AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 3

 If, in my previous writings on the rationales for metaphenomenal fantasy, I've given the impression that nonsense-fantasy was a new creation, I should correct that by mentioning that a fair number of archaic tales invoke the rationale of "just because." In fact, in Chapter 7 of Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY (which I referenced in yesterday's post), Langer begins her generally unflattering description of simple folktales with some examples from Melanesian lore. Her first example, for instance, involves a buffalo and a crocodile having a dispute, whereon they ask various other animals, or even inanimate objects like a mortar and a floor-mat, to judge the quarrel. The idea of attributing life even to clearly nonliving things seems to me more extreme than that of talking animals who behave like people, though both are examples of nonsense-fantasy. Another example of non-living things being given life appears in the (presumably much later) Japanese conception of tsukumogami.                                                       

The Aesop's fables offer a lesser range of nonsense-fantasy. Sometimes the animals therein are shown only doing regular animal activities, as in "The Dog and the Bone," with the exception that the animal may be given some degree of human intelligence. Other stories show such creatures like the Fox and the Stork dining together and using human utensils.                                                              

In the annals of literature, the example of Lewis Carroll's Alice-verse stands as one of the most sustained examples of pure nonsense-fantasy. However, L. Frank Baum's later Oz books might be termed "impure nonsense-fantasies." Sometimes Baum's world follows rough rules about what its system of magic can accomplish, with its witches and flying monkeys and prophetic hats. Other times, though, the world stretches to include a number of entities I'd consider "just because" fantasies, like the Hammerheads and the porcelain-people of China Country. I'd have to read more of the Oz books to judge whether the logic of magic or that of "just because" holds greater sway overall.                                                                               

As impressive as some of the nonsense-fantasies of both oral and written stories might be, those that appeared in early American cartoons might outdo them both by sheer preponderance. Felix the Cat, rated as the first major continuing character of those early short cartoons, might be exemplary here. I don't know if he's the first character in all fantasy who could break off a part of himself-- almost always his tail-- and just will it to become some other object, like a fishhook or a question-mark. But thanks to the popularity of Felix, animated cartoons became increasingly associated with the ability to transform themselves, or aspects of their universe, into anything they pleased.           

That acceptance of the "anything goes" propensity of cartoons of course didn't keep some animators from following the more circumscribed pathways of Aesop. Donald Duck debuts in the 1934 cartoon "The Wise Little Hen," which like its source material simply depicts its anthropomorphic creatures dressing like humans and doing human things.                                                                                   

 I tend to believe that the majority of Disney's stories about anthropomorphic creatures follow the Aesopian pattern, in which clothes-wearing ducks and mice and dogs go around doing all sorts of human things, not least the mouse named Mickey owning a non-anthropomorphic dog. Carl Barks is justly celebrated for creating scores of stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge having adventures indistinguishable from what humans might do in similar circumstances, with the protagonists' ducky nature being the only "nonsense" element. Once in a while, though, Barks did apprise himself of random nonsense elements, such as "Lost in the Andes," wherein Donald and his nephews encounter square chickens that lay corresponding square eggs. Some of Barks' stories might be considered another breed of "impure nonsense," in that they combine the base nonsense-fantasy of human-like animals with either scientific or magical rationales. Here's what I wrote about Barks' use of a particular type of magic in his story "Oddball Odyssey:"                                                                                                                                                                                                                       'For her part, Magica provides exposition for the reader about her great new powers, about having "scrounged secrets" from old temples and caves that have given her control over the elements. Most interestingly, Magica advances a fairly sophisticated theory for the origin of the Greek pantheon: "those gods were more likely live sorcerers than figments of ancient dreams." This theory allowed Barks to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't have to show his witchy villain garnering power from either old gods or, for that matter, Satanic sources. Instead, it's implied that ordinary mortals can generate magic powers from study of the universe's secrets, which is certainly an odd thing to find in a Disney comic book of the period.'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Thus endeth my short history lesson, though I expect to reference some of these observations in related essays,

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 2

In THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1, I outlined the three principal ways authors rationalize their fictional departures from consensual reality:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."                                                                                                                                                                             

 I also wrote of a major distinction between the first two rationales and the third:

 

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd.

                                                                                                  In essence, the first two rationales are "quasi-rational," because they are patterned after rationales, both magical and scientific, that can be and have been used to justify the nature of phenomena in this our "real world." "Just because," however, is "non-rational," in that there are really no rules but those the author arbitrarily declares, like Roger Rabbit claiming that he cannot perform certain actions unless they're funny-- presumably, funny to whatever audience Roger is playing to.

