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In Praise of Nonsense
Kant and Bluebeard
By Winfried Menninghaus STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8306-4
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Nonsense, Victorian Nonsense, Romantic Nonsense
Thesis
"All the richness of imagination," Kant cautions in the Critique of Judgement, "in its lawless freedom produces nothing but nonsense." Nonsense, then, does not befall the imagination like a foreign pathogen; rather, it is the very law of imagination's own "lawlessness." Kant therefore prescribes a rigid antidote: even in the field of the aesthetic, understanding must "severely clip the wings" of imagination and "sacrifice [...] some" of it. This politics of curtailment echoes the critique of the stormy genius well known since the 1770s. The "ideal" liaison between beauty and imagination, however, cannot be broken solely from the side of genius's excessiveness and unreason. In the 1790s nonsense escapes — for a brief moment in the history of Romantic literature, extending from its beginning in 1795 to its denouement in 1797, — the Kantian imperative that it be "disciplined" and sets off in another direction. It finds refuge in the aesthetics of ornament, arabesque, and fairytale, and acquires the character of a hyperbolically artistic form rather than of a natural power prior to all culture. Novalis inaugurates the ideal of "poems [...] without any sense or coherence;" similarly, Tieck demands license for a "book without any coherence," full of "contradictory nonsense" and "spectacles about nothing." "To introduce a new nonsense," seems to be the entire purpose of some literary productions. These citations introduce the central thesis of the present study: there exists an early Romantic poetics of nonsense. No-sense and non-sense [Ohne-Sinn und Un-Sinn] should be recognized as categories of the Romantic project in its earliest phase.
According to Kant, imagination in its pure form — which by the same token is its vitium-produces "tumultuous derangements" that shatter the "coherence which is necessary for the very possibility of experience." On the other hand, as the "faculty of intuitions" and of "presentation," imagination is precisely the guarantor, indeed, the producer of all reality: without intuitions and without signs all of our concepts would be empty and thus without "reality." Fichte, who along with Kant was a main source for early Romantic thought, established this as a central theorem in his 1794 Wissenschafislehre: "All reality — understandably, of course, for us, as in a system of transcendental philosophy it can only be understood — is produced merely through the power of imagination." On this basis, there are two avenues open to the Romantic poetics of nonsense. It can bring the imagination's creative powers into opposition with imagination's function of constituting reality. Inversely, this poetics can see in the displacement of meaningful contexts an "indication of reality": reality "in itself," which is otherwise unavailable, infiltrates the structures of the symbolic order, thus creating a phantom of the Real. The complexity of Ludwig Tieck's championing of nonsense lies in its attempt to negotiate both of these polar trajectories of imagination at the same time.
Around 1800, according to the diagnosis of Friedrich A. Kittler, the cultural "discourse network" was refitted and reoriented on a variety of registers toward "sense" as a power of meaning that permeates and orders all details of a discursive event into a totality. The distinction between the material surface of a discursive event and the depth of its meaning, accompanied by the preference for the intelligible pole of this opposition, became the characteristic framework for numerous social practices. These entailed a transformation in pedagogy and practices of promoting literacy as well as a reform in reading and study, in universities and in the bureaucracy. In academic teaching, the institutionalization of hermeneutics as the new vanguard science responded to this comprehensive revolution in the discursive network of writing and reading. This network's new practices and its underlying assumptions surpassed the academic science of hermeneutics in its breadth, while at the same time undercutting its subtle problematizations. (Only in this less subtle sense does the following study speak of "sense," "understanding," and "hermeneutic.") The poetics of nonsense arises within the horizon of this discursive system, in the border area between late Enlightenment and earliest Romanticism. In Foucault's sense, this poetics can be read as one of the diverse "points of resistance" that are "present everywhere in the power network," as counter movements that do not simply exist outside the new sense-paradigm, and yet are not merely its parasitic "underside." Long before today's "humanities," literature itself, at least in one of its genres, questioned the innocence of understanding and challenged the central fictions of the hermeneutical field. At least for a short period of time, a playful, even provocative suspension of the sense paradigm became the center of a genre theory as well as of a new literary rewriting of this genre. The name of this genre is the fairy tale.
