Nonsense School’s Critical Reading
1.1. Language, Nonsense, and Desire
Why do we use Lecercle’s theory of intuitive délire to read Carroll’s nonsense verse?
As a world renowned authority on nonsense, Lecercle creates two important concepts délire (PLG in 1985) and intuition (PN: IVNL in 1994) to analyze the complex workings of nonsense. In his theory, Lecercle’s délire is the dark, dangerous, and disorderly side of language that does not easily lend itself to word-to-word translation. Given its untranslatability, neither “delirium” nor “delusion,” as Lecercle argues, can be the English equivalent term for the French word délire since “delirium” is only narrowly operative in psychiatric contexts while “delusion” is defined in a way that its implication of deception
“fails to capture the element of truth that is present in délire” (PLG 8). Both “delirium” and
“delusion” suggest mental illnesses. However, Lecercle’s concept of délire is used to indicate the reality of language outside the scientific grasp of psychiatry. To avoid confusion, Lecercle keeps the French word délire untranslated, and introduces a threefold distinction of madness:
first, unreflexive delirium, the repetitive and unimaginative discourse of paranoiacs; then a reflexive delirium while I am calling délire, created by talented patients who write down their experience and devote their time to argument and what they take to be science; and finally, the shady activities of a scientist who yields to a mild form of mania, “une idée fixe.” (PLG 3)
The three kinds of madness correspond to three kinds of “madmen”: first of all, a mental patient whose “[m]ere delirium is poor and repetitive,” then, a poet or a talented inmate whose “délire is rich and imaginative,” and then, a mildly maniac scientist like Saussure
53
(PLG 1). What interests Lecercle the most is a nonsense poet or a talented inmate who skirts the delirious frontier between nothingness (gibberish) of a mere mental patient and everythingness (reason) of a methodical scientist. In his study, Carroll is a nonsense poet who lingers in a no man’s land where “philosophy consorts with the March Hare. . .” (PLG 3). It is also a three-forked road where the madman (psychiatry), poet (literature) and the scientist (linguistics) meet. Unfortunately, Carroll’s power of délire is often greeted with some suspicion of his sexuality by paranoiacs and scientists.
Is Carroll a poet, a talented schizophrenic, or a pedophile? Nonsense in his monstrous language always arouses busybodies’ conjecture about this Christ Church bachelor don’s loin desire. Many psychobiographers in the first half of the twentieth century misappropriate out of context Freud’s remark that “nonsense words are fragments of repressed sexual words”
(qtd. in FL 79) to look into Carroll’s nonsense language for his unusual passion for Alice Liddell. Viewed through psychobiographical lens, Carroll’s sexuality seems to be the sole raison d’être of two Alices. Some speculate that Carroll is Jack the Ripper, a gay, or the first acidhead while others insinuate that he is a sexual pervert. In his 2004 book The Force of
Language (coauthored with Denise Riley), Lecercle disagrees with Richard Wallace’s
demented interpretations in The Agony of Lewis Carroll (1990) and Jack the Ripper (1997) that see Carroll as “a secret gay, repressed by the moral and legal climate of Victorian Britain, and forced to express his sexuality in Aesopic language, in the shape of nonsense” or as “Jack the Ripper” (FL 78, 80). According to Lecercle, the instrument that Wallace uses to arrive at his two bizarre interpretations is anagrams, which have “the advantage that with a little ingenuity one can prove [to a gullible public] exactly what one wishes to prove. . .” (FL 80).Lecercle gives his disapproving comments as follows:
The exact title of the second Alice title is: Through the Looking-Glass, and
What Alice Found There. This, you would hardly have guessed, is the anagram
for: “Look with a lens through the cute darling, he’s a fag don.” . . . In The
Hunting of the Snark, there is a famous line that describes the method of
navigation of the boat on which the heroes have embarked: “Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.” This is an anagram of (again, would you have guessed?) “To Mother, Disturbed, I themed the worst pig-sex with men.” . . . There is no doubt, however, that Wallace is mad. Not content with his extraordinary interpretation of Carroll, he published a second book (fouslittéraires are usually afflicted with a compulsion of repetition), in which he
“demonstrated”, through the usual means, that Lewis Carroll was . . . Jack the Ripper.” (FL 79-80)
If Wallace is, as Lecercle claims, a madman, he must be a mental patient or a paranoiac who poorly repeats his mere delirium. Wallace’s anagrams give no hint of the rich and imaginative power of délire that Carroll the nonsense poet or Schreber the talented inmate has. He nearly reduces Carroll’s literary nonsense to gibberish.
