Activity 1 - What is Nonsense? When trying to decide what something is or means, one logical place to begin is the Dictionary. The first definition the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives for nonsense is: That which is not sense; absurd or meaningless words or ideas. To call something nonsense, then, is not to regard it as untrue or even to accuse the speaker of lying. It goes a step further: we cannot even regard a nonsense statement as a statement. It is below even needing to be discussed. Yet dictionaries are useful in helping us to shape not just one, but several different pictures of what a word means, and even to frame different kinds of argument about a word s meaning. It can be useful to pay attention to definitions that contradict one another. (Test this out by looking up definitions of the word nice, for instance.) The OED offers a series of contrasting ideas about what nonsense might be, and about the relation it has to words like sense and meaning, words which we might think of as important to a discussion of poetry or prose. We have seen that nonsense can be used to communicate the fact that something is entirely unintelligible. Yet it can be used to make a point about the value of an idea that has been understood; we use it to comment, for instance, on behaviour we want to stamp out or condemn: that is utter nonsense! The OED s second definition of nonsense describes it as foolish or extravagant conduct; silliness, misbehaviour. To cry nonsense is to write something off or, (back to the OED again) to denounce it as frippery; a trivial or worthless thing. Why, then, would a writer choose to write in nonsense? Why put together words of little worth, which together are not sense and which form an example of foolish conduct? What happens when you create a text which rejects the idea of having meaning altogether? Nonsense writing is interested in what you can do after the categories of sense and meaning have been rejected. In this module, I will invite the reader to think about the pleasures of not making sense, of creating a poem which rejects all ideas of usefulness. However, I also want to consider the limits of this view of nonsense, and the ways in which nonsense writing is not so totally separate from the world of sense-making and rules.
Writers and critics understand nonsense poetry in very different ways. For some writers, what we call nonsense has existed in some form for thousands of years. Vivian Noakes argues that the genre goes back as far as the ancient Greeks and a play by Aristophanes called The Birds. Shakespeare s plays include many passages we might think of as nonsense, or at least read as nonsense-like, in particular the playful speeches of the Fool, which often revolve around puns, paradox, and wordplay. Yet the genre of writing called nonsense poetry began to be written self-consciously in the late nineteenth century. Edward Lear s Book of Nonsense was published in 1846 and Lewis Carroll s Alice s Adventures in Wonderland followed soon after in 1865. Nonsense writing shot to fame via the huge popularity of both these writers, marking a change of direction in children s writing, which had previously been focused on nursery rhymes and moralising or religious stories. This website will tell you a bit more about children s literature before Edward Lear, much of which revolved around the idea of the child as sinful: http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/genre/childlit/moraltales.html. The aim of reading, as laid out by the typical children s rhyme or cautionary tale, was to school the child out of bad behaviour and encourage him or her in good, moral ways. Why did nonsense writing emerge at this time? And what is its relationship to the world of rules and morality to which other Victorian writers were so attached? Some critics see nonsense as a purely literary phenomenon, where the nonsense poem sets up a world entirely of its own, a world of words which is entirely separate from the rules, consequences, and complexities of the real world. In this view, if the poem has a point (a moral, lesson, or object of mockery), then it is not real nonsense. Nonsense works by blocking the reader in his effort to reach an understanding of the poem, and prevents them from passing judgement, from extracting a moral in the usual way. Other critics argue against this, and think of nonsense poetry as a kind of parody. To parody something means to copy it, but while imitating or exaggerating some of its characteristics. If nonsense writing is parodic this would mean that, instead of excluding the real, nonsense writing is a play with an exaggeration of the features of our own world, the world in which the
