The Sound of Nonsense

Richard Elliott

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501324567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.

1

The Sound of Nonsense

Nonsense Definitions

Before proceeding further, it would be as well to explain what I mean by ‘nonsense’ and to do so with reference to other writers’ attempts at definition. The first thing to establish is that most writing in English on nonsense is about, or at least has its starting point in, the tradition of nonsense literature, which is also the starting point for my study. However, one of the problems that emerges from the eliding of nonsense and nonsense literature is the tendency to make sweeping statements about the former which are only really relevant to nonsense literature quite narrowly defined. Wim Tigges’s 1988 study, for example, is presented as An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, yet drops the ‘literary’ specification for a section entitled ‘What Nonsense is Not’.¹ While my starting point in the next chapter is literary nonsense, my study subsequently covers other disciplines and therefore requires a broader definition of nonsense, towards which this chapter will work. For now, it should be noted that many of the attempts at definition below emanate from the long history of critical commentary on nonsense literature.²

In The Field of Nonsense, her classic commentary from 1952, Elizabeth Sewell writes, ‘The assumption that you know what sense is, and consequently what nonsense is, depends not on the acceptance or rejection of blocs of fact but upon the adoption of certain sets of mental relations. Whatever holds together according to these relationships will be sense, whatever does not will be nonsense.’³ For Sewell, context is everything and meaning is contingent upon it. There is no absolute nonsense any more than there is absolute sense; subjects establish and develop sense-making processes for themselves and those processes reflect and resound back on the subject. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, one of the best writers on nonsense, suggests that ‘the negative prefix in “nonsense” … is the mark of a process not merely of denial but also of reflexivity’ and that ‘non-sense is also meta-sense’.⁴ This helps to define nonsense as a deliberate strategy – for example, one used by nonsense writers, comedians, sound artists and musicians – and this is an idea I will return to. This usage also contrasts with the use of ‘nonsense’ as a dismissive description (‘stuff and nonsense!’), where it is the reader–critic who decides rather than the original author.

Nonsense writer Mervyn Peake, reflecting on Lewis Carroll’s work, spoke of the ‘madness’ of nonsense, a madness of the imagination and therefore more ‘lovely’ than that associated with pathology:

Nonsense can be gentle or riotous. It can clank like a stone in the empty bucket of fatuity. It can take you by the hand and lead you nowhere. … It swims, plunges, cavorts, and rises in its own element. It’s a fabulous fowl. For non-sense is not the opposite of good sense. That would be ‘Bad Sense’. It’s something quite apart – and isn’t the opposite of anything.⁵

Robert Maslen, editor of Peake’s Complete Nonsense, follows this up by suggesting nonsense as ‘an arrangement of words on the page without regard to meaning but with careful regard to grammar, form, sound and rhythm’.⁶ This definition again falls on the side of the producer of nonsense, and on nonsense as a strategy; usefully for my own study, it also highlights the role of sound in the workings of the nonsense text. Like Peake, Michael Heyman emphasizes the importance of play and process in his description of nonsense: ‘a particular kind of play, one that is not pure exuberance, not unrestrained joy and, above all, not gibberish (though all of these are often elements of it). Rather, it is an art form rooted in sophisticated aesthetics, linguistics and play with logic, and it is the art of nonsense that is one of its most appealing aspects.’⁷

Noel Malcolm, in the introduction to The Origins of English Nonsense, justifies his decision not to precisely define nonsense by arguing that ‘definition-making is not necessary for practical reasons, any more than it is necessary for studies of lyric poetry or comedy to begin with watertight definitions of those terms’. Nor is it desirable, he continues, ‘for theoretical reasons either, since these literary types are cluster-concepts: they have a core on which all can agree, and a more variable periphery on which disagreement is always possible.’⁸ Yet, Malcolm does appear to be at greater ease with what we might call anti-definitions and peppers his study with examples that are clearly marked as ‘not nonsense’. Of these, the following is useful in that it gets at a relationship – at times a tension – evident in this book, that between the literary and the sonic:

