Nonsense Verse

A poetic form of literary nonsense, often employed in works of children's literature, which is intentionally and overtly paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or otherwise strange.

INTRODUCTION

Nonsense verse carefully combines aspects of the rational with the irrational to create a playfully incongruous mesh of language and absurdist meaning whose insinuations of fantasy and humor are often of particular interest to juvenile readers. Essentially a foray into the illogical, manufactured through the corruption of tangible real-world objects, ideas, and modes of thinking by absurdist contaminates, works of poetic nonsense are lyrical constructs that have been fashioned utilizing proper semantic and grammar rules, but without the coherent meaning usually associated with them. Defining true nonsense verse can be difficult as critical definitions of the form vary; in its strictest interpretation, many poems lumped into the broader category of "nonsense" only employ aspects of the form to create the impression of irrationality but nonetheless retain clarity of meaning and intent. True nonsense, by the strictest standards, has little basis within rational thought and thus cannot easily be related to aspects of the real world. Its driving principle is to defy both qualitative meaning and rational explanation even as it is generally presented under the apparent veneer of initial acceptability. Thus, if the lyrical imagery can be envisioned as pertaining to or potentially existing within the real world—even if it is highly absurd—then it is not true nonsense. Rather, nonsense poetry establishes a new reality separate from this one, with its own tangents outside the realm of our rational understanding. Poets achieve this effect through several practices, including creative use of semantic devices like distortion, fantasy, surrealism, suggestions of impossibilities, opposites, parodic imitations of existing works, the utilization of made-up language, and the non-contextual placement of words. Their intended combined effect is to form textual dichotomies and tensions between fiction and reality, illusion and truth, and dreams and logic, a practice that was originated with the goal, in part, to test the meaning of language itself.

Early masters of the form like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll used nonsense as a means of resisting interpretation and embracing the uncontaminated joy of sound and meaninglessness, establishing a purity of language that critic Michael Holquist has termed "immaculate fiction." Perhaps surprisingly, given the seeming rebellious message of nonsense, practitioners of the form often rely upon usage of existing standardized literary formats as a means of expression. For instance, limericks, which were popularized as a suitable expression of nonsense by Lear in the nineteenth century, mostly employ a firm five-line formula utilizing fixed rhyme schemes and defined rules for introducing place names and characters. This usage of set literary forms is meant to demonstrate that the chaotic and often bizarre imagery found in quality works of nonsense verse were carefully crafted rather than simply the composition of a random amalgamation of words. Quality nonsense verse still utilizes normative rules of grammar to create an illogical seeming work that is nonetheless as clearly identifiable as a work of poetry as those remaining squarely within the confines of normal, lucid verse; nonsense is, therefore, the interface of irrational thought with a rational form. Even when relying upon made-up words as its primary basis, nonsensical poetry retains its grammatical sense, as with Carroll's iconic "Jabberwocky"—a poem found in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1872) which functions to further promote the insane undercurrents of Wonderland—in which Carroll's fictional words and portmanteaus still adopt normative semantic functions of verb, noun, and adjective, so that a plot of sorts is established, but nevertheless remains nonsensical: "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe." The reader is able to discern from the text that words like "gyre," "gimble," and "outgrabe" operate as verbs, whereas "toves," "wabe," and "borogoves" are nouns, and "brillig" and "mimsy" are placeholders for normative adjectives, despite readers having never read such expressions before. The resulting effect is humorous, particularly to children. Their reduced exposure to conventional literary forms allows juvenile readers fewer preconceived literary obstructions and a clearer understanding of Carroll's "story."

The origins of nonsense verse lies within the early, loose constructs of nursery rhymes, which often emphasized sound patterns over rational storylines to accentuate their simultaneous purposes of introducing language to a child and offering a lyrically soothing intonation of words. Many early nursery rhymes contain seemingly nonsensical elements, as with "Hey Diddle Diddle" (which features runaway place settings and a cow jumping over the moon) and "Humpty Dumpty" (about the untimely end of a humanoid egg sitting on a wall), but their familiarity to us masks their more outrageous components. In that sense, early English nursery rhyme collections, like John Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody (1765), may be considered the first nonsense texts. In the Victorian era, the genre gained two strong advocates, Lear (1812-1888) and Carroll (1832-1898), who remain the writers most closely associated with nonsense verse even today. Lear's career began during his employment as an illustrator for Lord Derby of Lancashire when he would drop into the nursery to amuse Derby's children with his lyrical creations. From there he went on to become a celebrated children's writer known best for such poems as "The Owl and the Pussey Cat," "The Jumblies," "The Yonghy-Bonghy Bo," "The Pobble," and the "Quangle-Wangle," as well as his adoption of the limerick form. Lewis Carroll was more of an enigma; born C. L. Dodgson, he wrote lengthy mathematical treatises as an Oxford don while moonlighting as the revered author of the "Alice" books. Though Carroll mostly wrote fiction, his books were devoted to the concept of nonsense and sprinkled with absurdist verse throughout. In addition to "The Jabberwocky," Carroll is responsible for The Hunting of the Snark (1876), which together represent perhaps the two most seminal works of nonsense verse. Despite the fame and advocacy of both Lear and Carroll, nonsense verse was taken lightly by critics initially. Considered by many as simply a vehicle for children's basic amusement, it was not subject to critical analysis or reviewed alongside more established literary forms throughout much of its early life—which is probably how its proponents preferred it. For their part, Lear and Carroll both resisted attempts to rationalize and find definitive meaning in their nonsense verse, preferring instead for their poems to remain inscrutable, distinguished more for their alliterative qualities, comic appeal, and subjective connotations.

Nonsense verse remains a viable art form among contemporary authors—many of them specifically writing for children—who have robustly adopted its tenets and principles. Among the best known of these contemporary advocates are Dr. Seuss, Edward Gorey, and Jack Prelutsky. While Lear and Carroll were both Victorian British writers who tapped into a cultural predisposition for absurdist humor, Seuss, Gorey, and Prelutsky's nonsense verse demonstrates the diversity with which the form enjoys today. Despite their shared American origins, their styles are dramatically divergent: Dr. Seuss' poetry is perhaps the simplest and most fantastical of the three, reflective of a methodology targeting early readers; Gorey's books are gothically-inspired, highlighting macabre celebrations of the dark underside of children's imaginations; whereas Prelutsky, perhaps the most prolific American children's poet, is the author of verse marked by its descriptive phrasing and sprightly humor. While none of these writers dedicated themselves exclusively to nonsense, all have helped to maintain the form's vibrancy for contemporary audiences and its place within children's literature. Of the three, Seuss' and Gorey's poetry are perhaps most reminiscent of those works created during nonsense verse's Victorian heyday. Seuss mastered the ridiculous sensibilities of early nonsense poets and wrote almost exclusively in a fixed anapestic tetralogy meter, whereas Gorey's nonsense verse clearly demonstrated his absurdist leanings and reverberates with echoes of Lear and Carroll. While Prelutsky's nonsensical works adhere to the comic absurdity of his predecessors, his poems are generally written in a free-verse format that violates the fixed semantic demands of strict nonsense poetry definitions. However, like Lear and Carroll, Prelutsky is known for his alliterative dedication to the sound patterns of a poem rather than its rational meaning, as demonstrated in his poem "Don't Ever Squeeze a Weasel by the Tail": "You should never squeeze a weasel / for you might displease the weasel, / and don't ever seize a weasel by the tail. / Let his tail blow in the breeze; / if you pull it, he will sneeze, / for the weasel's constitution tends to be a little frail." The repetition and emphasis upon the internal rhyme of "weasel" to "squeeze," "displease," "seize," "breeze," and "sneeze" rather than establishing the poem's cohesive rational meaning is analogous to the Victorian nonsense philosophy, albeit with a contemporized sensibility.

The value of nonsense verse to children has been the source of regular debate, with many critics dismissing its fanciful elements as merely simple expressions of sound whose lack of meaning is akin to a deficiency of substance that detracts from its literary value for any audience. However, nonsense verse holds great appeal to younger children, as much for its flights of fancy as for its slight meaning, and may, in fact, encourage reading as a habit later in life. But beyond establishing early literary interest among juveniles, literary nonsense has other positive attributes for children, including strengthening their language skills and nurturing creative instincts—particularly with regard to using words in unusual ways and learning problem-solving. Similarly, many teachers have utilized Carroll's "Jabberwocky" as a means of teaching grammar, noting that its heavy usage of fictional words allows readers to develop intuitive means of recognizing parts of speech and their relative functions within sentences. Further, nonsense verse represents one of the first forms of literature that rebelled against the didactic methodology previously ensconced within children's literature, allowing children the opportunity to choose their reading material for the first time—a prospect which held particular import during the Victorian era, when children's educational reforms led to a rapid raise in children's literacy. As such, nonsense verse represented a rebellion of sorts, away from the institutionalized and often overtly religious messages of many early works of children's literature and towards the more pleasure-driven genre of works familiar to contemporary audiences. While many works of nonsense verse rely upon dark—albeit humorous—imagery, such exposure to potentially frightening imagery contains value as well, allowing children to ease their worries through the confrontation of those fears by diminishing their potency through their portrayals in the silliness and irrationality of nonsense. Edward Gorey's self-illustrated works were particularly reflective of this philosophy, often depicting children as either the victims of outrageous crimes or in imminent danger from outlandish threats. Rather than driving readers away, his gothic style proved to be an enticing escape to a juvenile audience that reveled in his dire depictions. Indeed, Kornei Chukovsky has suggested that, despite its absurdist tenets, nonsense verse may actually strengthen a child's bonds to reality, overtly demonstrating for them the boundaries between truth and fiction. Nonsense verse is essentially a creative rebellion—called "lawless and innocent" by satirist G. K. Chesterton—whose purpose, Myra Cohn Livingston has noted, "is to rebel against not only reason but the physical laws of nature. It rejects established tenets, institutions, pokes funs at rational behavior, and touts destruction. It champions aberrations." In that sense, C. Anita Tarr has asserted, this "rebelliousness in nonsense allows readers to test adult rules about both language and reality in order to come to terms with them. In regards to nonsense poetry we don't have to assume that playing is a break from learning; instead, playing is learning."

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

Hilaire Belloc

*The Bad Child's Book of Beasts [illustrations by Basil T. Blackwood] (children's poetry) 1896

More Beasts (For Worse Children) [illustrations by Basil T. Blackwood] (children's poetry) 1897

N. M. Bodecker

Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear! and Other Nonsense Poems (children's poetry) 1976

Lewis Carroll

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [illustrations by John Tenniel] (juvenile fiction) 1865

†Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There [illustrations by John Tenniel] (juvenile fiction) 1872

The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits [illustrations by Henry Holiday] (poetry) 1876

The Jabberwocky and More Nonsense [illustrations by Simms Taback] (poetry) 1964

Edward Gorey

The Doubtful Guest (picture book) 1957

The Curious Sofa [as Ogdred Weary] (picture book) 1961

The Hapless Child (picture book) 1961

The Beastly Baby [as Ogdred Weary] (picture book) 1962

The Gashlycrumb Tinies; or, After the Outing (picture book) 1963

The Utter Zoo (picture book) 1967

The Loathsome Couple (picture book) 1977

Heinrich Hoffmann

‡Der Struwwelpeter oder lustige Geschichten und drollige Bildre für Kinder von 3-6 Jahren [Slovenly Peter, or, Cheerful Stories and Funny Pictures for Good Little Folks; as Reimerich Kinderlieb] (juvenile short stories) 1845

§Der Struwwelpeter [second edition; as Heinrich Kinderlieb] (juvenile short stories) 1846

X. J. Kennedy

Ghastlies, Goops, and Pincushions: Nonsense Verse [illustrations by Ron Barrett] (children's poetry) 1989

Edward Lear

A Book of Nonsense. 2 vols. [as Derry Down Derry] (children's poetry) 1846; revised edition, 1861

The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear [edited by Holbrook Jackson] (children's poetry) 1947

John Newbery

Mother Goose's Melody: Or, Sonnets for the Cradle (nursery rhymes) c.1780

Jack Prelutsky

The Queen of Eene [illustrations by Victoria Chess] (children's poetry) 1978

Ride a Purple Pelican [illustrations by Garth Williams] (children's poetry) 1986

Monday's Troll [illustrations by Peter Sís] (children's poetry) 1996

It's Raining Pigs and Noodles: Poems [illustrations by James Stevenson] (children's poetry) 2000

Dr. Seuss

Bartholomew and the Oobleck (picture book) 1949

The Cat in the Hat (picture book) 1957

The Cat in the Hat Comes Back! (picture book) 1958

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (picture book) 1958

Shel Silverstein

Where the Sidewalk Ends (children's poetry) 1974

A Light in the Attic (children's poetry) 1981

Falling Up: Poems and Drawings (children's poetry) 1996

Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook (children's poetry) 2005

Richard Wilbur

Opposites (children's poetry) 1973

*A revised edition, illustrated by Wallace Tripp, was published in 1982.

†Carroll's epic nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" was first published in the 1872 edition of Through the Looking-Glass. The first stanza of the poem had previously been published in Carroll's self-composed periodical Mischmasch in 1855 under the title "Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry."

‡Includes the stories "Die Geschichte vom bösen Friederich/The Story of Cruel (or "Naughty") Frederick"; "Die Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben/The Story of the Inky (or ‘Black’) Boys"; "Die Geschichte von dem wilden Jäger/The Story of the Wild Huntsman"; "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher/The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb"; and "Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar/The Story of Augustus who did not have any Soup."

§Hoffmann added two new stories to the original five for this edition: "Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug/The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches" and "Die Geschichte vom Zappel-Philipp/The Story of Fidgety Philip."

OVERVIEWS AND GENERAL STUDIES

Wim Tigges (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Tigges, Wim. "An Anatomy of Nonsense." In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, edited by Wim Tigges, pp. 23-46. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1987.

[In the following essay, Tigges provides a working definition of nonsense verse, arguing that the genre is the combination of meaning and the absence of meaning, located between logic and dreams.]

In a manner of speaking everything is nonsense, if we are to believe G. K. Chesterton, who put up a "Defence of Nonsense" in 1901.¹ Nonsense as a literary device, mode or genre (which of these remains to be seen) reflects the world picture of the nonsense-writer. A tree does not surprise him as long as he looks upon it as something whose existence can be taken for granted; not until he sees it "as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular" does he take off his hat to it—"to the astonishment of the park-keeper". In this view, nonsense is not in the nature of "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing", but rather expressive of the spiritual wonder at the miracle of Creation, which leads the Catholic Chesterton to his conclusion that faith is nonsense and that nonsense is faith.

In this article, I will attempt to give a working definition of nonsense as a literary medium. By means of a text analysis, a brief account of related terms, such as fantasy, grotesque, Dada, surrealism, absurdism and metafiction, and an exploration of the possible origins of nonsense, it is hoped some insight will be gained into the nature of nonsense.

1.

It is no simple matter to define precisely what it is that makes a text nonsensical or even, generically, Nonsense. Susan Stewart's so-called intertextual approach allows us to characterize nonsense as a literary mode;² besides, it allows us to gain a good deal of insight into the various ways in which commonsense can be transformed into nonsense. However, she does not adduce any literary criteria by which we may judge the quality of the "accomplishments" of, say, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll as compared to those of Thomas Hood or Ogden Nash. Having discovered that both Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Cabrera Infante's Three Trapped Tigers are novels that score highly on most levels of nonsensicality, we still have no explanation why the first has considerably more literary quality. Moreover, Stewart does not take away our suspicion that nonsense is at most accidental to literature (and in any case no reader, I presume, would call Tristram Shandy a "nonsense novel").

Elizabeth Sewell, whose monograph on nonsense is still a standard work on the subject,³ contributes a first step on the way to a demarcation of nonsense as a genre, but her basic definition of nonsense as a logical game is too narrow. Also, she seems to be in two minds about the aesthetic of nonsense, first stating that "Nonsense verse is too precise to be akin to poetry" (p. 23) and later modifying this by remarking that "Nonsense adds to poetry's precision an element of incongruity" (p. 102). There is a clear contradiction here as regards the precision of poetry.

Although Sewell realizes that to be considered art, the universe of nonsense must be more than the sum of its parts (cf. p. 53), she fails in her attempt to bridge the gap between game and dream at the end of her book, where we are meant to reach "the world of religion, magic, alchemy, astrology, poetry and those strange riddles, oracular or monstrous, proposed to human beings as a matter of life and death" (p. 187), a country where "words and play together fringe out into liturgy and magic" (p. 184). Apart from the tone of mysticism in the previous quotations, Sewell's persistent distinction between poetry and play (for instance p. 193) confuses the issue of what nonsense is to an unnecessary extent, because we cannot be quite sure what is meant by poetry either. I am willing to go along with statements to the effect that the use of simile, metaphor, imagery and figurative speech is different in poetry (p. 112), or that "[i]mages in Nonsense are not allowed to develop, to turn into or mingle with other images as happens in dreams and poetry" (p. 127), if the word "poetry" in these phrases is modified by "other". For it is meaningless to conclude that Lear "never quite reaches poetry" (p. 164), or to be surprised at the "genuine pathos" in the Dong and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò (p. 146). The antithesis should not be between nonsense and poetry, but between nonsense and commonsense. It may then well turn out that what ultimately characterizes nonsense is that its "discourse" (in Stewart's sense of language, including verbal art, as a "social accomplishment") refers to "nothing", whereas that of commonsense refers to "the real world" (Stewart, p. 13). This is because in nonsense a multiplicity of meaning is first created and then reduced to no meaning (cf. Stewart, pp. 34-6). As R. Benayoun correctly states, nonsense is not an absence of sense, but rather a frustration of expectations about sense, and that is also why it allows for the expression of "total poetry".⁴ Like all verbal art, but perhaps more literally, nonsense is "a world of words come to life", which does not so much "antagonize the ‘real’ world … as ignore it", and which "sometimes even questions the ‘reality’ of the ‘real’ world itself".⁵

Freud has pointed out that between words and reality there are thoughts, and that what leads to nonsense is playing with thoughts rather than with words.⁶ It is only if we assume that the language used in nonsense does not refer to any concepts, that we can classify it as something extra-literary.

For purposes of literary criticism, Stewart's intertextual approach allows too much space for whatever constitutes nonsense, whereas that of Sewell is too narrow. The latter, for example, postulates that nonsense must operate strictly on a borderline between order and disorder, in the "middle field" of language between logic and number on the one hand and dream and nightmare on the other (p. 53). She cannot, then, but come to the conclusion that Lear's longer poems as well as Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark are failures as nonsense.⁷ I find it hard to accept this, but I find it equally hard to accept as an example of a completely "successful" nonsense a poem consisting entirely of palindromes or containing only one vowel.

In her perceptive dissertation on Lear and Carroll, Lisa Ede comes closer to a viable definition of nonsense than either Sewell or Stewart.⁸ Ede defines nonsense as "a self-reflexive verbal construction which functions through the manipulation of a series of internal and external tensions" (p. 12). In fact, she relates nonsense generically to the major tradition of art, that is as a genre which deals with the same themes and questions that we find in other forms and genres; it is just that the themes are presented and the questions asked in a peculiar way. By creating and maintaining a tension between extremes (as of illusion and reality, order and disorder, form and content and so on) nonsense can freely explore a wide range of emotions, ideas and attitudes, and balance between the "nightmare of logic" and the "logic of dreams". It is in particular this tension between logic and dream, between reason and emotion, that seems to be most prominent in those works of literary art I wish to characterize as nonsensical.⁹

By its very denial, the emotion is not made to disappear altogether; it is rather that one's expectations are persistently frustrated.¹⁰ What comes to mind by way of an example is the ambivalence of the repeated wooing scenes between Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont.¹¹ Whatever happens here to the emotions of love and affection, they are not ignored. Very often, if not always, these scenes serve to offset the sentimentality of the "serious affairs" that are going on at the same time, as well as to show up the insincerity of the feelings of the upper class world against which the Marx brothers are in permanent rebellion.

Ede also draws our attention to what is an indispensable quality of nonsense, if it is to work, namely that it is basically a narrative art. It must tell a "story" if it is to convey more than the suggestion of an oddity or a clever play on words. Only the nonsensical cartoon may occasionally afford to confine itself to making a statement.

I would define nonsense, then, as a genre of narrative literature which balances a multiplicity of meaning with a simultaneous absence of meaning. This balance is effected by playing with the rules of language, logic, prosody and representation, or a combination of these. In order to be successful, nonsense must at the same time invite the reader to interpretation and avoid the suggestion that there is a deeper meaning which can be obtained by considering connotations or associations, because these lead to nothing. The elements of word and image that may be used in this play are primarily those of negativity or mirroring, imprecision or mixture, infinite repetition, simultaneity, and arbitrariness.¹² A dichotomy between reality and the words and images which are used to describe it must be suggested. The greater the distance or tension between what is presented, the expectations that are evoked, and the frustration of these expectations, the more nonsensical the effect will be. The material may come from the unconscious (indeed, it is very likely in many instances to do so), but this may not be suggested in the presentation.¹³

At this stage, an illustration of what has been stated thus far is called for. The following text is a posthumously published sonnet by Edward Lear:

Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hills,

Colder the cucumbers that grow beneath,

And colder still the brazen chops that wreathe

  The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!

For when the tardy film of nectar fills

The ample bowls of demons and of men,

There lurks the feeble mouse, the homely hen,

  And there the porcupine with all her quills.

Yet much remains—to weave a solemn strain

That lingering sadly—slowly dies away,

Daily departing with departing day.

A pea green gamut on a distant plain

When wily walrusses in congress meet—

  Such such is life—14

In this poem, so many images are offered that a multiplicity of meaning is clearly suggested. The sonnet form prepares the reader for a lyrical utterance, but no personal feelings are recorded. It is the crabs, the cucumbers and the chops that are cold, not the poet. All the same, a feeling of sadness, if not despair, seems to be clearly suggested by the repetition of "tedious gloom", "tardy film", "demons", "feeble", "a solemn strain", "lingering sadly", "slowly dies away", "departing", and culminating in the exclamation "Such such is life". Lear makes use of the formulas of Romantic poetry and the Victorian ballad, to make it appear as if the state of nature reflects or is indicative of the poet's mood. "Quotations" from or at any rate echoes of and allusions to Pope, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats, Burns, Gray and Arnold have been traced by Byron (p. 230). The poem is not, however, primarily a parody of traditional lyrical poetry.

The first quatrain, as the word "chops" indicates, is not so much a reflection on cold nature as on a cold supper. The crabs, cucumbers and chops, but also the nectar suggest simultaneously the remnants of a meal ("Yet much remains"), the effects of which must be neutralized perhaps by means of pills, and the animal, vegetable and liquid ("chops" in the sense of breakers) aspects of nature, which are only present in the mind of the poet, who surely cannot actually observe the crabs and cucumbers from his dinner-table, or from the homely surroundings suggested by the mouse, the hen and the porcupine, which are more likely to inhabit a garden. The key-phrase in the first quatrain is "brazen chops", which can be interpreted as "copper-coloured breakers", "impudent jaws", and so, one wonders, "saucy slices of meat"? For this is how nonsense works. The reader wishes to know what are these "brazen chops" that "wreathe / The tedious gloom of philosophic pills!" In what sense can chops be said to wreathe? In what sense can anything be said to wreathe pills? And what are "philosophic pills"? The pills, perhaps, prescribed by (love of) medical wisdom. It could be this wisdom that is gloomy, then, or the pills look gloomy, or cause gloom. These, and subsequent phrases are sonorous, but they are mere concepts and lack coherence. The rules of semantics are played with, and the first quatrain offers a new metaphor, creating a multiplicity of meaning, which is killed by any attempt at "sensible" interpretation.¹⁵ Is the gloom of cold nature presented in terms of a cold supper, or is it the other way about? Is it either or neither?

The second quatrain consists mainly of a suggested contrast ("For when … There lurks … "), and an implicit series of disproportionality: things are too slow ("tardy"), too large ("ample"), too weak ("feeble"), too simple ("homely")—and too prickly, as witness the porcupine with all her quills. If the first quatrain is an extended pun, that is word-play based on simultaneity of meaning, the second offers the arbitrary simultaneity of a catalogue.

