In the UK, 2013 saw the end of the most recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) consultation. It is interesting to note how this exercise appears to have affected publication strategies, with 2013 being a comparatively light year for British academics in terms of volume of published work. Fortunately, while quantity may be down, quality is most certainly not. It is also gratifying to note that those colleagues outside the UK and unaffected by REF-related matters have continued to publish the excellent work that is a hallmark of our discipline. This is where we begin this year’s review.

The year’s work in stylistics 2013:

Sometimes it takes nonsense to understand sense. And sometimes, it takes a child and his/her nonsensical question for the whole sense of the world to collapse. This paper is an attempt to study Anushka Ravishankar’s nonsensical children’s novel Ogd. Ravishankar through her novel, deconstructs religion, science, logic and language; entities looked upon as the final end of meaning. And in doing so, she sheds light on the process of meaning-making. Using Edward Lear’s Limericks and Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the paper attempts to understand the genre of nonsense in its act of deconstruction. And the paper tries to analyse the novel through the lens of what has been understood from Lear’s and Carroll’s works of nonsense. Using some of Derrida’s ideas, the paper attempts to understand Ravishankar’s novel in detail.

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The Messiah of Ogd: An Ode to Nonsense

Evolutionary accounts of nonsense usually try to recuperate it for biological "sense," and the Alice stories, in particular, have provided a convenient metaphor for the adaptive way in which the human mind works. Alice's tumble into a world of illogic and gibberish along with her repeated efforts to find coherent meaning in it is a framing figure for Steven Pinker's discovery of an evolved, innate "inventory of basic human thoughts" in The Stuff of Thought (27). His second chapter, "Down the Rabbit Hole," describes his discovery of a hard-wired scaffolding of core concepts in the brain that structures our sense of the social and physical worlds we navigate and, therefore, our very grasp of reality. By implication, these core concepts rescue us from the watery ground of nonsense. With a different emphasis, Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea introduces a chapter on the evolution of meaning with the often-quoted exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word," Humpty-Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty-Dumpty, "which is to be master--that's all." (Carroll 269; qtd in Dennett 401) For Dennett, Humpty-Dumpty's cantankerous insistence on the authority that arbitrarily assigns meaning to words paradoxically points to the indeterminate and evolved nature of that meaning. There is no intrinsic or natural reason why a particular word should stand for a particular thing. Instead, Alice's absurd adventures suggest the blind work of cultural selection in helping produce the most sophisticated form of sense-making in the animal world. In the context of other parts of Dennett's book, Humpty Dumpty's remarks also suggest his perverse and wrong-headed resistance to the role of language in cultural evolution. Describing how linguistic communication functions as an evolutionary "crane," Dennett stresses its function as a device that, like a simple machine enabling complex functions, accelerates the ordinarily slow pace of evolution by natural selection. Indeed, language might even be described as a "crane-making crane" (338), since it facilitates our development of other cultural tools. Language is the instrument by means of which humans are able to "compare notes" (380) about the phenomena they encounter and make relevant behavioral decisions that have enormous reach and efficiency. In this respect, and whatever Humpty-Dumpty may think, humans hold a significant advantage over all other species, even those with brains that enable them, like us, to recognize other beings as thinking agents. The everyday thought-reading processes that most human beings exercise ,which we call "theory of mind," already enormously enhances sociality, thereby conferring on us all kinds of evolutionary advantages. But by, in Dennett's words, "sharing ... design wealth through cultural transmission" (370), we vastly increase our range of behavioral options as well as the speed at which we can process them. In what follows, I want to think about Dennett's cranes in reference to the Alice stories, where the very possibility of shared cultural knowledge is dubious and, as a result, developmental learning goes askew. Alice's dream worlds continually undermine categorizations that organize raw experience into meaning and that themselves assume a world of stable objects: logical categories dissolve into contradiction; language thickens into puns and literalizations or slides into mere sound so that it neither illuminates the world with categorizing order nor transmits meaningful information from one mind to another; relationships among objects in space continually change so that reality cannot be anchored in a fixed scale; distinctions between things animate and non-animate become confusingly unstable. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.47.3.380

Anna Neill

Papers

Developmental Nonsense in the Alice Tales