But just because a nonsense-world is thoroughly without rational content, that does make it without relevance to the human condition. In my review of Lewis Carroll's "Alice books," I listed five types of tropes Carroll used to give the mad, anything-goes phenomena of Wonderland and of Looking-Glass Land their own "internal logic." Whatever efforts, conscious or subconscious, Carroll took to make his mad fantasies have human relevance provide a loose parallel to the "labour and thought" which Tolkien felt should inhere in a consistent "secondary world." I plan to put these observations to a test in a forthcoming mythcomics post, in which I will endeavor to show how a particular "nonsense fantasy" author managed to encode internal logic into his freewheeling descents into lunacy.

 

                                                                                                                                                                

CHAOS OVER ORDER

...Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles. He can help to give a voice to the inarticulate. By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternative orders of reality.-- Peter Washington, 1993 introduction to Calvino's IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER, Everyman's Library.

Chaos can be one means of arriving at a definable possibility, but if we look back at the works of Blake's youth chaos must be understood as something impossible, as a poetic violence and not a calculated order.  -- George Bataille, LITERATURE AND EVIL, p. 89, 1957. (translation Alastair Hamilton)

Despite bracketing Calvino and Bataille, I'm only citing them to support some of my recent thoughts on the legacy of Lewis Carroll.

 

I'm entirely on Carroll's side when he burlesques the moralistic priorities of his time. The "Father William" poem was one that I enjoyed as a child, though I had no idea that it was a parody of an earlier work. I responded, on an elementary level, to visual incongruities like an old man balancing an eel on the tip of his nose. 

At the same time, I remarked that Carroll did not set up any sort of direct counter-argument against the utilitarianism of the moralists. Doing anything like that would have run counter to his project, to embrace incongruous images and wordplay above all other considerations. Even if he meant to mock English orthodoxy with his spoof of the heraldic symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, he wouldn't be doing so to envisage some other, better ethos, which, in the first quote, Peter Washington claims was former Communist Calvino's motive for embracing non-representational fantasy.

I've no idea if Bataille had any contact with the works of Calvino, though I tend to doubt it. Yet it's interesting that the French philosopher undercuts, in general terms, the notion that the "chaos" of impossible notions might simply be used for non-specific utilitarian purposes, for forging new ideas about re-ordering society along better lines. I'm sure that I've occasionally touched on this notion in one context or another, but I like to think I've never descended into the banality of Jack Zipes, claiming that fantasy is good for "questioning the hierarchical arrangements of society." 

I don't know that Carroll, despite his considerable intellectual gifts, would have thought my ethos any less constricting than the Victorian moralists. Because I'm always validating narratives full of "epistemological patterns," some onlookers might assume I'm automatically claiming such works to be superior in my private literary hierarchy. I've tried to counter-act this misreading with my definition of all literary insights as "half-truths." They are not immutable truths or hearkenings of better societal orders. Of fantasy are half-truths born, and to fantasy they all return, even the ones with heavy utilitarian content. Still, I validate the psychological patterns of the Alice books as epistemologically concrescent, rather than the books being "pure nonsense." Perhaps Carroll would not have agreed.

Anyone who has read my blogposts attentively, if not uncritically, should anticipate that I might validate Bataille's analysis of impossible things. (I haven't written on Calvino before, but I will note in passing that though I liked some of the nonsense of COSMICOMICS, the aforementioned WINTER'S NIGHT is just another lit-guy fetishizing his disinterest/incapacity to tell an interesting story.) Bataille probably would also not get my distinctions regarding "epistemology built on literary patterns of knowledge rather than as knowledge as consensually defined." But I agree with him that "impossible things" in fiction always suggest the violence of chaos more than new patterns of order, in "orderly" fantasists like Tolkien as much as "chaotic" types like Carroll.

In the fourth section of LIMITED AND LIMITLESS CREATED HE THEM, I disagreed with Susanne Langer that folktales were no more than a "remarkable form of nonsense," and that they did on occasion encode some of the same epistemological patterns of "full-fledged myths." That said, the latter types of stories tend to privilege epistemological half-truths. I would tend to assume (though no one can be sure) that the chaotic elements in The Epic of Gilgamesh, like the giant scorpions encountered by the title hero, are "ordered" by, say, metaphysical correlations about the nature of the universe. In contrast, a lot of the talking animals of the simpler folktales Langer scorned may not have any such patterns. But as basic constructs the giant scorpions and the talking animals equally communicate the chaos of *strangeness," as much as do (say) Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter and the Mad Hatter of the BATMAN comics.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ALICE BOOKS (1865/1871)

 

What do you suppose is the use of a child without meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning-- and a child's more important than a joke, I hope.-- The Red Queen, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.

