Language, to philosophy’s chagrin, is both contradiction and contraction of reality—an intra-referential system of signs that borrows sense from without. But those negative elements by which language permits us to produce something out of nothing (out of something, out of nothing, and so on) tempt the speaker with the task of making sense. Non-sense, as the negative trace of comprehensibility, is not absence, and neither is it senseless. As noted, nonsense writing typically denotes a surfeit of sound, some physical evidence or a conspicuous presence that remains after a logical audit, even anticipating a future or alternative assignment.
In philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early work, nonsense marks a limit to language. According to his austere pictorial theory, propositions are portraits of the world, and that which cannot be countenanced in one must be disqualified in the other. The picture must have something in common with reality, Wittgenstein claims, in order to represent it. The linguistic propositions that he calls ‘pictures’ partake of a logical form that permits them to depict a world, and each depiction must be compared to reality in order to be deemed accurate or not. On this basis, of a representational pact between language and world, Wittgenstein forbids illogical, or otherworldly, thinking: “The truth is, we could not say of an “unlogical” world how it would look.”
This strict limit produces strange results, for the will to logic that Wittgenstein describes corresponds to a certain readerly credulity before language and world alike. Of course Wittgenstein himself would eventually abandon the strictures of the pictorial theory, as one of many multi-purpose “language games” with their own rules. Over the course of his project, the proposed correspondence of language to world persists insofar as one may posit any number of each: “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” Wittgenstein’s idea of a “form of life” is productively ambiguous, but here accounts for the ability of strange language to conjure vistas of plausible exteriority, and a suitable perceiver.
This pro-social posit encircles literary nonsense, too—we may not know what “toves” are, nor what precisely makes them “slithy,” but the form in which these unfamiliar words occur greets our acquisitive knack for vocabulary. “Hlahla! Uthlofan, lauflings!” may not mean anything to us on first hearing, but it implies receipt by one for whom it means. As importantly, where language and custom are indissociable, nonsense frequently projects a correspondingly improbable or untrammelled geography, of which it is a comprehending emanation.
Bursts of nonsensical language pepper the fantastic travelogues of Jonathan Swift, François Rabelais, or any number of classical precedents, as an authenticating token of encounter with a distant or imaginary culture. Long before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one finds nonsense closely identified with a way of life, or country, upon which it has conceptual purchase; and moreover, as the output of an interloper’s overhearing. Nonsense is someone else’s sense, one expects—such that it marks a strange and unknown world, where things cohere but differently. According to G.K. Chesterton, nonsense enacts “the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness.”
Musicologist Richard Elliott considers nonsense as distinct from gibberish, where the former requires logical structure, and the latter is removed from argument by sheer incomprehensibility. Here Elliott quotes actor Stephen Fry, who describes gibberish as the sonic keynote of “a strangely familiar land, yet one in which nothing is linguistically as it seems.” Within this world, Fry continues, “one man’s gibberish may be another woman’s native tongue.” Fry’s description plays upon the bare structure of nonsense: “strangely familiar” is oxymoronic, while the faux-politically correct revision of a truistic formula (“one man’s gibberish may be another woman’s tongue”) introduces an unsolicited measure of difference between terms, as if men and women were the object of compare rather than their respective preferences. Playfulness notwithstanding, this distinction between nonsense and gibberish places the onus of determination on a listener-interloper, charged with relation to a speaker; such that, to follow Fry’s definition, gibberish as often marks a kind of chauvinistic overhearing.
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