The first, sad and sentimental terzet is a return to the clichés of Victorian diction (cf. "yonder hills", "wreathe / The tedious gloom") and prosody, with its inner rhyme ("remains"-"strain", suggesting "pain" as well), the hesitant midline collocation "sadly"-"slowly", and the chiasmic conclusion ("Daily departing"-"departing day"—the first phrase more appropriate perhaps to a solemn train). Any meaning these lines may still convey is completely eliminated by the concluding terzet: the "solemn strain" proves to be a "pea green gamut", a monochromatic scale, possibly produced by "wily walrusses" that meet in "congress", which may well present a double entendre. The expectations of the probabilistic collocations of the first terzet are frustrated by the completely unpredictable sequence of "pea green", "gamut", "distant plain" (to contrast with "yonder hills"?), "wily", "walrusses", "congress" and "life", and, of course, by the fact that the poem is incomplete. Or is it? In view of the rhyme scheme, what is required at the end of the last line is a rhyme on /i:t/. In view of the abundant food-imagery, "—it's all the things we eat" would be a suitable conclusion, and we may wonder if the solemn strain that lingers sadly and daily departs after a cold supper on the terrace of Lear's San Remo villa, with a sound that is reminiscent of peas and resembles a meeting of walrusses, may have something to do with the poet's digestion.

If this is considered too far-fetched (or too nonsensical), I would suggest, by way of an alternative ending, "—a poem incomplete". Such a statement, of course, would be "true", and therefore not to be included in a nonsense poem. But it would also be untrue, because if included, it would in fact make the poem complete. Could one think of a better example of empty space (both infinity and its reversal, nothingness) as a nonsensical device?

It will be clear, I hope, that in this poem, a fairly random example of nonsense, meaning is suggested and taken away, leaving only the sense of isolation, which Sewell considers perhaps the only emotion permissible in nonsense (p. 145). The expectations of a Victorian sonnet, its sentimentality and wistfulness, are frustrated and shattered by its ultimate lack of coherence. This lack is created by Lear's play with thoughts rather than with words: none of the tricks of language that Stewart enumerates occurs in a direct form; the word-play is the reader's activity, if he attempts to obtain any meaning at all from the poem. The sonnet does not feature as a secondary device, but is nonsensical as a whole; it is, in fact, "a Nonsense". In the next section I shall present a brief survey of related types of literature, in order to demonstrate how Nonsense as a genre can be distinguished from them.

2.

Two types of writing often associated, if not identified with nonsense are the "curiosity" and the kind of poem that is referred to as light verse. The curiosity is the pure form of the fifth transformation type adduced by Stewart, arrangement and rearrangement in a closed field. Many samples can be found in C. C. Bombaugh's Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature.¹⁶ One of them is the following "snow-ball sentence", in which each word has one more letter than the preceding word:

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness.

     (p. 350)

In this example, play with infinity is used as a subsidiary transformation, and the cleverness of the author is in his ability to make as much "sense" as possible out of his material. Obviously, the aesthetic quality is negligible. The same goes for the following limerick, also from Gardner's annotations to Bombaugh:

Said the chemist: "I'll take some dimethyloximidomesoralamide

And I'll add just a dash of dimethylamidoazobensaldehyde;

  But if these won't mix,

  I'll just have to fix

Up a big dose of

trisodiumpholoroglucintricarboxycide."
 

     (p. 359)

Many other chemical terms could be substituted here, without adding to or diminishing the meaning.

The appearance of any of the transformations in their pure form is not enough to justify the appellation of nonsense. In the curiosity, the balance between form and content is awry; it is at the opposite end from Dada in that its form has been made entirely dominant over whatever content has been forced, no matter how ingeniously, into its bed of Procrustes. The tension is absent. This is also the case in light verse, which is at best both ingenious and ingenuous, and at worst mere doggerel. Unlike nonsense, it cannot afford to be without wit. Poems by Hilaire Belloc or Ogden Nash come to mind; the latter wrote the following poem called "The Turtle":

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks

Which practically conceal its sex.

I think it clever of the turtle

In such a fix to be so fertile.17

There is wit in the rhymes, culminating in the American pronunciation of "fertile" which is forced upon the reader, and in the humanized turtle, but the poem is not nonsensical, as the question proposed is legitimate enough. Once the point has been made, the climax reached, the tension is released.

Of the various types to be discussed in this section, that of fantasy is perhaps the most controversial and elusive. Like nonsense, it has been defined both as a genre and as a mode.¹⁸ Jackson (p. 144) agrees with Prickett (p. 126) that nonsense is a form of fantasy. The former calls it "a fantasy of extreme logic, of rationality pushed to its limits". To those to whom fantasy offers "the anti-expected, the dis-expected, … the not-expected" and "the irrelevant" (Rabkin, p. 13), or for whom its themes "revolve around th[e] problem of making visible the un-seen, of articulating the un-said" (Jackson, p. 48, where the preoccupation of fantasy with its limits is also stressed), there may indeed well be places of overlap. "The fantastic … pushes towards an area of non-signification" (Jackson, p. 41), and so, indeed, does nonsense. But whereas Jackson defines nonsense also as "a literature of semantic play" which "provokes no ambiguity of response in the reader" (p. 144), Manlove rejects the Alice books as fantasies because in them "the supernatural is seen as a symbolic extension of the purely human mind, since the happenings are presented as Alice's dreams" (p. 6). This, I think, blurs the issue. Those who define fantasy in one way or another as imaginative literature, creating a consistent new "world" (as is the case in many Utopian novels, as well as in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and Ursula LeGuin, to mention just a few instances), can only reject nonsense from their canons if they can prove that it is not only inconsistent (which as I have argued is not the case) but also non-imaginative (which is not the case either). On the other hand, Prickett, who emphasizes the escapist character of both fantasy and nonsense (p. 114) does not allow enough space for the notion of nonsense as a genre in its own right.

All we have to hold on to is the presence or absence of the tension I have discussed in the previous section. Fantasy does not offer the reader a brave or not so brave new world only to take it away with the other hand, and in this respect it cannot easily be confused with nonsense.

We get on to firmer ground when comparing nonsense to the concepts of the grotesque, surrealism and Dada, which, primarily associated with the visual arts, are also frequently applied to certain types of literature, and are often associated with nonsense. The grotesque, which is of respectable age, has been described as a "clash of codes":¹⁹ it may clash with the classical canon, the conventions regulating representation of reality, and the rules of tragedy. Violations of these codes result respectively in physical distortions, fantasy and comedy. I would still take the first of these as the primary characteristic of the grotesque: the distortion or fantastic combination of physical forms, which evokes horror rather than laughter. Because in nonsense the suggestion is made that all words and images have been pared of their emotional associations, the cruelty and violence which are so characteristic of much nonsense is made to appear rather harmless.²⁰ There is, that is to say, a tension between the presence of cruelty and the absence of the expected emotions. In grotesque art, on the other hand, the distortions are presented so as to illustrate the "lowest" aspects of reality. Unlike for instance the physical oddities in Lear's limericks, the grotesques are usually depicted quite "realistically". Sewell refers to the strict avoidance of beauty in nonsense (p. 107); the grotesque not only avoids beauty, but evokes ugliness, and it is clear that it belongs to a different category altogether. Compare for instance the following limerick by Edward Lear:

There was an old person of Pinner,

As thin as a lath, if not thinner;

They dressed him in white, and roll 'd him up tight,

That elastic old person of Pinner21

to Roald Dahl's account of Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.²² Lear's nonsense is contained in the tension between an ordinary expression about thinness ("thin as a lath") and the lack of emotion with which "they" first inconsequentially dress the old person in white and then proceed to roll him up, so that the man can literally be called "elastic". No horror is evoked by the text. The accompanying illustration shows us how it is at all possible to roll the thin man up: because he is not so much excessively thin as extremely long. The doodle-like quality of the drawing creates a distance from reality; here too, although the face of the thin man clearly expresses (apparently blissful) madness, that of the left-hand spectator stupidity and that of the man to the right placidity and possibly cunning, no emotion is conveyed. No canons are offended in either text or illustration, because there is nowhere a reference to what should be a normal state of affairs.

In Dahl's story, the little girl who swells up to the shape of a blueberry clearly evokes horror in author, characters and readers alike:

Everybody was staring at Violet. And what a terrible, peculiar sight she was! Her face and hands and legs and neck, in fact the skin all over her body, as well as her great big mop of curly hair, had turned a brilliant, purplish-blue, the colour of blueberry juice!

"It always goes wrong when we come to the dessert, "sighed Mr Wonka. "It's the blueberry pie that does it. But I'll get it right one day, you wait and see."

"Violet," screamed Mrs Beauregarde, "you're swelling up!"

…

But there was no saving her now. Her body was swelling up and changing shape at such a rate that within a minute it had turned into nothing less than an enormous round blue ball …

     (p. 89).

The only person who does not seem to be greatly concerned about the metamorphosis is Mr Wonka, but this is because he knows the outcome, as what happens to Violet must be regarded as a punishment for indulging in chewing-gum. The accompanying illustration is just that—no information is added, no further tension created.

Even more than his children's books, Dahl's short stories for adults often contain grotesqueries, as in "Jelly Royal" in which a baby is changed into a queen bee.²³ The suggestion that all these events, though horrible, are real, excludes the effect of nonsense.

To surrealism, a date of birth can actually be assigned. It originated in France in 1924, in the wake of the Symbolist movement. If much symbolist poetry strikes some readers as "nonsensical", this is presumably because of its frequently somewhat "aimless" appearance. Presenting images and sensations, it does not so much describe or recount as evoke feelings. Whereas nonsense pares each concrete noun or adjective of its connotations and associations by making them incompatible with other parts of the text, symbols in poetry cannot suggest enough of these, so that a deeper sense or "higher" reality can be discovered by the reader. Surrealism adds to this in particular the expression of the sub-conscious, which can only be effected by discarding the curbing force of reason. Sewell rightly distinguishes nonsense from surrealism by pointing at the latter's attempt to "suppress any conscious control of the mind's flow of images" (p. 5), and Stewart mentions the arbitrariness of surrealist art (p. 141), quoting Breton's unambiguous definition. "The Surrealists made the simultaneous convergence of disparity into a conscious poetic principle … " (Stewart, p. 159), which is seen as an element which they share with nonsense writers. So is the fact that "‘Surrealism’ itself can be seen as splitting into a pun, or being the answer to a riddle" (p. 161). Breton, who is quoted as defining surreality as a resolution of dream and reality, implicitly shows why surrealism may not be equated with nonsense: the dream is no denial of reality, but an extra layer of it (except of course for those who consider dreams as by definition "meaningless"). If nonsense is a dream, it must be a dream stripped of all its symbolism—not a wish-dream, nor a daydream or a nightmare.

An example of a surrealist poem is David Gascoyne's "The End Is Near the Beginning":

Yes you have said enough for the time being

There will be plenty of lace later on

Plenty of electric wool

And you will forget the eglantine

Growing around the edge of the green lake

And if you forget the colour of my hands

You will remember the wheel of the chair

In which the wax figure resembling you sat
 

Several men are standing on the pier

Unloading the sea

The device on the trolly says MOTHER'S MEAT

Which means Until the end.24

If at a first reading this poem resembles an accumulation of random images, as in a dream, a closer look will show that these build up into a complex image of female old age and approaching death. Words like "time", "lace", "wool", "eglantine", and so on, carry many connotations and associations which are not negated but sustained and accumulated.

If symbolism and surrealism intended to multiply meaning, Dada wished to destroy it altogether. Denying both sense and order, it manifested itself as anti-art, anti-establishment if not anti-everything. Once again, I think Stewart is mistaken to emphasize the great interest of Dadaism (and surrealism) in simultaneity, one of the transformation processes of nonsense (p. 153). When stating that Dadaism was "characterized by a convergence of languages and cultures" (p. 167), she does not really do more than indicate the growing internationality of the modern world. Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, which also shows this con- vergence, is a surrealist rather than a Dadaist novel. "Unlike the nineteenth century nonsense poets," Stewart remarks on p. 77, "the dadaists and surrealists were willing to invert the rules of poetic form". Not only, indeed, do Dada and surrealism go further than Lear and Carroll in this respect, they belong to different categories altogether. If anything counts in a Dada text, it is the position and the shape of words and symbols on the page rather than their semantic contents.

Stewart considers nonsense "the most radical form of metafiction" (p. 85). Whereas surrealism makes the unconscious conscious, metafiction makes skill conscious. It is fiction that is conscious of its own proceedings. A classic early example is Tristram Shandy. More recent instances are novels by Flann O'Brien and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Many of the devices listed by Stewart are applied in these novels, which of late have begun to form a genre in its own right. It is more difficult to see, however, how Alice in Wonderland can be defined as metafiction. Language and its workings and failures play an important role in it, but as a literary work it is not really a fiction about fiction. Gardner in his annotations to Bombaugh (p. 362) quotes a pair of metafictional limericks which speak for themselves:

There was a young man of Japan

Whose limericks never would scan.

  When someone asked why

  He replied with a sigh,

"It's because I always try to get as many words into the last

  line as I possibly can."
 

Another young poet in China

Had a feeling for rhythm much fina.

  His limericks tend

  To come to an end

Quite suddenly.

In everyday speech, "absurd" and "nonsensical" are often used as synonyms. Stewart states that absurdity is a variety of nonsense (p. 16). Here a distinction ought to be made as well. Absurdism is what characterizes the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, which according to its historian Esslin "tends towards a radical devaluation of language" (p. 26). Its prime characteristic is that it discards all formal structures. It is the art form that conveys meaninglessness, which is contrary to the purpose of nonsense to avoid complete absence of meaning.

Samuel Foote's "The Great Panjandrum", frequently referred to as an early if not the earliest nonsense poem, is really a phrase which the actor Foote made up on the spur of the moment to test his colleague Macklin's boast that the latter could repeat anything after once hearing it.²⁵ It runs as follows:

So she went into the garden

to cut a cabbage-leaf

to make an apple pie;

and at the same time

a great she-bear, coming down the street,

pops its head into the shop.

What! No soap?

  So he died,

and she very imprudently married the Barber:

and there were present

the Picninnies,

  and the Joblillies,

    and the Garyulies,

and the great Panjandrum himself,

with the little round button at top;

and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can

till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.

This is indeed but one step away from mere gibberish, as no part of this text allows itself to be read as an image. The poem can be read in no more than one way, as no ambiguity is suggested. Primary themes (food, traffic, death, marriage, a party and a game) are alluded to and can be linked, but the complete inconsequentiality ("So", "and"; also the impossibility to identify the many characters and their relationships) does not give us any clues as to a possible meaning of the "plot". One may well call this text absurd, for the nonsensical tension between meaning and its absence is lacking.

3

In the previous sections I have tried to explain what nonsense is, and how it can be distinguished from phenomena which are closely related to it in their use of imagination and their lack of mimesis, and which indeed are often confused with it. My main aim thus far has been to show how nonsense in its purest form, as a genre, possesses a literary value, and an aesthetic which is peculiar to it. In this final section I intend to discuss where nonsense originated, not only as a genre, but also as a mode or as a device.

The preference of nonsense for concrete nouns, as well as for series, such as numbers, colours, items of clothing, foodstuffs, parts of the body, animals and plants, and ritual or ceremonial acts,²⁶ can also be discovered in the nursery rhymes, of which the English-speaking world in particular has a long tradition. In its most elementary form, the nursery rhyme serves to lull asleep the child, which does not yet command a language, and is not yet conscious of its own experiences. The words of these nursery jingles can therefore have a certain amount of semantic disengagement, or may have acquired this in the course of time. Sound and rhythm are of prime importance, the meaning of the words is secondary. Yet, the words are there. The usual function of a word is that it refers to something, defining it by separating it in its meaning from all the other concepts the word does not mean. In this way a child will learn and know how to tell a man from a horse, but to the adult these simple concepts may merge into a centaur, which raises in its trail a dustcloud of myth and magic, where one layer of meaning is added to another.

The purest examples of nonsense, such as Lear's limericks, are very close to the nursery rhyme, and both of these are close to the pure forms of Aristotelian melos and opsis, as discussed by Northrop Frye.²⁷ These are respectively the aural and visual aspects which in literary art find their harmony as the structure of words: an equilibrium of rhythm and image in the word. Frye translates these terms into "babbles" and "doodles". In the "babble", rhyme, assonance, alliteration and word-play develop from the free association of sounds. In this view, one first associates, for instance, "hills" with "pills" and "quills" (which occur as rhyme-words in Lear's sonnet discussed earlier in this article) before a context in which these concepts are somehow brought into contact is thought of.

Rhythm, on the other hand, is "a physical pulsation close to the dance" as well as to the heart-beat, and is often filled with nonsense words, as in the refrain of a ballad. This also seems to be the case with many of Lear's limericks. Here we find the recurrent rhythm of the anapaestic measure, the Old Men and Young Ladies from all over the world are chained in a chorus of absurd behaviour. The "dancing" quality often appears in the illustrations, which are vital complements to the text, as has been shown in the discussion of the limerick about the thin man from Pinner. The Old Man of the Nile, who cut off his thumbs when sharpening his nails with a file, makes a dance-step as he says: "This comes / Of sharpening one's nails with a file!" Dancing, the laudable cook fishes the Old Man of the North out of the basin of broth he had fallen into, and many other samples can be found.²⁸ Again and again, feet can be seen to be slightly raised from the ground, or just touching it with the tips of the toes, arms being thrown backwards. Music and dance also play an important role in the texts themselves: the Old Man from Whitehaven dances a quadrille with a raven, others are dancing with a cat or teaching ducklings to dance. Someone plays the harp with her chin, another plays the lyre with a broom, yet others the flute, the fiddle, the gong. It is not surprising that in his lecture "The Music of Poetry", T. S. Eliot thinks of Lear first.²⁹

If the limericks are presented as if they were "babbles", the accompanying illustrations are strongly reminiscent of "doodles", the kind of drawings one makes during telephone calls or meetings, freely associating from the unconscious. According to Northrop Frye the "radicals" or basic types of melos and opsis, of babble and doodle, are respectively the charm and the riddle (pp. 278, 280). Another way of characterizing nonsense is that it is charm and riddle at the same time. Thus, it belongs to the oldest forms of language of any kind.

Nonsense is often said to have originated with Lear and Carroll. Obviously, if nonsense is defined as a mode, along the lines set out by Stewart, this can not be true. We may safely assume that playing with language is as old as language itself. Stewart refers to an example from ancient Egypt (p. 66), and many of the devices listed in her essay can be found in the hebrew Bible. In these early instances, however, nonsense seems to have served the aims of satire and numerology respectively. J. G. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, gives numerous examples of how in so-called primitive societies words and sometimes complete languages are replaced because of taboos on names.³⁰ This is interesting in view of the fact that Stewart refers to nonsense as "of necessity … a kind of taboo behavior" (p. 88). In this light, nonsense is seen as a "threat" to society, holding up the processes of social interaction by making the discourse of everyday life conscious of its own procedures, which Frazer tells us is exactly what happened in some of the societies he describes. In some instances the men and women belonging to one community speak two largely different "languages"; in others no history can be recorded, since no one is to use the names of deceased persons.

On the other hand, nonsense has also always been a device for "making the unsaid ‘said’" (Stewart, p. 89). Thus Shakespeare's numerous puns enabled him to introduce a layer of double entendre into his plays, which may have been relished by the "understanders" for its own sake, but which also debunked and showed the relative value of the protagonists' noblemindedness. Here too, when nonsense is used as a device in mimetic art, a meaning is suggested and simultaneously taken away, as when the author can ingenuously declare that "that" is not what he meant.

Considered as a genre, however, according to the views set out in the first section, we cannot, indeed, trace the origins of nonsense beyond the nineteenth century, when it first appeared in Victorian England. It is less difficult to account for the rise of nonsense as to the period than as to the place.

The concern of nonsense literature with language can, I think, be related to the rise of philology during the Romantic period. This is also the time when Kant, as quoted by Ede (p. 3) distinguished "between what man can assert with certainty (sense) and what is beyond his rational powers (nonsense)". In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophers as well as linguists began to consider language as a phenomenon in its own right, ruled by its own laws. Studies of etymology and phonetics teach us that language changes its sense as well as its sounds. Romantic poets and artists used language and images not to analyse, as had been the case in the preceding age of enlightenment and reason, but to synthesize, and, in particular, to evoke emotion.

The Victorian Age, which witnessed a renewed application of rationality with the Utilitarians and the rise and development of industrialism, preserved this feeling in a domestic, weakened-down form of it, that is to say, in its sentimentality and its melodrama. Ede is careful to point out that "nonsense has long been the happy property of children and the common man" (p. 3), and also that the Victorians on the whole did not consider Lear's and Carroll's works "to be anything other than a particularly successful and rather sophisticated form of children's literature" (p. 2). Still, it is not at all unlikely that for those who produced "nonsense" it was a means to escape both from the cloying sentimentality of Victorian domesticism with its strict bounds of decency on the one hand, and the rigour of capitalist efficiency on the other.

For Lear, who by Victorian standards was unsuccessful in either field, being a lifelong bachelor as well as a "dirty landscape painter", it was indeed true that nonsense was a method of self-defence, an escape to hide his feelings, his despair, his sense of failure.³¹ Escaping into a new-found-land of language and logic, Lear (and Carroll, who pace Sewell was in many respects a similar character) could at least pretend to "master" reality rather than only escape it (in madness or eccentricity) or reproduce it (in art or even mathematics). The reader will easily notice the similarity in this respect to a child's play. A second explanation for the rise of nonsense can be adduced by pointing out the simultaneous change of views about the identity of the child, which until then had been largely regarded as an adult in miniature. The nineteenth century, not surprisingly, also witnessed if not quite the beginnings, at any rate the rise and growth of children's literature, a literature, that is, written primarily for children. Lear's first Book of Nonsense (1846) may be considered a landmark in the history of juvenile literature. The same goes for the Alice books, which appeared in 1865 and 1872 respectively.

Surely, no illustration is needed of the fact that both the various types of series referred to at the beginning of this section (numbers, clothes, food etc.), and the personification of objects and reification of living beings are common devices of imaginative children's literature in general (one can think of Christopher Robin's toys in Winnie-the-Pooh or of Dorothy's companions in The Wizard of Oz). Interestingly, these are also very Victorian devices. The imagery of Charles Dickens abounds with personification (Time and his brother Care setting their marks on Dombey's brow), reification (London's inhabitants like maggots in a cheese in Little Dorrit), and series (Mr Boffin's dust-heap in Our Mutual Friend). The preference nonsense has for number and thing words can be explained in terms of their close reference to the concrete world of the child, a world of primary words like cat and fiddle, cow and moon, dish and spoon.

As regards the impact of nonsense upon the adult world, a sociological interpretation can and should be adduced. Andersen has written of "[t]he absurd numbers, Victorian symbols of prosperity" (161). The Victorian age was the era of the implementation of the industrial revolution and the capitalist system of economy. The primacy of demand being replaced by that of supply (to many of those who are critical of the system, this is in itself a nonsensical reversal), Victorian households, in particular the middle classes, were inundated with "things". It would be interesting to find out how many new objects, as compared with the previous century, which had been the age of new ideas, were introduced in the course of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx, who, as is known, decries the "fetishism of commodities", "exchanges", in the first chapter of Capital, coffee and overcoats, gin and books, like so many counters in a game—exactly in the way nonsense works according to Sewell. The interchangeability of one concept for another is indeed a notable feature of nonsense.

Not only the tremendous increase of physical objects, but also that of scientific knowledge may have played its part. Thus, the early nineteenth century discoveries of the fossils of prehistoric animals were greatly influential in the promotion of fantasy in general and of nonsense in particular. Is not the Dinosaur the remote ancestor of the Jabberwock? Likewise, Charles Darwin's discoveries, as recorded in The Origin of Species (1859), took away at least part of the sacredness of creation. Nonsense is indeed "a product of the Victorian era" (Prickett, p. 126). It was "an alternative language for coping with the conditions of a world at once more complicated and more repressive", constituting "an entire alternative aesthetic, making possible a radically different kind of art" (ibid., p. 146).