Though both the Red and White Queens talk a great deal of nonsense, there's actually a good deal of sense in what this royal chess-piece says to Alice, even if the response is disproportionate to Alice's line, "I sure I didn't mean--" (the thing the Queen attributed to her).

Now, since Lewis Carroll was a self-appointed apostle of nonsense, "making sense" is not necessarily a good thing. The author had already expressed a dim opinion of a similar outlook in WONDERLAND, when the Duchess self-importantly informs Alice that "everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." 

Clearly Carroll means for readers to laugh at the presumption of both the Duchess and the Red Queen and to embrace the lunacy of the author's mad, mad worlds. The two ALICE books are meant to delight children (and adults) with every sort of word-play imaginable-- which is to say, telling jokes whose appeal is that they don't apparently mean anything. Though Carroll avoids taking a philosophical position in the books, since that would be too much like "sense," it seems obvious to me that he rejected the utilitarianism of his time that would say a child only has "meaning" if he or she is "moral." The ALICE books are in every way a "vacation from morals."

That does not necessarily mean, though, that Carroll's works are a "vacation from meaning." And by "meaning," I'm not talking about allusions, like the allusions to familiar nursery-rhymes or well known political figures. I'm talking about Carroll using his unique logical system to mirror mad dreams with their own internal logic, a logic drawn from common human fears and anxieties. The primary tropes I find in both books are:

(1) Frequent references to injury and death, starting in WONDERLAND with Alice speculating on what would happen after she falls off the roof of a house-- though I like better the second one, where she wonders what it would be like to he a candle-flame once it was snuffed out. LOOKING GLASS begins much the same, in that before Alice goes through the mirror, she remembers having playfully told her nurse to pretend she's a bone while Alice is a hyena eating the bone.

(2) A trope I call "omniphagia" is related to the death-and-injury trope but not identical. All children are obliged to grapple with the fact that they, as living things, must devour other living things to survive. Carroll's worlds are defined by the sense that "everybody eats everybody," and this trope extends from the cake and drink labeled "EAT ME" to the foodstuffs that come alive on the Queens' table before one can devour them. 

(3) Egotism and quarrelsomeness. Only rarely does any character tender useful advice to Alice (the Caterpillar is one exception), and that's usually because they're busy pontificating on whatever's important to them. When any of these butt-headed characters butt heads, they get into ridiculous fights, though LOOKING GLASS emphasizes such conflicts more than WONDERLAND. I tend to class all the size-changing episodes under the "egotism" trope, for when she's small, Alice has to worry about being eaten by crows or puppies, and when she's tall, she has to contend with getting her long neck stuck in the trees.

(4) Inconstant motion. In both books Alice experiences long falls that seem to take a great deal of time, and LOOKING GLASS stresses that the Red Queen must constantly keep running to stay in the same place. Though WONDERLAND includes many examples of sudden transitions, like the door in the tree that leads Alice back to the long hall, LOOKING GLASS provided a sort-of rationale for said transitions in the chessboard pattern of the domain. Not that Alice always needs to move between squares: she undergoes at least three transitions in the shop run by The Goat, a character I've yet to see appear in any adaptation.

(5) Finally, the meanings of both words and one's sense of identity are just as inconstant. Alice can't say a word without one of the Carrollian creatures inverting her words or interrogating her intent to looney effects. And when Alice can't remember the correct words to familiar poems like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or "Father William," she immediately begins to doubt her identity. Throughout both books, various characters forget who they are and what they intend doing. Arguably WONDERLAND emphasizes this trope more than the other book, culminating in a group of jurors who can't recall their names unless they write them down. The arbitrariness of legal systems is also one that takes refuge in the meaninglessness of jargon, as with "sentence first, evidence afterwards." Most of Carroll's logic games in both books depend on the many-sided nature of words and expressions.

Because the ALICE books depict two nonsense-realms where all the denizens are mad and no form of logic applies, I deem them both to fit Northrup Frye's category of "the irony." With respect to focal presences, I've stated before that I consider Alice to be largely a viewpoint-character, even though her own egotism and sometimes erratic grasp of logic makes her a stronger character than most similar ones. But it's the denizens of the two weird realms who form the superordinate ensemble. In WONDERLAND, the narratively important characters are the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat (none of whom were in the 1864 draft), the Caterpillar, the Queen and King of Hearts, the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, and the Duchess. Others, such as the Gryphon and the various minor animals Alice encounters, form a subordinate ensemble. LOOKING GLASS is not nearly as rich in original characters, which is probably why many adaptations fold some or all of LOOKING GLASS's superordinate icons into the WONDERLAND universe-- usually Humpty Dumpty (whom Carroll did not invent), Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Red and White Queens, and (more rarely) the White Knight. The aforementioned Goat and the Gnat seem more like undistinguished spear-carrier types. However, Carroll allotted two subordinate "guest appearances" in LOOKING GLASS to the Hare and the Hatter, though both appear under pseudonyms.

