Times Literary Supplement, December 2-8, 1988

1333 TI.S December 2-8 1988 POETRY A conspiracy of strangeness work of Tennyson, Dickens, Browning and nonsenSe, compared to which that would be as sensi Alan Hollinghurst others. ble as a dictionary!" The conspiracy into which Carroll draws us Pope, as an exorcist of nonsense, had a refined HUGH HAUGHTON, editor is not so inward, but very much more entertain nose for where it could be found. New from Chicago The Chatto Book oCNonsense Poetry ing. It is based on the subversion of the lesson The caustic, corrective nonsense of Augus 53Opp. Chatto and Windus. £12.95. giving impulse in children's literature, and the tan satire is, however, well represented by lines 0701131055 rendering absurd - in its various kings, queens, from Henry Carey's Namby-Pamby: or, A duchesses and so on - of figures of authority. Panegyric on the New Versification, parodying Carroll's world is alarming in its seeming arbit Ambrose Philips (also an Art ofSinking victim) When introducing his Faber Book of Nonsense rariness, but because he combines his logi with manic animus: Verse nine years ago Geoffrey Grigson de cian's sense of rules with the dissolving logics of clared that "It wouldn't be sensible to be too dreams its effect is benignly anarchic. As a Namby-Pamby PiJly-piss, serious or too historical about nonsense." poet, Carroll, like Lear, can exploit the non Rhimy pimed on Missy-Miss . Hugh Haughton evidently disagrees, and the sense potential of serious poetry, as in the Namby-Pamby's little rhymes, Little jingle, little chimes, long, punning and densely informed introduc Wordsworthian "White Knight's Song" or the tion to his Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry , To repeat to little miss, Swinburnian "The Little Man That Had a Piddling ponds of pissy-piss though never solemn, takes its subject very Little Gun" from Sylvie and Bruno: seriously and historically indeed. To him non and so on. His distaste for what we now think sense is a form of controlled transgression, of He shall swathe him , like mists of the morning, of as Keatsian or neo-Elizabethan coinage of attractive if sometimes fearful estrangement, In platitudes luscious and limp. words ending in -y would have made short and he is at pains to show its social and political Such as deck , with a deathless adorning, The Song of the Shrimp! work of the infantilism of Lear as displayed in occasions, from medieval carnival to the in this same volume: "And when boats or ships voluntary obliquities of East European poetry But his preference is for putting nonsense to came near him I He tinkledy-binkledy-winkled today. He also believes that from immemorial the tune of the improving verse oUane Taylor, a bell" . While the procedures of nonsense re Freak Show children's jingles on, nonsense is an essential main similar over 600 years, the attitudes Presenting Human Oddities ingredient of literary experience: "I suspect which inform it are shown to have varied for Amusement and Profit there is a pleasure in nonsense at the core of all diametrically. ROBERT BOGDAN poetry." Here he is close to Auden, who stipu- . The playful, Scriblerian side of Augustanism Bogdan's fascinating social history explores lated that a good critic should like ("and by like is seen contributing to another tradition (ex the culture that nurtured and, later, aban I mean really like") "Long lists of proper emplified by the bench in the walks of St doned the freak show. "The story that names such as the Old Testament genealogies Catherine's College, Oxford, which bears the Freak Show tells us is an edifying one-the or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad" and story of some extraordinary people who, inscription "ORE STABIT FORTIS ARARE "Riddles and all other ways of not calling a against heavy odds, approached the ordi PLACET ORE STAT" - "0 rest a bit, for 'tis a spade a spade". The combination of an ab nary. " -Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic rare place to rest at"): that of the cod transla stract pleasure in strange words and a formal Hbk 022606311 9 £23 .95 tion. Haughton gives us Swift's "Love Song" 336 pages Illus. relish for riddling indirections is a major part of "Apud in is almi des ire I Mimis tres Ine ver re the appeal and purpose of nonsense. qui re" - as a precursor of the homophonous If the gazetteer of nonsense is much ex Mots d'Heures; Gousses, Rames of the suspi The Python Killer panded by Haughton's researches, its principal ciously macaronic-sounding Luis d'Antin van Stories of Nzema Life features remain the Wonderland of Carroll and Rooten and of Ernst landI's delightful transli VINIGI l. GROTTANELli the Wanderland of Lear. These two dominate teration of Wordsworth: The Python Killer renders a vivid portrayal the book, and exemplify the strongly literary of the Nzema of southern Ghana. Their affiliation of nonsense - Lear's to Tennysonian mai hart Iieb zapfen eibe hold exotic world of coconut groves, nza (palm melancholy and Carroll's to the didactic chil er renn bohr in sees kai wine), cassava, and poisonous snakes is dren's verse of the previous hundred years that so was sieht wenn mai lauf! begehen inhabited by a people who believe in so es sieht nahe emma mahen sinister witches, oracles, jealous gods, he parodies. Even in the spare cautionary so biet wenn arschel grollt and angry nwomenle (ghosts) to whom world of the limerick, Lear's constitutional horleckmitei! they offer "sheep, some rice, eggs, and loneliness makes itself felt: scht steil dies fader rosse mahen drinks, including two bottles of Coca-Cola.