poem and its reader live. In this reading, nonsense only half-escapes reality: the nonsense world remains partly related to the reader s own. Task 1 To test out these ideas, let s take a look some of Edward Lear s early poems, and use them to think about the kind of world the nonsense poem creates. How much is this poetry just a play with language? It seems to be ruled by finding words that rhyme, rather than words that mean something in relation to one another. What is the poem s relationship to the real world? And can we usefully talk about such poems having meaning? Edward Lear and the Nonsense Limerick Lear s first poetry collection, A Book of Nonsense, is made up of a series of four-line poems which use the limerick form. The young Lear began writing these poems as a diversion from his day-to-day employment as an illustrator (mainly of birds, and later of picturesque landscapes). Nonsense was an escape from everyday life, and yet, while his voyages to the world of nonsense were occasional, Holbrook Jackson observes, the occasions were so frequent as to pervade the whole of his life, becoming in the end a continuous way to express himself (The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, p.xii). Nonsense was a safe outlet through which Lear could express his fears about the world, and about his own peculiarity as a person within it. Meanwhile, he could also achieve distance from these same fears through the poem, which transforms danger into fun, play and silliness. Many of the limericks give us portraits of eccentric, rule-breaking behaviour. Limerick characters are often pictured as masked or disguised by a large hat or beard. Their motivations, too, are largely hidden, or described so briefly that they remain a blank. These characters are still expressive, however, and often ambiguous: to be in disguise could suggest shyness, but it could also seem like showing-off. We can make guesses about the feelings which lie behind their behaviour, even without being able to have these guesses confirmed. This is something, after all, that we have to do in reading any poem or story. In a comparable way, we can often tell a lot about a word without knowing what it means. An early limerick goes like this:
There was an Old Person of Spain, Who hated all trouble and pain; So he sat on a chair, with his feet in the air, That umbrageous Old Person of Spain. 1 This person s behaviour is peculiar by most people s standards. We can probably sympathise with his wish not to be troubled or in pain, but, at the same time, we might suspect that the Old Man s behaviour is more troublemaking than retiring. For one thing, he looks extremely uncomfortable on his chair. He sits back to front and while his body is placed squarely over the seat, it also hangs as though he is falling through the air, or engaging in some kind of acrobatics. But what kind of meaning can we build out of such a strange collection of details? There are some familiar elements to the situation. To tell a child to sit down, for instance, is often guided by the aim of making it get over an excitement. But this character seems to react in the opposite way: instead of calming him down, sitting down gets him wound up. The limerick s final line offers a kind of verdict on the character s behaviour. The limerick form 1 The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 47. All images are taken from here, and further references will be given by page number in the body of the text.
demands that the character s title is repeated in the fourth line, and Lear adds in a single extra adjective: That umbrageous Old Person of Spain. Like many of the best limerick words, umbrageous is not made-up, but starts in the context of the poem to look as though it is. To take umbrage means to take offence or show displeasure toward something, a definition which fits in well with this Old Person s dislike of facing trouble. Yet umbrageous can also mean to be obscure or dubious, and also has a third, more literal meaning of shaded, or covered in the foliage or shadow provided by trees. The word is being moved around in lots of different ways in the poem. The Old Man seems to be shady in both senses. He might be offended (meaning 1), but he is also odd or peculiar (meaning 2), and his face abounds in shadows that serve to completely obscure his features (meaning 3). Our inability to choose between all these meanings leaves open the question of whether he has sat on or fallen into the chair, got out of or run into trouble. Importantly, though, Lear s poems are not designed for the kind of reader who understands the various meanings of umbrageous. His nonsenses were originally written to make little folks merry. They started out as gifts to amuse the grandchildren, nieces and nephews of the Earl of Derby, one of Lear s early employers. In fact, both of the most famous nonsense writers, Lear and Carroll, composed their most famous writing for children. We might wonder, then, how umbrageous would strike a child reader of the poem? Not even the most bookish of children is likely to understand the word. What then, could be its point? Is it included merely for the sake of its sound, being a fun word to say aloud? Or can we know something about the word merely because of where it has been placed in the poem? Its role in the limerick s simple story? We keep an ear for the meaning of the word, for instance, when we listen to the meter of the poem. Meter and rhythm can provide a kind of clue to the meaning of words. Limerick poems are characterised by a lively, and a highly predictable rhythm. Try reading back over the poem and see if you can identify a pattern: how many stressed syllables fall on every line? You might notice that the liveliest words, the nouns (Person; Spain; trouble; pain) and the verbs (was; hated; sat) have a stress on the first syllable. This makes the actions of the poem feel especially energetic. The third line of the poem, as in all limericks, is a kind of exception to the rules. While each of the