Prickett, however, also seems to consider nonsense as a passing stage on the road of Fantasy, whose authors were "uneasy" about their products. This is partly a question of definition of terms, and we will not cover this field again. Since many of the aspects of the nineteenth century that we have discovered as being conducive to the birth of nonsense (the "reification" of creatures, the alienation of emotions, the continuing increase of knowledge and information) have persisted into the twentieth, we can, if so disposed, account for the persistence of nonsense as well. Our fear of "nothingness" may in fact have increased greatly by the added phenomenon of the nuclear threat, whereas the invention and development of the computer may have enlarged our fear of "everythingness", the blurring of identity. The rise of psychology (of special importance in this context are Freud's Traumdeutung of 1900 and Der Witz of 1905) has led to entirely new ways of exploring the field of nonsense.³² So has the development of linguistic philosophy as represented by the works of Wittgenstein.³³ It is in the twentieth century that we witness the rise of related non-mimetic art forms such as symbolism, dadaism, surrealism, absurdism and meta-fiction. Their origins may be largely explained in similar terms.

As a genre, nonsense is indeed a product of the Victorian age, which saw the appearance of not only the Alice books and the Snark poem by Carroll and the Nonsense books by Lear, but also the rise of light verse like the comic poems by Thomas Hood (30s and 40s of the nineteenth century) and W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads (1869), not to speak of the many, largely unsuccessful Carroll imitations. The tradition spread to the United States during the period between the World Wars, with Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories (1922), Laura Richard's Tirra Lirra (written much earlier, but published in 1932), and of course the Marx Brothers' films of the late 20s and 30s. In England appeared Richard Hughes' The Spider's Palace (1931).

After the Second World War, nonsense spread to the new media of radio and television with the Goon Shows (50s and 60s) and Monty Python's Flying Circus (early 70s; the later films incorporate a good deal of nonsense, but are basically parodies mixed with satire). Other postwar examples of nonsense are the two little volumes (and many song-texts) by Beatle John Lennon (In His Own Write, 1964, and A Spaniard in the Works, 1965), Mervyn Peake's Book of Nonsense (1972), Anthony Burgess' fairly successful Alice-imitation A Long Trip to Teatime (1976), and the series of little volumes by Edward Gorey, many of which have been collected in Amphigorey (1972) Amphigorey Too (1975) and Amphigorey Also (1983). The most nonsensical post-war artist, who also works with words and symbols, is without any doubt Saul Steinberg.

Looking at the dates of publication, one would almost suspect that nonsense has its heydays in times of prosperity and optimism, perhaps composed by men (and the occasional woman) who do not feel very much at home in such a booming world. If this is true, there may be an explanation here of the fact that so much of the greatest and purest nonsense was written in the English-speaking world, in the days when Britain ruled the waves and built up this nonsensical empire on which the sun never set, and when the States was at the crest of the various economic waves.

However this may be, I hope to have shown that what these authors have in common is the essence of nonsense: the ability to wrongly reduce an argument ad absurdum and backwards, to "play" with language and thereby with the reality that lies behind it, not in a haphazard fashion, leaving the result to accident, but to obtain the insight that every "sense", every "reality" has its reverse, and to keep these two sides of the coin in perfect balance. Adding to this a perfect balance of form and content, the product, like any well-accomplished work of art, is formally bound in the framework of its technique and logic, offering freedom to the beholder due to the insight it produces, as true liberty is in knowledge, since we are afraid of and hence in the fetters of what we do not know.

Notes

1. "A Defence of Nonsense", in E. Rhys, ed., A Century of English Essays, London and New York, n.d., pp. 446-50.

2. S. Stewart, Nonsense. Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, Baltimore and London, 1978. This work discusses nonsense as a sociological phenomenon, i.e. as one of the "accomplishments" of the methods that human beings practise to make sense of the world. The path from commonsense to nonsense leads through four "levels of textuality"-realism, myth, irony and metafiction. Shifts take place within each domain (metonymically), but also between the various levels (metaphorically). As the concept of intertextuality offers little clarity in the study of nonsense literature, it is not discussed in this article.

3. E. Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952. Sewell defines nonsense as a logical game with language, played between order and disorder in the human mind according to the rules of language and logic, in order to create a simple universe of "oneness" of meaning, and therefore balancing between "nothingness" and "everythingness". To this end, connotations which evoke emotion are avoided.

4. R. Benayoun, Le Nonsense, Paris, 1977, pp. 14, 20.

5. L. S. Ede, "The Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll", Ph.D. Diss., Ohio State University, 1975, pp. 5, 16.

6. S. Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, tr. J. Strachey, Penguin, 1976 (1960), p. 189n.

7. These "failures" are dealt with extensively in chapter 12, pp. 149ff.

8. Ede, "Introduction", esp. pp. 12-15.

9. Many critics have in fact established a contrast between two basic types of nonsense, represented in particular by the purely intellectual, mathematical and semantical prose nonsense by Lewis Carroll on the one hand, and the emotional, musical and phonetical poetic nonsense by Edward Lear. See e.g. Chesterton, loc.cit.; also: E. Partridge, "The Nonsense Words of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll", in Here, There and Everywhere. Essays Upon Language, London, 2nd rev. edn, 1950, pp. 162-88; S. Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, Hassocks (Sussex), 1979, pp. 114-49.

10. Cf. Benayoun, p. 14.

11. For examples (also with other ladies involved) see R. J. Anobile, ed., Why a Duck?, London, 1972 passim.

12. These five elements correspond to Stewart's "operations" which create nonsense from a sense base: 1. reversals and inversions (e.g. the anti-hero, the palindrome); 2. play with boundaries (e.g. acrostics, calligrams); 3. play with infinity (e.g. Chinese box motif, repetition, circularity); 4. simultaneity (e.g. digression, catalogues, puns); 5. arrangement and rearrangement within a closed field (e.g. medleys, anagrams, allegory, secret languages, parodies). Stewart's book presents a plethora of concrete examples of all these devices.

13.Alice in Wonderland is stated to be a dream by Carroll, but it is not consistently presented as such.

14. E. Lear, Teapots and Quails and Other New Nonsenses, eds, A. Davidson & P. Hofer, London, 1953. For discussions of this poem see A. Liede, Dichtung als Spiel. Studien zur Unsinnspoesie an den Grenzen der Sprache, 2 vols, Berlin, 1963, Vol. 1 p. 171; T. Byrom, Nonsense and Wonder. The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear, New York, 1977, pp. 229-31.

15. Stewart (p. 35) states that "nonsense results from a radical shift towards the metaphorical pole accompanied by a decontextualization of the utterance …. nonsense can be seen as an activity that replicates the activities of both play and metaphor in that it has to do with commonsense relationships brought into a paradoxical is/is not status." Metaphor, she continues to argue, is "rescued" from nonsense by contextualization. Without this contextualization, the metaphor ("like most nonsense … a violation of the rules of semantics", p. 34) becomes a "dead" metaphor. Any "new" metaphor creates a multiplicity of meaning, but once it is interpreted literally, it is "killed".

16. Ed. & Annot. M. Gardner, New York, 1961.

17. As in J. M. Cohen, ed., Comic and Curious Verse, Melbourne, London and Baltimore, 1952, p. 50. This collection contains many more samples.

18. See resp. C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 1, 10-11; and E. S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, Princeton N.J., 1976, p. 41, and R. Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion, London and New York, 1981, pp. 3, 32.

19. M. B. van Buren, "The Grotesque in Visual Art and Literature", DQR 12 (1981), 42-53, esp. 52-3.

20. See M. Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, rev. & enl. edn, Penguin, 1968, p. 333, and Sewell, pp. 139ff.

21. H. Jackson, ed., The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, London, 1947, p. 201.

22. Penguin, 1973 (orig. 1964), pp. 86ff.

23. R. Dahl, Kiss Kiss, Penguin, 1962, pp. 103-30.

24. From E. B. Germain, ed., English and American Surrealist Poetry, Penguin, 1978, p. 109.

25. See P. Harvey, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th edn, Oxford, 1967, s.v. "Panjandrum". The text is quoted in most anthologies of nonsense; see e.g. P. Jennings, ed., The Book of Nonsense, London, 1977, p. 163.

26. See Sewell, pp. 97-114, and cf. esp. pp. 189ff., where the relationship between nonsense and the dance is extensively discussed.

27.Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957, pp. 275-8.

28. See Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, pp. 33, 25 for these, and passim for many other examples.

29. In Selected Prose, ed. J. Hayward, Melbourne etc., 1953, pp. 56-67. Incidentally, Eliot defines nonsense briefly as "a parody of sense".

30. Abridged edn in one vol., London, 1971 (1922), pp. 321-45 on "Tabooed Words".

31. See e.g. J. Andersen, "Edward Lear and the Origin of Nonsense", English Studies 31 (1950), 161-6.

32. See Ede, pp. 10-11 for some references with comment.

33. See Ede, p. 5.

VICTORIAN NONSENSE VERSE

Lisa Ede (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Ede, Lisa. "An Introduction to the Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll." In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, edited by Wim Tigges, pp. 47-60. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1987.

[In the following essay, Ede studies how literary criticism of nonsense literature has attempted to overcome the natural resistance of the form to firm interpretations of structure and meaning, particularly as found in the works of Victorian children's writers Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.]

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied, "at least—I mean what I say—that's the same thing you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter.

     Alice in Wonderland, "A Mad Tea-Party"

As Alice discovered in both Wonderland and Looking-Glass Land, "saying what you mean" can be difficult indeed, especially when others seem to adhere to personal and eccentric rather than shared logical, linguistic, or social codes. It is hard to play when everyone knows the rules of the game but you. The problem of miscommunication is central to the nonsense of Lear and Carroll, who both expose and exploit man's mishandling of language, and who ultimately question the possibility of valid linguistic communication at all. This concern with language is one of the major links between Victorian nonsense and modern art and philosophy, for in a time when many feel that "no words are entirely right any more",¹ even nonsense begins to make sense, or at least it offers a potential explanation of why sense is no longer available to us. For these and other reasons, certain recent critics have examined nonsense with a seriousness and intensity which most Victorians, including Lear and Carroll, would have found absurd.²

This is not to imply that there is a unified body of criticism about nonsense, for there is not. Instead, one comes across suggestive references in widely differing fields—art, literature, philosophy, linguistics—references which imply that nonsense involves radical transformation without indicating very clearly the nature or causes of that change. Most Victorians would have been amazed at the following surprisingly typical statements:

This need to counteract ruthlessly the depreciation of language, a need which was felt in France by Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and at the same time in England by Lewis Carroll, has not ceased to be just as imperative since that time …

     (André Breton)³

Nonsense is how the English prefer to take their pure poetry

     (Elizabeth Sewell)⁴

Verbal nonsense is in the truest sense a metaphysical endeavor, a striving to enlarge and to transcend the limits of the material universe and logic

     (Martin Esslin)⁵

Le xix^e siècle a vu apparaître trois grands vérificateurs des Poids et Mesures du langage: Marx, Lewis Carroll et Freud

     (Claude Roy)⁶

For although Victorians were fascinated by Lear's and Carroll's work few considered it to be anything other than a particularly successful and sophisticated form of children's literature. The history of how such a major shift in emphasis took place is complex, but it provides a valuable context with which to analyse nonsense.

Nonsense is unusually difficult both to define and to delimit, but the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the term indicates its main elements. Denotatively, nonsense is "that which is not sense", a statement which sounds clear and simple until one realizes that it depends on the very slippery term "sense", which implies even more slippery concepts. Nonsense also carries the following connotative meaning: "spoken or written words which make no sense or convey absurd ideas; also, absurd or senseless actions." The basis for the definition is thus subjective, depending on a judgment most people make constantly and with unthinking ease in their daily lives. Finally, there is literary nonsense, which might be defined casually as verse or prose which is presented by the author so as to emphasize illogicality or even irrationality. For centuries hardly even considered a form of literature, nonsense has long been the happy property of children and the common man. Thus did nonsense mean different things to different people; while philosophers argued about one aspect of nonsense in terms of the limits of rational knowledge, storytellers and rhymesters enthralled less analytic audiences with nursery rhymes and riddles. Neither side looked to the other for enrichment or enlightenment; in fact, the gulf between the two was as broad and deep as that between work and play, or seriousness and frivolity—of which more later.

The bridging of this gulf began with the epistemological studies of Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant attempted to distinguish between what man can assert with certainty (sense) and what is beyond his rational powers (nonsense). In the process, Kant radically altered the direction and methodology of philosophy. Kant's denigration of the casual and associative "understanding" and his elevation of the imaginative faculty is crucial. So is his belief that "thinking becomes truly philosophical when it turns back and examines itself".⁷ Such statements can be seen as one starting point in the evolution of modern thought toward self-examination and the increasing abandonment of absolute standards. Continued questioning of what man can say with certainty that he knows has resulted in a "general movement everywhere in modern philosophy from positive content, and from the various dogmatisms".⁸ Instead, many contemporary thinkers concern themselves with language alone, as an independent structure. Two such movements are linguistic philosophy and structuralism.

The essential figure in linguistic philosophy is Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of Tractatus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations (posthum., 1953). In these two works, Wittgenstein presents his philosophy of language and linguistic reality. Starting from Kant's position that the philosopher should examine his own assumptions and language in order to avoid meaningless metaphysical speculation, Wittgenstein set even tighter bounds for man than had Kant. Wittgenstein believed that the limits of the knowable world and the limits of language are the same, and that "the logical limits of language are the limits both of what can be said and what can be thought, and therefore all that can be said to exist".⁹

This belief in the necessity of discussing reality in terms of language is shared by Structuralism, an increasingly significant movement which originated principally with the linguistic studies of Ferdinand de Saussure, but which has spread to related fields, such as anthropology (Levi-Strauss), psychology (Jacques Lacan), and literary criticism. Although structuralists at times use the term "language" loosely, and often in a slightly different sense than linguistic philosophers, they share Wittgenstein's belief that what is knowable about "all manifestations of social activity … may be reduced to the same set of abstract rules that define and govern what we normally think of as language".¹⁰

Whether language can bear the weight of such significance is a moot question, but it should come as no surprise that there is another, more negative, side to the twentieth century's preoccupation with language. Many modern artists view language neither as reality nor as the representation of reality, but as its disorder, a mass of dead words which inhibits man from perceiving his essential condition. One sign of this concern is the unprecedented preoccupation of modern literature with its own methods and with the form and function of language. One reaction has been to attempt to make the literary work self-sufficient, self-reflexive, its reality being nothing more than what it is, the sum of its parts. In an article discussing the relationship of Lewis Carroll's nonsense to modern literature, Michael Holquist describes this impulse: "the most distinctive feature of modern literature [is] … the attempt of an author to insure through the structure of his work that the work could be perceived only as what it was, and not some other thing; the attempt to create an immaculate fiction, a fiction that resists the attempts of readers, and especially those readers who write criticism, to turn it into an allegory, a system equatable with already existing systems in the non-fictive world".¹¹ One result of this emphasis is that much of modern literature is a comment on itself; style has become subject.

An alternative reaction takes a much more antagonistic view of language. The artist may continue to rely heavily on language, all the while asserting that he is saying nothing, as does Beckett in his novels and short stories. He may try to jar language, to reorganize its elements, and hope for a fortuitous meeting of chance and desire, as do the Dadaists and Surrealists. Or he may turn predominantly to extralinguistic means, as do many of the absurdist dramatists, using language minimally and then only to reveal its inadequacies. In between these extremes one can find a broad range of authors and styles. Not all are as obsessed with language as are Mallarmé, Joyce, Beckett, Ionesco, and Robbe-Grillet, but no serious artist can escape confronting the matter entirely.

How does the world of nonsense, of the Quangle-Wangle and the Snark, relate to this complex philosophical and literary maze? Part of the answer involves the fact that nonsense is, in a unique and special way, a world of words come to life, a world whose insistently self-defined reality is almost completely linguistic. In nonsense, words often exercise a creative power similar to that granted to language in some primitive cultures. Lear's nonsense botanies and Carroll's Looking-Glass insects, for example, represent objects created from attributes of language itself. Thus what is in Alice's world a butterfly becomes in Looking-Glass Land a "Bread-and-Butter-Fly", whose wings are made of bread and butter, while its body is a crust and its head a lump of sugar. At times language itself seems to become animated, to assume an independent reality. In Through the Looking-Glass, for example, the word "nobody", which serves in normal usage as a kind of negative marker, almost expands into a positive though still absent character: "‘I wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too." (TLG [Through the Looking-Glass], VII, 170).¹²

More significantly, in both Lear's and Carroll's nonsense language exerts an influence over events quite outside the bounds of normal usage. This is perhaps most clear with the nursery rhyme characters of Looking-Glass Land, such as Humpty Dumpty and Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who are forced to repeat the action of their verses against their will. Similarly, in Lear's limericks, the fate of his characters depends mainly upon chance linguistic encounters of rhyme and rhythm:

There was an Old Person of Tartary,

Who divided his jugular artery
 

     (BN [Book of Nonsense], 50)13

There was an Old Person of Gretna,

Who rushed down the crater of Etna
 

     (BN, 52)

Both Lear and Carroll reveal an acute awareness of the way in which language as a system can trap man, while at the same time allowing him to deceive himself that he is free and in control of his own life.

Precisely because it is so important, language is also a prime subject for debate among nonsense characters, particularly in the Alices. Carroll's characters argue incessantly about the meaning of words and poems with a sense of urgency typified by the White King, who constantly makes memoranda of his feelings, lest he forget them. In fact, perhaps because language is so important in the world of Victorian nonsense, just as in some ways it is in the twentieth century, here too one finds a certain pessimism, an awareness that language never can do all that is asked of it, and the nagging suspicion, shared by so many contemporary authors, that one might do better not to speak or write at all: "Alice thought to herself ‘Then there's no use in speaking.’ The voices didn't join in, this time, as she hadn't spoken, but, to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus … ‘Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!’" (TLG, III, 130).

Recent developments in play theory have also heightened critical interest in nonsense. Since the nineteenth century, as a result of the work of Johan Huizinga, Eugene Fink, Roger Caillois and others, the function and significance of play has been revaluated and expanded to such an extent that Huizinga, for one, argues that the most appropriate designation for man may not be Homo Sapiens, Man the Thinker, but Homo Ludens, Man the Player. Because of this important shift in perspective, many who in the past would have considered nonsense to be "mere child's play" now accept it as relating in basic ways to current cultural and literary phenomena.

Finally, the mad, fantastic world of nonsense no longer seems to many any more deranged or absurd than contemporary life. Agreeing with the Cheshire Cat that "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad" (AW [Alice in Wonderland], VI, 51), many artists, both literary and visual, often choose to convey their sense of predicament through black humor, grotesque fantasy, and other experimental forms that emphasize association. Kafka, Joyce, Ionesco, Beckett, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme—these are only a few of the artists whose work seems in some way to share in or extend the world view established by Lear and Carroll's nonsense.

No matter what the current intellectual situation, it is my belief that Victorian nonsense is intrinsically a fascinating, worthwhile study. But, given the philosophical, literary, and artistic concerns I have described, the importance of examining Victorian nonsense and revaluating its significance and position in literature becomes even more apparent. Criticism is never easy, but nonsense presents unique difficulties in (to recall Alice's dialogue with the Mad Hatter) "saying what you mean".

Because its literal meaning often eludes exact formulation, nonsense presents a ripe hunting-ground for symbol-hunters and systematizers of all sorts. Thus at various times nonsense (particularly the Alices) has been bent to the will of Freudian, political, allegorical, and just plain eccentric critics with results that should politely be called varying. The problem with such criticism lies not so much with the systems themselves, but with the way in which they are used and presented. For although criticis of nonsense usually mean what they say, too often they fail to say, overtly, all that they mean. And when implications carry the weight of hidden assertions, the reader not only is often confused, because part of the rules of the critical game are being withheld from him, but also may be led gradually to accept what are in fact arbitrary hypotheses and unquestioned assumptions as inherent qualities of the work itself. Such is clearly a potential problem with Louis Aragon's analysis of Alice in Wonderland, written while Aragon was still involved with the Surrealists, but was becoming increasingly involved with Marxism: "Dans les chaînes honteuses de ces jours de massacres en Irlande, d'oppression sans nom dans les manufactures où s'établissait l'ironique comptabilité du plaisir et de la douleur préconisée par Bentham, alors que de Manchester se levait comme un défi la théorie du libre-échange, qu'était devenue la liberté humaine? Elle résidait toute entière dans les frêles mains d'Alice où l'avait placée ce curieux homme … "¹⁴

The distortion involved in Aragon's interpretation is only more exaggerated than, not different from, that of many other critics. In an effort to insure that the reader will not be forced, like Alice, to spend his time attempting to penetrate and come to terms with my own critical assumptions and hypotheses, I will attempt to make these as clear as possible. This cannot, of course, guarantee objectivity, but if it allows the reader to participate in the formation of the argument as a fellow-player, rather than a mere onlooker, it will serve the purpose. In order to clarify my own position, however, it is first necessary to review past critical approaches.

Much of the criticism of Victorian nonsense as a genre takes the view expressed by Emile Cammaerts, who calls the nonsense world "Dreamland".¹⁵ Because such critics assume no serious intent or formal organization is possible in nonsense, they rarely achieve more than impressionistic renderings and intuitive flashes. Thus, although such writers as Cammaerts and G. K. Chesterton often hint at the fundamentals of the nonsense experience, their methodology is too haphazard, deliberately so, to create a unified sense of its form and function.

A much more useful approach is that taken by Elizabeth Sewell in her major study, The Field of Nonsense. Although she is correct in noting that the "order-disorder dialectic … may be the defining characteristic of the game of Nonsense",¹⁶ Miss Sewell is less convincing when she attempts to prove, through the use of formal logic, especially that of St Thomas Aquinas, that nonsense consists of "the mind's employing its tendency towards order to engage its contrary tendency towards disorder, keeping the latter perpetually in play and so in check".¹⁷ Her underplaying of the role of disorder in the nonsense dialectic has the effect of making nonsense both a simpler and more comforting form than most readers have found it to be.

Both the writings and personal lives of Lear and Carroll have attracted much psychologically-oriented criticism, particularly in the 1930's and 40's, although this kind of analysis remains popular still. Several problems may arise when this technique is applied rigidly to nonsense; in the article "Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalyzed", A. M. E. Goldschmidt unwittingly reveals a basic difficulty: "no critic upon whom the Freudian theory has made even the slightest impression can refrain from recognizing sexual symbolism in any medium, when it is clearly manifested".¹⁸ The dispute, of course, arises from differing interpretations of "clearly manifested". Psychological critics have achieved some interesting insights concerning nonsense, but too often they base assertions about a work on their interpretations of Lear's and Carroll's lives, only to turn around and then make judgments about Lear's and Carroll's lives by interpreting their works. The only constant frame of reference is clearly the critics' own interpretations, not the works themselves. Such analysis, which is, as Rackin describes "simple (in its practice and results), attractive, and within its own self-defined system rather foolproof—like plane geometry",¹⁹ often fails to do justice to the complexity of either the work or the man.

Edmund Miller's recent article on Edward Lear's Nonsense Songs typifies many of the excesses of psychological criticism of nonsense. Accepting as a given that "[s]erious attention to Lear's sexual obsessions is helpful in understanding his poetry",²⁰ Mr Miller not too surprisingly discovers that his "suspicion that there is sex everywhere in Lear is readily rewarded".²¹ In some ways more reticent than other critics, Miller devotes only a paragraph to vague hints about Lear's own personal sexual peculiarities, but such self-restraint unfortunately does not carry over to his analysis of the Songs themselves. When the Pobble protects his toes by wrapping up his nose in scarlet flannel, for example, Mr Miller solemnly announces: "The suggestion of displacement becomes at this point unescapable. The male genitalia are at the root of the Pobble's problems."²² Now it is one thing to present Lear, as Miller at one point does, as "a man with a narrow range of rather explicit obsessions—noses, beards, eating, growth, age";²³ it is quite another to draw conclusions such as the following from this basic information: "But there is such a thing as a runcible spoon, a kind of fork with two short blunt prongs and one long, curved pointed one—a virtual sculpture of the male genitalia, something never far from Lear's mind."²⁴

When it takes up mind-reading along with relentless sexual symbol-hunting, psychological criticism goes too far. It is simply too easy and too smug to assert of a great and complex author, as Mr Goldschmidt does of Lewis Carroll, that "[h]ad he lived today, he might have undergone analysis, discovered the cause of his neurosis, and lived a more contented life. But in that case he might not have written Alice in Wonderland".²⁵ It is not easy to talk about nonsense; its apparently simple surface masks a literature of great complexity and power, a literature with a built-in resistance to analysis. Most psychological criticism to date has failed to meet the challenge nonsense presents.