Nonsense language is, of course, a type of nonsense; it presents the form of meaning while denying us the substance. But the denial is so complete that it can go no further; it is unable to perform that exploration of nonsense possibilities in which proper nonsense literature excels. Apart from creating a generic nonsense effect, gibberish is capable of performing only one trick, which is to make funny noises. To achieve any other effects, it must dilute itself with words (or at least recognisable vestiges of words) which are not nonsense.⁹

For now, what I wish to take from this anti-definition of nonsense is, first, the subdivision of nonsense into other components such as ‘nonsense language’ and ‘gibberish’ and, secondly, the idea, repeated by numerous commentators, that nonsense requires a certain amount of regulation, logic and coherence to succeed as nonsense. This accords with the view taken by Jacqueline Flescher, who writes, ‘The backbone of nonsense must be a consciously regulated pattern. It can be the rhythmic structure of verse, the order of legal procedure, or the rules of the chess-game. Implicitly or explicitly, these three variations are all present in Alice.’¹⁰

For my own purposes, I am particularly interested in the ‘funny noises’ that Malcolm alludes to and, now that gibberish has been invoked, we might pause to recall other synonyms of, or words related to, nonsense: gobbledygook, drivel, twaddle, mumbo-jumbo, tosh, balderdash, babble, chatter, bunkum, hogwash, jargon. Some of these words can be associated with the subset of nonsense that Malcolm refers to as ‘nonsense language’, while others are more clearly related to forms of criticism. When Max Eastman refers to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as ‘mumbo-jumbo’, for example, we know that we are supposed to take it as harsh criticism; so too when Adam Piette, in his Remembering and the Sound of Words, dismisses Julia Kristeva’s theories as ‘the ruinous rhyme between childish babble and psychobabble’.¹¹ This use of nonsense-related words as criticism is interesting in that it invariably uncovers a resentment on the part of the user of the word which contrasts strongly with the playful usage of nonsense in the classic literature of Carroll, Lear and other authors of nonsense literature. While seemingly quite distinct, these uses of nonsense (as accusation or strategy) can often be found coexisting, as when Alice dismisses what the Queen of Hearts says as ‘Stuff and nonsense!’¹² As for gibberish, the world it summons is described by Stephen Fry as ‘a strangely familiar land, yet one in which nothing is linguistically as it seems’, which might well pass as a description of nonsense too. However, while ‘one man’s gibberish may be another woman’s native tongue’, Fry maintains a distinction between gibberish and nonsense, with the latter having a greater reliance on logic and therefore more coherent meaning.¹³

Then there’s logorrhoea, the ‘tendency to extreme loquacity’ (OED), an excessive wordiness often associated with extreme psychological conditions. Jean-Jacques Lecercle mentions logorrhoea as an example of nonsense where ‘too much signifies, and too little is signified’ and where ‘the abundance of words balances the lack of meaning’.¹⁴ Lecercle uses his own term, délire, to refer to ‘an utterance which, at the very moment when it plays havoc with language acknowledges the domination of the rules it transgresses’.¹⁵ These types of nonsense are not generally those of the classic tradition of Carroll and Lear but can be found in writers of earlier generations (François Rabelais, Laurence Sterne) and later ones (James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Julián Ríos). Lecercle frequently makes comparisons between writers of nonsense literature and later modernists, arguing that, for the latter, délire is wielded as a destructive agent. Writing about Antonin Artaud, Lecercle states, ‘Nonsense as a genre always strives towards the linguistic security of the mimetic; hence the strictures of Artaud, whose poetic stance is that of modernism: a position of negation and rejection. The modernist text asserts itself by rejecting mimesis – often pejoratively labelled “realism”.’¹⁶

