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Objects of Nonsense, Anarchy, and Order: Romantic Theology in Lewis Carroll’S and George Macdonald’S Nonsense Literature Adam Walker

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Objects of Nonsense, Anarchy, and Order: Romantic Theology in Lewis Carroll’S and George Macdonald’S Nonsense Literature Adam Walker View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St. Norbert College North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies Volume 37 Article 2 1-1-2018 Objects of Nonsense, Anarchy, and Order: Romantic Theology in Lewis Carroll’s and George MacDonald’s Nonsense Literature Adam Walker Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/northwind Recommended Citation Walker, Adam (2018) "Objects of Nonsense, Anarchy, and Order: Romantic Theology in Lewis Carroll’s and George MacDonald’s Nonsense Literature," North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies: Vol. 37 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/northwind/vol37/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. It has been accepted for inclusion in North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ St. Norbert College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Objects of Nonsense, Anarchy, and Order: Romantic Theology in Lewis Carroll's and George MacDonald's Nonsense Literature Adam Walker Introduction “Nonsense criticism, as it currently exists,” writes Josephine Gabelman in her new book A Theology of Nonsense (2016), “is essentially a secular enterprise. It is philosophical and psychoanalytical, philological and mathematical; it may be studied from a historical or cultural perspective, but apparently not a religious one” (162). Past scholarship has, in fact, not only avoided a serious consideration of theology regarding nonsense literature, but some scholars have gone so far as to insist that nonsense literature lacks any sense of the religious at all. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, when considering freedom in Alice in Wonderland, argues that nonsense grants her freedom from religiousness and, consequently, from “the stern God of Protestant extremism” (369), and, therefore, provides a means of escape from religion. Robert Polhemus similarly argues that considering theology in context with Carrollian nonsense would be inappropriate. Concerning the nonsense in Through the Looking-Glass, Polhemus writes, “The structure of the game and the plot, as well as the thought and humor of the book, reveal . Carroll winning out over the Reverend Mr. Dodgson, and a comic regression and reversal winning out over orthodox religion” (292). These approaches, where they have not been generally accepted, have at least gone unchallenged until recently. In A Theology of Nonsense, Gabelman explores the connections between nonsense literature and theology by challenging the arguments of Lecercle, Polhemus, and others by reevaluating theology’s role as an essential component in understanding nonsense literature.1 Gabelman relies on Sir Edward Strachey’s essay “Nonsense as a Fine Art” (1888), the first serious study of nonsense literature, to establish how literary nonsense was understood as a theological process of reversal and disorder that ultimately results in the reunification of reality into a higher order. Strachey writes that nonsense is “not a mere putting forward of incongruities and absurdities but the bringing out a new and deeper harmony of life in and through its contradictions” (515). This process of bringing North Wind 37 (2017): 11-27 Objects of Nonsense 12 “confusion into order by setting things upside down” not only reflects the aims of Christian orthodoxy, as Gabelman observes, but necessarily evokes the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination introduced as a synthetic power that “dissolves, dissipates in order to recreate” and “struggles to idealize and unify” (Coleridge 118). I shall also argue that the confusion, which Gabelman argues is necessary in bringing about the higher order, is also reflected in the writings of the German Romantic poet Novalis (the pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg), whose ideas about fairy tales were translated and introduced to England by George MacDonald. Gabelman’s argument confronts nonsense literature as “an inversion of the sensible,” instead of nonsense functioning as an “absence of its destruction” (168). Beginning with this approach, she establishes the theological context of the “nonsensical imagination” as dealing with “paradox, anarchy, and the childlike, all which in their own way reverse common-sense assumptions” (168). Gabelman draws from G.K. Chesterton to establish the fall of humanity in Christian theology as a reversal of sense. Chesterton states that the paradoxical position taken by Christianity can be seen in its claim that “the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. This is the inmost philosophy of the fall.” (191-2). Christianity, as Gabelman observes, “seems destined to defy common sense” (169) and aims to restore the sense through a process of paradox, anarchy, and chaos towards an eventual reunification, a resolution which J.R.R. Tolkien would later