Our regular series of posts by the Humanities Research Fellows continues. Here, O’Hornett Professor of English, Holly Laird uses Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear to reflect on the relationship between humor and nonsense.
Why is it that modern philosophers, “both Anglo-Saxon and continental, have always been fond of trying to solve the puzzles in which [Lewis] Carroll ensnares his readers, or of referring to the Alice books for the purpose of serious, and sometimes jocular, illustration of their pet problems,” asks philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle. He argues that the “emergence” of “nonsense as a literary genre [especially Carroll and Edward Lear]. . . in the Victorian period” marks a “historical conjuncture,” a conjuncture that anticipates, moreover, “the main aspects” of “current philosophical debate” (1-2). Serious stuff, this nonsense.
A MacArthur genius award winner, Susan Stewart notes that “Nonsense always refers back to a sense that itself cannot be assumed. The locus of investigation must be in the not that stands between the domain of common sense and the domain that takes its identity as ‘not common sense’” (4-5). But is it funny, we asked in our research seminar?
Each week this fall, we’ve been making a serious effort to define not only “nonsense,” but “humor” more generally, in the sense of “amusing” or “jocular”—a linkage that occurs for the first time in 1682 (OED), i.e., with the rise of the modern “enlightenment” (Critchley 71). (Excuse the pun.) The first major treatise on humor appears in 1901, authored by French philosopher Henri Bergson, “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.” (So too we’re tackling “laughter” and the “comic,” etc., etc.) For philosophers, Lecercle concludes, “Edward Lear’s . . . limericks [cry] out for an existentialist or Heidegerrian account” (Lecercle 1-2). Rabbits!