1 Modern Nonsense

Modern Nonsense: Locating a Classic Literary Genre in Adventure Time with Finn and Jake Literary nonsense lives in examples of prose and verse which utilize language to create fantastical worlds operating with their own grammatical rules. Producing those worlds, nonsense as a literary genre has been cited as disrupting operations of language, employing abnormal syntax and inventive words to form ‘a complex interplay of order and disorder, meaning and non-meaning’ (Sewell). While also incorporating aspects of parody, satire, comic, and fantasy, literary nonsense constructs ‘the privileged locus for the dialogue between an author and his [child] readers’(Lecerde). Archetypal examples of nonsense, the works of authors Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, exist as definitive texts ushering the literary category into mainstream circulation and remain the most examined works in terms of illuminating definitions of nonsense and its linguistic structures. Yet, understanding nonsense as a literary form has been a widely debated work in progress since the nineteenth century. In an effort to further concepts of nonsense operating in the formation and function and acquisition of language, modern literary mediums such as teleplay or screenplay might demonstrate nonsense’s adaptability, its intelligence, and dynamism. As an example I will show here that the same grammatical characteristics seen in Lear’s and Carrollian texts thrive within alternative literary frameworks of the scripts of Adventure Time with Finn and Jake, allowing the creative author, Pendleton Ward, creative freedom to produce demonstrations of contemporary literary nonsense. The Adventure Time series tracks the adventures of Finn, a 14-year-old human boy, and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake, a dog with magical powers to change shape or grow and shrink at will, in the enchanted and quaintly post-apocalyptic ‘Land of Ooo’. Finn is precocious and has strong morals and strives to be a hero, battling evil whenever it threatens the tasty ‘Candy Kingdom’ or its sweet ‘Candy-People’ denizens. Interacting with ‘Princess Bubblegum’, a royal made of the chewy substance, ‘The Ice King’, the mystic ruler of the ‘Ice Kingdom’, and ‘Marceline the Vampire Queen’, daughter of the Lord of the ‘Night-O-Shpere’, each Adventure Time episode engages its audience on the level of a fantastic and nonsensical epic narrative: “Ward intends the show's world to have a certain physical logic instead of ‘cartoony slapstick’; even though magic exists in the story, the show's writers try to create an internal consistency in how the characters interact with the world’ (DeMott). Adventure Time 1 has ‘developed a cult following among teenagers and adults, many of whom are attracted due to the series' animation and stories, (Lloyd), stories founded in the logic-based languages of nonsense. Names are more than names here; they bring into existence the nature of words used: ‘Hot Dog Princess’ is a hotdog and a princess; The ‘Earl of Lemongrab’ is an Earl and a lemon with a sour disposition; ‘Peppermint Butler’ is, of course, a butler, and a walking, talking, thinking and reasoning and sinister peppermint- man. The language building Ooo and its inhabitants gain their sense through consistent linguistic structures of plausible representations developing plausible meanings. ‘The City of Thieves’ is a city full of looters, poachers, and pick- pockets; ‘Magic Man’, a man of magic; ‘Spikey People’ are spikey and live in ‘Spikey Village’, and ‘Soft People’ are soft and live in ‘Soft Village.’ As such, literary examples of nonsense integrate language influencing the form of character, geography, and action; for Adventure Time we read this world as “Candy Land on the surface and dark underneath. This place is a fantastical land peopled with strange, somewhat disturbing characters and has at its center a young male making his way in that world with the help of unusual, not always reliable, mentors” (Lloyd). Like another part of Wonderland or an island continent in The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World, Ooo is a weird plane where anything you can speak has the probability of becoming possible. In terms of its applications of nonsense, language dictates the terms ergo the terms dictate the language. There is a distinct systematic making of adjectives at work among the populations of Ooo. Words like: ‘Math’ or ‘Mathematical’ or ‘Algebraic’ are no longer merely terms of calculation, they are descriptive exclamations of joy, as are ‘Slamacow’, ‘Shmow-zow’, and ‘Wow-cow-chow’, and ‘What the Zip?’