For understandable reasons – mainly a desire to clearly delineate a field of study – some writers on nonsense have wanted to make distinctions between nonsense literature proper (as they see it) and other forms of nonsense, such as those listed above. As we have already heard, Noel Malcolm makes a distinction between nonsense literature, gibberish and the ‘noise’ of nonsense language more generally. It is important for Malcolm to make this distinction not only because he wishes to defend nonsense literature as a cherished and particular art form, but also because he wishes to challenge what he sees as the generally agreed-upon origins of the form in the nineteenth century by asserting its creation in the seventeenth. I would argue that it is because of the corralling of nonsense into nonsense literature that the role of sound has been neglected in favour of the textual and that it is time to attend more dutifully to those ‘funny noises’ which are so crucial to most nonsense, literary or otherwise. What’s more, the division of nonsense into extremes of absolute gibberish and nonsense literature is a false one, with most nonsense art occupying some position in that ‘diluted’ in-between area. There are no obvious boundaries, and it is precisely the blurry play of boundary-crossing in which nonsense revels. For such reasons, I find Lecercle’s gradated instances of délire more convincing than Malcolm’s outright categorizations. As for the business of origins, I pitch myself closer to those who have looked at longer and broader histories of nonsense, those that reach not only for historical precursors and successors of the nonsense literature tradition, but also for related practices arising in other art forms associated with the word and the voice, including sound poetry, experimental art, comedy and music. In doing so, I feel a certain sense of shared mission to recent studies of nonsense that have appeared in print and broadcast media.¹⁷

There is a sense of exhaustion in defining nonsense. As Michael Heyman has observed, ‘there are as many definitions of sense, nonsense, and literary nonsense as there are critics’.¹⁸ Several writers, Malcolm among them, have suggested that nonsense is something we may not be able to define precisely but which we recognize when we see it. Yet such seemingly open and flexible approaches to defining nonsense are often belied by references to ‘real’ or ‘proper’ nonsense or claims that such and such an example is ‘not really nonsense’. Given my focus on sound in this book, I proceed at times with an understanding that nonsense is something we know when we hear it and I have restricted my use of negative definitions of the ‘this is not real nonsense’ type. No doubt some readers will find fault with what I include as nonsense but this seems to be a risk that no nonsensologist can escape. If, like other writers on nonsense, I am unable to provide a neat definition, I will posit as a starting point five types of nonsense that I have in mind for what follows:

1 That which introduces altered logic even when ‘normal’ language is used. This would be the realm of Carroll and his followers or of Goonesque comedy.

2 That which stays within a ‘normal’ syntactic regime but introduces glitches and other disruptive strategies and plays with the logic of semantics. Modernist and postmodernist writers and musicians would be among the examples of this type.

3 That which emerges from altering syntax to create magic, confusion or truth. This would include cut-ups, permutations and other strategies that play with the logics of syntax.

4 That which borders on or overlaps with the absurd. This would include Beckettian drama and Dylanesque songwriting.

5 That which uses codes or terms only understood by specialists or insiders. This is only ‘nonsense’ for non-specialists or outsiders, what we might more commonly think of as gobbledygook or jargon. This includes hip language like jazz jive, hip-hop slang, subcultural terms, certain academic discourse and the BBC Shipping Forecast.

Connecting these is the nonsense moment, that space of bewilderment between two or more modes of meaning where sense-making is forced into code-switching. Ultimately, there are many types and many definitions. For this book, I want to keep what nonsense means broad and to express my interest in the connections between these various ways in which sense is put up against its other(s). My list of nonsense types is a guide and not a set of rules.

Sound and Sense

If, as Susan Stewart has suggested, the fascination with nonsense resides in its being ‘language lifted out of context, language turning on itself, language as infinite regression, language made hermetic, opaque in an envelope of language’, then it is necessary to consider the importance of sound in all these processes and in sense-making more generally.¹⁹ It is striking how well Stewart’s description would work as a description of sound poetry, of what might be called ‘vocable art’ (non-semantic singing, vocalese, scatting, some forms of rapping) or of the manipulation of sonic communication by mechanical means (tape loops, sampling, mixing and remixing). It is also notable how Stewart’s use of ‘envelope’ echoes and anticipates work on what has been called ‘the sonorous envelope’. One of the more focused applications of such ideas to music is David Schwartz’s Listening Subjects, in which the author analyses a range of twentieth-century musical examples from a psychoanalytic perspective. Schwartz explores the notion of the sonorous envelope in an analysis of the early tape loops of Steve Reich, noting how the obsessive repetition and breaking do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Sound of Nonsense
• 2 The Sound of the Page
• 3 Silly Noises
• 4 Pop Hearts Nonsense
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Videography
• Index
• Copyright