Philosophy of nonsense (a book report)

"He therefore concedes that consistently concomitant events can induce us to to bridge the logical gap between inverse propositions"
The sentence is actually clear and I'm not sure I could find an equally economic way of saying the same thing using less pompous language, but the sentence is in reference to the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland - specifically the moment where after Alice has confusedly claimed that "I say what I mean" and "I mean what I say" are the same, the mad hatter following up by protesting "you might as well say 'I see what I eat' is the same as 'I eat what I see'". When the dormouse adds his example "you might as well say 'I breathe when I sleep' is the same as 'II sleep when I breathe'", the gets in a jab at the mouse, stating that for him they really are the same thing... thus, according to Jean-Jacques Lecercle, implicitly invalidating his own previous objection to Alice's statement by acknowledging that in some cases terms in sentences of this sort can be reversed without damage to meaning or logic. I just picked that sentence, because applying heavy academic language of that sort to silliness of that sort seems to me to enact the nonsense it is supposed to be dealing with. In the short blurb on the back of Lececle's book 'the philosophy of nonsense' the question is asked "why do Lewis Caroll and Edward Lear appear in so many otherwise dull and dry academic textbooks?" (I'm not sure why they couldn't choose 'dry' or 'dull' instead of putting both terms in). Instead of mining Alice for useful examples for discussions of logic and linguistics (though he does quite often use Alice to discuss logic and linguistics), Lecercle tries to find an underlying principle that explains the connection between nonsense books (which mainly just means Alice in Wonderland), and philosophy of language. He basically explains that for nonsense to work, an emptying of the semantic function of language has to be compensated for by an excess of syntactic regularity... he can point to the things like the recognizable morphology of all the made up words in Jabberwocky, i.e. the fact that though words are made up you can tell what word is an adjective, a noun or a verb, and you can even tell what tense the verb is in (furthermore, acceptable English combinations of phonemes are employed, so words are formed that could exist and make sense in English). He also talks about hypercorrection - exceptions in the language not being acknowledged, or the refusal of certain characters to understand anything but the most literal meaning of words employed ("I see you what you mean" "then you have better eyes than most"). It is because of the focus on structure and rule that the work maintains coherence in the midst of absurdity, and it is also because of the focus on structure that logic and language are problematized and discussed in a way that is particularly useful for anyone who is interested in studying how propositions can be judged and how language functions.
He uses nonsense to look at linguistic pragmatism, pointing out that the cooperative principle of discourse is roundly rejected in favor of an agonistic principle of discourse... I don't think I'm going to discuss that, though in a way that was one of the more interesting and convincing parts of the book - it led to a reading of the Alice books as almost Bildungsromans in which Alice had to learn that in the real world the dictates of polite conversation (never praising oneself or attacking others, etc. etc.) had to be replaced by an understanding of conversation as competition, with a focus on scoring points or disproving the claims of an opponent... he tries to give examples of Alice becoming increasingly effective as a conversational sparring points, good at at least deflecting the conversation or changing the subject when she can't win (he also frames this using Caillois' terms for different sorts of play, going from the more childish noncompetitive to the more adult competitive form).
In the end he tried to show nonsense as a reaction to the school system in Victorian England... I'm giving a chaotic account of it, partly because I can't make up my mind about what to take out of it or how to classify it. There's definitely over-reading and some unconvincing argument... Lecercle is a French University professor who teaches English. He's written on Deleuze, he makes frequent references to Lyotard, Lacan and Derrida, at the same time his main focus of study is English literature - he reads a lot of poetry and analytic philosophy. At one point he talks about a debate between Derrida and Searle, which began with an article Derrida wrote on Austin in 'margins of philosophy', searle wrote a response in the magazine glyph, which Derrida responded to with his book limited inc - anyone picking up this last book will find a summary of the whole debate. Here as elsewhere, he refers to a text without actually telling you what's in it, and it isn't all that clear why he mentions it. He simply states he won't take sides and his subject is something else entirely. He's worse about this when talking about linguistics or straight philosophy of speech texts that he expects the reader to be familiar with... luckily in most places you can still follow him pretty easily and ignore the references he is making... most of the time his style is simple and straightforward and he includes a lot of very nice passages from Alice and occasionally from other texts. He does seem to be genuinely neutral between analytics and continentals, and admires both groups (the text his own text obviously owes the most to is Deleuze's 'logic of sense', which is also largely about Lewis Carroll... I expect to be discussing that here soon). Anyway, what hasn't come out here yet is that, amid the places he seems to be over-reading, or just saying things that feel somewhat evident, he does have some beautiful and compelling sections. It's actually a pretty well-known and important book, especially for someone who is working on the sorts of things I've been working on lately.
At one point he mentions that the only solecism in Alice in Wonderland is "curiouser and curiouser", which has a privileged position as the very first words of the second chapter (again the importance of rules not being broken, and when they are attention being called to the infraction - he considers nonsense a conservative, even a reactionary genre, which strengthens rather than subverts the rules it toys with). This passage irritated me more than anything else in the book... in part because in order to strengthen his argument he tries to point out that the mistake, which the narrator points out as a mistake, calls attention to the strangeness of English rules governing the formation of comparatives - words of more than two syllables always take 'more' in front of them, words of two syllables usually take the -er ending but sometimes take more. He claims that curious is a two syllable word, and then says that it has an uncertain status between two or three syllables because of the schwa in the middle - I'm sure he's actually studied English phonetics and I haven't, but, whereas 'curieux' in French can be described this way (he wrote the book in French) is there any ambiguity in English? Don't we all pronounce curious as a three-syllable word? I know it is pedantic, and it doesn't really hurt his argument, but that sort of thing throws me off.
I also took exception to discussions of nonsense as a genre, though he wasn't the one who made the classification. Other than Alice and Wonderland, the 'genre' seemed to be mostly short poems, including a lot of limericks, maybe one or two super short stories - more or less prose poems. The Alice stories seem to be in a category all or there own. What you can accept or enjoy for a few lines and what remains interesting as an extended narrative are tow wildly different things, and they need to be explained in a different manner. At the same time, when he claimed that nonsense disappeared in England at the end of the Victorian era, I couldn't help thinking of Douglas Adams and Monty Python as obvious candidates for successors (to his merit, he included a wonderful bit of Churchill recounting learning Latin in school which worked well as a lovely bit of nonsense, but it was precisely in order to show the relation of nonsense to English schools in the late 19th century).
The conclusion where he talked about the hunting of the snark was a nice bit of literary criticism... nothing astoundingly new, but I had to teach the Aenead this semester and reading the hunting of the snark as the perfect classic epic is particularly pleasant at the moment - where the weapons should be described in great detail we get a description of the bakers luggage, which doesn't actually make it aboard the ship - the prophecy, the descent into the underworld... nonsense really is fabulous.