Systematic and Historical Relationship Between Sense and Nonsense
"Sense" is, in Nietzsche's words, "necessarily [...] a sense of relation and perspective." It can never be attributed to any phenomenon per se but is rather an effect of "interpreting." "Nonsense" too indicates something that is thoroughly relative: all utterances, actions, and facts that at a certain time and in a certain context are adjudged not to correspond to a certain idea of "sense." The borders between "meaningful" and "not meaningful" are transitory and unstable; they must be continually reconfirmed and are constantly being displaced. This ongoing (re)determination of borderlines is required for every articulation of "sense" or "meaning." The liminal region, the margin where sense and nonsense collide and pass into each other, is the definiens not only of nonsense but also of sense. Gilles Deleuze therefore formulated his Logique du sens by means of an interpretation of the prototypical nonsense books of Lewis Carroll. Nonsense does not merely imply, like any oppositional concept, that its contrary also exists. Rather, its Other always recurs within its own field. "Sense," however, tends to posit itself as an absolute in its own field and in this ideological self-sufficiency it tends to efface the reminder of its being dependent on the difference between sense and nonsense. Walter Blumenfeld rightly noted that "nonsense is always related to sense (indeed, linguistically), as nothing is related to something, [but usually] not vice versa." This asymmetry of an apparently symmetrical polarity shows not only that nonsense is parasitically dependent upon sense but also that it is a phenomenon that eminently articulates the entire difference between sense and nonsense.
The appeal to the border between sense and nonsense in general has a twofold character. Firstly, it enacts "a kind of taboo behavior." It identifies that which we cannot understand or meaningfully contextualize within a given framework and banishes it into the realm of the anomalous, the deviant, and the unreal. Wherever this excluded Other that threatens the integrity of an interpretational scheme is presented positively, monstrous forms and shapes are begotten that can fall into the grotesque and the absurd. Through a reflexive turn, however, the excluded nonsense can accrue the opposite value. If everything that we consider to be real and meaningful is in fact merely an effect of our own interpretive schemes, then that which evades those schemes can become for us the "authentic" and absolutely real in its transcendental givenness and unavailability. Indeed, it can even become from a religious perspective a proof of God's existence (credo quia absurdum).
Demarcating the border between sense and nonsense makes interpretative frames reflexive and therefore serves as a catalyst for exploring the very parameters of learning: "To engage in nonsense, one must already have the ability to learn about learning; nonsense not only engages this ability, nonsense itself may be seen as an exploration of the parameters of contexts of learning [...] Nonsense is not simply a safe place to work out a response to the world of common sense, as it might be in simple reversals and inversions, it is also a field where one can critique the interpretive procedures used in manufacturing that world, and, with increasing self consciousness, a critique of the interpretive procedures by which nonsense itself has come to be." According to Walter Blumenfeld, it is "actually considered to be an indication of intelligence if someone has the capability to intentionally produce indubitable nonsense. Experiments to develop intelligence tests on the basis of this assumption are being prepared, and look promising." From here, interesting prospects unfold for an anthropology of nonsense (which will not be further pursued in the present work): on account of its close connection to learning, intelligence, language, and laughter — hence to qualities that are generally regarded as defining homo sapiens — the faculty of voluntarily producing non-sense is actually a distinguishing characteristic of the human being. Up until now at least, no other beings have been discovered that possess this capability.
The extent to which the distinction between sense and nonsense is subject to historical change is proven primarily by the dynamism of worldviews: what today is taken for granted was yesterday condemned as nonsense. Even the asemantic play of language with its phonetic material allows very diverse classifications. If the baroque's phonetic playfulness is measured against the standard of the communication of meaningful sentences, it immediately falls under the category of nonsense. On the other hand, if it is related to baroque "theories" of sound and of the language of nature, such phonetic whimsy acquires a meaning and a function all its own. The same is true for counting rhymes (such as "eeny meeny miney mo"): even the most nonsensical ones are meaningful in the context of the counting exercise. Sense in this case, however, does not mean the specifically hermeneutical, comprehensive meaning of an individual text but rather the ability to perform a particular function within a given purposive context. With the varied coexistence of several, mutually irreducible levels of sense and nonsense one need not wait for Freud to speak of a "sense in nonsense."
For literary history and poetics, an even more radical historicity of the discourse on "nonsense" is essential. Not only is the ordering of linguistic phenomena along the distinction of "sense" and "nonsense" historically contingent; the institution and the application of the distinction itself mark an eminent date in literary history. In fact, the distinction is no more than 200 years old and essentially belongs to the "discourse network 1800" that Friedrich A. Kittler traced from the perspective of the hermeneutical dictum of meaning (or "sense"). Kittler did not, however, consider its counterpart (in both senses of the word), namely "nonsense." For more than two thousand years poetics, buttressed by rhetoric, has inquired into whether or not literature is beautiful, sublime, sentimental, overpowering, cathartic, pacific, soothing, or entertaining; whether or not literature fulfills certain virtutes dicendi in diction, phrase, and verse; and whether or not it attains canonical models. With the end of the rhetorical paradigm and the emergence of the hermeneutical paradigm, however, one claim above all is made upon literature: to be infinitely meaningful, Only with this claim does the correlative concept of nonsense become a relevant category of poetics. The system of literature first had to make the topic of "sense" its project as well as its criterion of quality before a counterpart could be created: a discrete genre that explicitly institutes the concept of nonsense as its proper name.