· in teig kurt wisch mai desto bier Hbk 0226310051 £19.95 There was an Old Person of Bow, baum deutsche deutsch bajonett schur alp eiertier Whom nobody happened to know ; 240 pages Illus. So they gave him some soap, and said coldly, "We "Supporting each man on the top ofthe lide", 1896, The nonsense of " Un petit d'un petit I S'etonne hope one ofHtnry Holiday's illustrations 10 Lewis aux Hailes", of course, is heightened by the Dance, Sex, and Gender You will go back directly to Bow!" Carrol/'s The Hunting of the Snark, reproduced from critical apparatus which seeks to inflict sense Signs of Identity, Dominance, (Cold-soaping, as a term of censorious rejec the book r~iewed here. on the purely phonetic assemblage of words it Defiance, and Desire tion , is a Learism waiting to be coined.) But it Southey or Watts. He understands the contract annotates- and, after a fashion, succeeds. This JUDITH LYNNE HANNA is in the longer poems, such as "The Dong with whereby parody finds something nonsensical is nonsense at its most sophisticated. George From New York to New Guinea, from a Luminous Nose" and "The Yonghy-Bonghy in its victim and magnifies the nonsense for du Maurier's limericks, too, are enchanting - ballet to the bump, dance expresses erotic Bo" (which, amazingly, is not included by comic ends; as well as the proximity of solem especially fantasies, courtship rituals, and fluctuating Haughton) that Lear's itinerant misfit s and boundaries between the male and female nity and nonsense that is a running subtext of II existe une Espinstere a Tours, careworn escapees align themselves with worlds. Hanna's provocative analysis Haughton'S book and a vindication of the Un peu vite , et qui porte toujours draws upon semiotic and psychological Mariana and the Lady of Shalott: theory that the lure of poetry lies in its sound Un ulsteur peau-de-phoque, theory, anthropological models, dance ingness, and the more sounding the more Un chapeau bilicoque, criticism, and the history of dance in many And all who watch at the midnight hour, Et des nicrebocqueurs en velours From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower, prone to absurdity. cultures. Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright , What to Carroll was an opportunity for inno which exploits and augments the pre-Franglais Hbk 0226 31550 9 £31 .95 Moving along through the dreary night , cent play was in the Augustan period a target strain of French vocabulary responsible for 312 pages Illu s. "This is the hour when forth he goes, for fiercer satire than mere parody, though it words such as redingote and boule-dogue. Pbk 0 226 31551 7 £9.95 The Dong with a luminous Nose! " often embraced that and - as in much of Pope's Some nonsense procedures are pretty Lear's absorption in Tennyson's work, and his literary satire - derived a vicarious exhilaration rudimentary: Haughton includes items, such as The Poison in the Gift grand project to illustrate it , are now well from the imitation of what it deplored. Paul Scheerbart's "Monologue of the Crazed Ritual, Prestation, and known: he clearly felt an affinity for Tenny Haughton gives us the celebrated lines from Mastodon" ("ZCpke! ZCpke! I Mekkimapsi - the Dominant Caste in a son's enigmatic treatment of semi-legendary ~ Book One of The Dunciad: "On cold Decem muschibr6ps") and Christian Morgenstern's North Indian Village stories and reproduced in a simplified form the ber fragrant chaplets blow, I And heavy har "The Great Lalula" ("Kroklokwafzi ? GLORIA GOODWIN RAHEJA waning music with which he adumbrated the vests nod beneath the snow", . which are a Semememi!"), which are as pure as they are Advancing a powerful new theoretical hidden subjects of hi s poems. It is striking, parody of bad continuity in poetry and have crude. Other techniques which el(as p ~ r a t e but in terpretation of caste, Raheja shows that though, that Lear's poems make no attempt at their own surreal beauty; but nothing from The lack the estranging dimension of true nonsense patterns of centrality, rather than hierarchy, the virtuoso pictorialis m of Tennyson; a gifted Art of Sinking, which is in part a kind of anti are the interpolation of jingle lines into are the most salient in the ritual and social landscapist of the exotic in his professional life , poetics exalting poetry into nonsense, and straightforward ballads or of meaningless syl life of a Hindu village.

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