lines have three stressed syllables, the third line carries an extra one (So he sat in the chair, with his feet in the air). This means that when the usual pattern of stresses is taken up again in the final line, our voice puts an extra energy into the first stressed syllable. This affects the way we read the last line of the poem. Notice how the stressed and unstressed syllables fall when you speak it aloud: That umbrageous Old Person of Spain Umbrageous gets a special stress which gives it a sense of being spoken in high emotion, whether this emotion be disapproving (think: outrageous, ridiculous) or admiring (think: stupendous, fantastic). Either, way, we pick up on the fact that judgement is being passed on the Old Man. This idea is only strengthened by the fact that this is the only grown-up sounding word of the poem, as well as the only word of more than two syllables. We can think of the limerick as a kind of story, with certain extra rules or expectations in place. Firstly, it is too short for our emotions to be deeply invested in what happens to anyone within the poem, and second, its blank style works to prevent us from drawing a conclusion. The reader bears witness to an event or occurrence, but we remain largely in the dark about its meaning. Is sitting down a solution to the Old Man s troubles? Or has he discovered that chairs, too, are troubling? Being made to sit down could look like a punishment, in particular for such an energetic personage. Yet punishment often has a questionable impact on the limerick world. While the Old Man of Whitehaven is ultimately smashed for his eccentric behaviour, for instance, Lear s illustration leaves the reader with a different impression: (Lear, 39)
If the Old Man is punished, there is also a powerful sense in which he seems to escape pain, and to go on dancing with his raven indefinitely. Since the illustration is much bigger than the poem in Lear s original book, the final impression we are left with may be the dance and not the punishment. It becomes difficult to decide what line the poem is taking, or what exactly it might mean to be smashed or punished in this kind of world. In the case of the first limerick, we might think of umbrageous as a quality which describes the poem, and its shadiness, as well as the peculiar Old Man. Indeed, part of what nonsense texts often do is to confuse the relationship between meaningful and trivial happening. The child who hears umbrageous might be reminded of the way that the adults around him use long words, and catch the sound of a telling-off. This is what one might call the parodic element of nonsense, making it a kind of poetry that mimics or does impressions. Yet the telling-off or adult judgement turns out to be as much nonsense as the childish behaviour which caused it. We might explain this by thinking of nonsense as a world in which no kind of rule makes sense; while nonsense is as attached to rules as we are, these rules are free to mean almost nothing, and to suffer no real consequences. On the other hand, nonsense keeps some of the feeling of the ordinary world, and we can continue to come up with comparisons or similarities between the nonsense reality and the world in which we live ourselves. Nonsense poetry makes us think about the rules we live by: the pleasures of escaping the rules, but also the way that we continue, even in nonsense, to invest in their importance. One point on which critics of nonsense tend to agree is that, far from throwing out the rulebook, nonsense writing seems to delight in the creation of rules. In Lear s writing, many of these rules are generated by the limerick form, which gives a highly rule-bound recipe for poetry. Line 1 introduces a character in terms of where he or she is from, lines 2-3 develop the situation in some way, by describing a feature or action attributed to this character, and line 4 delivers a statement of some kind which takes us to the end by returning us, poetically speaking, to the beginning, repeating the final word of the first line again to give us the final rhyme.
Let s look at a few more limericks. This time, I want you to come up with your own ideas about what the games are that nonsense poetry is playing. Here are a few questions to start you off: Is there something to say about the relationship between poem and image? They may be on the same page, but are they telling different stories? What impact do these inconsistencies have on how we read the poem? What kind of meaning do these poems have? If limericks behave something like stories, what does it mean to have the plot dictated by rhyme, by a movement back to the first line? Why does nonsense have so many rules? Look at the last limerick below, in particular. To make a nonsense of one s feeling is to play them out within a form which makes a point of meaning nothing. How could the limerick form allow the poet to express feelings which otherwise might seem too threatening? (Lear, 7)
There was an Old Lady of Chertsey, Who made a remarkable curtsey, She twirled round and round, till she sunk underground, Which distressed all the people of Chertsey.
(Lear, 15) There was a Young Lady of Dorking, Who bought a large bonnet for walking; But its colour and size So bedazzled her eyes, That she very soon went back to Dorking. (Lear, 51). There was an Old Man of Capehorn, Who wished he had never been born; So he sat on a chair, Till he died of despair, That dolorous Man of Cape Horn.