stevens’ succeeds in transgressing the boundaries, and hierarchies, that exist between human and animal

While Stevens’ unites the animal and reader together, in which the human reader’s fears are animalised, Carroll’s animalisation of Alice in both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass enact a ‘relocation of the human’. By transgressing from the human, Alice is brought to the Animal and the qualities that made her human –language, naming and clothing- are under the ‘critical gaze’. Rather than being situated within a human system, Alice is positioned as ‘potential predator, prey or equal’, in she identifies her relationships based on her physicality: subordinate in the presence of animals larger to her, such as the Puppy whom ‘she was terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it might be hungry’[xxiv], and as equals when of the same size, such as the Caterpillar. Alice’s fluid body challenges her identity as human; ‘I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then’[xxv]. Alice is no longer able to draw on the human systems of language, naming and clothing to identify herself as human, rather she defines herself ‘in a hierarchy of physical, rather than moral or social relations’[xxvi]. By situating Alice in an animal system, purely based on physicality, she transgresses her social being and subverts the distinction between animal and human. Arguably, this could be seen as a critique on the social being, in which the human is ‘merely a clever animal, interchangeable with other species’. Alice’s shifting body places her under the ‘critical gaze’ of the reader, where what defines the human as non-animal is rejected and the human as animal is brought to the reader’s attention.

While Derrida’s essay offers an exploration of the animal-human hierarchy, and the violent subordination of the animal he calls for the deconstruction of this relationship; in which the human is dislocated from the centre. David A. Nirbert explores the position of the animal in the capitalist world, in which deconstruction cannot be reached:

Prejudice against other animals arises from socially promulgated beliefs that reflect a speciesist ideology, created to legitimate economic exploitation or elimination of a competitor. Oppressive practices have deep roots in economic and political arrangements. Therefore, for injustices to be addressed effectively, it is not enough to try to change socially acquired prejudice or to focus only on moral change. The structure of the oppressive system itself must be challenged and changed.[xxvii]

However, within nonsense literature these ‘oppressive practises’; such as the clothing, naming and language in Carroll’s work, the naming and limitography in Lear’s work and the violence and threat against the animal in Stevens’ work. In drawing upon these, and then transgression from them, tension arises from the resonance of the rational world of meaning and the creation of the nonsensical world that exists outside of this oppressive system. This tension creates the nonsensical space that allows for transgression of a world of social order, in which the animal is continually oppressed within the social world.  While society is yet to reach the deconstruction that Derrida calls upon, displacing the human from the centre of the world and thus the dominant position, nonsense literature enables this deconstruction, denying the human the position of the dominant.

While the rational world is built upon human systems and ideologies that oppress the animal, nonsense literature can succeed in the emancipation of the animal. It is the nonsensical space, external to the rational world, arising from the tension of meaning and non-meaning that enables human systems to be transgressed and the power relationship between human and animal to be subverted. It is the nonsensical space, where the dominant is placed under a ‘critical gaze’,  that opens up opportunities for Derrida’s deconstruction. While this anthology focuses upon the emancipation of the subordinate animal, the nonsensical space enables for a vast range of hierarchies to be transgressed due to its existence outside of the rational, ordered world that is built upon power hierarchies.

[i] M. R. Haight, ‘Nonsense’, Brit J Aesthetics (1971) p.1.

 

[ii] Sarah, Minslow, Challenging the Impossibility of Children’s Literature: The emancipatory Qualities of Edward Lear p. 17.

 

[iii] John, Lehmann, Edward Lear and His World, (New York: Scribne’s, 1977).

 

[iv] Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to Follow)”. Critical Inquiry28.2 (2002) pp. 369–418. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1344276.pdf?acceptTC=true> [Accessed: 10^th January, 2016] NB:  All future quotations from this edition unless stated otherwise. 

 

[v]  Ibid.

 

[vi] Rose Lovell-Smith, ‘The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll’s Reader’, Criticisms, 45.4 (2003), pp. 383-415 (p.402).

 

[vii] Lewis, Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ The White Rabbit, (Macmillan Children’s books: London, 2015) p.1. Appendix 1 [Fig. 1].

 

[viii] Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to Follow)”. Critical Inquiry28.2 (2002) pp. 369–418. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1344276.pdf?acceptTC=true> [Accessed: 10^th January, 2016]

 

[ix] Lewis, Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, (Harper Press: London, 2013), pp. 44-45. See appendix 2.

 

[x] Diane Ponterotto, ‘Rule Breaking and Mean Making in Edward Lear’, Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Alicante (1993) 153-161 (p. 154).

 

[xi] Manypeeplia Upsidownia, ‘Nonsense Botany 1 1871’, Nonsense Literature (2012) http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/nb.html [accessed 10^th January 2015] see Appendix [Fig. 2].

 

[xii] Piggiawiggia Pyramidalis, ‘Nonsense Botany 1 1871’, Nonsense Literature (2012) http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/nb.html [accessed 10^th January 2015] see Appendix [Fig. 3].

 

 

[xiii] Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to Follow)”. Critical Inquiry28.2 (2002) pp. 369–418. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1344276.pdf?acceptTC=true> [Accessed: 10^th January, 2016]

 

[xiv] Ibid.

 

[xv]  Edward, Lear, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, ‘Complete Nonsense’, (Wordsworth Classics: London, 1994), pp. 137-138. See Appendix 5.

 

[xvi] Ibid. p. 137.

 

[xvii] Ibid. p. 138.

 

[xviii] Lewis, Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ The White Rabbit, (Macmillan Children’s books: London, 2015) p.53-55.

 

[xix] Ibid. p. 54.

 

[xx] Ibid. p. 55.

 

[xxi] Wallace, Stevens, The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,  < http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/wallace-stevens/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts/> [Accessed: January 9^th 2015]. See Appendix 5.

 

[xxii] Ibid.

 

[xxiii] Ruth, Murphy, ‘Darwin and 1860s Children’s Literature: Belief, Myth or Detritus’ Journal of Literature and Science, Vol 5. 2 (2012) pp. 5-21 (p. 13).

 

[xxiv] Lewis, Carroll, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, (Harper Press: London, 2013) See Appendix [Fig. 4].

 

[xxv] Murphy,Ibid. p. 13.

[xxvii] David, A. Nibert, ‘Animal, Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict’, (Columbia University Press:2013) p. 47.

 

 

 

 

[FIG. 1]

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, LEWIS CARROLL

This must be the wood’ she said thoughtfully to herself, ‘where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of my name when I go in? I shouldn’t like to lose it at all- because they’d have to give me another, and it would be almost certain to be an ugly one. But then the fun would be, trying to find the creature that had got my old name! (…) ‘What does it call itself, I wonder? I do believe it’s got no name- why, to be sure it hasn’t!’

She stood silent for a minute thinking: then she suddenly began again. ‘Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I’ determined to do it!’ But being determined didn’t help her much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was, ‘L, I know it begins with L!

Just then a Fawn came wondering by: it looked at Alice with its large gentle eyes, but didn’t seem at all frightened. (…)
They came out into another open field, and there the fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arm. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight. ‘And, dear me! You’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

 

[FIG. 2]

[FIG.3]

 

 

THE OWL AND THE PUSSY-CAT, EDWARD LEAR

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!”

 

II

Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?”

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

 

III

“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

 

 

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, LEWIS CARROLL

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and address her in a languid, sleepy voice.

‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I- I hardly know Sir, just at present- at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid, Sir!” Said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

(…)

“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to say!”

This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again.

“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.

“Is that all?” said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as she could.

“No,” said the Caterpillar.

Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking; it at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth again, and said, “So you think you’ve changed do you?”

“I’m afraid I am, Sir,” said Alice. “I c’a’n’t remember things as I used- and I don’t keep the same size for ten minutes together!”

“C’a’n’t remember what things?” said the Caterpillar.

“Well, I’ve tried to say ‘How doth the little busy bee,’ but it all came different!” Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.

“Repeat ‘You are old, Father William,’” said the Caterpillar (…)

“That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar.

 

A RABBIT AS KING OF THE GHOSTS, WALLACE STEVENS

The difficult to think at the end of day,

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun

And nothing is left except light on your fur-

 

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,

Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk

And August the most peaceful month.