As Elizabeth Sewell notes, "[i]f nonsense is an art, it must have its own laws of construction".²⁶ I agree with this, and would further argue that nonsense is, if not a genre, then a sub-genre or type of literature with definite thematic and structural characteristics, a form whose methods are not isolated and erratic, but can in fact be related to a major tradition of modern art and thought. Like most narrative art, nonsense concerns itself with such problems as the nature of reality and of personal identity, and the relation of the individual to society. What is unique about the themes of nonsense is not the questions themselves but the striking and unusual way in which they are posed.

I would define nonsense as a self-reflexive verbal construction which functions through the manipulation of a series of internal and external tensions. The basic dichotomies involve illusion and reality and order and disorder, with such further contrasting pairs as fantasy and logic, imagination and reason, the child and the adult, the individual and society, words and their linguistic relations (language as designation and language as expression), denotation and connotation, and form and content. Victorian nonsense ranges from Lear's phonetically oriented alphabets—

  A was once an apple-pie,

    Pidy

    Widy

    Tidy

    Pidy

  Nice insidy

  Apple-Pie
 

     (NSB [Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets], 138)

to such complexities as the Berkeleyan dialogue of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and Humpty Dumpty's speculations on the nature of language. These structural and thematic extremes, which at first seem to be opposites, are actually, as are all polarities, parts of a continuum. The power and fascination of nonsense arise from the successful maintenance of these tensions, and from the wide range of emotions, ideas, and attitudes it is thus free to explore. The complexity of nonsense, its power to disturb intellectually and emotionally, results in part from the constant redefinition and sudden jarring illuminations inherent to the dialectic technique. At perhaps its most profound, nonsense reforms its terms to reveal the nonhuman nightmare of logic, and the surreal logic of dreams.

Play theory provides a useful model to clarify how this dialectic functions in nonsense. Although play may at first appear formless and of little import, just as nonsense may appear to some as "Dreamland", major theorists agree that play is in fact a highly structured and central cultural phenomenon. Huizinga's definition, formulated in 1938 and still generally accepted today, presents its basic characteristics: "Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having an aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life’."²⁷ One result of play is that it "produces a play world … an enigmatic realm that is not nothing, and yet is nothing real".²⁸ The nature of this play world is by no means fully clear, yet it is significant that another major play theorist, Eugene Fink, has chosen to describe it in terms of "objectively existing images",²⁹ such as mirror images, or the reflections of objects in water. Such images are both real and unreal: an image of a tree is a real reflection of the original tree, but the image itself exists only as a result of the reflection of light and not in reality. Fink also asserts that: "The ontic illusion (mirror image and the like) is more than a simple analogon of the play world—in fact, most of the time it occurs as a structural element of the play world itself."³⁰

If Fink's thesis is accepted, then Lear's and Carroll's use of mirror images appears remarkably appropriate, as indeed it is. And in fact, the self-defined world of nonsense does constitute a play world. Within this world, nonsense operates according to its own unique rules of order and logic. Much of the pleasure of voluntarily choosing to play, or in this case, to enter the world of nonsense, arises from the resulting intense absorption in oneself and one's own world: "The mode of play is that of the spontaneous act, of vital impulse. Play is, as it were, existence centered on itself."³¹ In nonsense the satisfaction of such absorption is represented in events ranging from the simple and relatively unconscious abandonment of oneself to the phonetic and serial pleasures of Lear's alphabets, to the highly sophisticated, self-conscious delight involved in appreciating the complex ways the reversals and chess plays are manipulated in Carroll's Looking-Glass world.

Play can be both an exploration, a statement of personal freedom, or a withdrawal, an attempt to deny upsetting realities and problems. Nonsense does not make an explicit choice between these two, but maintains them in constant tension, as part of its dialectic structure. A unique expression of this interplay in nonsense involves a basic ambivalence between the desire to present emotion, with its concomitant pain and confusion, and the tendency to refuse to admit that such discomforting realities exist. This dualism is most commonly exemplified in the tension between form and content, where ordered surface structures such as rhyme, alliteration, and number series distract attention from material which is often quite alarming. Lear's limericks, for example, often present cases where physical violence, death, and madness are at least partially contained within and mediated by the framework of rhyme and rhythm:

There was an Old Person of Buda,

Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder,

Till at last, with a hammer, they silenced his clamour,

By smashing that person of Buda.
 

     (BN, 14)

Carroll's use of game structures to organize and thus partially control frightening materials and experiences serves a similar function. Even the disclaimer of "nonsense" itself has an influence over the response of the reader to the material.

It is important to note that these protective devices do not destroy the "dangerous" aspects of nonsense; they merely pit their force against them in constant interplay. In fact, they provide their own kind of protection, which then allows nonsense to present ideas, emotions, and images often unacceptable to more serious literature, especially that of Victorian England. This is very important for an understanding of the mechanics of the violence and death jokes in the Alices and "The Hunting of the Snark", or the scenes of general annihilation in Lear's "History of the Seven Families" and "Mr and Mrs Discobbolos". This delicate balance must be maintained between all the antitheses of nonsense, for successful nonsense requires the same rigorous honesty as does other litera- ture, and if the tension between any two forces is allowed to slacken, nonsense loses its power. (Lewis Carroll's lapse into sentimentality in Sylvie and Bruno represents just such a failure of integrity.)

I do believe, however, that underlying these series of antitheses a basic orientation can be established. This attitude is one that is subversive of a social perspective; in fact, it is most commonly anarchic and individualistic. Because the nonsense world is a play world, it exists apart from society. Centered in itself, it does not so much actively antagonize the "real" world (although Lear and Carroll's work contains much that is explicitly anti-social) as ignore it; worse yet, it sometimes even questions the "reality" of the "real" world itself.

Notes

This paper is the introductory chapter to a Ph.D. dissertation entitled "The Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll", Ohio State University, 1975.

1. Michael Wood, "Where the Wolf Howls", New York Review of Books, 15 December 1973, p. 19, col. 1.

2. This was their attitude, at least, when questioned about their work. In an undated letter to the Lowry children in America who had written him about the meaning of "The Hunting of the Snark" for example, Lewis Carroll replied: "As to the meaning of the Snark? I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense" (Evelyn Hatch, ed., A Selection of the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends, London, 1933, pp. 242-3).

3. André Breton, "On Surrealism and Its Living Works", Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, Ann Arbor, 1972, pp. 297-8.

4. Elizabeth Sewell, "Lewis Carroll and T. S. Eliot as Nonsense Poets", Aspects of Alice, ed. Robert Phillips, New York, 1971, p. 120.

5. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, New York, 1961, pp. 241-2.

6. Claude Roy, "Alice a des raisons que la raison connaît", Lewis Carroll, ed. Henri Parisot, Paris, 1972, p. 153.

7. Quoted in David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York, 1969, p. 18.

8. Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton, 1972, p. 195.

9. Quoted in Justus Hartnack, Wittgenstein and Modern Philosophy, trans. Maurice Cranston, New York, 1965, p. 38.

10. Michael Lane, Structuralism: A Reader, London, 1970, pp. 13-14.

11. Michael Holquist, "What Is a Boojum?: Nonsense and Modernism", Yale French Studies, 43 (1969), 147.

12. All quotations from Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and "The Hunting of the Snark" (abbreviated resp. AW, TLG and HS) are from Alice in Wonderland: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Donald Gray, New York, 1971. Further references will be cited in the text by chapter and page number.

13. All quotations from Edward Lear's Nonsense are from The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear, ed. Holbrook Jackson, New York, 1951. All subsequent references will be cited in the text by book and page number, and will utilize the following abbreviations: BN, Book of Nonsense (1846); NSB, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871); MN, More Nonsense (1872); LL, Laughable Lyrics (1877).

14. Quoted in André Breton, "Lewis Carroll", L'Humour Noir (1939), rpt. Paris 1966, p. 185.

15. Emile Cammaerts, The Poetry of Nonsense, New York, 1926, p. 32.

16. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952, p. 46.

17. Sewell, p. 48; my emphasis.

18. A. M. E. Goldschmidt, "Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalyzed" (1933); rpt. in Aspects of Alice, ed. Robert Phillips, New York, 1971, p. 279.

19. Donald Rackin, "What You Always Wanted to Know about Alice But Were Afraid to Ask", The Victorian Newsletter, 44 (Fall 1973), 2.

20. Edmund Miller, "Two Approaches to Edward Lear's Nonsense Songs", The Victorian Newsletter, 44 (Fall 1973), 8.

21. Miller, 7.

22.Ibid.

23. Miller, 6.

24. Miller, 7; my emphasis.

25. Goldschmidt, p. 282.

26. Sewell, p. 6.

27. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston, 1950, p. 28.

28. Eugene Fink, "The Oasis of Happiness: Towards an Ontology of Play", Yale French Studies, 41 (1968), 23.

29. Fink, 27.

30. Fink, 28.

31. Fink, 20.

Elizabeth Sewell (essay date 1987)

SOURCE: Sewell, Elizabeth. "Nonsense Verse and the Child." In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, edited by Wim Tigges, pp. 135-48. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 1987.

[In the following essay, Sewell distinguishes between good and poor nonsense poetry through a study of the works of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.]

No sooner is such a title chosen and penned than there comes an immediate sense of misgiving: those are two entities very slippery to deal with. Nonsense verse is not too readily distinguishable from epigram, satire, parody, wit, and humor, while children, mysterious creatures, come in all shapes, sizes, and skins, including one's own. Not wanting to meddle with experts on literary genres, nor, let us say, with pedagogues and Piagets, I shall assume a rough plan by which to work—that there is a child in each one of us, and that Nonsense is what appeals to that audience. Ruled out by this would be the element of parody in "You are old, Father William", the sharp but adult fun of seeing Southey's blah piety mocked; included would be the pleasure of contemplating Father William incessantly standing on his head. Similarly, in a rhyme Edward Lear confided to his diary, the adult might enjoy knowing the contents of the "large volume" mentioned (again perhaps because of a sense of irreverence, of taking liberties), but the child's pleasure, in adult and child alike, will lie elsewhere:

There was an old man with a ribbon,

Who found a large volume of Gibbon,

  Which he tied to his nose,

  And said: I suppose

This is quite the best use for my ribbon.1

So let each indicate other. Child shall be that which in each of us, regardless of age, responds to Nonsense verse; Nonsense shall be that to which this child responds.

This child … "And so ends 1868—a year of much weariness, doubt, change, pain,—yet, or I am mistaken,—of some good effects on this child." So writes Lear, of himself, to himself, in his diary, at the age of fifty-six.² He speaks of himself in this fashion over and over again, and it must express, beneath a façon de parler, something of what he considered himself truly to be—helpful for us to notice, perhaps, since he will be the main ground of our inquiry here.

I am choosing him because of a question about the nature of Nonsense which rose up before two fellow-students and me as we studied Lear's work a month or so ago.³ Lewis Carroll has accompanied my thoughts for many years, but it is a long time since I worked on that other, "laureate of all nonsense poets", as a critic in the Spectator dubbed him in 1887. As part of a refresher course I made the acquaintance of William B. Osgood Field's Edward Lear on My Shelves—a huge rewarding book, not to be tied to one's nose—and also happened upon a small anthology of Nonsense verse for children, Oh, What Nonsense,⁴ whose editor, William Cole, decided to omit Lear and Carroll as already well known, and so provided a useful small field of other examples for this inquiry.

Now for the question. We three students, watching our reactions to Lear's limericks, asked one another: "How is it that on reading these, one says that one limerick is better than another?" This is Nonsense we are dealing with. What is "better" or "worse" Nonsense? I do not mean to dogmatize nor to suggest that we should agree upon categories, say, of weak, middling good, and excellent. But how do we judge at all? How does the child know? For plainly there is a scale of value, of some instinctive sort, underneath this assessment, and it arouses my curiosity mightily.

An example or two seems needed at this point. Since the less familiar is often easier to think about than the thoroughly familiar, suppose we start with three stanzas from the Mad Gardener's Song which are scattered through Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno books, its form as tight and symmetrical as any limerick. This is how I would rank them on that threefold scale:

Weak—       He thought he saw a Rattlesnake

          That questioned him in Greek:

          He looked again, and found it was

          The Middle of Next Week.

          ‘The one thing I regret’, he said,

          ‘Is that it cannot speak!’

Middling      He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four

good—                    That stood beside his bed:

                He looked again, and found it was

                A Bear without a Head.

                ‘Poor thing!’ he said, 'poor silly

 thing,

                ‘It's waiting to be fed!’

Excellent—     He thought he saw an Argument

              That proved he was the Pope:

              He looked again, and found it was

              A Bar of Mottled Soap.

              ‘A fact so dread’, he faintly said,

              ‘Extinguishes all hope!’

Turning next to Lear's limericks, I propose again to take some that may be less well-known than the classic two hundred and twelve which figure in the collections of 1846 and 1872. The following examples are quoted in Edward Lear on My Shelves, some of them later published in Teapots and Quails in 1954.⁵

Each limerick in this group, dealing respectively with the inhabitants of New York, Compton, Kildare, Diss, Harrow, Twickenham, Brussels, Cheam, Carlisle, the hills, Bradley, Girgenti, and Iowa, is accompanied as usual by its illustration, and that makes decisions about them rather more complex, for, should the words falter, the drawing may give enough delight to sweep all before it.

Weak—     There was an old man of New York

        Who murdered himself with a fork;

        But nobody cried, though he very soon

 died,

        For that silly old man of New York.

That is an unfair example in a way, for Lear himself withdrew it, with one or two other rhymes, from later editions.

Middling      There was an old person of Cheam,

good—        Who said, "It is just like a dream,

             "When I play on the drum, and wear

 rings

                              on my thumb,

             In the beautiful meadows of Cheam!"

Excellent—       There was an old person of Diss,

                Who said, "It is this! It is this!" When

 they said,

                "What? or which?"—He jumped

                              into a ditch,

                Which absorbed that old person of

 Diss.

And there it goes, the secret of the universe, lost forever.

Two of the limericks in this group, the old man of Carlisle and the old person of Bradley, are printed opposite one another on the pages of Teapots and Quails, and a closer look at them, verse and drawing, may be helpful. In this illustration the rotund but nimble body of the ex-Carlislean is admirable, but better still is his facial expression, that blend of complacency and intense absorption which one sees on children's faces when they dance. (The old person of Filey who "danced perfectly well, to the sound of a bell" wears a rather similar look.) This must be why we were always instructed to "Smile!" as we danced. The verse, however, eating cakes and living with dancing snakes, seems lackluster. Turn now to the old person of Bradley. Here the words wobble—that "all so" looks like straight filler to pad out the line—yet poem and drawing together nearly convince me that they belong in the class "Excellent". The delight seems to come from the combining of "loud" and "sad" and the sheer weight of what he waves around in his hands—so energetic a lugubriousness. There is less actual disorder in this limerick than in the former, only a slight and more subtle shift, as if that in itself might make for better Nonsense (but what is "better" Nonsense?) Nonetheless the same point seems to be borne out by another of these limericks:

There was an old person of Harrow

Who bought a mahogany barrow,

For he said to his wife,

  "You're the joy of my life!

"And I'll wheel you all day in this barrow!"

It is the mahogany barrow that does it there, so slight a shift into so delicious an incongruity.

I am well aware that I am explaining nothing by these words—incongruity, nonsense, shift, disorder—and we shall return to them later. For the moment, let us see if some of the more modern productions in Oh, What Nonsense can throw any light on our question.

One striking thing about this collection is the number of well known "straight" people who write Nonsense. Or should I say: well known men? Female Nonsense writers are very few. Appearing here are D'Arcy Thompson, Theodore Roethke, John Ciardi; in fact the best thing in the book is "Sir Smasham Uppe" by E. V. Rieu, and I want to add, "of all people", the translator of the Gospels into simple and beautiful English, though Sir Smasham may really be adult's rather than child's Nonsense in his trail of havoc through a polite tea-party, porcelain tea-cups, windows, objets d'art:

A chair—allow me, sir! … Great Scott!

That was a nasty smash! Eh, what?

Oh, not at all: the chair was old—

Queen Anne, or so we have been told.

This and Roethke's "Dirty Dinky", a version of the classic Cautionary Tale, carry energy and conviction:

Last night you lay a-sleeping? No!

The room was thirty-five below;

The sheets and blankets turned to snow.
 

  —He'd got in: Dirty Dinky.

What also may strike the reader here is how derivative much of this Nonsense is. An extended tale of an old lady tidying up the seashore seems to grow right out of "The Walrus and the Carpenter." The suggestion of a hippo as a desirable house-pet sends one back to Hilaire Belloc's Yak in The Bad Child's Book of Beasts from the twenties. Using one's long nose as a flute recalls Lear's old man of West Dumpet, and you can infer how that limerick, and its drawing, go. And so on.

I used the word "derivative" in this regard, as if Nonsense should strive to be original; but perhaps there are only so many ideas in Nonsense—platonic forms of what might be called a nonsense universe—of which these are examples. We should be able to run these through fairly quickly, with examples from Oh, What Nonsense. First, simple inversion or upside-down-turning:

They only eat the apple peeling,

And take their walks upon the ceiling.

Next, verbally induced contradiction:

… As a barefoot boy with shoes on

Stood, sitting on the grass

a procedure one remembers from traditional childhood rhymes such as: "Three children sliding on the ice / Upon a summer's day … " Next, rhyme, the gift of a particular language in providing unfitting pairs. Antelope-canteloupe, vanilla-sarsaparilla occur here, paralleling Lear's cakes and snakes; Roethke makes use of blizzard-lizard-gizzard as Calverley did in part too, and one remembers that play upon Plato-potato which Byron and W. S. Gilbert offer us. Next, disproportion: "A grasshopper stepped on an elephant's toe", associated with which comes hyperbole. The nose elongating into a flute belongs here, and we return to Lear's verses, for this is one of his strong lines:

There was a young lady of Firle,

Whose hair was addicted to curl.

It curled up a tree, and all over the sea …

Last and most important, central to Lear and to Nonsense as a whole, is the maneuver I am going to call "muddling things up". The Oh, What Nonsense volume, of which we can now take our leave, provides examples in plenty: rice pudding in a sock, painting one's toes alternately black and white, a flying cow in a porkpie hat. This is the very stuff of Nonsense, and with it we come back to the puzzle of "weak-middling good-excellent". Mere muddle as such does not necessarily enchant the attentive child we are thinking about. The form which Lear devised for a late Nonsense work of his, included in Teapots and Quails, with four "muddled" objects in the first two lines and a repetitive last couplet, does not work well. Examples are:

Ribands and Pigs,

Helmets and Figs …
 

Eagles and pears,

Slippers and Bears …
 

Rainbows and Wives,

Puppies and Hives …

This is similar to what Carroll is doing in refrains such as: "Sing Cats, sing Corks, sing Cowslip-tea!" (though he has added alliteration) in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, and it too seems uninspired.

Yet when this device works, whatever that means, it shines forth as one of Nonsense's chief glories:

But they said, ‘If you choose,

  To boil eggs in your shoes,

You shall never remain in Thermopylae.’
 

He weeps by the side of the ocean;

He weeps on the top of the hill;

He purchases pancakes and lotion,

And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

What makes the difference?

It reminds me of a childhood experience of my own. I was about seven and fortunate to have been given anthologies of classic poems, to make of them what I could. I could say that already some seemed to me magical, some not. One line, "We take the Golden Road to Samarkand", beguiled me all that summer. I had looked at Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" and opted firmly for the latter. The fact of power in certain arrangements of words was clear to me, though not the reason for it. (I realize that is still largely true.) This particular reminiscence has to do with one short lyric, Tennyson's "The splendour falls on castle walls". First verse is wonderful, I said to myself: read on. But … whatever happens in the second? "O hark, O hear! how thin and clear", and indeed it did seem thin and getting thinner as the lines ran on, despite fleeting pleasure at the phrase "purple glens". And so to verse three which just faded out completely. I was left with a sense of disbelief, as if I had seen something and had then watched it vanish. Where did it go? And what is it?

I have used the words "power" and "magic", but I am afraid a harder word is needed. I think it is Beauty, in poetry and Nonsense alike. Now truly one may have those misgivings again. Does that high presence, that Idea, belong with Nonsense? Speaking for myself, I can say we are not accustomed to thinking so.

A first step may be to get some of Lear's critics, even the appreciative ones, out of the way, for they may have misled us. Some samples of what I mean: "It would be difficult to give to a ‘non-sequitur’ greater charms than these" (Athenaeum, 1876); "it is the special pride of the Nonsense Epigram that it has no sting or point at all" (Examiner, 1876); "no nonsense is so absolutely devoid of ‘arrière-pensée’ as that of Mr. Lear, none so refreshingly destitute of sense or probability" (Spectator, 1887).⁶ Then there is Sewell, 1952, speaking of "odd assemblages of elements … incongruity of the thing-series".⁷

Inconsequence, pointlessness, senselessness, incongruity—all negatives, we notice, and they lead us to equate Nonsense with disorder. The comments also carry almost a quantitative implication, as if more extreme Nonsense, however that might be judged, would give greater delight. But "the more disorder, the more delight" is as difficult a phrase to give meaning to as was "better Nonsense". (I am not sure that negatives are subject to degrees of comparison in any case.) A phrase used by Lady Macbeth—strange Muse for Nonsense, I must say—comes to my mind here: "a most admired disorder". I am twisting it from its original sense, but there is the heart of the problem. Why should one disorder be admired as against another? The next step is to ask whether we admire or take delight in disorder at all. If we do doubt that this is the case, then what attracts the child in Nonsense may be not senselessness or incongruity but something else.

A suggestion that this may indeed be so, inside Nonsense itself, comes to light in an essay by Benjamin Whorf, "Language, Mind and Reality".⁸ He is talking about the apparently chaotic Nonsense words which embellish the work of Lear, Carroll and others from time to time, words such as tulgy or scroobious or Tishnar sootli maltmahee which is a line from Walter de la Mare's "Marching Song" in The Three Royal Monkeys. By a fairly complex equation Whorf demonstrates that such words are not leaps into chaos, doing so in part by inventing Nonsense words of a kind which an English-speaking Nonsense writer will not produce, words such as ngib, zih, fpat, nwelng, dzogb. "Any budding Lewis Carrolls or Edward Lears will somehow mysteriously refuse to coin such words", he avers and draws the conclusion: "word-coining is no act of unfettered imagination, even in the wildest flights of nonsense, but a strict use of already patterned material" (pp. 265 ff.).

Throughout the essay he speaks to us of those patterns—of letters, sounds, grammatical categories, syntactical organization—which our native language imposes on us, inexorably and invisibly: we then in accordance with them proceed to pattern the universe in that way, to think of it as absolute and to call that "Truth". Despite his interesting passing reference to Nonsense and its classic practitioners, Whorf is concerned with science and metaphysics and the urgent need, here and now, for apprehension of "a noumenal world" which "awaits discovery by all the sciences … awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably manifold" (p. 248). The re-patterning required for the new vision to be perceived, he says, works upwards, admitting us to higher orders (he expresses much of his thought in terms of series, hierarchies, planes, levels) and downwards, where language is "specialized in a different way in order to make available a different type of force manifestation, by re-patterning states in the nervous system and glands" (p. 250). Later (p. 267) he adds that to produce awareness on lower planes than its own indicates a power of the order of magic.

Network overlaying and sliding upon network, correspondences between patterns in the brain and those in the various orders and levels of the universe—Whorf, writing forty years ago cites Ouspensky and Whitehead, where we might flash a glance, somewhat vertiginously no doubt, at scientific thinkers such as Prigogine and Pribram. But now if we can simplify this and bring it down to our own level, perhaps this is what Nonsense in its turn does: produce by re-patterning of letters in a word or of objects in a seemingly given universe, a dislocation of that given and then a re-location which, slight as it is, may yet permit glimpses of just such other orders beyond and through our usual perspectives. Nonsense may give delight in proportion as it makes possible such glimpses. So too may poetry. This hypothesis at least gives us some explanation for the sense of some Nonsense being better than other. The slight shift which accords a different vision comes close to Emily Dick- inson's description of how she recognized poetry, as a chill all over the body, or a sense that the top of one's head had blown away—the perceptible shock which is the body-mind's response to Beauty, or one of them.

Nonsense … poetry … beauty … (it was, I think, A. E. Housman the poet who called one of Shakespeare's loveliest songs, "Take, O take those lips away", celestial nonsense)—can Edward Lear help us to marshal that still rather discrepant seeming trio? A clue to that lies, I believe, in his art, the landscape paintings and, more particularly, his watercolors and drawings.

