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Unclear Definitions: Investigating Dictionaries’ Fictitious Entries Through Creative and Critical Writing

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Unclear Definitions: Investigating Dictionaries’ Fictitious Entries Through Creative and Critical Writing Unclear Definitions: Investigating Dictionaries’ Fictitious Entries through Creative and Critical Writing Eleanor Williams 1 Royal Holloway, University of London Ph.D. Creative Writing Official Declaration of Authorship I, the undersigned, declare this Ph.D. and the work presented in it to be entirely my own. Where I have consulted or drawn upon the work of others, I have always endeavoured to state this clearly in the text. Signed: Eleanor Williams Date: 12th April 2016 2 Acknowledgements I am indebted to Royal Holloway, University of London for the College Research Scholarship that enabled me to take up this Ph.D. Sincere thanks to my supervisors Prof Judith Hawley and Dr Kristen Kreider for their insights, patience and candour throughout my studies. Thank you for your generosity and confidence. Thanks also to my examiners Prof Patricia Duncker and Dr Richard Hamblyn for their invaluable critiques, comments and kind words. My thanks to Profs Andrew Motion and Robert Hampson for their early encouragement and conversation. I am also much obliged to Beverley McCulloch for her assistance in the Oxford University Press archives and to curator Davey Moor for helping me source exhibition images from the Monster Gallery in Dublin. My thanks to Jacquie Dow and her aunt Prof Sylvia M. Broadbent for their conversation and time. I am grateful to The White Review for publishing ‘Spins’, the germ of an idea, and to Helen Zaltzman for letting me be tangential on her podcast The Allusionist. I also really appreciate Maximilien Talbot, Éireann Lorsung and Jonathan Vanhaels for scrambling through French graveyards on my camera’s behalf. Thank you to all friends for their guidance and support (witting or otherwise) including Matt Lomas, Timothy Thornton, and all the members of the purpureus group. Thank you, Twitter’s amassed Difficult Aunts. I also want to offer specific thanks to Špela Drnovšek Zorko, Nisha Ramayya and to Prudence Chamberlain and the Chamberlains for their many illuminating discussions, and for illuminating generally. To my family: thank you. 3 Abstract This practice-based Ph.D. investigates false entries within dictionaries and encyclopædias and provides an exegesis of such entries as literary texts. An initial critical thesis defines mountweazel, ghost and evanescent lexicographical entries, and considers the extent to which these function as ‘creative writing’. Its chapters are structured around three fictitious entries: the noun esquivalience1, biographical matter pertaining to Lillian Virginia Mountweazel2, and the elusive allusive jungftak3. It also analyses whether false entries — as ‘meaningless’ lexemes or lemmas — can be read as part of a canon of nonsense literature. Assessing the perceived infallibility of dictionaries and encyclopædic resources, the thesis examines the textual and social ramifications of a lexicographer who has violated or subverted a dictionary’s authority by including untrue or deliberate incorrect entries. Watchword’s narrative is split between two main characters: in the 19th century, a disaffected lexicographer inserts false entries into a dictionary in an attempt to assert some sense of agency, while in the present day a worker employed by the same publishing house is tasked to uncover these entries before the dictionary is digitised. The trans-temporal cat-and-mouse relationship established between these characters and the manner in which they are in thrall to their creative impulses forms the basis of the novel. Together, the Ph.D. posits the role of a scurrilous lexicographer as protector and violator of a dictionary’s authority and explores the ways lexicographical probity and impropriety can be figured as creative expression and commentary. 1 New Oxford American Dictionary, eds. Elizabeth J. Jewell and Frank Abate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 New Columbia Encyclopedia, ed. William H. Harris and Judith S. Levey, 4th edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). 3 Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language ed. Joseph Devlin, Elsie Wright, Josephine McCarter, rev. ed. (New York: World Publishing, 1943). 