 

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,

Without the monument of cat,

The cat forgotten in the moon;

 

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

In which everything is meant for you

And nothing need to be explained;

 

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;

And east rushes west and west rushes down,

No matter. The grass is full

 

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,

The whole of the wideness of night is for you,

A self that touches all edges,

 

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

The red cat hides away in the fur-light

And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone-

You sit with you head like a carving in space

And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

 

[FIG. 4]

Bibliography

Carroll, Lewis,  ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’,  (Macmillan Children’s books: London, 2015)

Carroll, Lewis, ‘Through the Looking Glass’, (Harper Press: London, 2013)

Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (more to Follow)”. Critical Inquiry28.2 (2002) pp. 369–418. < http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1344276.pdf?acceptTC=true> [Accessed: 10^th January, 2016]

Haight, M. R. , ‘Nonsense’, Brit J Aesthetics (1971)

Lear, Edward, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, ‘Complete Nonsense’, (Wordsworth Classics: London, 1994), pp. 137-138

Lehmann, John. Edward Lear and His World, (New York: Scribne’s, 1977)

Lovell-Smith, Rose , ‘The Animals of Wonderland: Tenniel as Carroll’s Reader’, Criticisms, 45.4 (2003), pp. 383-415

Murphy, Ruth ‘Darwin and 1860s Children’s Literature: Belief, Myth or Detritus’ Journal of Literature and Science, Vol 5. 2 (2012) pp. 5-21

Nibert, David. A, ‘Animal, Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism and Global Conflict’, (Columbia University Press: 2013) p. 47

Ponterotto, Diane, ‘Rule Breaking and Mean Making in Edward Lear’, Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Alicante (1993) pp. 153-161

Wallace, Stevens, The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,  < http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/wallace-stevens/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts/> [Accessed: January 9^th 2015]

 

 

Nonsense and Surrealism – The Chaos of Meaning

If traditional nonsense plays with the unexpected disorder of the universe Surrealism makes a much more serious attempt to economize it. Surrealism seeks an epistemological identity through the marriage of conscious and unconscious realities. By inhabiting the ‘underground’ both Surrealism and nonsense occupy a vertiginous place in time and space. The liminal consciousness of the subject, revered in Surrealism, is a much more troubled concept in nonsense literature. Although parallels can be drawn between the two styles nonsense does not share the Surrealist confidence of subjective ‘transcendence,’ explicitly the reintegration of man and nature, subject and object and conscious and unconscious.

Lewis Carroll’s canonical text of nonsense Alice in Wonderland was valorized by the Surrealists. Alice was a natural muse for the movement’s epistemophilia; her characteristic curiosity, primordial drives and a particular dissatisfaction for arbitrary rules were beguiling to the Surrealist travail. Louis Aragon treats Alice as a symbol of an endemically feminine curiosity; “at an epoch when, in the definitively United Kingdom, all thought was considered so shocking that it might well have hesitated to form itself, what had become of human liberty? It rested in its entirety within the frail hands of Alice.”[1] Thus the nonsense of Carroll’s text is given a specifically political agenda. From its marginal position Alice’s curiosity stands to destabilize specifically patriarchal order. Through the iconography of Pandora and the biblical figure of Eve, Mulvey argues that the myth of female curiosity projects itself “onto and into…forbidden space,”[2] or for Alice, Wonderland. Woman’s invasion of this undetermined territory carries “connotations of transgression and danger” due to her “drive to investigate and uncover secrets.”[3] Thus curiosity is often dismissed as madness or nonsense. For the Surrealists I would argue that this sense of danger manifests itself in an ambiguously conscious othering of woman. The perceived danger of feminine curiosity manifests itself in the reification of hysteria by the Surrealists as “women hysterics are endowed with particularly poetic powers because of that state of Otherness.”[4] The Surrealist ideal of aesthetic madness, feminine irrationality and it’s access to the dream world has a natural alignment to Alice’s Wonderland of nonsense. For the Surrealists Wonderland is a space of this unconscious aesthetic madness, navigated by Alice, a muse of feminine curiosity.

Alice’s fall, unlike Eve’s, is a leisurely and absurdly blithe experience. Having “plenty of time…to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next”[5] Alice surpasses geographical, temporal and rational boundaries. Beer highlights the nonsensical behavior of this space; “wells, however deep, do not usually affect the speed of falling.”[6] Gravity is particularly inconsistent, as Alice falls, the jar of marmalade retains its ‘normal’ weight and she seems to fall faster than numerous cupboards. Alice’s perception of her fall has a vertiginous resonance; “down, down, down” to a place where farcically “people walk with their heads downward.” Avant-garde tendency towards the perception of space and time correlates to the Surrealist agenda. A subject that “is disposed of its privilege” of space must then imperatively experience a displaced reality. Whilst in Surrealism this is a frankly violent displacement, Alice seems to take the nonsense in her stride, maintaining a specifically Victorian politeness – “fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air!”

Whilst Surrealism privileges an authenticity surrounding the violent displacement of the subject, nonsense commits to neither reality nor non-reality. Instead nonsense problematizes natural as well as nonsensical laws. This is particularly evident in the corporality of Carroll’s world. The immaterial dreamscape of Wonderland comes to life with a resounding “thump! thump!” The tangibility of the onomatopoeic sound transcends the sensory boundaries; we can almost ‘hear’ Alice land as we read the text. The word materializes abstract experience and so Carroll’s written word becomes both visual and aural. Nonsense consistently pushes the boundaries of language. The orthodoxy of language as a privileged medium and the tension between language and reality manifests in ceaseless subversion of language in Surrealism. This approach undoubtedly draws its roots from Dadaism (of which Surrealism was descendent), which assaulted the notion of hierarchical language systems.

The arbitrariness of language is illustrated by Alice’s hypnagogic question– “do cats eat bats…do bats eat cats.” Through its inversion the sentence becomes a linguistic paradox; the terms are undoubtedly a minimal pair but as Lecercle points out “the context is so peculiar that it prevents the normal application of [grammatical] rules.”[7] Alice states, “As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it” thus the meaning of both words becomes identical, phonetically /k/ and /b/ are interchangeable. Lecercle proposes that this conscious negation of the rules of grammar shows that “the attitude of nonsense texts towards language is not one of playful imitation and random disorganization.”[8] Nonsense thus shares the Surrealist propensity for the “simultaneous creation and negation”[9] of the system of language.

The allegory of Alice’s fall also maps closely onto a decent into the Freudian unconscious. Arguably to produce nonsense in the face of reality is a rational response. According to Freud the “inner nature is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.”[10] The disorientation of the subject that often occurs in nonsense and Surrealist texts thus imagines this discrepancy. Where Carroll cautiously approaches the tension between the conscious and the unconscious, the subject is enthusiastically taken up by Surrealism, which seeks “both physical and metaphysical satisfaction by pushing back the frontiers of logical reality.” The uncertainty of subjectivity manifests in Alice’s insatiable curiosity, however resolution to her quest for knowledge is presented as dangerous in the text. Alice’s curiosity is boundless in a specifically modal and temporally uncertain linguistic space; as she consistently uses the modal verbs “shall,” “must,” and “hope” her questions are voiced in future tense “it will never do to ask.” However a change occurs as Alice is at the threshold of consciousness and demands “now, Dinah, tell me the truth.” This imperative is followed by Alice’s violent arrival in Wonderland as “suddenly…the fall was over.” Her conviction is interrupted thus the reader is in left in an ambiguously liminal reality where truth is erratic. Carroll’s refusal to designate reliable space feeds into Surrealist dismissal of the confines of ‘order,’ as Aragon states, “the idea of the limit is the only inconceivable idea.”

The idea of the limit is semiotically interrogated in both Surrealism and nonsense literature. The interaction between text and image, present in nonsense literature, is consciously and critically examined in Surrealist art. Magritte’s famous work The Treachery of Images[11] exposes many of the antagonisms of representation. Nonsense literature’s affinity for text and image, as in the works of both Carroll and Lear, is significant when we consider that the structure and rules of semiotic interpretation are looser than that of grammar and syntax. Nonsense as a genre already pushes the boundaries of linguistic decorum and then complicates this by adding another layer of interpretation through image. For nonsense literature the use of pictures that accompany the text is another way of expanding the boundaries of the written word. In Magritte’s work nevertheless the interaction of text and image is more violent, though not less pleasurable. The painting depicts a pipe under which the sentence “ceci n’est pas une pipe” is written. When the two interact, the natural polysemy of images lends a stronger reliance on the text to anchor meaning. As the two act upon each other in an interpretive relay the boundary between the two modes of representation becomes unconvincing. Where the viewer seeks confidence in their interpretation of the image Magritte undermines this with an oxymoron. Both text and image thus perpetually undermine each other, each vying for verisimilitude. Realistically both of them present the truth – the pipe resembles an object in the real world, whilst the sentence reiterates that this image is not an object of the real world.

Magritte argued “a painting was most successful when it defied the viewer’s habitual expectations and resisted any logical explanation or verbalization.”[12] The use of everyday objects in Surrealism is fundamental to the refutation of perceived normality. Manipulation of the everyday is also a theme of nonsense works, the tea party in Alice in Wonderland for example is an event in which specifically Victorian social expectations are warped by illogicalities. The irrational loops back on itself to reveal the arbitrariness and absurd normality of ‘the tea party.’ As in Magritte’s work where crucially the “explicitly rendered image of a pipe cannot be trusted. [and] is a treacherous friend that masquerades as the real object”[13] nonsense deals with the treachery of reality. According to Magritte the interaction of text and image in the space of our minds “is not the calm territory of unified and consistent thought, but is rather the territory of illogicities, doubts and surprises, where image and language mix only antagonistically, if at all.”[14] Nonsense is certainly not a “calm territory” – in many ways nonsense literature is this cerebral plane of interaction between antagonistically competing senses.