To connect Lear himself, as man and artist, with poetry and beauty is straightforward enough. It was common knowledge that he was an admirer and friend of Lord Tennyson, and had a lifelong project to illustrate a broad selection of the Poet Laureate's works with two hundred paintings of his own. In the end all that came of this was a limited edition in which three of Tennyson's poems were accompanied by twenty-two of Lear's landscapes. Franklin Lushington, Lear's friend, who wrote the introduction, says of the artist that he works "sometimes with a few swift incisive strokes and broad simplicity of effect; always with … the highest appreciation of whatever poetical beauty the scene he was drawing contained".⁹ Those qualities appear particularly clearly in Lear's drawings, with the sense which they and the water-colors give of planes and levels, perspectives opening out in series and hierarchies—I am thinking momentarily of Whorf again. The Nonsense is as yet, however, unconnected.

But was it really separate, or is this just our determination to categorize and classify, analysis being the only method we trust, or even know? Another small drawing of Lear's reproduced in a fairly recent biography of him, shows that the artist did not always keep them segregated.¹⁰ It depicts a view in the Roman Campagna, but taking his leisure in the foreground is an unmistakable denizen of the Nonsense world. A few critics, too, give us encouragement for a more unified approach, and interestingly, this seems to go hand in hand with a growing recognition of Lear's artistic achievements. W. B. Osgood Field, who is on the whole rather unappreciative of Lear as landscape painter, nonetheless quotes the following, by Martin Hardie in 1930,¹¹ "Lear, we think, is far greater as draughtsman and painter than has hitherto been admitted", a comment supported in Ray Murphy's introduction to Edward Lear's Indian Journal, 1954: "By looking at his watercolours (which were largely executed for his own amusement) we today realize that his genius was not limited to his nonsense verses…. They [the water-colors] represent an unique achievement … a century in advance of the prevailing artistic conventions of his time".¹² Extend the notion of genius, then, from the nonsense into the drawing and water-colors—surely the genius must be all of the same kind? If we ask next, as we must, "Of what kind?" an interesting small clue is presented by Martin Hardie, just quoted above. He sets up a little formal statement, almost an equation, saying of Lear, "His drawings were to him what mathematics were to Lewis Carroll"—Mathematics:Carroll::Art:Lear. Since mathematics was at the heart of Carroll's Nonsense, then on this view art must be at the heart of Lear's. It is the mathematics and logic which make Alice's creator the methodologist of Nonsense. Edward Lear, "this child", may be its aesthetician.

One can only surmise where this might lead. All I want to suggest, finally, is that Nonsense may prove to be one of the child's roads to Beauty. An indirect one it seems to us, a crooked one maybe. But William Blake would be there to remind us that the crooked roads are roads of Genius.

Notes

This article was first published in The Lion and the Unicorn 4 (1980-1), 30-48.

1. William B. Osgood Field, Edward Lear on My Shelves, Munich, 1933, p. 90.

2. Field, p. 65.

3. Phyllis Atkinson and Jane Nugent, to whom my thanks.

4. William Cole, ed., Oh, What Nonsense, New York, 1966.

5. Edward Lear, Teapots and Quails and Other New Nonsenses, ed. Angus Davidson and Philip Hofer, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954.

6. Field, pp. 202, 204, 210.

7. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London, 1952.

8. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll, New York and London, 1956. The essay in question dates from 1942.

9. Lord Alfred Tennyson, Poems. Illustrated by Edward Lear, London New York, 1889, p. III. (In his own extended project for these illustra- tions, Lear had chosen no less than five possible scenes for "The splendour falls on castle walls", not included in this small collection. They were his paintings of Suli, Epirus, Albania; Sermoneta, Pontine Marshes, Italy; Celano, Abruzzi, Italy; San Nocito, Calabria, Italy; Bracciano, Italy.) The volume contains Tennyson's poetic tribute to the painter, "To E. L."—not one of his best productions. A more effective tribute is paid to Lear as landscape painter and creator of beauty in a poem by the present Poet Laureate of Great Britain, Sir John Betjeman, in "Greek Orthodox" from A Nip in the Air, New York, 1974.

10. Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer, Boston, 1969, p. 66. It is taken from a sketchbook of 1842.

11. Field, p. 223, from an article in Artwork, A Quarterly Magazine, edited by D. S. MacColl, No. 22, Summer (London, 1930).

12. Ray Murphy, ed., Edward Lear's Indian Journal, New York, 1954, p. 25.

Joyce Thomas (essay date fall 1985)

SOURCE: Thomas, Joyce. "‘There Was an Old Man … ’: The Sense of Nonsense Verse." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 10, no. 3 (fall 1985): 119-22.

[In the following essay, Thomas argues that most nonsense literature is inherently imbued with a type of rationality due to its reliance on language and the logical restrictions that proper grammar places upon the form.]

Quite literally, nonsense verse does not make sense; and in that way, it is different from any verse that does retain a heavy dose of recognizable sense. Even Edward Lear, that master of nonsense, was not writing true nonsense when he penned,

There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!—Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard!"

Granted, the Old Man's predicament is absurd, but, like the word "nonsense" itself, its base is squarely situated in sense: we recognize that full, bushy growth of beard; we recognize those eight, named, real birds. Logic, which is the diametric pole of true nonsense, works to extend that base by means of exaggeration. The busy beard become an actual bush that houses nesting fowl. It is absurd, it is incredible, it is hirsute hyperbole; but it still makes sense. Had Lear placed the birds on the Old Man's tonsils or had he substituted for them nesting tangerines and chamber pots, his limerick might more aptly be tagged nonsense.

Pure nonsense rejects sense. As much as is possible in this ultimately impossible enterprise, it nullifies sense. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics suggests, the raison d'etre of pure nonsense is to create a completely different world, rather than merely distort or invert the familiar world. Inversion, distortion, exaggeration more properly belong to the sphere of the fantastic; in themselves they constitute logical processes, one dependent upon a recognition of what is "normal." In part, we appreciate and take pleasure in any nonsense construct (whether "pure" or quasi-nonsense) because we apprehend the normal and also apprehend the logical processes used to alter it to something momentarily abnormal. The moment of experienced nonsense is most often precisely that—a moment, a flickering, fluttering instant of disorientation during which the unfamiliar, the confusing, the chaotic reign. But almost as soon as that moment is sparked, it vanishes, for our rational minds immediately set about recasting nonsense back into sense. It is as if reason exerted a gravitational pull on nonsense's light verse, always seeking to draw it down and back to sense's solid earth. Thus, by virtue of that rational process it elicits in us, virtually all nonsense verse "makes" sense if we can succeed in returning to our known, apparently sensible world. Here, the sense in nonsense is already multiplied, for it exists not only in that return to the sensible, but also in our sensing (perceiving) the sense (logic) involved in the departure from the sensible; and, of course, we sense (appreciate) those creative machinations that have effected that departure.

In contrast, the Princeton Encyclopedia suggests that the world of pure nonsense operates "according to its own laws and into which sane people can never really penetrate." It is nonsense when viewed from our "sane" world, and operates within its crazy-quilt boundaries on the basis of altogether different logic. If, as Robert Frost avowed, poetry is "a momentar stay against confusion," then pure nonsense dissolves that stay, and dives into confusion for its own sweet, swirling sake. It may even create its own language to help us break free of the sense inherent in our known language and grammar. Which brings us to the crux of the problem posed by allegedly pure nonsense: our minds and tongues are so grounded in our own language that it would seem impossible to ever free ourselves of it, impossible to ever create pure nonsense.

Even "Jabberwocky," the most famous nonsense poem in the English language, is deeply rooted in sense. As John Ciardi notes, the entire poem satirizes common motifs of the folk ballad: motifs like the first stanza's "opening contest of dark forces" and overall depiction of a tested, triumphant hero (705). Lewis Carroll's actual nonsense lies in the nonsense words he creates, words like "brillig" and "toves." Yet even here that gravitational pull toward sense exerts itself. Any ten-year-old child with a background in our language, its grammar and punctuation, can decipher the first stanza's cryptic sense, though not its precise meaning. Knowing the parts of speech, such a child could distinguish the nonsense words as either nouns, verbs or adjectives. Being functional constructs, those words are thus sensible constructs. Only if Carroll had written a line like "brillig toves mome raths," could we say the (apparent) sequence was absolute nonsense. It is easy to discern the role played by these nonsense words because they are coupled with words of sense—notably, the coordinating conjunction "and," article "the," and a spattering of known verbs:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

  And the mome raths outgrabe.

The most nonsensical stanza of "Jabberwocky" still adheres to the sensible grammar and punctuation of the language in which it was crafted, and thus is imbued with sense. Patricia Meyer Spacks quotes W. H. Auden's comment, "We can lie in language and manipulate the world as we wish, but the lie must make sense as a grammatical proposition" (268). Furthermore, one can even ascribe meaning to that "lie," though it will be as individual as each reader's connotations of each word's sound. As any good poet knows, sound is sense; here, it becomes meaning.

No matter its strivings toward the different world, then, nonsense verse is necessarily confined by the sensible restraints of language. Perhaps this is one reason the subject matter of nonsense verse is often violent or grotesque—as a means of testing those restraints or providing a counter-balance to them. And, while there's a fine freedom to the nonsensical, most of us experience it with some discomfort. Nonsense worlds and words, those half-familiar sounds signifying no known substance, can readily evoke a sense of threat, as little Alice discovered when all her grapplings after sensible signifiers were turned inside-out. Here we see another sort of sense nonsense makes: that of feelings, usually those of a vague, discomforting nature.

Which brings us back to the master, Edward Lear, whose work is often discomforting. In fact, the violent and the grotesque often figure in his wealth of limericks, and appear in a more muted, covert form in his longer works.

Perhaps the limerick best embodies what constitutes the essence of nonsense. While the verses sketch a quick thumbnail portrait of some peculiar individual, their most common character is the ubiquitous "they." And "they" is a violent sort, who threatens to thump the old man of Ibreem blue, bakes the Old Man of Berlin, hammers the Old Person of Buda, smashes the Old Man with a gong. One wonders why the old so frequently suffer at the hands of "they" or "their" representative:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;

But they said—‘It's absurd, to encourage this bird!’

So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
 

There was an old Person of Chester,

Whom several small children did pester;

They threw some large stones, which broke most of his bones,

And displeased that old person of Chester.

Individuals also frequently commit violent acts, often self-directed, as with the Old Person of Tartary, "who divided his jugular artery," the Old Man of the Nile who cuts off his thumbs, the Old Person of Cromer who "concludes" himself by jumping over a cliff.

The old comprise the majority of all limerick protagonists—according to Ina Rae Hark, they appear in 169 out of 212. The old do not always suffer violence, however; just as easily, they may be applauded by "they," or aided by "them" in some way. As we will see, the very unpredictability of how "they" will respond is a prime factor in the nonsense world Lear presents.

Where violence does appear, it is often in itself grotesque, while other grotesqueries emphasize the human's misshapen, deformed body, bizarre eating or drinking habits, absurd attire, or markedly eccentric mode of dwelling. Basically, Lear wrote two types of limericks: those treating the grotesque and violent, and those of a whimsical, droll nature. Far less memorable, the latter seem more like fare to fill the vacant hour than do the sharply focused portraits of eccentric individuals and illogical behaviors of "they."

As a tightly compressed verse form, the limerick perfectly demonstrates the sort of dialectic existing within most true nonsense—it is one between familiar and unfamiliar worlds, logic and its absence, order and chaos, sense and non-sense. At the center of that dialectic is the word itself and language as a whole. As we have seen, even where the words are unknown, nonsense entities, they exist beside known, sense words; there the dialectic is between words as well as between the worlds they represent. In the case of Lear's limericks, the words are familiar while the content is not, so that the central dialectic is between content and word, subject and form. How a subject is voiced is a crucial aspect of such verse, for it is the word as sound which controls what is presented. Where grotesquerie and violence are present, the fundamental dialect becomes that of subject and sound, violence and voice, nonsense-world and sense-word.

No matter how incongruous the nonsense world, it is congruously presented. No matter how extreme the violence or grotesquerie, it is in the limerick, that small package tightly wrapped in four simple declarative lines and couched within a reassuring rhythm and aabba rhyme. For all its posited confusion and chaos, the limerick is a remarkably rigid form, almost tedious in its formulaic predictability. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes, nonsense verse emphasizes precision and a meticulous regularity of rhythm (and rhyme), further stressed outside the verse by the frequent use of precise line-drawings. This description is quite obviously based on Lear's own limericks and accompanying sketches. Such precision serves to distance us from the verse's content, so that our initial response is cerebral in nature, and our sympathies are spare any true involvement with the protagonist or any victimized subject. The limerick is such an abbreviated form, such a quick snapshot of the bizarre, that its violent, grotesque content—somewhat analogous to television's rapid-fire news shots of disasters, strewn bodies, scorched flesh—disturbs but does not distress. At least not on a conscious level. Its rigid form frames and contains whatever disturbing material is given. In that form we perceive and experience structure, order, a controlled design, and logic, all of which provide reassurance despite the verse's unstructured, chaotic, illogical content. Rather like contagious magic, form affects content, imbuing the incongruous with a semblance, a sense, of congruity.

Herein rests the paradox of "pure nonsense." On the one hand, the term is pretty much a misnomer, since, given the necessary adherence to language and its inherent sense, probably only a madman's babbled jibberish properly qualifies as pure nonsense. On the other hand, writers like Edward Lear and, to a lesser extent, Lewis Carroll, have come as near to creating pure nonsense as is possible. Their success demonstrates that the creation of nonsense requires a decidedly astute and conscious use of sense. The paradox continues. Our apprehension of nonsense is not merely that of incongruous content, for content can never be severed from how it is vocalized. Hence, the ultimate paradox of nonsense verse lies in the manner of its presentation—its form, its voice. As noted, that voice reassures us because it speaks in a (relatively) familiar language, follows the rules of that language, is controlled, excites and simultaneously soothes via lilting, lulling rhythm and rhyme. And yet the voice is the one creating nonsense. The true apprehension of nonsense derives from the tension generated between the voice and the world it creates. Our discomfort is evoked far less by that unfamiliar, grotesque, perhaps violent world than by that world's being so familiarly, so reassuringly, so lightheartedly rendered. The fact that an old man is knocked about or smashed merely for dancing a quadrille with a raven is disturbing, to be sure; far more disturbing is the fact's vocalization in playfully light verse. Children chant, "Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks … " What bothers us is not the content per se, but that merry singsong rendering of it. In the tension between content and form, world and word, violence and voice, beats the heart of our discomfort, sprouts the seed of all successful nonsense verse.

Which would seem to account even better for the presence of so much grotesque and violent matter in nonsense. Much of Carroll's nonsense verse is actually fantastic, exaggerated parody of already existing verses and poems, but when the Dutchess bellows her rude lullaby, "Speak roughly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes," the same tension exists as is present in many of Lear's limericks. Lear especially was aware of form's function, and fully utilized the limerick as an apt vehicle for nonsense. Ina Rae Hark notes how Lear took this already rigid form and made it even more rigid, thus developing the best of all possible paradoxical tensions between form and content: "For if the verse form becomes confining and conventionalized, the people and events portrayed therein repeatedly stray from the norms of everyday life" (29). Hark sees the "doublesidedness" generated by this paradox and others as what differentiates the limericks from "simple fantasy or comic incongruity" and makes the verses true nonsense (49). Further tensions derive from the closing line's pronouncement or judgment upon the protagonist and his described behavior. Often the closing epithet or statement is quite incongruous, having no apparent reference to or logical connection with what has come before:

There was an old person of Brill,

Who purchased a shirt with a frill;

But they said, ‘Don't you wish, you may'nt look like
a fish,

You obsequious old person of Brill?’

We can predict how the last line will end—almost always, upon the same final word as the first line—but we cannot predict what the line will contain before it reaches that end.

Tension also exists between the limericks and Lear's accompanying sketches. Lear's black and white drawings portray such nonsense imagery as humans metamorphosing into all manner of birds, a waltzing blue-bottle fly the size of its human partner, exaggeratedly phallic proboscises, threatening grasshoppers, bees, crabs and beetles of gargantuan proportions. A violent verse, such as that of the old man knocked about, has smiling characters above its printed text, including the gleeful old man, who best can be compared to a rotund infant. A simple droll verse may have as its sketched counterpoint something grotesque, as with Lear's drawing of toads impaled upon pronged forks brought to the Old Person of Rhodes.

Lear is the master of nonsense verse because he so effectively fuses the congruous and incongruous, the certain and uncertain. Interestingly, the places he names within the formulaic limerick are gleaned from real geographical locales (Rhodes, Whitehaven, Cromer, Troy), and he always treats human subjects. All that sense is turned topsy-turvy by the humans' nonsense behavior, which is unpredictable. Though certain patterns of plot exist—for example, an eccentric character being tormented by "they"—the patterns cannot be predicted for any given limerick. "They" may just as easily prove friendly, or the protagonist may turn the tables on "them":

There was an old person of Stroud,

Who was horribly jammed in a crowd;

Some she slew with a kick, some she scrunched with a stick,

That impulsive old person of Stroud.

Likewise, the last line's statement can as readily shift from blame and negative judgment to praise and the positive, in limericks of similar content. In true nonsense fashion, it is but one step further to the descriptive epithet whose meaning is completely incongruous with its context … one further step to nonsense words detached from all known meaning. Despite its brevity, the limerick has the potential to portray virtually anything; within its rigid form and compressed space, nonsense is fluid and protean.

That protean characteristic of nonsense and its unpredictability account for much of the discomfort it evokes in us, a discomfort which is reinforced by the verse's various paradoxical tensions. A vague sense of disturbance, difficult to articulate, constitutes the ultimate effect of nonsense. After all, nonsense is play—but it is a playing with our known world and known language, language we use to define, frame and control that world. We like to think both are solid realities, yet nonsense reminds us they can become fluid and be manipulated at will. The very fact that it is but light verse, but a game, a toying with reality, accentuates our discomfort. Momentarily, sense has given itself over to the service of nonsense. This, then, is the essence of our discomfort, the essence of the dialectic established within the verse—the essence of nonsense. It is itself violent, even grotesque, for it tears the fabric of our sensible world.

Given this effect, violence and grotesqueries seem perfectly suited to nonsense verse. Suited, too, is the momentary experience, for it represents a flickering instant of time when what we thought was solid suddenly shifts and sways to catch us unaware, and then as suddenly freezes solid again. Nonsense loves the spasmodic moment. Perhaps that is why nonsense's impact tends to diminish in longer verses, and why lengthy excursions into nonsense are best rendered in the form of fiction, though such fiction will partake more of the fantastic (its devices of exaggeration, distortion, inversion) than the purely nonsensical. Lewis Carroll is the master of nonsense fiction, whereas Edward Lear is the master of nonsense verse. His best limericks embody the quintessence of nonsense. Unlike these, his other verse is decidedly more fantastic: non-human characters and protagonists predominate, animals talk, locales and place-names are often whimsical fabrications. As Hark notes, these poems and songs have closer ties to traditional nursery rhymes ("The Cat and the Fiddle" immediately comes to mind) and fairy tales than do the limericks, for which no previous analogs exist. The vague discomfort the limericks evoke while simultaneously distancing us from any emotional involvement with their subject is not as evident in the poems. In response to them one is more likely to ex- perience articulated feelings derived from their common themes of wandering and loss. The violent and grotesque may appear, as in "The Pobble Who Has No Toes," though it is usually lightly sprinkled, little more than a crescent sliver or intimation of possibility rather than actuality. Where it is overtly rendered, it is notably the exception, as in the second part of "Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos," where Mr. Discobbolos blows up his entire family—a rare instance of death, written by Lear, says Hark, at the request of Wilkie Collins (87). In the longer poems, readers never really experience the spasm-shock of nonsense. Instead, we meander within a drawn-out fantasy that conjures essentially whimsical impossibilities: "The Owl and The Pussy-Cat," "The Jumblies," "The Dong With A Luminous Nose," "Calico Pie." The overall effect of these poems is elegaic, poignant, even plaintive. Of course, there is nonsense here also, since that effect is derived from fantastic, non-existent realms.

No matter whether one is experiencing allegedly pure nonsense or quasi-nonsense, what matters most is its effect upon us. The core of that effect is some sort of disturbance, yet we seek it out and savor it. Nonsense feeds our appetite, perhaps an atavistic one, for worlds other than our apparently known, fixed and solid, sensible sphere. It permits a safe tasting of the grotesque, the violent, the absurd and chaotic, so that we, too, can have our cake and eat it, embrace both sense and its opposite at the same moment. Nonsense verse is that "momentary stay against confusion" and a diving into confusion; it is a "momentary stay" into and of confusion. Without that stay, which is the anchoring word and our whole language, the verse would be indecipherable chaos. Unconfined by words, nonsense would spill over into our sensible world; chaos would swamp our ordered cosmos. Langauge will not permit such a tidal wave. It is the linked, forged chain holding nonsense in while permitting us to be playfully tantalized, safely tormented. Of course, there is risk in nonsense as in sense, whose antique chain might snap, but that is more than half the fun. And even if, like Alice, we should suddenly find ourselves plopped inside a whirling pool of pontificating eggs and surly lumps of muttering mutton, we have only to cry out, "Stuff and nonsense!" We need merely, like the old person of Stroud, scrunch any runcible beings with our world's word-stick to regain the solid bone of sense sheathed within the shifting flesh of nonsense.

References

Byrom, Thomas. Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Ciardi, John. How Does a Poem Mean? Boston: The Riverside Press, 1959.

Gardner, Martin, ed. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. Cleveland: World, 1963.

Hark, Ina Rae. Edward Lear. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

Lear, Edward. The Complete Nonsense. Collected by Holbrook Jackson. New York: Dover, 1951.

Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1974.

Spacks, Patricia Myer. "Logic and Language in ‘Through the Looking Glass.’" Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll's Dreamchild as Seen Through the Critics' Looking-Glasses. Ed. Robert Phillips. New York: Vanguard, 1971.

John Rieder (essay date 1998)

SOURCE: Rieder, John. "Edward Lear's Limericks: The Function of Children's Nonsense Poetry." Children's Literature 26 (1998): 47-61.

[In the following essay, Rieder suggests that Edward Lear's limericks were intended both as carnivalesque literature as well as anti-didactic forays into the private sphere of the child's universe, ultimately creating a rapport between the author and his intended readership.]

Readers who seek to make sense of Edward Lear's nonsense limericks are in danger of putting themselves into the frustrating position of the people who question Lear's man of Sestri:

There was an old person of Sestri,

Who sate himself down in the vestry,

When they said "You are wrong!"—he merely said "Bong!"

That repulsive old person of Sestri.
 

     (192)

But if Lear's limericks defy critical interrogation, they do so with a good deal more charm than the repulsive old person of Sestri, because their resistance, unlike his, does not put an end to conversation. On the contrary, their inscrutability instead raises the crucial question of the difference between the meaning of Lear's nonsense and its function. The question I wish to raise here, then, is not what Lear's nonsense means but rather what it does.¹

This important distinction appears, for instance, in a comment Lear made in 1871 regarding some of the reviews of his second volume of nonsense writings: "The critics are very silly to see politics in such bosh: not but that bosh requires a good deal of care, for it is a sine quâ non in writing for children to keep what they have to read perfectly clear & bright, & incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense" (Selected Letters 228). Lear's point is that his nonsense's irrationality is the result of a painstaking, rational process. To attempt to see past the surface of such verse is to ignore precisely what is most important about it, so that such seeing is a way of being blind to its real artistic merit. Indeed, the tension produced by offering multiple invitations to interpretation within a piece of art that at the same time deliberately resists any attempt to make sense of it has been called the essential feature of literary or artistic nonsense in general (Tigges 27).