4 Contents: Introduction _ 6 Chapter 1 10 Exploding Dictionaries: Fictitiousness and the Dictionary Chapter 2 20 Weasel Words: Reading False Entries as Creative Texts Chapter 3 34 Flights of Fancy and Unhinged Birds: Fictitious Entries as Nonsense Literature Chapter 4 44 My Word Against Theirs: the 19th Century and esquivalience (n.) Conclusion 61 Bibliography 66 Watchwords 84 A Novel 5 Introduction Literature and the public imagination often privileges dictionaries and encyclopædias as ‘represent[ing] an illusion of totality, of an immobile order of things, of harmony’4. This is often done in such a way that implies there is an oppressive power inherent to a dictionary. In his novel Gambit, for example, author Rex Stout introduces the fictional detective Nero Wolfe to the reader as looming by a fire and ripping sheets of paper from a dictionary, condemning its pages to a sitting-room fire. The dictionary in question is specified to be a buckram-bound ‘new edition, the third edition, of Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged, published by the G. & C. Merriam Company of Springfield, Massachusetts’. 5 Wolfe justifies his biblioclasm to other characters by explaining that this new Webster’s edition ‘threatens the integrity of the English language’, highlighting the treatment of imply and infer within its definitions. Similarly in the first few pages of Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s character Becky Sharp ejects a copy of Johnson’s dictionary from the window of her carriage and in doing so is shown to physically enact a rejection of its didacticism.6 Elsewhere in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the character Henry Tilney appeals to dictionaries so that he might support his prescriptive attitude towards the meaning of words; fittingly, Austen has Tilney provoked to comment by what he deems to be the other characters’ misuse of the lexeme nice. In response, characters Catherine and Eleanor remark that they fear becoming ‘overpowered with Johnson’.7 Even in Tove Jansson’s Moominland, dictionaries are figured as authoritative powers that verge on the oppressive: ‘In a cloud of sand the Ant-lion tumbled out, and, quick as lightning, the Snork popped a Dictionary of Outlandish Words on top.’8 4 Alain Rey, Littre: L’humaniste Et Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), quoted in Johnathon Green’s Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries they Made (London: Pimlico, 1997), p.22. 5 Rex Stout, Gambit (New York: Viking, 1962; repr. New York: Bantam, 1964), location 45 in Kindle edition. 6 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848), p.7. 7 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (London: John Murray, 1818), p.253. 8 Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll trans. Elizabeth Portch (London: Penguin Books, 1950; repr. 2001), p.29. 6 The status that the dictionary has assumed within public discourse as not only authoritative but also an authoritarian, oppressive force means that the refiguring, disfiguring and disordering of a dictionary’s format and matter has a particular anarchic appeal, and is performed with often ludic results. Many works of creative writing use dictionaries as a location for objets trouvés for this reason, whereby parts of a dictionary are isolated from their context to create new works. Examples range from the illustrations that were excised from 19th-century encyclopædias for the creation of Max Ernst’s collages in his anti-novel Une Semaine de Bonté9 to Oli Hazzard’s hymn to lethologica ‘The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something’. The latter features a page-long list of definitions for obscure words; in Hazzard’s poem, the words’ lemmas have been removed and the definitions rearranged out of alphabetical order to create disturbing new narrative possibilities: ‘the act of opening a bottle with a sabre / the habit of dropping in at mealtimes / the act of killing every twentieth person’.10 The constraints of the lexicographic and encyclopædic form can be artistically generative in this way, with the assumed order and presumed unimpeachability of a dictionary making it a tempting site for transformation. The rigidity of a dictionary’s alphabetical arrangement has even been harnessed as a tool for creativity; one recalls the OuLiPo transformational technique of S+7, whereby every noun in a given text is replaced with the noun that is found seven places beneath its position in the dictionary, with results varying widely depending on the edition of the dictionary that is used.11 This thesis seeks to investigate the incidence and nature of fictitious entries that occur within such works of reference, and attempts to ascertain whether these entries operate as metafictional commentaries upon the authority of the dictionaries 9 Max Ernst, Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage (Paris: Jeanne Bucher, 1934). 10 Oli Hazzard, ‘The Inability to Recall the Precise Word for Something’, The Salt Book of Younger Poets, ed. Roddy Lumsden and Eloise Stonborough (Cambridge: Salt, 2011), p.81. 11 Jean Lescure: ‘La Méthode S+7’, La Littérature Potentielle: Créations,R e-créations, Récréations (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p.143. The title of this thesis might be transformed, for example, into ‘Unclear Deflagrabilities: Investigating Dictyonalia’s Fictitious Enunciation through Creative and Critical Wrong-doing’ using the OED online. 7 and encyclopædias in which they
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