Perhaps the most nonsensical and Surrealist space is that of the dream. In dream the unconscious and conscious mind interact to produce an unregulated reality. Luis Buñuel’s 1972 film Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie[15] explicitly deals with this boundless space, in order to parody the senselessness of specifically bourgeoisie social conventions. The structure of the narrative represents the fragmented subjective processing of reality, blending the real with absurdity in a way that resembles the nonsense of the dream world. Magritte considered his artwork “an act of visual thought”[16] – Buñuel’s film is also a visualization thought process, mimetic of an interior reality projected onto the real world. The nonsense of Buñuel’s work derives from the juxtaposition of the normal, the dining of a bourgeois group of friends, and the ridiculous, the interruptions of soldiers, political activists and the police, to name but a few. Within the tempestuous space of the film the characters are subjected to the violence of their subconscious; whole scenes are reinterpreted as dreams after they have occurred. Through the emphatically Freudian and bizarre representation of the soldier’s dream Buñuel satirizes and undermines the notion of ‘the dream.’ The vagueness of temporality in the space of the dream is highlighted in the constant chiming of a clock in the background. The soldier describes being “here,” a proximally indefinite space, deictically known only to him. The dream is thus both timeless and immaterial and so is equated with a kind of limbo state. The obviousness with which Buñuel alludes to death, as dirt is shovelled onto an unknown body is uncannily humorous. The dream becomes an allegory of the Oedipus complex as the protagonist forsakes a past lover to find his mother “among the shadows.” Interpretation of the dream is imposed on the viewer simply because it lends itself to such an overtly Freudian narrative.

For Buñuel it becomes nonsensical to separate dream from reality, the two are inextricably linked; as Bergson states, “the plane of dream, or dilated memory, is just as real as the plane of action.”[17] The scene feels particularly surreal in that it is introduced as “a very nice dream.” The absurdity thus also arises from the treatment of the dream as an anecdote. It feels jarring to the viewer as what is recounted is wholly personal. The dreamscape is a space of the indefinite past where memory functions nonsensically. Buñuel treats the unconscious as a place of “free volleying thought”[18] undeterred by reason. This is why the dream is so forcibly and violently crying out for interpretation by the viewer, but this would simply privilege reality and render the dream subservient to it. In actual fact Buñuel sees both reality and the dream as equal in the status of their interpretation of reality, both as pastiche of “haphazard chance meeting and ideas and visions.”[19] Carroll has a similar sense of the dream, as in his diary he writes “we often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: ‘sleep hath its own world,’ and it is often as lifelike as the other.”

The binary of interior and exterior realities is reflected in the dual consciousness of Haruki Murakami’s protagonist in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World[20]. The difficulty in defining the genre of Murakami’s novel stems from it’s postmodern rejection of categorization, thus it is a pastiche of different styles including sophisticated surrealism, nonsense literature, science fiction, detective and film noir. The conscious/unconscious binary that is explored in Alice in Wonderland, mapped and derided in The Treachery of Images and Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeousie is “radically dismantled”[21] in the novel. The narrator has a split consciousness that resides in two separate narratives and seemingly separate worlds. His psyche split between a futuristic ‘hard-boiled wonderland’ and the nonsensical fantasy land ‘the end of the world’ the protagonist “is made to become his unconscious, to inhabit his unconscious/to be inhabited by his unconscious.”[22] If the unconscious is a space of secrets lost to the conscious Murakami creates a world in which the subject itself becomes a lost object. The narration begins in a nonsensical elevator; a journey somewhat similar to Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole where all sense of space and time is distorted as “all sense of direction simply vanished.” The use of modal lexis adds to an uncertainty of time and space: “it could have been going down…Maybe I’d gone up…Maybe I’d circled the globe.” The narrator’s blasé treatment of his induced vertigo is reminiscent of the casualness with which Alice accepts her fall. Surrealists saw the displacement of subjective space as an experience synonymous with religious ecstasy. Masson describes such a moment occurring in the mountains of Montserrat in Barcelona:

The sky itself appeared to me like an abyss, something which I had never felt before – the vertigo above the vertigo below. I found myself in a sort of maelstrom, almost a tempest, and as though hysterical. I thought I was going mad.[23]

The space of the elevator is reminiscent of this in its stasis of both elevation and the feeling of being underground. Although Murakami’s narrator is not exposed to the violent “maelstrom” of Masson’s description, he experiences a similar subjective displacement: “I didn’t even know if I was moving or standing still.”

The nonsensical space of the elevator induces a distortion of the senses; the narrator “ventured a cough, but it didn’t echo anything like a cough.” The narrator’s warped sensory perception of reality thus provokes a kind of madness.. As the protagonist is “hermetically sealed in a vault” his inner consciousness is detached from the outside reality. The result of subjective isolation is that we cannot rationalize and assimilate our behavior within the structure of the policed social system and so it seems we are “mad.” The narrator absurdly notes the elevators capacity for “an office…a kitchenette…three camels and a mid range palm tree” as well its lack of switches, or in fact anything that resembles an elevator. Yet he merely questions how “this elevator could have gotten fire department approval.” The narrator’s follow up statement that “there are norms for elevators after all” reemphasizes his nonsensical observations. Although one can return from the chaos of Alice’s wonderland it seems that “Murakami’s narrator is fully at the mercy of forces preceding and exceeding him.”[24] The narrator has very little agency reflected in the image of him “stationary in unending silence, a still life: Man in Elevator.” The imagery of the title of the novel ‘hard-boiled’ crucially evokes the dynamic binary state (reminiscent of a Freudian separation of the conscious/unconscious) of an egg, separated unto itself between yolk and white. And yet Wonderland is a space without boundaries, without reason or structure. Thus the hard-boiled reality may seem from the outside permanently dual, inside it is a world ruled by chaos and nonsense.

Through the ‘underground’ worlds of dreaming and the unconscious, nonsense and Surrealism destabilize the boundaries of ontological certainty. Nonsense becomes a space where the chaos of representation and meaning is liberated. Carroll meditates “when we are dreaming…do we not say and do things which in waking life would be insane?”[25] None of the texts in this anthology are stable entities; they are liberations of the chaos of reality, necessarily thoughtful and wholly playful.

Footnotes:

[1] Kevin Jackson, ‘A-Z of Alice in Wonderland,’ The Independent (2010) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/az-of-alice-in-wonderland-1902684.html [accessed 01 July 2015] (Para 19)

[2] Laura Mulvey, ‘Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,’ in Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Insitute and Indiana University Press, 1996) pp. 53-65 (pg. 60)

[3] ibid

[4] Katharine Conley, ‘Through the Surrealist Looking Glass: Unica Zurn’s Vision of Madness,’ in Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) pp.79-113 (pg. 100)

[5] Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (London: Wordsworth Editions 2001) See Appendix I. NB. All future references from this edition unless stated otherwise

[6] Gillian Beer, ‘Dream Touch,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (2014) http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/viewFile/702/1018 [Accessed 1st July 2015] (pg.6)

[7] Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense. Jstor (1994) http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3829400?sid=21106165925903&uid=2129&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739216&uid=2 [Accessed: 19 March 2015] (pg. 36)

[8] ibid

[9] Fiona Bradley, ‘Surrealism,’ Movements in Modern Art (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, 1997) pg. 13

[10] Sigmund Freud, Dream Psychology. Translated from German by M. D. Eder. Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org [Accessed: 1st July 2015] pg. 279

[11] René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe) c.1928-1929, Oil on Canvas, 63.5cm x 93.98 cm, Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, USA. See Appenidix II

[12] Gerrit Lansing, ‘Rene Magritte’s ‘The False Mirror:’ Image Versus Reality,’ Notes in the History of Art, Vol.4. No.2/3 (1985) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23202433 [Accessed 30th May 2015] pp 83-84 (pg. 84)

[13] ibid

[14] Robin Greenly, ‘Image, Text and the Female Body: Rene Magritte and the Surrealist Publications,’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol.15. No.2 (1992) http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360500 [Accessed 30th May 2015] pp.48- 57(pg. 52)

[15] Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972 [Film, DVD] Directed by Luis Buñuel. France: 20th Century Fox. See Appendix III. Nb Quotations are from this film unless stated otherwise

[16] Suzanne Guerlac, ‘The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Margritte,’ Representations, Vol.97. No.1 (2007)

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2007.97.1.28 [Accessed: 30th May 2015] pp. 28-56 (pg.39)

[17] ibid pg.43

[18] Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (New York: The Noonday Press, 1959) pg. 154

[19] ibid

[20] Haruki Murakami, Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. Translated from Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. (London: Vintage Books, 2001) See Appendix IV. NB. All further quotations are from this book unless stated otherwise

[21] Jonathan Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011) pg. 70

[22] ibid

[23] David Lomas, ‘Vertigo: On Some Motifs in Masson, Bataille and Caillois,’ in Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, ed. Peter Collier (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006) pg. 91

[24] Jonathan Boulter, Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011) pg. 62

[25] Gillian Beer, ‘Dream Touch,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (2014) http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/viewFile/702/1018 [Accessed 1st July 2015] (pg.6)

Bibliography

Balakian, Anna Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (New York: The Noonday Press, 1959) pg. 154

Beer, Gillian ‘Dream Touch,’ Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (2014) http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/viewFile/702/1018 [Accessed 1st July 2015]

Bradley, Fiona ‘Surrealism,’ Movements in Modern Art (London: Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, 1997)

Boulter, Jonathan Meloncholy and the Archive: Trauma, Memory, and History in the Contemporary Novel (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011)

Conley, Katharine ‘Through the Surrealist Looking Glass: Unica Zurn’s Vision of Madness,’ in Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996) pp.79-113

Freud, Sigmund Dream Psychology. Translated from German by M. D. Eder. Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org [Accessed: 1st July 2015]

Greenly Robin, ‘Image, Text and the Female Body: Rene Magritte and the Surrealist Publications,’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol.15. No.2 (1992) pp.48- 57

Guerlac, Suzanne ‘The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Margritte,’ Representations, Vol.97. No.1 (2007) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2007.97.1.28 [Accessed: 30th May 2015] pp. 28-56

Jackson, Kevin. ‘A-Z of Alice in Wonderland,’ The Independent (2010) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/az-of-alice-in-wonderland-1902684.html [accessed 01 July 2015] (Para 19)

Lansing, Gerrit ‘Rene Magritte’s ‘The False Mirror:’ Image Versus Reality,’ Notes in the History of Art, Vol.4. No.2/3 (1985) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23202433 [Accessed 30th May 2015] pp 83-84

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques Philosophy of Nonsense. Jstor http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3829400?sid=21106165925903&uid=2129&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739216&uid=2 [Accessed: 19 March 2015]

Lomas, David ‘Vertigo: On Some Motifs in Masson, Bataille and Caillois,’ in Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers, ed. Peter Collier (Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2006)

Mulvey, Laura. ‘Pandora’s Box: Topographies of Curiosity,’ in Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Insitute and Indiana University Press, 1996) pp. 53-65

Anthology

Appendix I 

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down a very deep well.

Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book-shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled `ORANGE MARMALADE’, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

`Well!’ thought Alice to herself, `after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!’ (Which was very likely true.)

Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end! `I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?’ she said aloud. `I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think–‘ (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) `–yes, that’s about the right distance–but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?’ (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)

Presently she began again. `I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth! How funny it’ll seem to come out among the people that walk with their heads downward! The Antipathies, I think–‘ (she was rather glad there was no one listening, this time, as it didn’t sound at all the right word) `–but I shall have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know. Please, Ma’am, is this New Zealand or Australia?’ (and she tried to curtsey as she spoke–fancy curtseying as you’re falling through the air! Do you think you could manage it?) `And what an ignorant little girl she’ll think me for asking! No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.’

Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. `Dinah’ll miss me very much to-night, I should think!’ (Dinah was the cat.) `I hope they’ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time. Dinah my dear! I wish you were down here with me! There are no mice in the air, I’m afraid, but you might catch a bat, and that’s very like a mouse, you know. But do cats eat bats, I wonder?’ And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, `Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, `Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, `Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Source: Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass (London: Wordsworth Editions 2001)

Appendix II

The Treachery of Images – This is not a Pipe

Source: René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (This is not a Pipe) c.1928-1929, Oil on Canvas, 63.5cm x 93.98 cm, Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, USA. Available to view at: http://artdaily.com/news/19062/Magritte-and-Contemporary-Art%20–%20The-Treachery-of-Images#.VW1zDkJRfdk

Appendix III

Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972 [Film, DVD] Directed by Luis Buñuel. France: 20th Century Fox.

Appendix IV

THE ELEVATOR CONTINUED its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?

Every last thing about this elevator was worlds apart from the cheap die-cut job in my apartment building, scarcely one notch up the evolutionary scale from a well bucket. You’d never believe the two pieces of machinery had the same name and the same purpose. The two were pushing the outer limits conceivable as elevators.

First of all, consider the space. This elevator was so spacious it could have served as an office. Put in a desk, add a cabinet and a locker, throw in a kitchenette, and you’d still have room to spare. You might even squeeze in three camels and a mid-range palm tree while you were at it. Second, there was the cleanliness. Antiseptic as a brand-new coffin. The walls and ceiling were absolutely spotless polished stainless steel, the floor immaculately carpeted in a handsome moss-green. Third, it was dead silent. There wasn’t a sound— literally not one sound— from the moment I stepped inside and the doors slid shut. Deep rivers run quiet.

Another thing, most of the gadgets an elevator is supposed to have were missing. Where, for example, was the panel with all the buttons and switches? No floor numbers to press, no DOOR OPEN and DOOR CLOSE, no EMERGENCY STOP. Nothing whatsoever. All of which made me feel utterly defenceless. And it wasn’t just no buttons; it was no indication of advancing floor, no posted capacity or warning, not even a manufacturer’s nameplate. Forget about trying to locate an emergency exit. Here I was, sealed in. No way this elevator could have gotten fire department approval. There are norms for elevators after all.

Staring at these four blank stainless-steel walls, I recalled one of Houdini’s great escapes I’d seen in a movie. He’s tied up in how many ropes and chains, stuffed into a big trunk, which is wound fast with another thick chain and sent hurtling, the whole lot, over Niagara Falls. Or maybe it was an icy dip in the Arctic Ocean. Given that I wasn’t all tied up, I was doing okay; insofar as I wasn’t clued in on the trick, Houdini was one up on me.

Talk about not clued in, I didn’t even know if I was moving or standing still.

I ventured a cough, but it didn’t echo anything like a cough. It seemed flat, like clay thrown against a slick concrete wall. I could hardly believe that dull thud issued from my own body. I tried coughing one more time. The result was the same. So much for coughing.

I stood in that hermetically sealed vault for what seemed an eternity. The doors showed no sign of ever opening. Stationary in unending silence, a still life: Man in Elevator.

Source: Haruki Murakami, Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. Translated from Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum. (London: Vintage Books, 2001)

The Nonsense Language Game

‘Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. ‘I don’t quite understand you,’ she said, as politely as she could.’

‘Nonsense’ is an unruly word that rarely fits neatly into one category. The Oxford Dictionary alone has 5 different definitions of the word which all slightly differ from one another, therefore the exact moment in in which something leaves the world of sense and enters the realm of nonsense is not always intelligible. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein inadvertently offers a resolution to this issue in his book Philosophical Investigations by exploring language and its origins. He contemplates where language derives from and also what constitutes language in order to create a set of rules that should set apart nonsense from real discourse. I will be using the theories of Wittgenstein to consider the nonsense within extracts from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and a clip from the 1986 film Labyrinth directed by Jim Henson. All of these examples are fictions that create another world within their stories that children of varying age finds themselves in. These worlds are both similar and dissimilar, almost like a mirror image that is slightly distorted. I will be analysing the place of language within that world and consequently complicating Wittgenstein’s theory of language.

Lewis Carroll’s is one of the most universally acknowledged nonsense writers. The extract from his novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is taken from the chapter in which Alice stumbles upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party that mimics the Victorian tea parties that were around at the time. Alice regretfully decides to join the party of the Hatter, the Dormouse and the March Hare and is continuously confused by their conduct and conversation. The extract starts with Alice and the Hatter debating the subject of his watch that tells the day of the month rather than what o’clock it is. The idea of a watch that isn’t used to tell the time seems ridiculous to Alice as she remarks ‘What a funny watch’ and the Hatter’s response creates more confusion when he proceeds to question her.[1]

‘Why should it?’ muttered the Hatter. ‘Does your watch tell you what year it is?’

‘Of course not,’ Alice replied very readily: ‘but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.’

‘Which is just the case with mine,’ said the Hatter.

Carroll tells the reader that Alice thought that ‘The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English’ which the reader would inevitably agree with, contributing to the idea of this conversation as entirely nonsensical. Wittgenstein believed that the rules of language are similar to the rules of a game and so came up with the term ‘language-game’ to explain how language acquires meaning.[2] Once you understand the rules of the game you know how to play, just as in language once you understand the rules of language you understand how to use it. In order to speak a language, a person would have to be able to play the various overlapping and woven language-games which are each governed by different rules. His aim was to teach people to be able to ‘distinguish from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense’ and did this by suggesting that when the rules of language are broken, nonsense happens. This is what appears to be happening here because although Alice understands the Hatter’s language to be English, she doesn’t understand its meaning because it breaks the rules of the language games she is familiar with and therefore it has no meaning and becomes ‘patent nonsense’.

In this extract the Hatter speaks with such certainty and authority that to dismiss the nonsense of Wonderland as meaningless could be too presumptuous as the inhabitants of Wonderland seem to understand and find meaning in it. The Hatter asks Alice if she has solved a riddle he had asked earlier and reveals he himself doesn’t even know the answer and Alice’s response is ‘I think you might do something better with the time… than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers’ (Carroll, pp. 93) . Alice’s intention with the sentence is clear to the reader as it fits in with the language games they and Alice are familiar with, however in Wonderland the meaning behind this is different. The Hatter replies ‘If you knew Time as well as I do… you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him’. He changes time from a concept to a person and projects human characteristics on him. For example he says to Alice ‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time’ suggesting time has the ability to speak. He also talks of time as if it has the capability to form relationships when he says ‘now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock’. The personification of time in Wonderland seems altogether abnormal for Alice and the reader but that is not to say that it is incorrect or false. As Alice is in a new world and as a consequence of this there will be new rules. As Henry Staten points out, not understanding these rules may be a result of the mind being ‘closed to some other way of doing it’.[3] So whilst the language games in Wonderland appear to be nonsensical to Alice and the reader it may just be down to Wonderland being governed by an entirely different web of language games.