Yet Lear's emphasis here is not on the general character of nonsense so much as on its appropriateness to a certain audience. "Writing for children," he says, requires one to keep things "perfectly clear & bright." What purpose does this clarity and brilliance serve, and how is it specific to writing for children? One of the "clear & bright" things about Lear's limericks is his highly predictable handling of the form.² The first line usually uses the formula "There was an [old/young] [man/lady person] of [place name]." Lear frequently echoes this formula in the final line: "That [adjective] old man of [place name]." The middle lines usually describe some sort of eccentric behavior on the part of the subject, often accompanied by a response to it by the people around him or her, as in the oft-repeated formula beginning the third line: "When they said." The "old man of Sestri" limerick is a good example of this basic structure. Sometimes the interaction between the eccentric and "the people" extends into the final line, yielding variations on the basic formula: "They [verb] that old man of [place name]" (e.g., "So they smashed that old man of Whitehaven" [39]) or "Which [verb] the people of [place name]" (e.g., "Which distressed all the people of Chertsey" [7]). Thus the rather chaotic interplay between Lear's eccentrics and "them" is tightly contained within the repetitive form, providing a combination of novelty and familiarity that, like much nonsense verse for children, provides the child with a strictly rule-bound, reliable, and therefore reassuring set of boundaries within which to experience the fantastically extravagant and sometimes threatening contents of the poems (Ede 58-60; Kennedy).

The most distinctive feature of Lear's poetic craft in the limericks is his handling of the final line. Here one often finds whatever frightening or violent material the limericks contain, such as the eccentric protagonist being smashed or killed or drowned or choked. The need to control such threatening possibilities may help to explain the curious restraint of Lear's formal handling of the final rhyme. Unlike most later composers of limericks, and in distinction even from the "sick man of Tobago," which Lear cited as the primary model for his limericks,³ Lear almost never tries to deliver a witty or surprising rhyme at the end of a limerick. But this is not to say that the final lines contain no surprises. On the contrary, the adjectives that describe the eccentrics are fabulously various. Sometimes they deliver an appropriate description or judgment, but just as often the description or judgment is mildly or strikingly inappropriate, and on a good number of occasions it is entirely mysterious. For instance:

There was an Old Man of Peru,

Who never knew what he should do;

So he tore off his hair, and behaved like a bear,

That intrinsic Old Man of Peru.
 

     (12)

"Intrinsic" neither expresses a judgment nor plausibly describes any of the old man's qualities. It is quite as inscrutable as the man of Sestri's "Bong."

What the use of "intrinsic" achieves, in fact, is precisely the short-circuiting of interpretation that Lear describes as the "perfectly clear & bright" quality of his verse, that which makes it "incapable of any meaning but one of sheer nonsense." According to one eminent theorist of nonsense, "This is the beginning of nonsense: language lifted out of context, language turning on itself … language made hermetic, opaque" (Stewart 3). Nonsense, according to Stewart, is language that resists contextualization, so that it refers to "nothing" instead of to the word's commonsense designation. In this way Lear's wildly inappropriate adjectives are paradigmatic instances of one of the fundamental activities the limericks perform: the world of Lear's nonsense is a playground.⁴ It separates itself from the "real" world, letting loose a number of possibilities, including dangerous and violent ones, and at the same time disconnecting those possibilities from the real world, that is, from what goes on after the game is over. Thus Lear's artistry is "repulsive," not quite in the unmannerly fashion of the man of Sestri, but in that, like him, it stakes out a territory where being "wrong" is only a way of rhyming with "Bong."

The insulation of the artistic event from its social context is hardly peculiar to children's nonsense verse, however. We enter similarly playful (and, Huizinga argues, quasi-sacred) spaces when we go into an art gallery or a theater. But the distance from the commonsense world achieved in Lear's limericks is not just that of aesthetic contemplation. Although the language of any verbal artifact can be said to play rather than to work insofar as its readers adopt an aesthetic disposition toward it, Lear's limericks direct themselves to a specific audience and function precisely by actively refusing to work as conventional communication. This is not to say that the language of the limericks falls out of referentiality altogether, but rather that the truncated or suspended referentiality of Lear's nonsense is what makes the limericks peculiarly appropriate for children. And to adapt Lear's own critical vocabulary, the limericks' clear but restricted referentiality also makes them not just playful but festive in a full and complex way.

Lear declared both the limericks' intended audience and their festive character on the title page of his Book of Nonsense (1846) with this limerick and its illustration:

There was an old Derry down Derry,

Who loved to see little folks merry;

So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook

At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

The illustration shows the dancing Derry down Derry handing his book to a group of frolicking children. Keeping in mind that most of Lear's limericks were not written with publication in mind, but rather as gifts for specific children, we might ask what relationship between the adult and the children the book is helping to create or mediate. Lear simply calls it "fun" in this limerick, but it is a special kind of fun. The adult dancing amidst the children may be in charge of the situation, since, after all, he wrote the book; or he may be giving up his authority, becoming one of "them," when he hands the book over to the children. The adult's size and dress clearly differentiate him from the children. What is not clear, however, is whether his dancing is a performance for them or an emulation of their excitement, and so, by implication, it remains unclear whether the book is primarily an entertainment for the children or a means of entrance into the children's fun for the adult. The point is not that it is one way or the other, but that both possibilities are offered. The adult's authority is neither protected nor abdicated, but rather suspended, at least for as long as the fun continues.

The suspended hierarchical relation between adult and child suggests social possibilities that move the limericks' fun beyond the formalistic aspects of play as understood by Huizinga and applied by critics such as Sewell and Ede. Instead, their engagement of social convention here resembles the highly charged mode of festivity that, according to Mikhail Bakhtin's classic book on Rabelais, was ritualized in the medieval carnival. Bakhtin argues that the carnival "celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions" (10). The relationship between Derry down Derry and the children is indeterminate, it seems to me, in much the way that social rules and hierarchies were set topsy-turvy during carnival. That is, Lear's verses, like a carnival celebration, clear a space for nonsensical fun by creating a hiatus in social rules and hierarchies, so that for a while it may become hard to tell the difference between us and them, high and low, teacher and student, or even adult and child.

But there is also a crucial difference between the spirit of carnival and Lear's nonsense. If the carnival "offered a completely different, nonofficial, extra-ecclesiastical and extrapolitical aspect of the world" and so "built a second world and a second life outside officialdom" (Bakhtin 6), Lear's nonsense directs its parodic and liberating energies not against the state or the church but rather in less "official" directions. In keeping with the interests of his intended audience, it is the private, domestic realm rather than the public domain that most preoccupies Lear in the limericks. They consistently address some of the most basic social conventions with which children struggle, such as those governing eating, dressing, grooming, and talking. Lear's approach to these conventions is "meta-cultural," in that it manipulates and explores the limits of social codes (Bouissac). Consequently the limericks tend to expose the arbitrariness or artificiality of convention rather than laying down the law. The limericks on eating, for instance, include stories of starvation and of gluttony, of "old men" who sink into alcoholic depression and of others who enjoy pleasantly recuperative snacks, of accidental cannibalism but also of miraculous cures (such as the man who is cured of the plague by eating a bit of butter).

Within this festive frame it remains unclear whether the children receiving these limericks are supposed to identify with the eccentrics or with the people—or with neither. The people react to the protagonists' antics with delight, curiosity, embarrassment, perplexity, astonishment, solicitude, outrage, and sometimes violent retribution. In fact, the range of behaviors ex- hibited by the eccentrics is matched in its breadth and unpredictability by the range of attitudes expressed toward them by the other characters, and both the behaviors and the attitudes are as portable and transient as carnival masquerades. This similarity tends to undermine the notion, once popular among critics of Lear, that "they" represent an intolerant social normality and that the eccentrics stand for persecuted individualism, or that the limericks deliver a univocal polemic in favor of the eccentrics' freedom to be themselves or against the people, who often close ranks against Lear's oddballs (Hark, "Edward Lear").

If the boundaries and hierarchies put into play in Lear's carnival are not reliably congruent with the boundaries between the eccentrics and "them," nevertheless they surely refer to social conformity and the conventions that govern manners and private codes of behavior rather than sacrality or legitimacy. They quite often do this by way of a widely prevalent strategy in children's literature: that of inviting identification between humans and animals. For instance:

There was an Old Man in a tree,

Who was horribly bored by a Bee;

When they said, "Does it buzz?" he replied, "Yes, it does!

It's a regular brute of a Bee!"
 

     (7)

The old man, not the bee, is the one who is out of his proper place, perhaps invading the bee's territory, so that the word "brute" in the last line puns on the uncertain distinction the limerick sets up between a social animal and an unsociable human. The illustration emphasizes the similarity between the old man and the bee in a more broadly comic way, since their faces are nearly mirror images of one another, right down to the pipes in their mouths. Perhaps this hints at some hypocrisy in the old man's attitude, and perhaps it also indicates the interchangeability of roles within the limerick's play space. At the very least, the limerick and the illustration cast serious doubt on whatever kind of authority the old man might have to pronounce the bee a "regular brute."

The social dynamics in this limerick involve a contest over who is occupying whose place and who has the right to say what is "regular." Although the limerick's general tenor is antiauthoritarian, the form of authority being satirized does not resemble that of general society toward the eccentric individual nearly as much as it looks like the interact on of an authoritative adult with a child. Or rather, the adult, like Derry down Derry, has been transformed into a comic entertainer, a clown, who mimics the irrationality and hypocrisy of adult authority in the face of the buzzing, childlike bee's own parodic imitation of him.

I am suggesting that the limericks consistently address themselves to the kind of authority adults exercise over children in general, and, more specifically, that the social institution toward which they are primarily directed is the Victorian family. The limericks offer a panoply of interactions between children and adults that refers, both mockingly and at times far more tenderly, to the family. For Lear himself, we can speculate, nonsense enacted an alternative to the parental relationship that some combination of muted homosexuality and serious health problems made psychologically, if not physically, impossible for him.⁵ Lear's nonsense was for him a way of cementing a playful, avuncular relationship with the children he met in his travels. Lear's nonsense persona, Derry down Derry, gives way to "Uncle Arly" in Lear's last, most autobiographical poem; and the Lear of the nonsense in general is the one he called an "Adopty Duncle" on the drawings of an alphabet when he presented them, one by one, to a little girl at the hotel they were sharing (Noakes 243-44). The old man in the tree, I would argue, has no less entered into a fantasy of family life than the Lear in the self-portrait illustrating the following passage in a letter of 1871: "I think of marrying some domestic henbird & then of building a nest in one of my olive trees, whence I should only descend at remote intervals for the rest of my life" (Selected Letters 236).⁶

Whatever way the limericks may have functioned for Lear, they can be coherently understood as extending to the child reader an invitation to imaginative role-playing. The dramatistic game they open up refers predominantly to basic areas of socialization—eating, dressing, grooming, speaking, and so on—and to the kinds of tensions inherent in familial relationships, that is, ones involving obedience and authority, conformity and individuation, nurturance and independence. The limericks treat these relationships in a carnivalesque fashion, using parodic, grotesque, ridiculous, and subversive strategies of representation. Whether the limericks' overall effect is to rehearse rebellion or to provide a safety valve for antiauthoritarian energies seems to be precisely what the form of nonsense refuses to determine. Instead, the limericks' nonsensical resistance to commonsense interpretation draws a kind of magic circle around them, not only setting loose the extravagant energy and exu- berant emotions of the nonsense world but also, at the same time, sealing off this world from "real" consequences. The limericks themselves often allude to and, indeed, theorize this magic circle in a quite detailed and often delightful way. Let me now, without presuming to make sense out of Lear's nonsense, try to trace this circle through a series of limericks.

We can begin with another man in a tree:

There was an old man in a tree,

Whose whiskers were lovely to see;

But the birds of the air, pluck'd them perfectly bare,

To make themselves nests in that tree.
 

     (191)

The old man in the tree appears to be another comic self-portrait of Lear, and the illustration shows him smiling impishly on his branch while the little birds pluck him bare. Even more explicitly than in the bee limerick, the childlike animals have aggressively set on an adult invading their territory. But this is an unexpectedly tender poem, for it transforms the birds' attack on the old man's "lovely" whiskers into the benevolent activity of nest-building. Thus it rather pointedly reverses the plot of Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme to which the illustration clearly alludes. This is not a cautionary tale about the irremediable consequences of a foolish action. Rather, this poem seems to encourage the child audience's aggressivity in the belief that such comic and aesthetic appropriation of the poem will ultimately have constructive results. The poem represents an adult attitude of optimistic tolerance toward the rambunctious and perhaps unruly children set free to play at nonsense.

At the opposite extreme from this old man's tolerance one finds a didactic adult being subjected to some of Lear's most clear-cut ridicule:

There was an old man of Dumbree,

Who taught little owls to drink tea;

For he said, "To eat mice, is not proper or nice,"

That amiable man of Dumbree.
 

     (184)

Here the illustration is particularly relevant. In it the old man of Dumbree has lined up the owls in front of him so that he can amiably instruct them to act in a way that goes against their nature. Lear presents this arrangement in such a way as to emphasize the uniformity being imposed on the owls, so that they turn into a faceless series of "proper" students of etiquette. The old man's authoritarian project is rendered thoroughly ludicrous by his own birdlike posture and beaklike nose. Thus this limerick renders quite explicit the antididactic element implied by the "Old Man in a Tree" reversal of Humpty Dumpty. At the same time, it may preserve some of that poem's tolerance by pronouncing the old man of Dumbree "amiable"; or perhaps this hint of tolerance enters the poem simply by way of the indeterminacy and playfulness enjoyed by the adjective in the final line. The fact that there is really no way of telling whether the limerick's sympathy for the man of Dumbree is congenial or nonsensical is, after all, precisely what keeps Lear's parodic strategy from breaking out of the circle of nonsense and turning into full-fledged, allegorical satire.

The emotional counterpart of the limericks' indeterminacy and tolerance is their strong ambivalence. For example:

There was an old person of Crowle,

Who lived in the nest of an owl;

When they screamed in the nest, he screamed out with the rest,

That depressing old person of Crowle.
 

     (195)

The person of Crowle seems to exemplify the quality of nonsense that Bakhtin, speaking of carnival laughter, would call its most egalitarian element, its holism: "It is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival's participants…. This laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding." Unlike the laughter of satire, which places the satirist above and in opposition to the object of laughter, this kind of laughter "expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it" (Bakhtin 11-12). But this "depressing" old person's egalitarian laughter also has the appearance of an invasion. The price of its liberating effect on the "old person" may be that it threatens the stability of the social relationships inside the nest. The owls in the illustration certainly seem to be of two minds about it. The largest ones, apparently assuming the role of parents, glare coldly at the demented-looking man in their midst, while the smallest ones look quite comfortable and secure in his presence. Thus a hierarchical reception of nonsense dictated by conventional familial roles uneasily resists the egalitarian possibility that nonsense might transform the nest of owls into a family made up entirely of children.

The art of Lear's nonsense is the art of sustaining its ambivalence and indeterminacy; but making the limericks "perfectly clear & bright" also involves pro- viding some form of resolution or at least security for the child audience. Thus Lear's success depends on his ability to balance the eruptive possibilities of the nonsense against a perhaps stronger, more imperative demand for closure. To say that the limericks ultimately satisfy this demand in a purely formal way is not to detract from them, but rather to epitomize much of my argument and bring it, so to speak, full circle. As an illustration let me offer this final limerick:

There was an Old Man, on whose nose,

Most birds of the air could repose;

But they all flew away, at the closing of day,

Which relieved that Old Man and his nose.
 

     (58)

Although the old man is said to be relieved by the birds' departure, the illustration shows that he is quite happy in their presence. Yet the substitution of the old man's tremendous nose for the various nonsense perches, the trees or nests of the other limericks, confers some additional, strenuous responsibility on him. Even though it is the birds, not the man, who perch themselves on the nose, it is the old man who assumes the posture of a tightrope walker. The effort and the performance are ultimately his, and the birds enjoy it contentedly and seemingly without any awareness of the old man's artistry. Yet what relieves him and makes the balancing act possible is the knowledge that it will end and the birds will depart as surely as "the closing of day." Time is the partner of poetic form, and will bring about a kind of closure even where meaning remains open. Lear's artistry establishes an interlude where the children in his audience find themselves metaphorically suspended from the conventional world but still secure in the reassurance of the nonsense world's finitude, its balance of imaginative possibility and formal limits, and the certainty that the game always comes to an end.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, Lear's limericks are quoted from The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear.

2. See Hark, Edward Lear, 24-29. The critical literature on Lear's limericks is very concisely and usefully surveyed by Colley, 1-31.

3. On the sources of the limericks and Lear's handling of them, see Hark, Edward Lear, 24-29; Byrom, 49-51; and Colley, 25-27.

4. On play in the limericks, see Ede, 58-60; on the marking-off of play space, see Huizinga, 9, 19-20.

5. Lear's most recent biographer states unequivocally that "there is no evidence whatever of homosexuality in [Lear's] life" (Levi 31); Lady Susan Chitty's 1989 biography, in contrast, takes Lear's love for Frank Lushington as the keynote of its interpretation of Lear's life. My argument adheres to the presentation of the problem of Lear's sexuality in Noakes's Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer.

6. See Selected Letters, 236, for the portrait as well, a charming sketch of an expressionless, bird-sized Lear sitting in a nest with his arm around a coyly smiling henbird.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bouissac, Paul. "The Meaning of Nonsense (Structural Analysis of Clown Performances and Limericks)." In The Logic of Culture: Advances in Structural Theory and Methods, ed. Ino Rossi. South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin, 1982. Pp. 199-213.

Byrom, Thomas. Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Chitty, Susan. That Singular Person Called Lear: A Biography of Edward Lear, Artist, Traveller, and Prince of Nonsense. New York: Atheneum, 1989.

Colley, Ann C. Edward Lear and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

Ede, Lisa. "An Introduction to the Nonsense Literature of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll." In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges. Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1987. Pp. 47-60.

Hark, Ina Rae. Edward Lear. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

———. "Edward Lear: Eccentricity and Victorian Angst." Victorian Poetry 16 (1978): 112-22.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1950. Reprint. Boston: Beacon, 1955.

Kennedy, X. J. "Disorder and Security in Nonsense Verse for Children." The Lion and the Unicorn 13 (1990): 28-33.

Lear, Edward. The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear. Ed. Holbrook Jackson. 1947. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1951.

———. Selected Letters. Ed. Vivien Noakes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988.

Levi, Peter. Edward Lear: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Noakes, Vivien. Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969.

Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952.

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Tigges, Wim. "An Anatomy of Nonsense." In Explorations in the Field of Nonsense, ed. Wim Tigges. Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 1987. Pp. 23-46.

CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE VERSE

Kevin Shortsleeve (essay date spring 2002)

SOURCE: Shortsleeve, Kevin. "Edward Gorey, Children's Literature, and Nonsense Verse." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 27, no. 1 (spring 2002): 27-39.

[In the following essay, Shortsleeve argues for contemporary nonsense writer Edward Gorey's place within the children's literature genre. despite the author's dark themes, noting that Gorey's books offer a postmodern take on the classic model of nonsense created by Victorian masters like Lear and Carroll.]

A lot of my books I've intended for children primarily.

     —Edward Gorey (Wynne-Jones 543)

Ted Gorey is perfect for children; and that's the saddest thing of all, that they [his books] weren't allowed to be published that way.

     —Maurice Sendak

On April 15, 2000, Edward Gorey, author of a notorious canon of verse and prose, departed this life. In the wake of his passing—and during his own lifetime—there appears to have been a great deal of disagreement as to whether or not the works of Edward Gorey should be categorized as children's books. Obituaries on and critiques of the curious author run the gamut on this issue. Kate Taylor of the Toronto Globe and Mail affirmed that "Gorey is not a children's author" (R-5), while Mel Gussow commented in The New York Times that Gorey was "sometimes mistakenly categorized as an author of children's books" ("Edward Gorey" B-8). For others, Gorey's obituary was the perfect opportunity to warn any who might make that very mistake: in London, Brian Sibley of The Independent reported that "It might be argued that [Gorey's verses] were, by their subject matter, quite unsafe for children" (R-6). With less conviction, Myrna Oliver, writing in the Los Angeles Times, offered that his texts were merely "hard to categorize as children's books," suggesting that indeed, they might be children's books after all (B-6). The Daily Telegraph reported that "most of his material was aimed at reasonably small children" ("Edward Gorey: Recluse" 31), and Celia Anderson and Marilyn Apseloff, in Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss, confirmed that many children do appreciate Gorey's verses (139) and suggested that the dark themes depicted in them are indicative of their affiliation with a subgenre of nonsense literature (35). Completing the spectrum, Amy Hanson exhibited no apprehension whatsoever when, in a 1998 article in Biblio, she enthused that Gorey "has written many gently humorous books that are suitable for young readers" (20).

My purpose in this essay is to confirm that Edward Gorey was a children's author and, further, that his contributions to the field of nonsense verse are both unique and valuable precisely because his work and career raise doubts about the accuracy of current understandings of children's literature. I will begin by examining why Gorey's work has been so difficult to categorize, suggesting that an unusual publishing decision and Gorey's steadfast ambivalence about his own career combined to prevent his acceptance as a children's author. An examination of Gorey's thematic concerns and personal background confirms that childhood was one of his principal themes and that Gorey worked solidly in the tradition of nonsense literature, his verse inspired by the nonsense rhymes of Lear, Carroll, and Hoffman. The violence in Gorey's work is both largely innocuous and, indeed, necessary to this genre. Ultimately, I will suggest that because his verses combine the traditional mores of the fathers of nonsense with a liberating blend of modern and postmodern tendencies, Gorey's works represent a valuable advance in nonsense literature. The author's dark verses are, in fact, uniquely situated to offer a rewarding set of challenges to the child reader.

Because of Gorey's complex public persona, we must dismantle the legend before we can examine the mechanics of his verse. It is significant that throughout his career, Gorey was involved in the field of children's literature and, particularly, children's poetry. In 1959, shortly after he began publishing his rhyming picture books, Gorey became a founding editor at The Looking Glass Library, a short-lived imprint of Random House, dedicated to releasing children's classics in hardback, including Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense and The Looking Glass Book of Verse. In the 1960s and 70s, Gorey worked tirelessly as an illustrator of children's books. He provided art for numerous volumes and was especially effective when accompanying the verses of children's poets like Lear and John Ciardi. For many years, in fact, Gorey's main source of income was as an illustrator of children's books. His collaborations with Peter Neumeyer in works such as Why We Have Day and Night and with Florence Heide in her Treehorn series are particularly well remembered. Gorey once taught Children's Literature at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His course prospectus from Fall, 1965, reads:

The course will emphasize the creative and imaginative aspects of illustrating—and writing—children's books and give practical experience in techniques, media, design, and typography. Included will be an informal history of children's books … and a survey of the field now, ranging from the picture book for the youngest child to the novel for the young adult…. The course will deal, also, with the nature of illustration[,] … its relationship to text, and the two conceived as one entity.

     (1)

Later in life, in addition to his own work and illustration for others, he created dolls for children and produced puppet shows annually on Cape Cod.

Despite this lifelong involvement in children's entertainment, scholars, critics, and everyday readers have been unsure how to classify the picture books Gorey authored. Faced with a canon that appears to link childhood and the macabre, many, at first glance, are challenged and may refuse to validate the connection. Yet, much of the confusion regarding Gorey's work is due to the manner in which his stories have been anthologized. His single-title picture books have largely been unavailable to a mass-market audience. Often, first editions of Gorey's individual titles are produced in small press runs. These volumes are swooped up rapidly by Gorey aficionados, and it is not uncommon for these single-title books to become collectable within a year of release. Most people who have read him, then, have done so within the confines of three coffee-table size anthologies: Amphigorey (1972), Amphigorey Too (1975), and Amphigorey Also (1983). Gorey himself admitted in a preface to Amphigorey that the original releases "are now difficult and often expensive to come by: hence this compilation." The anthologies, which comprise fifty-two picture books, were assembled in such a way that the titles suitable for children were placed alongside those that many would suggest are not suitable. In Amphigorey, for example, delightful rhyming works such as The Doubtful Guest and The Wuggly Ump, which could appropriately be categorized as children's books, sit in uncomfortably close proximity to titles many would suggest are unsuitable for a child, such as the risqué The Curious Sofa and the brutal The Hapless Child. The problem is intensified by the look of the volumes. Each story has the feel of a children's picture book, and jaunty rhyming verse implies that innocent reading awaits. So the "hapless child" who is left alone reading with delight in The Wuggly Ump, "Sing tirraloo, sing tirralay, / The Wuggly Ump lives far away" is likely, having finished that tale, to flip through the pages and read in The Listing Attic:

A head strong young woman in Ealing

Threw her two weeks old child at the ceiling;

When quizzed why she did,

She replied, "To be rid

Of a strange overpowering feeling."

While The Wuggly Ump does eat the children in the end, the story is clearly in good fun, and it presents a theme children can easily relate to (monsters) and a vocabulary that can be easily read. That same child reader may have more difficulty discerning the humor or meaning of the "Head Strong Young Woman" limerick.