. Each episode of this television series is comparative to a chapter in a book with each new part introducing new language into the canonical lexicon of both worlds, that of Ooo and our own. As terms are adopted and used regularly among Oooians and us human viewers to convey consistent meanings, Ward is essentially building a vocabulary between his characters and his audience to further ground definitions of literary nonsense as practiced sensible language, ‘The backbone of nonsense must be a consciously regulated pattern: rhythmic structure of verse, legal procedure, or rules of a chess game. Implicitly or explicitly, these variations are all present in Alice’ (Flescher); and those aspects are all present in the scripts of Adventure Time. 2 The regulated language pattern in the Land of Ooo is its strict adherence to taking words and word pairings at their figurative and literal meanings, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Nuts’ are an anthropomorphized Pecan and Peanut who oversee the ‘Nut Kingdom’; ‘The River of Junk’ is a river of junk; and ‘Dr. Doughnut’ is a surgeon, living his animated life as an icing covered confection. Nonsense ensues as Finn strives to better himself and his surroundings upholding a strict philosophy as a boy ‘Bound by his word to uphold the Hero’s Code’, his ‘Pledge of Ultimate Responsibility’ standing as such, ‘To help anyone in need no matter how small the problem.’ Finn’s fight for justice is predicated on his best intentions, but often gets tied up in the semantics and technicalities operating in the language of his world which ‘Take adult language of reason to hyperbolic extremes, so forcefully embracing the sophistication of academic language as to render it utterly silly’ (Rettberg). That silly or nonsense language at play in Adventure Time is carefully crafted in each travel-oriented script. Scripts, screenplays and teleplays, like forms of literary nonsense, have been relatively marginalized and separated from mainstream classifications as legitimate forms of literature. Like more canonical formations of literature such as novels, scripts rely heavily on rules of construction to effectively tell, through carefully chosen grammar structures, a visual story. As Disney demonstrated in 1951, adapting Lewis Carroll’s Alice for the screen in the contexts of animation, the marriage of literary nonsense and screenplay proved successful. While Adventure Time’s nonsense seen operating in its own printed comic forms follows original literary processes similar to Edward Lear and Carroll, that same nonsense language works well when adapted into each episodic teleplay constructing the animated incantations of the Cartoon series Adventure Time with Finn and Jake. Show after show, Ward’s Finn and Jake are seen and heard employing and playing with nonsensical methods of forming inventive meaning through the morphology of words; the phonology and sound words take on together, together take on the syntax, coupling and decoupling of affixes and suffixes, along with the developed device of an authorial usage of terms to scrupulously reflect systematic cooperation and coordination of grammar rules, equally brought to literary delight in the nonsense stories of Carroll and Lear. Methodical linguistic structures of nonsense which parody meaning, while bringing a world into being through plays in and on language adapt from the page to fit the screen. Though the process of acquiring nonsense is primarily visual in today’s culture, the languages of nonsense are heard loud and clear as 3 actors read and recite lines of nonsensical dialogue. Theatrical nonsense, perhaps, but it is in essence the nonsensical language building the scripts of each episodic narrative where we are able to locate literary nonsense in action: Finn and Jake are spelunking in a cave. Jake yawns making a sound similar to Chewbacca from Star Wars. JAKE Man... let's go home. FINN Nuts to that. I wanna find a mystery cave. JAKE (Sighs) But, Finn, I'm gettin' all cranky around my joke-hole. Jake accidentally drops on Finn. FINN Ow! JAKE Oof! FINN Ooh-la-la. JAKE Whuzzat? FINN Mystery cave! C'mon, Jake! (Grunts while crawling through tiny entrance.) Oh, my glory... Tiny Jake comes through the entrance then gets back to normal size. The Lamb Relic is seen on a pedestal at the top of pyramid-arranged stairs. Finn walks up to it and nearly touches it. JAKE Dude, no!! Don't touch that thing! It's probably got some kind of sacred significance. FINN Yeah. I want it for my sacred bathroom. Finn touches it and the lamb lights up. JAKE Finn?! The light dims down. Finn's face has replaced that of the lamb; Jake runs up to the lamb panting JAKE (CONT) Oh, my Jah! Finn's become one with the lamb!! 4 In the Spirit World. Finn can be seen, along with numerous odd-looking Spirits. FINN Jake!! You see this crazy jazz?! Blurring the lines of representation and reality, a new world is entered; Finn and we enter a world within the world that is a parody or satirical version of our own. “Beyond this Earthly Realm" is the eleventh episode in the fourth season of Adventure Time, and is the eighty-ninth episode overall and represents well the typical language between Finn and Jake which demonstrates dialectical choices based in nonsense.

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