Throughout the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland extract, Alice constantly expressed her confusion at her failed logic. However in the clip from the film Labyrinth directed by Jim Henson, the young girl Sarah who like Alice, finds herself in the other world of the labyrinth, thinks she has begun to figure out the governing rules of the new world she has been thrust into. Although this film is not usually associated with nonsense in the way that Carroll’s writing is, this short clip contains similar elements of the unfamiliar language usage and logic similar to that in the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland extract. Sarah finds herself in front of two doors that are guarded by two unfamiliar creatures and is faced with a riddle in order to find out which door to go through. One doors takes her in the direction of her desired destination and the other leads to certain death or the less dramatic version, the opposite direction. She is allowed to ask one knight one question but she is warned that one knight always tells the truth and the other knight always lies. The answer to this riddle is to ask one guard which door the other guard would say leads to the place she wishes to go because both guards will indicate the same door which will be the door that doesn’t lead to the right way. Sarah figures out the answer and choses a door but the second she goes through it boasting that she’s ‘figured it out’ and that she thinks she’s ‘getting smarter’ she falls down a hole and away from where she was trying to get.[4] This is similar to the nonsense in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as Sarah has followed a logic that the audience understand, however it still did not work out. On one hand this could just be dismissed as nonsense as like the Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the guards were speaking English and Sarah thought she understood them yet the language clearly breaks the rules of Wittgenstein’s language games as the words clearly have no meaning behind them.

However this may not necessarily be the case. Whilst Sarah is falling down the hole, she is slowed down by some ‘helping hands’ who are literally just hands that aren’t attached to bodies, that are helping her by slowing her down. She is faced with the decision of going back up or continuing down. Sarah decides to go down which is the logical choice seeing as the door she went through did not go the right way and to carry on that way would seem illogical if it doesn’t lead the right way. She gives the hands her answer and they all start to laugh. This causes Sarah to panic asking if she made the right choice to which the hands reply ‘too late now’. Down was in fact the wrong way and whilst the question and decision could be passed off as nonsense as it again breaks the rules of language, it could be argued otherwise. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein frequently refers to the game of chess. In Section 31 he says that when teaching someone how to play chess you wouldn’t pick up the king and immediately explain the rules that govern that piece as they wouldn’t make sense at that point. You would show the piece and say its name but not reveal its use until the person you were showing is aware of the rules up to the last point of the king. You need a vague sense of the rules in order to understand what the statement ‘this is the king’ means (Wittgenstein, 31). This may be the case in this scene from the Labyrinth. Sarah is not given the full information she needs in order to make her decisions. She doesn’t understand the rules of the language game because she doesn’t have them all and therefore is unable to play. If you were to play a game of chess without fully understanding the rules, you would also make mistakes just as Sarah does. Whilst this scene is still nonsensical in its use of the made up creatures and the mass of detached hands that can talk, it is once again reasonable to say that it should not just be dismissed as meaningless as like Wonderland, the Labyrinth is a new space with new rules.

In Carroll’s other nonsense tale about Alice, Through The Looking-Glass, Alice goes on an adventure to another world again but this time it is Looking-Glass land. The extract from Through The Looking-Glass is taken from the chapter in which Alice meets Humpty Dumpty, the nonsense character from a popular Victorian nursery rhyme that is shaped like an egg. In this extract, Alice is asking Humpty Dumpty to explain the poem the Jabberwocky to her. Rather than being confused as Alice was in Wonderland, she is engaging with Humpty Dumpty and even contributing to the answers herself. When she asks ‘and what’s the “GYRE” and to “GIMBLE”?’ Humpty Dumpty answers ‘To “GYRE” is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To “GIMBLE” is to make holes like a gimlet’.[5] Rather than to express confusion as she did during her time in Wonderland, Alice replies ‘And “THE WABE” is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?’ and Carroll describes her as being ‘surprised at her own ingenuity’. These words she is enquiring about are typical examples of nonsense words as Carroll produced them from his imagination. Wittgenstein would immediately dismiss these words as patent nonsense as they wouldn’t possibly fit into any language games we know because up until reading Alice we never knew they existed. However, Alice, who is a player in the language games Wittgenstein claims fall under the jurisdiction of sense, is able to understand these words and accept Humpty Dumpty’s meanings of them.

This could be because Alice is learning. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein explores the way in which language acquires meaning. He imagines a scenario in which Builder A asks the assistant B to pass him various stones they are working with such as ‘blocks, pillars, slabs and beams’. A reads out the order and B brings the stone which he has ‘learnt to bring at such-and such call’ (Wittgenstein, Section 2). At this point of the story Alice has been in Looking-Glass Land for 6 chapters now and so it could be argued that she is starting to pick up the rules of their language games. She is still in the simple stages of the language games as she still needs to ask questions but her response to those questions is no longer bafflement but rather understanding. When Humpty Dumpty explains what ‘Brillig’ and ‘Broiling’ mean, she replies his response will ‘do very well’, as if what he had said made sense even though to the reader, it is still nonsensical (Carroll, pp.225). In his introduction Wittgenstein observes that his ‘thoughts were soon crippled if (he) tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination’, which he claims is connected to the ‘very nature of the investigation’ (Wittgenstein, Preface). In that case, the thoughts of Alice’s mind during this interaction should surely be crippled as well as she is forcing them to understand something against their ‘natural inclination’. However the opposite seems to happen as it could have been the real language that was crippling her and preventing her from opening up her mind to the possibilities of new language-games and a new set of rules.

Christopher Lane observes in his essay ‘Lewis Carroll and Psychoanalysis: Why nothing adds up in Wonderland’ that ‘our culture adopts rules that can seem absurd, even ridiculous when seen to close and interpreted too literally’ and what Carroll is doing is casting a ‘wry light on their sometimes ludicrous foundations’.[6] This would suggest that in this extract Carroll allows Alice to understand the language game being played in order to highlight the arbitrariness of associating meaning with language. Alice finding meaning in these seemingly meaningless words undermines Wittgenstein’s language game theory and suggests the rule-guided nature of our language may not be a strict or as effective as Wittgenstein would suggests. Paul Zacchaeus furthers this idea by suggesting that ‘the marvellous logic of the mad… seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same’.[7] What Zacchaeus means by this is that nonsense is closely linked to sense and as I stated before, distinguishing when one begins and the other ends is not always clear. Zacchaeus is suggesting that nonsense does this on purpose in order to mock the real meaning of sense. In all three extracts we see this; for example in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she remarks that the hatter is speaking English and he is using words that have meaning just not in the right order. In Labyrinth when Sarah is falling down the hole and is slowed down by ‘helping hands’, nonsense becomes a way in which our language is interpreted literally so it uses the meaning of sense to create nonsense. Finally in Through The Looking-Glass Carroll allows Alice to understand a conversation that is entirely made up of nonsense suggesting that nonsense follows the same logic as sense if thought about carefully enough.

What it ultimately comes down to is the question, does nonsense have its own overlapping and interwoven language games that are beyond the realms of our understanding or is it, to use the words of Carroll, a case of ‘We’re all mad here’ (Carroll, pp.83)? Wittgenstein would favour the latter even though he does not entirely dismiss the idea of nonsense, he doesn’t see the use in considering what is beyond the realm of our understanding. To the reader the language is nonsense and its purpose is ambiguous but to those inside the other worlds that is not always the case. When you fall down the rabbit hole, you fall into a whole new world of possibilities and rules and to disregard these rules as nonsense serves less purpose than the nonsense itself does. Susan Smith views nonsense as an ‘active way by which the world is disorganised and reorganised’ and suggests it ‘ultimately serves the interest of sense making activities’.[8] Both Alice and Sarah are still in the process of growing up and these worlds offer them a chance to mature and get better understanding of the way the world works. Although the rules in Wonderland are different to the rules in Alice’s real world, they still teach her how to learn and adapt to new situations that seem unfamiliar. Sarah is forced into the labyrinth after neglecting and not valuing her family and baby brother. The trials in the labyrinth teach her to value her family more and help her mature as a person. Therefore the nonsense worlds are parallel words that provide simulated and distorted versions of obstacles in reality that the girls will face. The nonsense language-games in these new worlds allow the girls to partake in a consequence free trial of coming to terms with the rules of the world. Although the rules are different from their actual worlds they still learn how to deal with them, making them not meaningless or useless.

Footnotes

[1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through The Looking-Glass, (Herefordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993) pp. 92-93 (All other references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are from the same edition and page numbers unless stated otherwise)

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1958) Section 7 (All other references to this text are from the same edition with sections stated parenthetically at the end of each quotation)

[3] Henry Staten in Leila S. May, ‘Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass’, Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1, (2007) pp. 85

[4] Labyrinth, Dir. Jim Henson, Lucasfilm, 1986 (All further references to this film are from the same scene unless stated otherwise)

[5] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through The Looking- Glass, pp. 225 – 226 (All further references to Through The Looking-Glass are from the same edition and page numbers unless stated otherwise)

[6] Christopher Lane, ‘Lewis Carroll and Psychoanalysis: Why nothing adds up in Wonderland’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 92, No. 4, (2011)

[7] Paul Zacchaeus in Leila S. May, ‘Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass’, pp. 83

[8] Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and literature, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1917)

Bibliography  

Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through The Looking-Glass, (Herefordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993)

Labyrinth, Dir. Jim Henson, Lucasfilm, 1986

Lane, Chrisopher ‘Lewis Carroll and Psychoanalysis: Why nothing adds up in Wonderland’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 92, No. 4, (2011)

Staten, Henry, in Leila S. May, ‘Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass’, Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1, (2007)

Stewart, Susan, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and literature, (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1917)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1958) Section 7

Zacchaeus, Paul, in Leila S. May, ‘Wittgenstein’s Reflection in Lewis Carroll’s Looking-Glass’, Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1, (2007)

Anthology Texts

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity. ‘What a funny watch!’ she remarked. ‘It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!’