In the next anthology, Amphigorey Too, one of Gorey's greatest achievements in children's literature, The Untitled Book—an assemblage of Lear-esque nonsense words ("Flappity flippity, flip, / Thumbleby stumbleby, / Rambleby rumbleby")—is juxtaposed against The Disrespectful Summons, which includes such gems as,

She did her neighbors' forms in wax

And stuck them full of pins and tacks.

They then expired with frightful pains

Inside their bowels, lungs and brains.

Eventually this character is abducted by the Devil:

He seized her hair, and with his hoof

He kicked a way out through the roof.

The end had come, and this was it;

He dropped her in the Flaming Pit.

And in Amphigorey Also, Gorey's funny and inoffensive rhyming cautionary tale, The Stupid Joke, is joined by The Loathsome Couple, a tale in prose that appears, at first glance, to be a "humorous" look at child serial killers.¹

When Gorey's anthologies were being readied for release, the publishers did not include children in their concept of the target audience. Fearing public disapproval of even the most innocuous of his works, publishers have apparently been wary of labeling Gorey's books as appropriate for young readers for quite some time. According to Andreas Brown (longtime friend to Gorey, executor of his estate, publisher, promoter, and archivist of his works), in Gorey's entire career, apparently only one book, The Wuggly Ump, was promoted specifically as a children's title. Focusing on an adult audience, then, the publishers made the anthologies as inclusive as possible.

Had Gorey been concerned with this problem, or had he endeavored to produce a separate volume containing only his works that might be deemed appropriate for children, such confusion would surely have never arisen or would have been dispelled. But Gorey actively resisted categorization, preferring to let the public reach its own conclusions about what sort of writer he was. Nor was he one to promote himself. He resisted many attempts by publicists to increase his fame. It was only reluctantly that he allowed his works to be anthologized—a move that secured his reputation among a wide audience. He refused to accept a Tony Award, thinking it unimportant, and he let deals with Disney and Jim Henson fall by the wayside simply because he felt he lacked the time. Reportedly living a somewhat reclusive life on Cape Cod, he resisted nearly all attempts to promote his work. As Stephen Schiff observed in The New Yorker in 1992:

In New York, a small squadron of Gorey devotees has been trying for several frustrating years to make his name a household word; he seems to tolerate their efforts, but can't bring himself to participate much. "Edward has kept himself protected from success," says friend Clifford Ross, an artist and producer who has known him for over twenty years. "I was telling him on the phone about some projects we were working on for him, but he wasn't responding…. Sometimes with him nothing happens, because nothing is exactly what he wants to happen."

     (86)

As Gorey wrote:

The Dawbis is remote and shy;

It shuns the gaze of passers-by.
 

     (The Utter Zoo)

This tendency to avoid promotion is another reason Edward Gorey was never "discovered" as a children's author. The business of children's publishing is like any other, in that the need for promotion is indeed very real. Book tours, radio appearances, and attendance at celebrity weddings do count for something.

Despite his ambivalence concerning his status as a children's author, Gorey was in touch with childhood on several levels and his writings reflect the depth of those concerns. Alison Lurie points out that Gorey's most well-known character, the inexplicable Doubtful Guest, may indeed represent a child: upon learning of Lurie's pregnancy, Gorey dedicated to her what would become one his most popular works. Lurie notes:

The title character in the [Doubtful Guest] is smaller than anyone in the family. It has a peculiar appearance at first and does not understand language. As time passes it becomes greedy and destructive: It tears pages out of books, has temper tantrums, and walks in its sleep. Yet nobody even tries to get rid of the creature; their attitude toward it remains one of resigned acceptance. Who is this Doubtful Guest? The last page of the story makes everything clear:

It came seventeen years ago—

And to this day

It has shown no intention of

Going away.

Of course, after seventeen years, most children leave home.

     (20)

Of the fifty-two picture books featured in the anthologies, thirty-nine depict or include children in some way. Collectively and individually (and obscurely—as above) it is the children in Edward Gorey's verses who are often the most memorable characters.

Further, it was perhaps in his works that articulate the concerns of childhood that Gorey was at his most insightful. He clearly had a keen understanding of what frightens children even if he didn't think child readers would "really" be frightened by his images: huge, dimly lit empty halls with doors leading on into other huge, dimly lit empty halls, staircases that descend into a black abyss, dragons, ghouls, and, of course, those menacing adults. Gorey's penchant for depicting eerie waifs in eerier situations indicates an emotional investment in childhood that clearly informed his career.

Lurie observes that many of Gorey's characters "tend to seem baffled or oppressed by life" (20). This is especially so for the children in his books. In Gorey's The Gilded Bat, a child prodigy ballerina is taken from childhood and sadly thrust into a world of adult concerns. Knowing about similar experiences in Gorey's childhood (Gorey was himself a child prodigy), one may perhaps conclude that some of the author's keen understanding of children's suffering may have been inspired by his own experiences. Gorey variously maintained that he had either a sad or a happy childhood. What is certain is that he somehow taught himself to read at age three and, from then on, was disconnected from what most would consider a "normal" childhood. He read Dracula and Alice in Wonderland at age five. By age eight, he had read the complete works of Victor Hugo. His parents' divorce when he was a child and a series of disruptive family moves, as well as his skipping entire grades, further removed the precocious Edward from our society's traditionally conceived notions of the carefree child. As Gorey remembered it:

We moved around a lot when I was a child; I never quite understood that. I mean, at one point I skipped two grades at grammar school, but I went to five different grammar schools, so I was always changing schools it seemed to me…. I hated moving, and we were always doing it. Sometimes we just moved a block away into another apartment; it was all very weird.

     ("Interview with Henwood" 166)

Dealing with this disruptive environment, confronting the loss of a parent, and even suffering a lonely year in Miami at a boarding school (Brown), it is perhaps no wonder that a grammar school age child with a college level intellect could carry some heavy emotional baggage into adulthood. And while Gorey's childhood may in some ways appear as a rushed ascendance into adulthood, his adulthood appeared in many ways to be a lingering visit to childhood. He was known to speak in a sing-song manner, often ending a sentence by actually singing the last word. "I'm always trying to keep myself open to inspiration, tra-la" (Gussow, "A Little Blood" C-4). He dressed ostentatiously and liked to preserve an air of mystery about him. He maintained what some considered a "smothering" relationship with his mother well into his middle age. He never married and never had any children of his own. He was often heard to say words like "jeepers" and "zippy." He collected toys.

Those who knew Gorey suggested that it was a quality of his to be childishly unaware that anyone might find what he says objectionable. Indeed, Schiff identified that one of the reasons Gorey's more violent texts are palatable at all is because you get the impression that the author "hadn't quite grasped the situation" (87). This would seem to be one of the keys to understanding Gorey's "gorey" tendencies. For it seems likely that in his own childhood the author was simply unafraid of the macabre. In creating challenging children's books for the precocious reader, Gorey may, in fact, have been answering the call of his child self. The five-year-old Gorey would be unlikely to have enjoyed Pat the Bunny, but The Beastly Baby alongside the works of Stoker and Hugo would seem a more thematically cohesive assembly of titles.

This sophisticated approach to childhood literature has served to allow many of Gorey's books to appeal to a wide audience. Selma Lanes suggests that adults experience his books as a child might:

Gorey succeeds admirably in reducing sophisticated adult readers to the state of helpless bafflement and incomprehension so often experienced by small children. Slowly, like that child, the reader gains whatever mastery is possible over this work, and his victory parallels a child's as he imposes whatever fragmentary logic and sense he can on the enigma at hand. It is an exotic and cerebral entertainment, with Gorey forcing his audience to experience the world anew….

     (6)

For adolescents, there is an attractive blend of sophistication and outrageousness. Lurie described Gorey's fan base as age thirteen and up (20), and Schiff's comment that "Reading Gorey is like losing your innocence" indicates that appreciating Gorey books can be understood as a sort of literary rite-of-passage (88). It so happens that I discovered Amphigorey at age thirteen. As a male at that age, there was really no poetry or verse that felt appropriate for me to be reading. Everything was either too childish, like Seuss or Silverstein, or too boring (to me), like Keats and Longfellow. Gorey was a revelation. He was gross, offbeat, and sophisticated, and I remember feeling somewhat proud that I was mature enough to appreciate his humor. It was a book I could confidently carry around at school and not feel embarrassed. Amphigorey is probably one of the main reasons I decided to pursue a career as a writer.

Once asked who he thought his work appealed to, Gorey noted, "There are a lot of kids who like my work" ("Interview with Solod" 97), a fact Brown, Anderson, and Apseloff all attest to. And there are a number of reasons that the child reader may be drawn to his work. Apseloff and Anderson suggest that some children today, when faced with an endless procession of happy endings, view Gorey's verses, in contrast, as parody. Thus, by embracing his texts, the child is able to demonstrate his or her maturity and deliver a "fatal blow to babyhood" (171).

It might also be noted that a violent text may hold a special allure for children. Diana Gainer, in "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo: Violence and Other Elements in Children's Rhymes," conducted a content analysis on nursery rhymes and concluded, "In all collections, published and unpublished, violence is the most frequent element" (45). She also adds that among children, "violence is the most favored element" (46). Admittedly, however, some of the violent images in Gorey's works are reasons to doubt his status as an author appropriate for young readers. Even if one can begin to pick and choose which titles are appropriate for children, just knowing that Gorey drew the illustration for "K is for Kate, who was struck with an axe" in The Gashlycrumb Tinies is almost enough to make one throw in the towel.² It is only when one begins to understand how firmly Gorey believed that children would not be bothered by these sorts of violent images that one can begin to understand his motivation and, perhaps, forgive him his supposed offences. As Sibley reported in The Independent, Gorey "resolutely refused to believe that youngsters were easily scared by the sinister or bloodthirsty" (R-6). In writing about Gorey, Henry Allen, in the Washington Post, agreed with the author's outlook and added, "Children, in fact, love ghastliness and morbidity, especially if they aren't prompted to recoil in sentimental horror by parents or educators" (C-8). Gorey understood that, historically, children's literature often embraced the sinister, and therefore he was not convinced that any of his stories were inappropriate for children. If we accept this view, then even The Loathsome Couple begins more to resemble one of the darker Grimm fairy tales than anything else. Is there really much of a difference between an "undesirable villa" harboring child serial killers, as in Gorey's tale, and a secluded cottage harboring a witch who eats children, as in Grimm? Both texts can operate as cautionary tales, a genre that one expects will depict a fictive danger understood as representative of a real danger.

Of course, like Gorey's tales, the appropriateness of Grimm's has also been scrutinized in contemporary times. As Gorey's child-friendly The Doubtful Guest compares to his more sophisticated The Loathsome Couple, likewise Grimm's "The Frog Prince," for example, compares to the oft omitted, and very bloody, "The Almond Tree." Gorey's work came of age in a time when the popular Disneyfication of traditional fairy tales resulted in many an unhappy ending being rewritten to close with a more cheerful "happily ever after." Disney's The Little Mermaid is the perfect example, where a wedding replaces Andersen's complex and melancholic resolution. Yet, if we compare the works of Gorey and the tales of Grimm, we may note the similarity that while current definitions of children's literature would suggest that neither collection seems wholly appropriate for children, it is likely that this judgment represents the opinion of the adult and not that of the child.

In examining Gorey's appeal to the young, it should also be noted that some youth may be reacting to the reality in his books and particularly, to the honesty with which Gorey depicts danger. His work has frequent depictions of certain tangible fears that many children consider very real. It is perhaps important to stress this point. It is not necessarily the macabre—the Goosebumps—tendencies of Gorey's texts that attract children. Gorey notes:

I think a lot of my work has to do with reality. I think of my stuff as quite real…. Fantasy I've always found a word I don't much care for…. It annoys me to be stuck with [the macabre label]. What I'm really doing is something else entirely…. I write about everyday life.

     (qtd. in Theroux 6, 65)

The truths contemplated in Gorey's books—the brutal truths—have as much to do with children's failings and fears as with those of adults. Aside from active participation in a war, childhood is potentially the most violent time in the average person's life. Bicycle accidents, jungle gym mishaps, and collapsing tree forts are standard events of childhood. For the young, then, there is the constant specter of physical danger, and for this reason, Gorey's works, such as the bouncing, rhythmic The Gashlycrumb Tinies (in which Amy falls down the stairs, Earnest chokes on a peach, and Ida drowns in a lake), appear situated within the realm of the possible. Another brutal truth of childhood is violence among children. Skirmishes with siblings, fights in the schoolyard, and even roughhousing that goes too far are, again, very real and present dangers for the average child.

Theroux points out that another appeal to Gorey's work may be found in the fact that "we all live closer to our deficiencies than to our dreams" (7). Children are no exception to this rule. In fact, according to Gorey, children live much closer to their "deficiencies" than is commonly admitted:

When I was twelve, I read a book called A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes. In it, good-natured pirates rescue some kids from a hurricane. But in the end the kids are responsible for having the pirates hanged. That killed the myth about innocent children for me. It was the sort of book you never forgot, and you never feel the same because of it. I didn't need Lord of the Flies as a paradigm.

     (qtd. in Theroux 12)

The young child, then, may be drawn to an Edward Gorey book for its sense of parody, for its realistic approach to danger and violence, or for a refreshing dose of brutal truth offered within. In identifying reality and danger as preoccupations of Gorey's work, we must note his debt to the cautionary verses of Wilhelm Busch, Heinrich Hoffman, and Hillaire Belloc. Exactly how closely Gorey's style is tied to that genre can be made clear with just a few examples. Among the most popular books in their day, Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter poems were a collection of dark cautionary verses such as "The Dreadful Story of Harriet and the Matches," first published in English in 1848:

So she was burnt, with all her clothes,

And arms, and hands, and eyes and nose;

Till she had nothing more to lose

Except her little scarlet shoes;

And nothing else but these was found

Among her ashes on the ground.
 

     (9)

Compared with Gorey's child-gobbling Wuggly Ump, Hoffmann's poem would seem far more graphic and frightening. But like Gorey's readers, Hoffman's young audience may have appreciated his texts as parody. Indeed, many today still fondly recall reading the Struwwelpeter poems as children—and apparently doing so without suffering emotional harm. Comments such as John Griffith and Charles Frey's that, "after Grimm's fairy tales [the Struwwelpeter poems are] surely Germany's greatest contribution to children's literature" (149) indicate that there is an enduring appeal and importance attached to these dark cautionary verses.

Published in 1907, Hillaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales embody a doom and gloom not unfamiliar to the Gorey reader, as in "Rebecca: Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably":

Her funeral Sermon (which was long

And followed by a Sacred Song)

Mentioned her virtues, it is true,

But dwelt upon her vices, too,

And showed the Dreadful End of One

Who goes and slams the Door for Fun.
 

     (136)

Among the materials that were discovered in Gorey's home after his death is a collection of illustrations for Belloc's Cautionary Tales.³ For Gorey, this medley of grim subjects was a sort of life work that had occupied his "free time" for nearly twenty years. Gorey's The Stupid Joke is not unlike the above examples and is about a boy who decides to play sick and stay in bed:

A dreadful twang came from the springs;

The bed unfolded great black wings.

While Freidrich screamed, the bed took flight

And flapped away into the night …

The bed came down again at dawn,

Both Freidrich and the bed-clothes gone.

Several other of Gorey's texts, including his translation of Alphonse Allais' Story for Sara, about a selfish young lady's fatal encounter with a tiger, and the previously mentioned, ever popular The Gashlycrumb Tinies are further variations on this theme. Gorey's ABC book, The Eclectic Abecedarium, brings the art of cautionary verse to a level of perfection unmatched by his Victorian forerunners. Rarely have works of warning been accomplished with such dexterous brevity:

Be loath to Drink

Indian Ink

or

Beware the vine

Which can entwine

The volume also includes echoes of a more ancient wisdom literature. The verses read like proverbs from the Bible, or the rhymed morals tacked on to the end of Aesop's fables and some antiquated Mother Goose collections. First, two examples from Mother Goose:

A hedge between

Keeps friendships green
 

Be always on time,

Too late is a crime.
 

     (Baring-Gould 288, 290).

And Gorey's:

Don't leave the shore.

Without an oar
 

With every Yawn

A moment's gone

See down the sun

When day is done

Gorey, of course, also makes room for the ominous:

The way to Hell

Is down a Well.

But one must not judge Gorey's oeuvre as simply a reworking of cautionary verse. The introduction to Gorey Children: A Book of Postcards ties the author more closely with another genre. Faced solely with images and verses depicting Gorey's "woeful urchins," the editors are led to the conclusion that Gorey's works are "[c]reated in the literary tradition of nonsense verse and [the] somewhat surreal narratives of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear" (Gorey Children). As an author of literary nonsense, Gorey shares much in common with many of the genre's chief contributors. His use of nonsense creatures like The Wuggly Ump, Throbble Specter, Beelphazon, and the Raitch are derivative of Carroll's Jabberwocky, Lear's Quangle Wangle, and even Seuss' Zizzer Zazzar Zuzz. It might also be pointed out that the word amphigory—the title Gorey chose for all three of his anthologies—means "a nonsense verse." Gorey himself indicated this in a preface to Amphigorey. In the interview with Schiff, just where Gorey is coming from becomes more clear:

The darkness, the sadism, the bloodshed—questions about these things disturb him the most. He feels misunderstood. His books aren't in the gothic tradition, he insists…. What he's up to has more to do with nonsense, with Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear…. [As Gorey said,] "If you're doing nonsense it has to be rather awful, because there'd be no point. I'm trying to think if there is sunny nonsense. Sunny, funny nonsense for children—oh, how boring, boring, boring. As Schubert said, there is no happy music. And that's true, there really isn't. And there's probably no happy nonsense either."

     (89)

To the uninitiated, the preceding claim may appear too sweeping. Are not the works of some nonsense authors at least occasionally, and successfully, optimistic?

So …

be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray

     or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,

     you're off to Great Places!

     Today is your day!
 

     (Seuss, Oh, the Places You'll Go)

Purists of nonsense poetry such as Elizabeth Sewell would say no. The presence of optimism in a work of nonsense precludes its inclusion in the genre by the strictest definition of the term. Monsters, violence, and anti-social behavior are among the most common themes in nonsense; from Carroll's slain Jabberwock, to Lear's numerous tortured ladies and gentlemen, and to Gorey's carnivorous Wuggly Ump, nonsense has always presented a boldly confrontational spirit, both dark and pessimistic in appearance. Children are not emotionally harmed by the presence of these themes because nonsense texts provide an emotional detachment from character. As Sewell explains in her seminal Field of Nonsense:

The detachment which is a pre-requisite for the appreciation of violent humor, and which perhaps comes naturally to children, connects with one of the cardinal rules of nonsense: author and reader alike must remain emotionally unattached to the characters, and these in turn must be similarly detached in regard to one another. Unfriendliness and incivility are the prevalent manners.

     (194)

Like Lear, Hoffman, and Carroll, there is in Gorey's work an emotional detachment from violence. As Lear destroys the entire family of Discobolos and Hoffman reduces poor Harriet to cinders, so Carroll violently abuses the baby with a fire iron and cooking pots in the scene in the Duchess' kitchen in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Herein we find the thematic link between cautionary verse and nonsense verse. And while the two genres may at first appear to be different animals, they share not only a detachment from their violence, but also an ability to produce a volatile and charged effect upon the child reader. Like Anderson and Apseloff, Gorey considers the two forms complementary and interchangeable.

The threat of emotional harm is lessened further by Gorey's tendency to use rhyming couplets. Rhyming verse allows Gorey's readers to maintain a certain distance from his grim subjects. Compare the following Gorey texts; first, a couplet from The Gashleycrumb Tinies:

G is for George smothered under a rug.

H is for Hector done in by a thug.

And this line of prose from The Loathsome Couple: "They spent the better part of the night murdering the child in various ways." Had Gorey written The Gashlycrumb Tinies in prose, it might have been as off-putting as The Loathsome Couple. By extension, had Gorey written The Loathsome Couple in verse, its effect might have been at once more palatable and more engaging. Elizabeth Sewell, Susan Stewart, and Wendy Steiner have each suggested that the validity of content is threatened by its presentation in verse. As Stewart notes, "Nonsense poetry takes the traditional division between content and form (technique), with its hierarchical weighing of content over form, and inverts statuses to present form over content" (76).

When form is more valued than content, a reader is less likely to be alarmed by content, he or she subconsciously (or consciously) using the necessity of the rhyme to reject the possibility that the text reflects something real.

Roughly half of Gorey's canon is presented in rhyme or alliterative short lines and nonsense phrases. Gorey's rhyming works have naturally been his most popular among children who have long enjoyed the dark rhythms found in works like The Gashlycrumb Tinies and The Wuggly Ump. And while prose works of nonsense are also popular with children, critics such as Sewell suggest that nonsense is at its most pure when presented in verse. She notes that

Nonsense much prefers to be in verse…. [We may] expect to find Carroll's pure Nonsense in his verse, while the prose will provide the commentary…. It is interesting that every time a set of verses appears in the Alices it becomes a subject for discussion and argument…. [This] is one of the many features of the Alices which one unthinkably accepts; but it is rather strange.

     (20-22)

Consideration of contemporary authors of "unpure" nonsense may additionally help us to situate Gorey in his genre as well as suggest why certain critics have marginalized his texts. It is interesting to note, for example, that Gorey's rhyming The Doubtful Guest and Seuss' rhyming The Cat in the Hat were released the same year (1957), both books concerning themselves with nonsense creatures that mysteriously arrive uninvited and proceed to turn a house upside-down. While Seuss' Cat balances a fishbowl on his head, Gorey's Doubtful Guest wrenches the horn off the new gramophone. Despite this similarity, Seuss went on from here to become the most successful children's author of all time, while Gorey's works have been regarded with suspicion and were quarantined to the realm of adult literature. One difference, of course, between The Doubtful Guest and The Cat in the Hat is that Seuss has resolved his story: everything is put back to normal and the Cat leaves. Gorey's Doubtful Guest, however, "has shown no intention of going away."

In a 1998 interview on National Public Radio, Christopher Lydon asked Gorey about the connection between fantasy and nonsense. His answer demonstrates both Gorey's knowledge of nonsense criticism and reveals a hint of frustration with Seuss' Cat:

Oh, dear. There is a book by Elizabeth Sewell [Field of Nonsense] which was the best book on nonsense I've ever read. It was mostly about Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Alice and Lear's limericks are everything in nonsense, but they have a connection with sense. Whereas fantasy seems to be totally arbitrary at its worst. You know, you can just think up something odd. Or you can start with the endless numbers of children's books which are stuck together with the first rhyme that comes into somebody's head for an animal's name or something. Well, I don't wish to denigrate Dr. Seuss, but I mean, you know, "The Cat in the Hat."

     (226)

Both Seuss' and Gorey's illustrations of children's faces have often been described as "impish," indicating that the two illustrators shared a perspective on the best way to depict the look of an innocent child. The fact that, like Lear and Carroll, neither Seuss nor Gorey had children of their own may further link them insofar as their insights into children were largely based on their personal memories of childhood and less perhaps on observation of the next generation. While Lear and Carroll had friends who were children, neither author experienced a parental bond with them. With Lear, Carroll, and Gorey, this detachment from a bond to one's own children may have resulted in a less urgent, or less immediate, need to place optimistic messages in their verses. For Seuss this was not the case. In fact, what separates Seuss from Gorey most significantly is the happiness and optimism pervading Seuss' work; that, and the fact that Seuss was willing to go on book tours, seems to have made all the difference.

To further demonstrate Gorey's vital connection to nonsense verse we might note that one of his single greatest influences was Edward Lear. He apparently had a lifelong interest in Lear's work and identified with him in many ways. One could look to a verse from Lear's The Dong With the Luminous Nose to get a taste for the brooding melancholy that so inspired Gorey:

Till morning came of that hateful day

When the Jumblies sailed their sieve away

And the Dong was left on the cruel shore

Gazing—gazing—for evermore….

A similar mood is achieved in Gorey's The Iron Tonic:

The Light is fading from the day.

The rest is darkness and dismay.

They've gone and left it all alone:

An absolutely useless stone.