describe as the “eucatastrophe,” the satisfactory feeling of resolution and a deeper insight into Truth about the world.2 Furthering this assertion that the aims of nonsense literature are shared by and deeply connected to Christian theology, my argument seeks to examine George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories as texts whose literary nonsense operates in accordance with the aims of Christian theology, namely, to bring out “a new and deeper harmony of life” (Strachey 515). The scope of Gabelman’s study is restricted to institutional theology, and she neglects consideration of the Romantics and their theology. This article will extend Gabelman’s argument by recognizing nonsense literature’s indebtedness to the Romantic theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Novalis. Thus, the literary nonsense of MacDonald and Carroll specifically relies on a theology distilled by their Romantic predecessors, particularly the Romantic understanding of the imagination and anarchy. I will also consider how the readers’ engagement with the nonsense literature 13 Walker of MacDonald and Carroll requires a proper epistemological approach to understanding reality by normalizing the abnormal. Objects of Nonsense in MacDonald’s and Carroll’s Texts This section will address the use of symbols, namely the fire-opal in MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and the looking-glass in Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and their indebtedness to Coleridge’s imagination. Both texts use what I will call “objects of nonsense” to convey truth and how truth is understood theologically through Romantic intuition. This use of nonsense is reflected in the Chestertonian notion of Christian sense, as we have seen, as “the unnaturalness of everything in light of the supernatural” (145). Gabelman insists that these inversions of the natural within nonsense literature introduce “a post-edenic, unnatural topsy- turvydom,” and, “in such a context, to speak of that which is ‘natural’ or ‘the right way up,’ it may thus be necessary to speak nonsensically” (174). Basing her idea of reversal on the theological notion of restoration, Gabelman relates Strachey’s observations on nonsense literature, that it “bring[s] confusion into order by sitting things upside down,” to the euchatastrophic elements of the Christian story through the death and resurrection of Christ. Let us apply this observation to MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin to better understand the role of the imagination through theological imagery. The imagery of Grandmother Irene’s gifts, such as the fire-opal ring and the thread, function as simulacra for Romantic intuition and Christian understanding of the paraclete (the Holy Spirit), neither exclusively symbolic nor entirely allegorical, but as interconnecting parts within the living organism of the fairy tale. I will soon return to the significance of the paraclete in MacDonald’s works. Irene’s guiding thread, which Irene can feel only forwards, never backwards, is spun by her grandmother and is characterized by its indescribability. In Chapter III, when Irene discovers her great-great-grandmother living at the top of the castle by wandering up hidden staircases and passageways, she is led to her chamber by the “low sweet humming sound” of her grandmother’s spinning wheel (20). The humming of the wheel is almost undetectable “stopping” and “beginning again,” yet difficult for the author to describe. MacDonald portrays it as “curious,” “more gentle, even monotonous like the sound of rain,” and “like the hum of a very happy bee that had found a rich well of honey in some globular flower” (20). Recognizing the limitations of similes, the narrator settles on this description, deciding that it is more like the humming of a Objects of Nonsense 14 bee “than anything else I can think of at the moment” (20). This ineffable element lends a supernatural or supersensual meaning to the string and invites spiritual interpretation of its symbolism. The voice of the narrator and Irene’s grandmother both insist Irene guess or intuit what the grandmother is spinning. We are introduced to the spinning wheel early in the story, but neither Irene nor the readers learn what she is spinning until much later. At the end of Chapter III, we are told that we must “guess” what she is spinning (30). In Chapter XI, when Irene returns to her grandmother’s room, she finds her spinning again, and she urges the princess to tell her what she is spinning. Irene replies, “I don’t know what you are spinning. Please, I thought you were a dream” (114). Again, the grandmother insists, “You haven’t told me what I am spinning” (116). This insistence, in part, is meant to engage the reader in an active participation with the story, as well as to emphasize the importance of Irene’s self-knowledge, or to awaken within her what Coleridge described as “the sacred power of self-intuition,” the essential faculty of the “philosophic imagination” (Coleridge 241-2). MacDonald would extend this further by connecting it with the “listening” to what he calls the “voice of the Spirit” (Unspoken Sermons 57).
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