‘Why should it?’ muttered the Hatter. ‘Does your watch tell you what year it is?’

‘Of course not,’ Alice replied very readily: ‘but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.’

‘Which is just the case with mine,’ said the Hatter.

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. ‘I don’t quite understand you,’ she said, as politely as she could.

‘The Dormouse is asleep again,’ said the Hatter, and he poured a little hot tea upon its nose.

The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without opening its eyes, ‘Of course, of course; just what I was going to remark myself.’

‘Have you guessed the riddle yet?’ the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.

‘No, I give it up,’ Alice replied: ‘what’s the answer?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said the Hatter.

‘Nor I,’ said the March Hare.

Alice sighed wearily. ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers.’

‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice.

‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. ‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time!’

‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied: ‘but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.’

‘Ah! that accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o’clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you’d only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!’

(‘I only wish it was,’ the March Hare said to itself in a whisper.)

‘That would be grand, certainly,’ said Alice thoughtfully: ‘but then—I shouldn’t be hungry for it, you know.’

‘Not at first, perhaps,’ said the Hatter: ‘but you could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked.’

Labyrinth, Dir. Jim Henson

https://youtu.be/AQUeK7nYxBQ

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

 

‘You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,’ said Alice. ‘Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called “Jabberwocky”?’

‘Let’s hear it,’ said Humpty Dumpty. ‘I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.’

This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:

     ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

     Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

     All mimsy were the borogoves,

     And the mome raths outgrabe.

‘That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted: ‘there are plenty of hard words there. “BRILLIG” means four o’clock in the afternoon—the time when you begin BROILING things for dinner.’

‘That’ll do very well,’ said Alice: ‘and “SLITHY”?’

‘Well, “SLITHY” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

‘I see it now,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully: ‘and what are “TOVES”?’

‘Well, “TOVES” are something like badgers—they’re something like lizards—and they’re something like corkscrews.’

‘They must be very curious looking creatures.’

‘They are that,’ said Humpty Dumpty: ‘also they make their nests under sun-dials—also they live on cheese.’

‘And what’s the “GYRE” and to “GIMBLE”?’

‘To “GYRE” is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To “GIMBLE” is to make holes like a gimlet.’

‘And “THE WABE” is the grass-plot round a sun-dial, I suppose?’ said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

‘Of course it is. It’s called “WABE,” you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it—’

‘And a long way beyond it on each side,’ Alice added.

‘Exactly so. Well, then, “MIMSY” is “flimsy and miserable” (there’s another portmanteau for you). And a “BOROGOVE” is a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.’

‘And then “MOME RATHS”?’ said Alice. ‘I’m afraid I’m giving you a great deal of trouble.’

‘Well, a “RATH” is a sort of green pig: but “MOME” I’m not certain about. I think it’s short for “from home”—meaning that they’d lost their way, you know.’

A Nonsense Anthology of Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature

A Nonsense Anthology of Anthropomorphism in Children’s Literature

A Critical Introduction

Anthropomorphism, the “ascription of a human attribute or personality to anything impersonal or irrational”, has been a trope of children’s Literature since the composition of the Aesopica in 600BCE[1]. The Aesopica or as it is more commonly known Aesop’s Fables, is a series in which animals are anthropomorphised and evoke moral lessons such as  in the ‘Hare and the Tortoise’. In addition the fables were illustrated so to form text-image cohesion between the anthropomorphised characters and their fable (Fig.1). The evocation of anthropomorphism and didacticism as in Aesop’s Fables continued throughout history and can be seen to have particularly frequented Children’s Literature.  For instance 1765 saw the publication of Mother Goose’s Melody, which is a book of playful poetry juxtaposed with maxims such as in ‘Dickery Dickery Dock’ (Fig.2). Burke and Coppenhaver suggest that the use of anthropomorphism in this moralising way is so to “give children pleasure [whilst] they were being instructed”[2]. This is because the use of familiar and lively animals softens the didacticism that to children may be “socially controversial”, allowing them to learn in a imaginative environment. (Burke and Coppenhaver, pp.210). Anthropomorphism therefore becomes a conservative guise for educating children about society and life.

So what does Nonsense Literature have to do with this I hear you ask? Well, Nonsense Literature is a somewhat problematic Genre as its standard definition is “that which is not sense”, and thus what constitutes for one critic as Nonsense can radically differ from another[3]. When devising an Anthology thus, one has the choice to conform to any one interpretation of Nonsense which supports their reading of their respective Nonsense Literature extracts. In this instance the asserted definition is that of Hugh Haughton. In his introduction to the Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (1988) Haughton describes Nonsense Literature as “in its comic guise, dealing with the serious things of our lives”.[4] Here, Haughton ascribes Nonsense Literature the powerful social purpose of educating the reader about the more serious matters such as “desire, death, identity and authority”; in a similar manner to the function of anthropomorphism as described by Burke and Coppenhaver (Haughton, pp.3). This Anthology therefore explores how Nonsense Literature which contains anthropomorphism functions cross periodically, in educating children about society.

The Victorian Era (1837-1901) is often noted as the birthplace of Nonsense. For instance John Lehmann credits Lewis Caroll and Edward Lear as the forefathers of Nonsense, claiming they are responsible for what was a “popular and so widespread” movement[5]. In 1865 Caroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and as Cohen suggests, the book “earned almost unconditional praise”[6]. Behind the novel’s humorous tales that unravel Alice’s navigation through Wonderland, is the social commentary on Victorian society. During the Victorian era there was a great deal of pressure on young children and many were expected to work. Most explicitly however there was pressure on young girls, for instance as Lurie suggests Victorian girls were expected to be “angels of the home” [7]. Carroll however writes Alice as a subversion of this ideal as Alice is shown to be “active, brave and impatient” (Lurie, pp.78). In the novel the anthropomorphism of the White Rabbit can seen to be a representation of Alice’s anxiety about living up to the ideal image of the Victorian child.

This is emphatically suggested for example when Alice first encounters him (Extract 1.) In the extract this is signified through the Rabbit’s repeated worry that he is “late”: “Oh dear! Oh Dear” I shall be late!” / “Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it is getting!” (Caroll, pp.38). In addition this is shown in his checking of his pocket watch, which is emphasised through the text-image cohesion. The White Rabbit’s hyperbolic repetition of the onomatopoeic “oh”, juxtaposed with the repeated use of exclamation marks “!”, highlights the extent of anxiety the rabbit feels. This becomes nonsensical as the talking rabbit subverts natural order, but also comic as the rabbit’s image juxtaposed with his hyperbolic speech creates a humorous character. Anthropomorphism functions here as Swallow-Prior suggests, through the illustration which emphasises the textual description, as “animals are still animals, but are presented in a way that allows the reader to identify” with them[8]. The rabbit’s image, shown through Tenniel’s illustration (Fig.3) shows he is still an animal through the pastoral setting and animal face, otherwise however the rabbit represents a human as he adopts human posture, height, hands, eyes and clothing. Like Alice the reader is able to take pleasure in the imaginative character of the White Rabbit, but is still able to identify with the animal because of his human attributes. The reader is thus “instructed” on, or is able to at least acknowledge, the issue of anxiety which the Rabbit symbolises (Burke and Coppenhaver, pp.208). Carroll’s use of anthropomorphism here thus educates the reader about the silliness of misplaced anxiety, suggesting that children should be less concerned with defining themselves against hegemonic ideals, and should instead enjoy themselves.

On the other hand the extract can be read as a caution against curiosity. This is because the White Rabbit’s anthropomorphic appearance is what catalyses Alice’s descent into the dangerous and logic defying wonderland. Carroll describes the Rabbit’s appearance as “burning with curiosity” in Alice’s mind (Carroll, pp.38). The use of the diction “burning” evokes a sense of danger, foreshadowing the perils of Wonderland thus suggesting the potential dangers of inquisitiveness. Alice’s interest stems from her initial inability to distinguish herself from the rabbit because they both wear clothes, as she notes that at first it “all seemed quite natural” (Carroll, pp.38). Alice’s curiosity about her identity and what defines her from the animals plays on fears of inter-species confusion, which stemmed from Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). The novel can consequently be seen as a novel about identity, in which Alice questions who she is/should be in relation to the animals which reside in Wonderland. Alice’s “active [and] brave” journey into Wonderland as a quest for identity subverts the stereotype of the docile Victorian young girl (Lurie, pp.78). The anthropomorphised Rabbit thus becomes a symbol of the dangers of curiosity. The ‘education’ of the child reader comes therefore from Carroll’s presentation of Alice’s choices to subvert Victorian hegemony as potentially threatening and dangerous. This is because the nonsensical world of Wonderland defies logic and order and has many risks. The child thus learns to not be tempted by appearances and curiosity (the anthropomorphic rabbit) and is taught instead to obey the rules of society.

