Literary nonsense

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Literary Nonsense refers to literature in which there are either nonsensical words, or the meaning does not make the slightest bit of sense. Two writers who are skilled in this subject are Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) and Ian Hurd.

Lewis Carroll is most famous in Literary Nonsense for a poem he wrote called "Jabberwocky", which appeared in Through the Looking-Glass. His other Literary Nonsense works include The Hunting of the Snark. See Lewis Carroll for more information.

Ian Hurd is also a renowned Literary Nonsense writer, even though he is not as widely known as Lewis Carroll. His writings are famous for the fact that they directly state that they are nonsensical.

The sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense, and are arranged according to proper grammar, yet the result is still nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction and irrelevant or immaterial characteristics (an idea cannot have a dimension of color, green or otherwise), both of which would be sure to make a phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle. This principle is behind the inscrutability of the koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", as one hand would supposedly require another hand to complete the definition of clapping.

Still, the human will to find meaning is strong; green ideas might be ideas associated with a Green party in politics, and colorless green ideas criticises some of them as uninspiring. For some, the human impulse to find meaning in what is actually random or nonsensical is what makes people find luck in coincidence, or believe in omens and divination.

The dreamlike language of James Joyce's "novel" Finnegans Wake sheds light on nonsense in a similar way; full of portmanteau words, it appears to be pregnant with multiple layers of meaning, but in many passages it is difficult to say whether any one person's interpretation of a text is the "intended" or "correct" one. There may in fact be no such interpretation.

Nonsense verse represents a long tradition; its best known exponent is Edward Lear, author of The Owl and the Pussycat and hundreds of limericks. But according to Douglas R. Hofstadter, the crowning achievement in a nonsense limerick goes:

There once was a man of St Bees

Who was stung in the hand by a wasp;

When asked, "Does it hurt?"

He replied, "Yes, it does,

I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet."

A "limerick" that does not rhyme and is not funny, which makes it funny. The above limerick was actually a parody of Lear's limericks by W. S. Gilbert.

Nonsense verse represents a tradition older than Lear; the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle is also a sort of nonsense verse. There are also some things which appear to nonsense verse, but actually are not, such as the popular 40's song "Mairzey Doats".[1]

Lines of nonsense frequently figure in the refrains of folksongs. Nonsense riddles and knock-knock jokes are seen often. Lewis Carroll, seeking a nonsense riddle, once posed the question How is a raven like a writing desk? But someone answered him, Because Poe wrote on both. However there are different answers.

In the field of Art, the Dada movement created nonsense art as an expression of disaffection with art and a society that seemed unavoidably addicted to the insanity of war.