Nonsense as a positive category in poetics is not, as is generally assumed, a Victorian invention. It goes back, in fact, to early Romanticism where nonsense did not develop into a specific genre; nor did it have the same semantics and theoretical function as in Victorianism. Scholarship on Romanticism is largely ignorant of the fact that nonsense is a Romantic category at all and, moreover, an important one, nor does it recognize that such a category made it possible to describe fundamental innovations in Romantic literature. Indeed, no less a figure than Arno Schmidt himself drew attention to the phenomenon; but his portrait of Tieck went strangely unnoticed by the academic guild. The scholarship on Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll reveals a different picture: it occasionally hints at a Romantic heritage in Victorian nonsense.
Nonsense Poetry in the narrow sense can be characterized by a series of succinct procedures on the level of word, clause, sequence of clauses, and verse line: through devices such as phonetic substitution and inversion, addition or removal of phonemes, asemantic word combination, literalizations and decontextualizatons, the choice of specific rhyming pairs, unmotivated application and repetition of fixed schemata. The fairy tale and the Romantic fairytale arabesque, the subjects of this study, hardly offer any parallels to these techniques in their construction of word, clause, and verse. As a rule, they leave the phonetic material intact as well as the syntagmatic structures of everyday language. Nonetheless, the fairy tale and the fairytale arabesque also anticipate, though indirectly, the linguistic techniques of Nonsense Poetry. The latter's phonetic and semantic "tricks" have their analog, and in part their prefiguration, in the Romantic nonsense arabesque at higher levels of textual patterns: in the demotivation, the inversion and empty repetition of traditional units of plot, and their narrative concatenation ; and in the provocative indifference and even defiance of their narrative plot and of their figures of representation in complying with readers' expectations of sense and meaning.
The various linguistic techniques of Nonsense Poetry are not its exclusive possession nor are they obligatory in particular combinations or even as single devices. Therefore, these techniques by themselves cannot suffice for the creation of nonsense effects. Wim Tigges consequently looked for a distinctive type of communication that first and foremost makes inversions, serializations, and so forth into forms of nonsense. His definition, certainly the most satisfactory to date for explaining the "canonical" Nonsense Poetry, is as follows:
In order to be successful, nonsense must at the same time invite the reader to interpretation and avoid the suggestion that there is a deeper meaning which can be obtained by considering connotations or associations, because these lead to nothing [...] Nonsense therefore is a genre of narrative literature which balances a multiplicity of meaning with a simultaneous absence of meaning [...] The greater the distance or tension between what is presented, the expectations that are evoked, and the frustration of these expectations, the more nonsensical the effect will be.
According to this definition, nonsense would have no effect at all and in fact would not even be perceived as nonsense were it not always already situated within the field of sense. It is therefore never simply the Other of the hermeneutical field but rather occupies an eccentric position to it and within it: as a provocative or playful exploration of its limit and as an impediment and intermittent suspension of its proper functioning. Nonsense is a way in which "the non-hermeneutical" (Gumbrecht) still appears within the horizon of the hermeneutical field; as a hybrid of inside and outside, it articulates the field's limitations. The Romantic discourse about nonsense in the literature of nonsense evidently also produces sense effects and hence the very negation of what such literature seems to be about. But even this "sense in nonsense" does not per se destroy the balance Tigges requires because it is immediately differentiated into contrary extremes and thereby submits to the "nonsense structure" of self-contradiction. Its poles are as follows: nonsense as the negative meaninglessness of existence (and so tending toward the absurd); nonsense as the positive promise of a "free" untrammeled poetry; and — not least of all — nonsense as the "real" that in Friedrich Schlegel's words is provided only "sparingly and drop by drop," in apparently realistic and completely motivated narratives. These elements of a Romantic poetics of non-sense — in order not to "sublate" themselves and in order not to be dispatched out of the border area of nonsense — can be presented in the mode of arabesque only at the cost of being unavoidably at cross-purposes with their own concept.
Within the polemical and ambivalent relation to the power of "sense," the poetics of literary nonsense pursues its effects with intention and calculation. Even when literary nonsense claims to short-circuit the control of conscious reason, this act depends on a conscious sanction, a deliberate license. Thus, literary nonsense effects are as distinct from involuntary nonsense as they are from Derrida's dissemination of sense, which is always imminent and indeed ultimately omnipresent, overshadowing as well as undermining every intentionality. One could say that literary nonsense practices what for deconstruction to a certain extent is impossible as well as unnecessary: a deliberate dissemination. Nonsense does not "subvert" logos tout court, but rather has an historically specific opponent in view and remains bound in a "love-hate" relationship with the imperatives of that opponent.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Praise of Nonsense by Winfried Menninghaus. Copyright © 1999 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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