Murphy suggests that ultimately Lear is the “laureate of nonsense” on account of his plethora on Nonsense Literature which resonated throughout the Victorian era, which began with his Book of Nonsense in 1846[9]. Like Carroll, Lear’s work is overwhelmed by the use of anthropomorphism with accompanying illustrations that ultimately seek to ‘educate’ its child audience. Explicitly in his poem Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow Lear discusses the importance of ‘fitting in’ in Victorian society, similar to how Alice can be interpreted as cautioning against individuality (Extract 2.). Firstly Lear’s decision to anthropomorphise sparrows is important as in Victorian society Sparrows were seen as the pariah of birds. For instance Russell noted that the Victorians could “do as well without Sparrows as without Rats or Cockroaches”[10]. In the poem the anthropomorphised Sparrows who go to town to dress themselves appropriately represent how children in Victorian society had to respectively adopt social conventions so to not become pariahs. In the poem therefore Lear uses clothing as a symbol of the rules and regulations that children must adapt to, and the children are thus “instructed” on what to do by following the example of the Sparrows (Burke and Coppenhaver pp.208). In the poem Lear reveals the expectations through the Sparrows anthropomorphised conversation as they discuss how Mr Sparrow’s hat-less head is “wrong” because “no one” else does that, and how Mrs Sparrow “ought (…) to wear a bonnet” (Lear, 3.3 / 4.8). The use of the modal auxiliary “ought” shows how Mrs Sparrow is defying what is expected of her, similar to the use of the diction “wrong” to describe Mr Sparrow’s actions. This is emphasised by the implication that “no one” else behaves like that, as it conveys how Mr Sparrow would be considered different and thus how he must learn to adapt. Lear continues this idea when the Sparrows note they must adapt so they are “completely in the fashion” as the use of the adverb “completely” connotes how they must fully adapt to the “fashion” (Lear, 5.1). This is so that the Sparrows’ are wholly accepted by society which will have positive emotional effects by making they feel “quite galloobious and genteel!” (Lear, 5.6). Here, as Applebee suggests “having animals do the active mistake-making allows face saving emotional distance” allowing the reader to identify the issue and then learn through imitation[11].The success of the Sparrow’s is evident at the end of the poem as the baby Sparrow’s note that now “We (…) shall look like other people”, which is emphasised by Lear’s illustration (Lear 7.8) (Fig.4). The anthropomorphic illustration in which the Sparrow’s wear a Bonnet and a Top-Hat symbolises their success in adapting to the rules of society, as the image is one of domestic bliss.

The use of the refrain in the poem, which Bradshaw calls “pure nonsensical language” also aids in the reader’s ‘education’[12]. This is because the continued use of the refrain creates a sense of order reflecting the ordered rules and regulations of society which they must adapt to. This idea is emphasised explicitly through the refrains language which can be seen as an anthropomorphic representation of the language of Sparrows (Lear, 7.9-11):-

‘Witchy witchy witchy wee,
‘Twikky mikky bikky bee,
Zikky sikky tee.’

In this instance therefore the anthropomorphism as Burke and Coppenhaver argue gives children “pleasure” through the use of nonsensical language aided by Lear’s illustration (Burke and Coppenhaver, pp.208). In addition anthropomorphism and nonsense combine to educate the reader showing them how they must behave in order to be successful in society, similar to how Carroll uses Alice to warn against deviating from Victorian hegemony.

As Scott suggests, “at the top of the juvenile pantheon” for Twentieth Century Children’s Nonsense Literature is, Dr. Seuss[13]. Seuss was originally turned away by publishers as his early work was said to be too progressive and lacking in didacticism which would “transform children into good citizens” (Scott, para.6). During this time America faced political issues as a result of the ‘Red Scare’ and its’ war on Communism, and youth culture was in upheaval taking a stance against the war in political groups such as the ‘Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’. However, in 1957 Seuss successfully published The Cat in The Hat, which can be seen as a book which explores the dichotomy of chaos and order which was rife in 1950’s America (Extract 3.). As Marcus suggests in the book Seuss uses “nonsense as a device for holding the interest of the reader whilst he [says] something important”[14]. In this instance Seuss uses rhyme and a nonsensical narrative so to engage the interest of the reader whilst suggesting the temporality of chaos and necessary consistency of order. As Bader suggest in the book Seuss displays how he is a “natural moraliser” through the anthropomorphism of both the Cat and the Fish, who depict and argue out the divide between chaos and order[15] . In the extract Seuss uses the Cat to symbolise anarchy and chaos as he is disruptive, excessive and demands attention. For instance he demands the children to repeated look at him as he attempts to balance multiple items on himself but inevitably causes chaos by dropping everything (Seuss, 1.1-3 / 2.2-4):-

“look at me!

look at me!

look at me NOW!”

(…)

then he fell on his head!

he came down with a bump.

The encounter is juxtaposed with a colourful illustration which aids in the “comic guise” of the Cat who is shown as laughing whilst performing his tricks (Haughton, pp.2) (Fig.5). Seuss emphasises the Cat as an anthropomorphic symbol of chaos through the creation of the Fish as an anthropomorphic symbol of order and regulation. For instance this is shown following the Cat’s fall (Seuss, 2.):-

‘now look what you did!’

said the fish to the cat.

‘now look at this house!

look at this!  look at that!

you sank our toy ship,

sank it deep in the cake.

you shook up our house

and you bent our new rake.

you SHOULD NOT be here

when our mother is not.

you get out of this house!’

said the fish in the pot.

In the extract the Fish resonates as a rule enforcing character who points out the Cat’s wrong doings. This is suggested through the repeated use of “you” and the repeated use of the imperative “look”, which forces the Cat to reflect on the consequences of his chaotic nature. Seuss emphasises this through the use of capitalisation as the Fish tells the cat that he “SHOULD NOT” be there and so must leave (Seuss, 3.9). In this instance the anthropomorphism functions again by “having animals do the active mistake-making”, allowing children to learn from the Cat’s mistakes and acknowledging that chaos causes trouble (Applebee, pp.213). As Scott suggests through the anthropomorphism Seuss allows children to “delight in the liberties of imagination, without condoning anarchy”[16]. This is because the children and reader are able to take “pleasure” in the nonsensical narrative and illustrations, but like Sally and the boy is able to acknowledge that ultimately rules and regulations should be obeyed (Burke and Coppenhaver, pp.208). This is suggested at the end of the novel when Sally and the boy are unable to answer their mother’s question if they had fun or not, and consider lying to her (Seuss, 4):

“And sally and i did not know

What to say.

Should we tell her,

The things that went on there that day?”

Ultimately therefore Seuss connotes to the children of America how they should stray from being chaotic and rebelling against the dominant order.

In 1961 Roald Dahl published James and the Giant Peach. Although Dahl is not typically classed as a nonsense writer many of his books including James, have prominent nonsensical elements and use anthropomorphism to ‘educate’ their readers. Haughton’s definition of as instructing children is evident in Dahl’s work as Held suggests, because “Dahl begins from the fact life is chaotic and often painful” and so subsequently “does not lie to children”[17]. In his work Dahl plays on themes similar to those encountered in this anthology, such as in the case of James, issues of identity. In the book Dahl anthropomorphises insects as representations of children who are in some way ‘different’, and shows how ‘difference’ is a blessing. In James, Dahl shows how both the Centipede and Earthworm are criticised because of their individual characteristics. For example Centipede is told there is “nothing marvellous (…) about having a lot of legs” but responds that Earthworm just cannot see “how splendid” he looks. In addition Earthworm also has to defend himself that he’s “not a slimy beast [but] a useful creature” (Dahl, pp.12). Here Dahl shows through the anthropomorphic characters that people like insects are more than just their stereotypes. In this instance the positive-body image outlook given by the insects instructs the reader to adopt a similar outlook. This is because the anthropomorphism of the insects, aided by the illustrations present the animals in a manner which “allows the reader to identify with the animals experience” (Swallow-Prior, 3.). In this instance the child identifies with ideas of body image and imitates the insect’s positive outlook in the face of diversity, whilst enjoying the humorous drawing of Centipede in his beloved boots (Fig.6).

In addition in the book Centipede’s individuality is also explored through his nonsensical songs (Extract 4.). In the extract Dahl uses “pure nonsensical language”, like Lear in Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow, to show the Centipedes unique taste (Bradshaw). For example the Centipede describes having eaten “dandyprats”, “slobbages” and “hot noodles made from poodles” (Dahl, lines 1/6/13). The use of nonsensical language and internal rhyme when Centipede describes his delicacies helps to emphasise Centipedes diversion from the societal understanding of what Centipedes eat. The presentation of this diversion as imaginative and fun, which is suggested by the plays on words in Centipedes nonsensical array of food which transforms sausages(?) to “slobbages”, shows things outside the ordinary in an ameliorative manner. In this case the use of Centipede’s anthropomorphic song juxtaposed with nonsensical language helps the child learn through showing how it is acceptable to have alternate tastes. The child is both “instructed” through Centipedes positive attitude, but also takes “pleasure” in the nonsensical narrative (Burke and Coppenhaver, pp.208).

Finally Dahl shows ‘difference’ as something positive through ‘rewarding’ Centipedes  (and the other insects) positive attitude at the end of the book with a job which highlights his individuality (Dahl, pp.72):-

“The Centipede was made Vice-President-in-Charge-of-Sales of a high-class firm of boot and shoe manufacturers.

The Earthworm, with his lovely pink skin, was employed by a company that made women’s face creams to speak commercials on television.”

In the extract therefore anthropomorphism is again utilised to educate children on embracing individuality through the “comic guise” of the insect’s tales (Haughton, pp.2).