Gorey's intimate connection to Lear is further established by the fact that Gorey's drawings for Lear's poems were considered by many to be the illustrator's defining moment. Gorey's illustrations were praised as "the most inventive and tonally complex of his drawings" (Ross 51), and The London Times reported that "Gorey's greatest achievement was to provide Lear's The Jumblies and The Dong with the Luminous Nose with drawings that match the atmosphere of poems so resistant to illustration" ("Edward Gorey, Eccentric" 25). Alison Lurie saw a deep connection between the two authors and noted that the "overall effect" of an Edward Gorey poem "is not tragic, but comic, just as it is in the work of Edward Lear, whom Gorey greatly admired" (20). And as Hendrik van Leeuwen points out, "the two certainly exhibit similarities, such as the sing-songy musicality of the verse, the use of playful rhymes and the (nonsensical) limerick form, and in a fascination with dance" (80). Brown has even suggested Gorey's beard was worn, in part, in emulation of Lear.

However, van Leeuwen believes that Gorey goes too far in his blackness and suggests that the lack of optimism in Gorey's work points to a difference between Gorey and the fathers of the nonsense tradition. "Gorey is blacker than Lear…. He does not exhibit the hilarity of paradoxical reason, but rather the nullity of paradoxical emotion" (80). But, according to Sewell's much celebrated definition of nonsense, Gorey is in fact a nonsense purist precisely because of his "blackness," as evidenced by the presence of emotional detachment, violent humor, and the inherent unfriendliness and incivility of his texts. I believe van Leeuwen may be making the mistake of looking at Gorey's canon in whole—as presented in the anthologies—as opposed to considering only those works of Gorey's we might naturally be inclined to share with our children. In making this separation we see how Gorey's texts become less sinister and appear more humorously macabre. Indeed, as Anderson and Apseloff argue, Gorey is beholden to a particular brand of humorous, yet macabre nonsense: "Edward Gorey seems to have inherited the role of chief propagator of eerie nonsense" (35). In this way, we may liken Gorey to contemporary cartoonists Charles Addams and Gary Larson. In so doing, we have found two more authors who, like Grimm and Gorey, are accepted as appropriate for adults but whose collected works may be regarded with apprehension when children begin to show an interest.

In attempting to further debunk Gorey as a member of the "nonsense club," van Leeuwen additionally suggests that Gorey is not wholly in the nonsense tradition because, as he sees it, "in Gorey's work, text and picture diverge technically" (80), and "The extreme aesthetics of the pen and ink drawings … deprive the gruesomeness of its gravity … " (79). Presumably, van Leeuwen is responding to the mores of the nonsense purist, who traditionally asserts that nonsense illustrations should appear offhanded, like hasty scribbles, as in the drawings of Edward Lear, G. K. Chesterton, James Thurber, or Shel Silverstein. If we simply observe the work of John Tenniel, however, whom Gorey greatly admired, we see the weaknesses of van Leeuwen's argument. For, what nonsense drawings are better known or more highly regarded than Tenniel's detailed and often eerie black and white illustrations? Indeed, many believe that Gorey's illustrations not only perfectly complement their texts but are, in fact, clearly in the nonsense tradition because they add a significant layer of mystery that works to demand creative interaction with the reader. Scholars such as Lisa Ede and Jane Doonan argue that the illustrations for the works of Lear and Carroll were especially effective in their predilection for the creation of a divergence in meaning between illustration and text that served to produce a heightened level of reader participation. In chapter two of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Tenniel's interpretation of the heroine floundering in the stream functions very like a Gorey illustration. This densely crosshatched black and white drawing depicts a struggling Alice in the water. Upon close examination, this illustration suddenly takes on an eerie element. Is Alice staring in horror at something out of frame? What she might be seeing is never explained in the text. Gorey's illustrations for The Sinking Spell have a similar effect. In this story, Gorey's verses describe a strange visitor to a household, and though he shows us the puzzled looks of the inhabitants, we never actually get to see the creature at which they stare. This tension between text and illustration is the final element linking Gorey to the fathers of literary nonsense. Everything seems to indicate that when we are dealing with Gorey, we are dealing with nonsense literature.

Much has been written on the benefits of nonsense verse on the young mind. Anderson and Apseloff go to great lengths to successfully suggest that a "profound relationship exists between the nonsense tradition and children's progress in speaking, reading and writing" (60). Anderson and Apseloff cast a wider net than a nonsense purist would allow, but in so doing, provide us with a general understanding of the beneficial functions of certain aspects of nonsense literature, regardless of whether those aspects are presented in the confines of an optimistic text or not. Central to the language learning experience is an experimental babbling stage that nonsense texts from Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss have always reinforced and encouraged. It is apparently very useful and liberating for a child to learn to say "hickory dickory dock," for example, or "Derry Down Derry" in the case of Lear, or "Bunglebung Bridge … across Boober Bay at Bumm Ridge" as with Seuss (Did I Ever …). With Gorey we find many like examples such as the following alliterative lines from The Raging Tide:

Skrump thwacked Figbash with a dishmop

Figbash scattered cracker crumbs on Hooglyboo
 

     (2-3)

Or as in The Utter Zoo:

The Boggerslosh conceals itself

In back of bottles on the shelf.

And in the names of many of Gorey's fantasy creatures we find language at its most challenging, such as the Ippagoggy, the Jelbislup, the Ombledroom, the Quingawaga, and the Wambulus from The Utter Zoo.

Further, nonsense, according to the experts, is in reality a hyper-conductor of sense. As Sewell notes, "Nonsense plays on the side of order, its aim and method is to defeat disorder with disorder's own weapons" (122). Other claims are equally important, such as Anderson and Apseloff's contention that nonsense helps children to understand that words can have multiple meanings, thus providing them an opportunity to begin to make sense out of language (67-68). In presenting readers with confusing scenarios, nonsense, in fact, trains one in how to reach reasonable decisions when faced with confusing circumstances (99-100). It teaches lessons in logic (79) and helps to develop a sense of humor (95). They also suggest that the preponderance of existential dilemmas depicted in nonsense texts can lead to intellectual discoveries (81-83) and that there is, in nonsense, a latent heretical mission that has the liberating effect of teaching children that the rules we live by are not inevitable (94). Concerning the darker qualities nearly always present in nonsense verse, Anderson and Apseloff suggest that "nonsense literature sends a conflicting message to the young reader; namely, that dangerous possibilities exist in the world, but through cleverness, particularly verbal ingenuity, disaster can be averted" (97). No less significant, and just one more of many other important claims that Anderson and Apseloff make, is that nonsense inoculates the child against narrow-mindedness (99).

The way in which nonsense texts achieve these lofty goals is highly subversive. It is, in fact, in the very obscurity of meaning that many of these qualities are unleashed. Faced with incongruities, the reader must attempt to sort out the missing links. The rhymes of Seuss, Silverstein, and Prelutsky all make more sense, relatively speaking, than those of Gorey's and, thus, are less able to perform subversive functions. Seuss, with his carefully constructed plots, clear moral lessons, and neat endings, and Silverstein with his well-timed, humorous final lines are both more predictable. With Gorey, an ending is often highly arbitrary. In The Lost Lions, the last panel shows a man staring off into the distance. The text reads, "He was told they had been sent to Ohio for the winter." The reader is thus provoked to think more about the man's future than of the "ending" of the story. Gorey's The Untitled Book simply ends with one more in a long list of nonsense words, "hoo," thus allowing any number of interpretations as to its meaning. As a nonsense purist, then, Edward Gorey is one of the few authors in our time to produce the volatile texts recommended by Anderson and Apseloff. As Wendy Steiner aptly noted in 1982, "Gorey is certainly the foremost nonsense artist of our day" (146).

Writing on the subject of nonsense literature in 1901, critic and nonsense poet G. K. Chesterton asserted that because nonsense literature is not allegorical, it is not only "a new type of literature," but it may represent a "literature of the future" (68). Chesterton's foresight is remarkable when one considers commentaries written nearly seventy years later linking nonsense to modernism, Dadaism, and surrealism. Michael Holquist, for example, in "What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism," links writers like Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Nabokov, Borges, Genet, and Robbe-Grillet by the mores they inherited from Victorian nonsense. Such an observation is important to one who wishes to demonstrate Gorey's relevance. For, in linking Gorey to writers like Joyce and painters like Max Ernst, we learn that Gorey is not merely a throwback to bygone days of Victorian England, but is, in fact—through nonsense—a vital player in what are arguably the most influential art movements of the twentieth century, including modernist, surrealist, and postmodern art and literature.

Susan Stewart, Wendy Steiner, Juliet Dusinberre, along with Anderson and Apseloff, all explore Joyce's connection to nonsense literature. Anderson and Apseloff explain:

Nonsense is often an organized and coherent statement that appears incoherent on the surface and is therefore declared senseless by readers unaware of the design and intent of the author. Such literature can be the best of all nonsense. In the twentieth century, for example, Joyce and Samuel Beckett, two writers of immense influence, use just such a technique.

     (23)

Dusinberre observes:

When Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty he perches blithely on the wall, convinced that he won't fall off, while she waits with arms outstretched to catch him, knowing that his future, which he thinks free, is already decided because "it's in a book." The completion of the nursery rhyme is the completion of his destiny, as James Joyce realized when he made him the symbol of a new Fall in Finnegans Wake.

     (206)

And Stewart reminds us that:

Joyce's debt to Carroll takes up a full chapter in James Atherton's The Books at the Wake. Iona and Peter Opie have identified forty-six traditional nursery and street rhymes in Ulysses, and Mabel Worthington found sixty eight nursery rhymes in Finnegans Wake.

     (52)

In an attempt to demarcate the literary boundaries of modernist writers such as Joyce and Eliot, Virginia Woolf claimed that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed" (194). Certainly well aware of Woolf's oft-quoted statement, Gorey frequently mentioned or conceded in interviews that his books were situated on or about 1910. His introduction to The Black Doll situates the action "In the year 1910, more or less … " (7). It might also be pointed out that in the essay in which Woolf made her famous statement, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," she defines modern literature by detailing a mysterious carriage ride that is—in many ways—a narrative passage whose qualities ring extraordinarily familiar to the Gorey reader. Woolf describes two Edwardian characters who are involved in "perhaps [a] sinister business" (196) who state several seemingly disconnected lines such as "It's odd they don't start a golf club there" (197) and "Can you tell me if an oak-tree dies when the leaves have been eaten for two years in succession by caterpillars?" (197). The male is described as "menacing" (198), and the elderly female is described as "very small" and "suffering intensely" (198). Woolf suggests that the passage invites "[m]yriads of irrelevant and incongruous ideas" (198) and adds that the story ends "without any point to it" (199). Later in this essay (which has gone on to be regarded as a sort of modernist manifesto) she refers to Joyce (read Gorey) as a writer of "calculated indecency" who is at the same time "magnificent" (210).

It is precisely in an attempt to create "irrelevant and incongruous ideas" that Gorey designs his work. He notes that

If you create something, you're killing a lot of other things. And the way I write, since I do leave out most of the connections, and very little is pinned down, I feel that I'm doing a minimum of damage to other possibilities that might arise in the reader's mind.

     (qtd. in Schiff 93)

Surrealism, a movement whose 1924 manifesto directly refers to Lewis Carroll, was also a main interest of Gorey's. Max Ernst was said to be a fan of Gorey's work (Brown), and it was not uncommon for Gorey's art to be compared to Ernst, Magritte, or Dali. As Dali chose to illustrate a volume of Alice in Wonderland, so Gorey illustrated an obscure Beckett piece, All Strange Away.

Postmodern literature may be described as those works that are self-reflexive, books that draw attention to the fact that they are books. And while postmodern children's literature such as Sesame Street's The Monster at the End of The Book or Jon Scieszka's The Stinky Cheese Man would seem, at first, a very recent innovation, one cannot escape the image of Alice waiting for Humpty Dumpty to fall because "it's in a book" (Carroll 107). A postmodern approach to literature at once removes the reader from a traditional conception of story time while simultaneously increasing his or her interaction with the text. Gorey's postmodern tendencies are readily documented as many of his works challenge how a reader thinks about books. One such title is The Raging Tide. In this book, each page has a line of alliterative nonsense that is followed by an invitation for the reader to pursue alternative sequences rather than follow a traditional narrative from one page to the next: "If you want to get on with the story, turn to 24. If suddenly you'd rather be doing something else, turn to 29" (16). And as Alexander Theroux notes concerning the playfulness with which Gorey constructed his books, "This one is wordless! That one is one-inch high! That one pops up! This one folds the wrong way!" (63). One title, The Tunnel Calamity, actually folds out like an accordion and cannot be opened in the traditional way. The viewer is forced to lean over and examine the interior flaps one by one, stretching the "book" to its limit in order to see every detail.

In 1926, Emile Cammaerts, in his The Poetry of Nonsense, suggested that Chesterton's "literature of the future" would have such a liberating effect that he could "foresee a time when, far from being set aside as a trivial subject, [nonsense] will be considered as one of the most valuable contributions of the art of writing to the development and happiness of mankind" (73). As gushing as this comment may sound, the fact that James Joyce is included in the documented link between Lewis Carroll and Edward Gorey suggests that, indeed, great literary events such as Ulysses can theoretically be connected, via a textual heredity, directly back to the development of the nonsense rhyme.

In "A Defense of Nonsense" Chesterton spoke admiringly of the benefits of a literature that ennobles doubts. Edward Gorey's works certainly do just that, from the The Doubtful Guest onward. In examining Gorey we doubt the narrowly defined limits of what is and isn't children's literature—we doubt that children are as disturbed by grim honesty and cruel reality as we imagine—and we doubt that we should be so fortunate as to meet the likes of Edward Gorey again anytime soon. A supremely talented artist, a creator of haunting and humorous verses, knowledgeable in all fields of literature and art, erudite scholar of surrealism and Victorian nonsense, Edward Gorey is alone among contemporary authors who might fulfill the "great destiny" of nonsense literature as envisioned by Chesterton and Cammaerts. And this "great destiny" continues to be alluded to. At the height of Gorey's fame, in 1979, Susan Stewart suggested the vital connection that exists between nonsense and progress in culture and society. And in 1989, Apseloff and Anderson suggested nothing less than the fact that "nonsense literature contributes to the civilizing process" (108). Included in that book are ample demonstrations of Gorey's appropriate placement in that genre.

Gorey has left behind a collection of works that is the embodiment of everything we could hope for in great literature for children: rhymes they will want to memorize, lessons they will not forget, and stories that make them think—both about the world they inhabit and about the very nature of the text they are experiencing.

Notes

I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to Dr. Kenneth Kidd of the University of Florida for his guidance and encouragement during this project. I am also indebted to the assistance of Dr. Richard Flynn, Dr. John Cech, and Elizabeth Iwanowski Shortsleeve. I would also thank Andreas Brown, Peter Neumeyer, Maurice Sendak, and Jack Smith for sharing with me their insights and memories of Edward Gorey.

1. While Gorey admitted that The Loathsome Couple was an upsetting work, he defended it on the grounds that it was based on a true story, the case of the Moors murders. And as a reader pointed out to me, The Loathsome Couple can be viewed as one of Gorey's most moral stories as it is one of his few tales in which the guilty are punished.

2. As part of my research for my full-length thesis, "Edward Gorey and Children's Literature," I conducted a content analysis comparing genres of violence and instances of violent episodes in Gorey texts. While space does not allow detail here, I can report with confidence that of the seventy books examined, I could easily argue that forty-eight of them were appropriate for many children.

3. According to Brown, Gorey's Cautionary Tales of Hillaire Belloc will be published in December 2002.

Works Cited

Allais, Alphonse. Story for Sara: or What Happened to a Little Girl. Trans. Edward Gorey. New York: Albondocani, 1971. Gorey, Amphigorey Too n. pag.

Allen, Henry. "For Years, G Was For Gorey." The Washington Post 19 Apr. 2000, obit.: C1, C8.

Anderson, Celia, and Marilyn Apseloff. Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss. Hamden, CT: Library Professional Publications, 1989.

Baring-Gould, William S., and Ceil Baring-Gould. The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Bramhall, 1962.

Beckett, Samuel. All Strange Away. New York: Gotham Book Mart, 1976.

Belloc, Hillaire. "Rebecca: Who Slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably." Rainbows in the Sky. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt, 1935.

Brown, Andreas. Personal interview. 27 Oct. 2001.

———. Telephone interview. Early Jan. and mid-Apr. 2001.

Cammaerts, Emile. The Poetry of Nonsense. New York: Dutton, 1926.

Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in One Volume. New York: Heritage, 1941.

Chesterton, G. K. "A Defense of Nonsense." The Defendant. London: Dent, 1901. 63-70.

Doonan, Jane. "Realism and Surrealism in Wonderland: John Tenniel and Anthony Brown." Signal 58 (Jan. 1989): 9-30.

Dusinberre, Juliet. Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art. New York: St. Martin's, 1987.

Ede, Lisa. "Edward Lear's Limericks and their Illustrations." Explorations in the Field of Nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987. 103-16.

"Edward Gorey, Eccentric Illustrator." The London Times 18 Apr. 2000, obit.: 25.

"Edward Gorey: Recluse Who Depicted His Own Whimsically Gothic World Through Macabre Verse and Darkly Atmospheric Etchings." The Daily Telegraph [London] 18 Apr. 2000, obit.: 31.

Gainer, Diana Heyer. "Eeny Meeny Miney Mo: Violence and Other Elements in Children's Rhymes." Southwest Folklore 4.3-4 (1980): 44-50.

Gorey, Edward. Amphigorey. New York: Perigee, 1972 n. pag.

———. Amphigorey Too. New York: G. P. Putnam's and Sons, 1975 n. pag.

———. Amphigorey Also. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1983 n. pag.

———. The Beastly Baby. n.p.: Fantod, 1962. Gorey, Amphigorey Too n. pag.

———. The Black Doll. New York: Gotham Book Mart and Gallery, 1973.

———. Course Prospectus. "E-319 Advanced Children's Book Illustration." New York: School of Visual Arts, Fall, 1965.

———. The Disrespectful Summons. n.p.: Fantod, 1973. Gorey, Amphigorey Too n. pag.

———. The Doubtful Guest. Garden City: Doubleday, 1957. Gorey, Amphigorey n. pag.

———. The Eclectic Abecedarium. New York: Adama, 1983. Gorey, Amphigorey Also n. pag.

———. The Gashleycrumb Tinies. New York: Simon, 1963. Gorey, Amphigorey n. pag.

———. The Listing Attic. New York, Boston: Duell/Little, 1954. Gorey, Amphigorey n. pag.

———. The Loathsome Couple. New York: Dodd, 1977. Gorey, Amphigorey Also n. pag.

———. Interview with Simon Henwood. "Edward Gorey." Spring 1995. Wilken. 158-71.

———. Interview with Christopher Lydon. "The Connection." Natl. Public Radio. WBUR, Boston. 26 Nov. 1998. Wilken. 216-27.

———. Interview with Lisa Solod. "Edward Gorey." Boston Magazine Sept. 1980. Wilken. 92-109.

———. The Iron Tonic. New York: Albondocani, 1969. Gorey, Amphigorey Also n. pag.

———. The Lost Lions. n.p.: Fantod Press, 1973. Gorey, Amphigorey Too n. pag.

———. The Raging Tide. New York: Beaufort, 1987.

———. The Sinking Spell. New York: Obolensky, 1964. Gorey, Amphigorey n. pag.

———. The Stupid Joke. n.p.: Fantod, 1990. Gorey, Amphigorey Also n. pag.

———. The Tunnel Calamity. New York: Magic Windows/Putnam, 1984.

———. The Untitled Book. n.p.: Fantod, 1973. Gorey, Amphigorey Too n. pag.

———. The Utter Zoo. New York: Meredith, 1967. Gorey, Amphigorey Also n. pag.

———. The Wuggly Ump. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. Gorey, Amphigorey n. pag.

Griffith, John W., and Charles H. Frey. "Heinrich Hoffmann," Classics of Children's Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1992. 149.

Gussow, Mel. "A Little Blood Goes a Long Way." New York Times 21 Apr. 1994: C1, C4.

———. "Edward Gorey, Artist and Author Who Turned the Macabre Into a Career, Dies at 75." New York Times 17 Apr. 2000: B-8.

Hanson, Amy. "Edward Gorey's Fiendish Fables, Bizarre Allegories." Biblio 16.1 (1998): 17-21.

Heide, Florence Parry. The Shrinking of Treehorn. New York: Holiday, 1971.

———. Treehorn's Wish. New York: Holiday House, 1984.

Hoffman, Heinrich. Struwwelpeter. New York: Dover, 1995.

Holquist, Michael. "What Is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism." Yale French Studies 43 (1969): 145-64.

Introduction. Gorey Children: A Book of Postcards. Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2001.

Lanes, Selma. "Edward Gorey's Tantalizing Turns of the Screw." New Boston Review 1.3 (1975): 6-8.

Lear, Edward. The Book of Nonsense. New York: Random, Looking Glass Library #7: 1959.

———. The Dong with the Luminous Nose. Illus. Edward Gorey. New York: Young Scott Books, 1969 n. pag.

———. The Jumblies. Illus. Edward Gorey. New York: Young Scott Books, 1968.

Lurie, Alison. "On Edward Gorey." The New York Review of Books 47.9 (25 May 2000): 20.

Neumeyer, Peter. Donald and The…. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969.

———. Donald Has a Difficulty. n.p.: Fantod, 1970.

———. Why We Have Day and Night. New York: Young Scott Books, 1970.

Oliver, Myrna. "Edward Gorey, Dark-Humored Writer and Illustrator." The Los Angeles Times 18 Apr. 2000, obit.: B-6.

Ross, Clifford, and Karen Wilkin. The World of Edward Gorey. New York: Abrams, 1996.

Schiff, Stephen. "Edward Gorey and the Tao of Nonsense." New Yorker 9 Nov. 1992: 84-94.

Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto, 1952.

Seuss, Dr. Oh, the Places You'll Go. New York: Random, 1990.

———. Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? New York: Random, 1973.

Sibley, Brian. "Edward Gorey." The Independent [London] 18 Apr. 2000, obit., review sec.: 6.

Smith, Janet Adams, ed. The Looking Glass Book of Verse. New York: Random, Looking Glass Library, #8: 1959.

Steiner, Wendy. The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation Between Modern Literature and Painting. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: John's Hopkins UP, 1979.

Taylor, Kate. "G Is for Gorey, Who Never Was Sorry." The Globe and Mail [Toronto] 22 Apr. 2000, metro sec.: R-5.

Theroux, Alexander. The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2000.

Toledano, Henry, ed. Goreyography: A Divers Compendium of & Price Guide to the Works of Edward Gorey. San Francisco: Word Play, 1996.

Untermeyer, Louis, ed. Rainbows in the Sky. New York: Harcourt, 1935.

van Leeuwen, Hendrik. "The Liaison of Visual and Written Nonsense." Explorations in the Field of Nonsense. Ed. Wim Tigges. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987. 61-95.

Woolf, Virginia. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." The Virginia Woolf Reader. Ed. Mitchel Leaska. New York: Harcourt, 1984. 192-212.

Wynne-Jones, Tim. "A Catafalque for Edward Gorey." Horn Book 76 (Sept. 2000): 541-44.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Holquist, Michael. "What Is a Boojum?: Nonsense and Modernism." Yale French Studies 43 (1969): 145-64.

Suggests that Lewis Carroll's nonsense fiction, particularly The Hunting of the Snark, was experimental fiction intended to resist allegorical analysis.

Livingston, Myra Cohn. "Nonsense Verse: The Complete Escape." In Celebrating Children's Books: Essays on Children's Literature in Honor of Zena Sutherland, edited by Betsy Hearne and Marilyn Kaye, pp. 122-39. New York, N.Y.: Lathrop, Lee & Shepard Books, 1981.

Suggests that nonsense poetry is an escape from the rational thought, which nonetheless utilizes the real world as its starting point.

McLinton, David. "Insights on the Snark." Jabberwocky—The Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society 14, no. 2 (spring 1985): 23-7.

Surveys possible symbolic and thematic meanings in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark.

Tarr, C. Anita. "Nonsense Now." Five Owls 15, no. 4 (March-April 2001): 85-7.

Examines works of contemporary nonsense poetry.

Thwaite, M. F. "Flood Tide: Nonsense, Verse, and Drama." In From Primer to Pleasure, pp. 125-38. London, England: Library Association, 1963.

Offers an introduction to nonsense poetry, tracing its evolution from origins found in nursery rhymes and chapbooks through to its establishment as an independent literary form in the Victorian era.