On the other hand, Carroll’s mysterious relationship with Alice Liddell, his amateur pastime of taking pictures of nude angelic young girls, and most important of all, in two
Alices the verbal violence, the psychological or physical brutality, and the “primal scenes and
overpowering, symbolic renditions of classic Freudian tropes (a vaginal rabbit role and a phallic Alice, an amniotic pool of tears, hysterical mother figures and impotent father figures, threats of decapitation [castration], swift identity changes behind the comforting social façade of a looking-glass, etc.)” (Rackin, NSM 22) all together cast clouds of suspicion over Mr.Dodgson who lives behind the amiable mask of Carroll. This shy mathematics don at Christ Church of Oxford University may not be as well known in the world as the writer of two
Alice books who uses the pseudonym Lewis Carroll; still, his friendship with Alice Liddell,
the second of the Dean’s three daughters, has been a source of popular interest among his55
biographers and Freudian critics, whose publications are primarily rife in the first half of the twentieth century. Their complicit implication that Dodgson was a pedophile has put his name under a cloud. In Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, Will Brooker observes that the most representative Carroll biographer Morton Cohen never puts it bluntly that Dodgson was a sexual pervert, but “the idea of an unusual passion that was controlled and channeled into creative writing is central to Cohen’s argument” (56). Freudian critics bring into full play the insinuation that Carroll’s nonsense writing serves as an outlet for Dodgson’s repressed sexual urges. A. M. E. Goldschmidt begins his remarks in “Alice in Wonderland Psychoanalyzed” to justify30 such irrefutable critical interest. Although Freudian approach may not suit the treatment of all fantasy literature, Alice’s dreams as “products of the author’s subconscious mind” give them an ecstasy of joy because “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 very clearly manifested” (279). Nonsense words, in such psychobiographical logic of representation, are symptomatic of Carroll’s repressed sexuality. Sexual symbolism makes interpretation possible because every riddle must imply an answer in advance. In Goldschmidt’s translation, the plunge into a deep well and lock and key represent coitus; the doors of normal size represent adult women; and the little door symbolizes a female child and the curtain before it her clothes (280-81). Goldschmidt concludes with a tone of Freudian sublimation that Carroll’s repressed sexual impulses make him a great author: “Had 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” (282). Both Cohen (the biographer) and Goldschmidt (the Freudian critic) agree that Carroll’s unusual passion is channeled to a socially acceptable end
30 His article is included in Robert Phillips’s Aspects of Alice, in which Phillips implies that Goldschmidt’s essay was likely penned to parody the Freudian interpretations in 1930s (438).
in his nonsense creative writing. This psychobiographical view of Dodgson’s “dirty little secret” sublimated into Carroll’s popular child readers ferments trouble among parents. In such insinuation, a sinister image of Dodgson is behind the amiable mask of Carroll. With regard to this contemporary ambivalence, Ian Fitzgerald writes: “Whatever the truth, it is the case that most parents today would be happy for their children to listen to the story of Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland—but they probably would not want Dodgson to be the man to
read it to them” (qtd. in Brooker 67). There is no way we can recognize whether Carroll is attracted to little girls by their angelic beauty or erotic sexuality. Even so, psychobiographers are still in their frenzy of treasure-hunting in the author’s private diaries, letters, photographs, and accounts from families, colleagues, and friends, trying to reconstruct an “objective”portrait of the author of two Alices. However, the Queen of Hearts’s “Sentence first—verdict afterwards” (AW 96) ironically befalls her creator. Many psychobiographers assume Carroll as a sexual pervert first, and then set their hands on all primary or secondary material to prove their suspicion. As a biographer who has studied Carroll for over thirty years, Edward Wakeling sighs out his worries that some biographers’ desperate search for a “new angle” in the available but limited primary source material has led to pure invention (ix). Whether a fictional image of Carroll is faithfully reflected with factual evidence or twisted with sinister insinuations, Freudian critics appeal to these biographies for their symptomatic readings. As with Saussurian structural linguistics, psychobiographical approach establishes the prevailing transcendence of the signifier over the signified and the speaking subject over the language as if everything that happens could be figured out with reason and a speaker could exactly mean what he or she says. In this logic of representation, Carroll’s nonsense language in Alice texts corresponds to his repressed sexuality in reality, or vice versa. Some other Carroll scholars like Richard Kelly have warned against the psychobiographical interpretation of the Alice
57
books, which might underestimate their literary value.31 Whatever the truth of the “dirty little secret” is, David Robinson thinks: “All we really know about Dodgson’s sexuality is that if he was indeed a paedophile it was in thought rather than deed. Whether he was too emotionally immature or controlled, he never acted on those particular impulses” (qtd. in Brooker 60). To put an end to the endless psychobiographical debate on Carroll’s sexuality, Fitzgerald suggests “separating author from text” (qtd. in Brooker 67). On Lecercle’s three-forked road where the madman Wallace, the nonsense poet Carroll, and the scientist Saussure meet, Carroll’s power of délire steers his nonsense language between gibberish and scientific language. In this no man’s land, Carroll is possessed by his delirious language.
Language becomes its own master.
