Nonsense

Nonsense applies to a wide range of meaningless ways of expression, from incomprehensible sentences to perfectly formed linguistic texts that block interpretation. Nonsense expressions easily become humorous ones, as humans often obtain pleasure from linguistic play and are ready to look for alternative paths to produce meaning. Nonsense has been experienced as a form of freedom, especially as a means to free thinking from the conventional bindings of logic and language. Complementarily, it has turned out to be a felicitous cognitive tool to venture off into the unknown, to explore unfamiliar regions of mind. In a historical sense, nonsense has to be considered as a literary genre, attaining particular interest during the Victorian period of English literature; its value as witty wordplay has equally to be taken into account, as well as its role in humorous utterances, in connection with the findings about humor appreciation; lastly, its implications with related categories like play or paradox merit are also to be mentioned.

Literary nonsense was already present in the oldest forms of European verse like those of Occitan troubadours or the early French ludic poems called fatrasies, and also in German Lügendichtung (lie-poetry), mainly related to impossibilia (impossible things), like hens capturing hawks or flying millstones. Nonsense verse was an influential practice during medieval times as a form of humorous play, one that exploited the frailty of linguistic devices. In the Divina commedia (Divine Comedy), Dante also explored incomprehensible language in his depiction of Nemrod (Inferno, XXI), a giant speaking a language of its own. But it was in the Renaissance that nonsense attained the status of a humanistic discussion, with Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Praise of Folly (1509), a literate and funny defense of foolishness. François Rabelais also cultivated the genre, as did the popular Italian poet Domenico di Giovanni, alias Il Burchiello, who wrote sonnets of desolate and comical nonsense, like his famous quatrain: Nominativi fritti, e mappamondi, / E l’arca di Noè fra duo colonne / Cantavan tutti “Kyrieleisonne” / Per la’nfluenza de ‘taglier mal tondi, which translates as “Fried nominatives and global maps / And Noah’s Ark between two columns / Were all singing Kyrie Eleison / Under the influence of badly rounded trenchers” (Zaccarello, 2004, p. 10).

During the Enlightenment, nonsense practices grew, and authors like Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Georg C. Lichtenberg made use of them for different purposes. In the Victorian period of English literature, two main writers of nonsense emerged: Edward Lear (1812–1888) and Lewis Carroll (1832–1898). Lear composed nonsense prose and verse that have amused English-speaking children for decades. His famous limericks (although he did not use the word limericks), short five-line nonsense cyclic compositions, show both the caprices of rhyme and the pleasure of futile play: “There was a young lady of Sweden, / Who went by the slow train to Weedon, / When they cried, “Weedon Station!” / She made no observation, / But she thought she should go back to Sweden” (Jackson, 1947, p. 52). As these verses make no sense whatsoever, readers are only required to enjoy the poetic play, which constitutes a challenge of its own. Lear gathered his limericks in The Book of Nonsense (1846), invented characters as the Quangle-Wangle or the Jumbies, and wrote the celebrated nonsense poem The Owl and the Pussycat (1867), among other fanciful productions. G. K. Chesterton called him a complete citizen in the world of unreason.

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