This Anthology thus seeks to display the continued practise of the juxtaposition of anthropomorphism and nonsense in Children’s Literature, and how it serves the conservative function of education. The chosen extracts exemplify how this practical juxtaposition functions cross periodically, dealing with the relevant social issues of the milleu, from identity and burgeoning curiosity to diversity. The nonsense texts illuminate however how education does not have to be straightforward, and logical. The extracts which juxtapose anthropomorphism with nonsensical language and illogical worlds illustrate how children can, and do, learn about society through imagination and subversive forms, illustrating the power of Nonsense Literature.

  Bibliography

[1] OED, ‘anthropomorphism’, n, 1.b, www.oed.com, [accessed 11/05/15].

[2]  Carolyn Burke and Joby Coppenhaver, Animals as People in Children’s Literature, in Language Arts: Explorations of Genre, Volume 81.3, (Urbana: National Council of Readers of English, 2004), pp.208.

[3] OED, ‘nonsense’, n, 1.a, www.oed.com, [accessed 11/05/15].

[4] Hugh Haughton, Introduction, in The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, ed. Hugh Haughton, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1988), pp.2.

[5] John F. Lehmann, Lewis Carroll and The Spirit of Nonsense, (Nottingham: The University of Nottingham, 1972), pp.34.

[6] Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography, (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 17.

[7] Alison Lurie, Don’t tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children’s Literature, (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1990), pp.78.

[8] Karen Swallow-Prior, Ask the Animals and They Will Teach You,  Flourish Magazine Online, (07.2011), < http://www.flourishonline.org/2011/07/lessons-from-literature-about-animals/&gt; , [Accessed 13/05/15], (paragraph 3.).

[9] Ray Murphy, Edward Lear’s Indian Journal, ed. Ray Murphy, (London: Jarrolds, 1953), pp.12.

[10]Colonel. C. Russell, The House Sparrow, (London: Wesley and Son, 1885), pp.21.

[11]Applebee, in Animals as People in Children’s Literature, in Language Arts: Explorations of Genre, ed. Carolyn Burke and Joby Coppenhaver Volume 81.3, (Urbana: National Council of Readers of English, 2004), pp.213.

[12] David Bradshaw, “Wretched Sparrows”: Protectionists, Suffragettes and the Irish, in Literature and Language Journals: Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 20.0, < https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-385822055/wretched-sparrows-protectionists-suffragettes>, [Accessed: 15/05/15], (paragraph 2.).

[13] A. O. Scott, Sense and Nonsense, in The New York Times Magazine Online, (11.2000), http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-seuss.html , [Accessed: 16/05/15], (paragraph 2.).

[14] Leonard Marcus, in Sense and Nonsense, in The New York Times Magazine Online, ed. A.O. Scott,  (11.2000), http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-seuss.html , [Accessed 16/05/15], (paragraph 7.).

[15] Barbara Bader, in Sense and Nonsense, in The New York Times Magazine Online, ed. A.O. Scott, (11.2000), http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-seuss.html , [Accessed 16/05/15], (paragraph 7.).

[16] A. O. Scott, Sense and Nonsense, in The New York Times Magazine Online, (11.2000), http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-seuss.html , [Accessed: 16/05/15], (paragraph 8.)

[17]  Jacob M. Held, Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then, (London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2014), pp. 4.

Appendix

Appendix

(Fig.1)

(Fig.2)

(Fig.3)

(Fig. 4)

(Fig.5)

(Fig.6)

 

(Extract 1.) Lewis Carroll, Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, ed. Michael Iwrin, (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2001), pp.38.

“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 late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, 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, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it (…)There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, `Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!’”

(Extract 2.) Edward Lear, Mr and Mrs Spikky Sparrow, in Nonsense Songs, Stories and Botany, (1871), http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/sparrow.html , [Accessed: 03/05/15].

On a little piece of wood, Mr. Spikky Sparrow stood; Mrs. Sparrow sate close by, A-making of an insect pie, For her little children five, In the nest and all alive, Singing with a cheerful smile To amuse them all the while, Twikky wikky wikky wee, Wikky bikky twikky tee, Spikky bikky bee!

Mrs. Spikky Sparrow said, ‘Spikky, Darling! in my head ‘Many thoughts of trouble come, ‘Like to flies upon a plum! ‘All last night, among the trees, ‘I heard you cough, I heard you sneeze; ‘And, thought I, it’s come to that ‘Because he does not wear a hat! ‘Chippy wippy sikky tee! ‘Bikky wikky tikky mee! ‘Spikky chippy wee!

‘Not that you are growing old, ‘But the nights are growing cold. ‘No one stays out all night long ‘Without a hat: I’m sure it’s wrong!’ Mr. Spikky said ‘How kind, ‘Dear! you are, to speak your mind! ‘All your life I wish you luck! ‘You are! you are! a lovely duck! ‘Witchy witchy witchy wee! ‘Twitchy witchy witchy bee! Tikky tikky tee!

‘I was also sad, and thinking, ‘When one day I saw you winking, ‘And I heard you sniffle-snuffle, ‘And I saw your feathers ruffle; ‘To myself I sadly said, ‘She’s neuralgia in her head! ‘That dear head has nothing on it! ‘Ought she not to wear a bonnet? ‘Witchy kitchy kitchy wee? ‘Spikky wikky mikky bee? ‘Chippy wippy chee?

‘Let us both fly up to town! ‘There I’ll buy you such a gown! ‘Which, completely in the fashion, ‘You shall tie a sky-blue sash on. ‘And a pair of slippers neat, ‘To fit your darling little feet, ‘So that you will look and feel, ‘Quite galloobious and genteel! ‘Jikky wikky bikky see, ‘Chicky bikky wikky bee, ‘Twikky witchy wee!’

So they both to London went, Alighting on the Monument, Whence they flew down swiftly — pop, Into Moses’ wholesale shop; There they bought a hat and bonnet, And a gown with spots upon it, A satin sash of Cloxam blue, And a pair of slippers too. Zikky wikky mikky bee, Witchy witchy mitchy kee, Sikky tikky wee.

Then when so completely drest, Back they flew and reached their nest. Their children cried, ‘O Ma and Pa! ‘How truly beautiful you are!’ Said they, ‘We trust that cold or pain ‘We shall never feel again! ‘While, perched on tree, or house, or steeple, ‘We now shall look like other people. ‘Witchy witchy witchy wee, ‘Twikky mikky bikky bee, Zikky sikky tee.’

(Extract 3.) Dr Seuss, The Cat in The Hat, (London: Harper Collins Children’s Books, 2004), pp.21. ‘look at me!look at me!look at me NOW!it is fun to have funbut you have to know how.i can hold up the cupand the milk and the cake!i can hold up these books!and the fish on a rake!i can hold the toy shipand a little toy man!and look!  with my taili can hold a red fan!i can fan with the fanas i hop on the ball!but that is not all.oh, no.that is not all…’ that is what the cat said…then he fell on his head!he came down with a bumpfrom up there on the ball.and sally and i,we saw ALL the things fall! and our fish came down, too.he fell into a pot!he said, ‘do i like this?oh, no!  i do not.this is not a good game,’said our fish as he lit.’no, i do not like it,not one little bit!’ ‘now look what you did!’said the fish to the cat.’now look at this house!look at this!  look at that!you sank our toy ship,sank it deep in the cake.you shook up our houseand you bent our new rake.you SHOULD NOT be herewhen our mother is not.you get out of this house!’said the fish in the pot.(…) “and sally and i did not knowwhat to say.should we tell herthe things that went on there that day?

(Extract 4.) Roald Dahl, The Earthworm, in James and The Giant Peach, http://english4success.ru/Upload/books/449.pdf, [Accessed: 09/05/15], pp.30-31.

“I’ve eaten many strange and scrumptious dishes in my time, Like jellied gnats and dandyprats and earwigs cooked in slime, And mice with rice – – they’re really nice When roasted in their prime. (But don’t forget to sprinkle them with just a pinch of grime.) “I’ve eaten fresh mudburgers by the greatest cooks there are, And scrambled dregs and stinkbugs’ eggs and hornets stewed in tar, And pails of snails and lizards’ tails, And beetles by the jar. (A beetle is improved by just a splash of vinegar.) “I often eat boiled slobbages. They’re grand when served beside Minced doodlebugs and curried slugs. And have you ever tried Mosquitoes’ toes and wampfish roes Most delicately fried? (The only trouble is they disagree with my inside.) “I’m mad for crispy wasp-stings on a piece of buttered toast, And pickled spines of porcupines. And then a gorgeous roast Of dragon’s flesh, well hung, not fresh – – It costs a buck at most, (And comes to you in barrels if you order it by post.) “I crave the tasty tentacles of octopi for tea I like hot-dogs, I LOVE hot-frogs, and surely you’ll agree A plate of soil with engine oil’s A super recipe. (I hardly need to mention that it’s practically free.) “For dinner on my birthday shall I tell you what I chose: Hot noodles made from poodles on a slice of garden hose – – And a rather smelly jelly Made of armadillo’s toes. (The jelly is delicious, but you have to hold your nose.) “Now comes,” the Centipede declared, “the burden of my speech: These foods are rare beyond compare – – some are right out of reach; But there’s no doubt I’d go without A million plates of each For one small mite, One tiny bite Of this FANTASTIC PEACH! “