In Saussurian structural linguistics, the remainder cannot be subsumed under its representational categories; therefore, it is usually discarded as irrelevant. However, in Lecercle’s study of délire, the “left unsaid” remainder is significant because it resists the communication of meaning with uncompromising interference. This eccentric philosophical tradition of délire has been a source of inspiration and fascination for poets because of “its liberating value” rather than its being reduced as “a symptom of the dereliction of the linguistic order” (PLG 7). In Lecercle’s discussion, délire is the limit of science; nevertheless, the suppressed but persistent tradition of délire, operative against the backdrop of the dominant tradition of controlled and instrumental language, knows no bounds of the latter and shifts beyond truth, sense, abstraction, and method to fiction, nonsense, desire, and the madness of délire (PLG 11, 7). Lecercle’s délire is significant for two things in its account of the relation among language, nonsense, and desire: first of all, the principle of délire is that
“language, after all, is master”; secondly, “language becomes tainted by desire, by the actions
31 As Richard Kelly suggests, “[t]he psychoanalytical approach, which uses the poetry to confirm assumptions about the emotional make up of its author, has limited literary value. . .” (54).
and passions of our body, by its instinctual drives” (PLG 10, 7). In the episode of “A Mad Tea-Party,” Alice’s statement that I say what I mean is the same as “I mean what I say” is challenged by the Hatter’s “I see what I eat” and “I eat what I see,” March Hare’s “I like what I get” and “I get what I like,” and the dormant Dormouse’s “I breathe when I sleep” and “I sleep as I breathe” (AW 55). This is a typical motif that science tries to subsume language under its methodical logic. Earlier on, Alice becomes drowsy in her long and slow falling down the rabbit hole and confuses the minimal pair cats and bats by saying that “Do cats eat bats?” or sometimes “Do bats eat cats?” Alice’s self-monitoring in her dreamy state becomes so lax that she transposes verbal equation to algebraic equation. If we see cats as “1” and bats as “2,” then the transposition of “cats” and “bats” does not add up to the same result “3” as we do in an algebraic equation. That is, in an algebraic equation, “1 + 2 = 3” is same as “2 + 1 = 3.” Nevertheless, the algebraic equation is different from the verbal equation because “Do cats eat bats?” does not add up to the same result as “Do bats eat cats?” does. This illustrates the fact that science cannot generalize language because parole always leaks out from langue.
The desire in nonsense language is untamed. Therefore, the fact that Alice’s “I say what I mean” is different from “I mean what I say” tells us two things: first of all, to look at a verbal expression through a scientific lens is problematic; secondly, the overtly optimistic correspondence between saying and meaning is called into question by coincidence.
In the foregoing analysis, it is the utterance itself, instead of the speaking subject “I,”
that has its privileged place in the game of nonsense language. A speaking subject “I” freezes the heterogeneous elements in language while the utterance finds its power of life by reversing metaphor (institution) back to metamorphosis (intuition). To reverse, language needs to resist cooperative communication with agonistic interference. The life of language resides precisely on this resistant forces, with which language can drive back any despotic impositions upon it and discourage what Lecercle calls the “‘scientific’ linguist’s attitude,
59
whose sole concern is to clip the wings of language to keep it still and make it manageable for dissection” (DL 71). “Délire, as an experience of possession, of loss of control by the subject, reverses the relation of mastery. . . . The dominated haunts the dominant, and
‘returns’ within it” (PLG 9, 7). As uttering subjects, we think language is completely at our disposal, without the least idea that “the subject of délire is not in control of his own speech production” (PLG 9). Contrariwise, we are possessed by it when we speak language. “Délire, then, is the experience of the body within language, of the destruction and painful reconstruction of the speaking subject, not through the illusory mastery of language and consciousness, but through possession by language” (PLG 40). The urge of desire for liberation is so strong that it spurs the remainder in language to utter “what we refuse to recognize, what we would rather have left unsaid” (PLG 6). This chaotic power of délire throws nonsense part of language into palpable relief, whose result of ego-loss baffles common language users and scientists, but arouses interests in Lecercle’s logophiliacs
(delirious lovers of language like Roussel, Brisset, Wolfson, Artaud, etc.):
Even if délire is primarily a psychiatric concept, it should not come as a surprise that it has found its philosophers: for the love of language which is the essential characteristic of delirious writers has reflexive value; it produces, almost by spontaneous generation, amateur linguists. Paradoxically, those (i.e. most of us) who use language as a tool treat it as if it were transparent, the mere vehicle of thought . . . . They leave the inquiries into the nature of workings of language to specialists, linguists or philosophers. On the other hand, the logophiliacs of our tradition do care for language; they are interested in its power, in the way it works: they are “natural” philosophers of language. And they anticipate the work of the professional who takes them seriously. . . . (PLG 8)
In this understanding, the dominant tradition of controlled and instrumental language is of no
avail in the dark and shady part of language. Since “[d]élire is the incarnation of the dangerous side of language” (PLG 87), what we need is the intuition of fous littéraires prior to our already frozen understanding. “[D]élire, as a form of literature that specializes in crossing frontiers” and as a place where “the remainder is at work” (VL 25), is right for the study of Carroll’s no man’s land!