All and all, though LOOKING GLASS hasn't been mined nearly as much as WONDERLAND, both deserve their status as literary classics for all ages. One documentary claimed that the ALICE books are the works most quoted after the Bible and Shakespeare, and that speaks to the author's incredible facility with the mysteries of language and logic.

NULL-MYTHS: THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR (1985)

 

By coincidence, this null-myth suffers from the same symbolic deficiency as the last one I reviewed here, WONDER WOMAN: WAR OF THE GODS.  Said deficiency might be called "the shoehorn problem," in which the creator becomes preoccupied (whether out of personal taste or from business considerations) with shoehorning so many disparate elements into the narrative that none of them possess any individual charm. But whereas as a multi-crossover work like WAR OF THE GODS had to tie into a dozen or more other DC comics features, the raconteurs behind this 1985 project-- plotter E. Nelson Bridwell, scripter Joey Cavalieri, and artist Carol Lay-- might have been able to trim away a lot of the extraneous elements in order to allow the strictly necessary characters some room to breathe. (To be sure, the project's editor was Roy Thomas, so based on his eighties writing, he too might have thought that "more is always better.")

Right off the bat, the project-- henceforth abbreviated to OZ-- has to work with a team of seven main characters, the members of "Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew." This group of anthropomorphic animal-superheroes debuted in 1982, written by Roy Thomas and penciled by Scott Shaw, and the OZ storyline was originally intended to appear in the regular magazine. The feature was cancelled, so the idea of the Zoo Crew countering a threat to both the fantasy-lands of L. Frank Baum's Oz and of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland became a stand-alone opus. The narrative consisted of three issues published in 1985, just one year before Captain Carrot's world of humanoid animals would be expunged (however temporarily) by the Crisis of Infinite Earths.

I should note here that I was not a fan of CAPTAIN CARROT at its best moments, for its creators tried to walk a tightrope between adventure and humor, and succeeded in neither arena. At most I experienced a mild liking for the design of the group's "Thing," a big porcine crusader named Pig Iron. But all the others were tedious in the extreme. If they weren't just blandly designed and poorly characterized-- Captain Carrot, Rubberduck, Fastback and Little Cheese-- they also had horribly punny names like Yankee Poodle and (ugh) Alley-Kat-Abra. So on top of finding deeds for all seven of these comical crusaders to accomplish in the narrative proper, Bridwell and Cavalieri-- possibly working to Thomas's specifications-- had to find a rationale for the beast-heroes to go adventuring in both Oz and Wonderland. Further, while the title seems to suggest a literal martial conflict between those two fantasy-domains, the truth is that there's just one evil overlord, the Oz-derived "Nome King," who's attempting to subjugate both realms.

I won't dilate upon the plot, which IMO is just a patchwork of episodes in which the Zoo Crew jaunts from one fantasy-realm to another for this or that forgettable errand. This extremely loose structure allows the writers to work in numerous characters from Baum and from Carroll, which might have worked out well if Bridwell or Cavalieri had shown any ability to continue the witty characterizations of such figures as the Mad Hatter or Dorothy Gale (who appears in OZ, though there's no accounting for Alice, the feminine muse for Wonderland). But the writers might as well have been attempting to emulate stock figures for a D&D game. As with the regular ZOO CREW comic, OZ is astoundingly unfunny and underwhelming in the adventure department.

Carol Lay's art is OZ's only saving grace, for her successful tightrope-act consists of rendering all the beast-heroes in typical bigfoot style, while the Carroll characters are all rendered along the lines of illustrator John Tenniel and the Oz characters follow the conceptualizations of illustrators Neill and Denslow. And there's one decent joke at the end of OZ, for after Captain Carrot has returned to his home from defeating the Nome King, the story ends with him getting yet more barely-welcome visitors: DC's klutz-heroes The Inferior Five. Their appearance is just a nod from Bridwell, since he wrote the Five's series, which I think is probably more fondly remembered than Captain Carrot even though the former didn't even rack up twenty issues. Frankly, since Bridwell seemed in my opinion more comfortable with writing the Five's baggy-pants comedy, a Five crossover with the Zoo Crew might have stood a slightly greater chance of being funny. 

I suppose that one other positive aspect of this project is that its concentration on Oz-mythology-- a necessary result of the multitude of Oz-books compared to the two canonical Carroll tomes-- might make some readers want to sample the Baum canon.