The Sense of Nonsense

Reading time: 12 minutes

Charicature of G.K. Chesterton: James Montgomery Flagg

When something serves no purpose or doesn’t seem useful, we tend to call it nonsensical. But is nonsense useless? The author G.K. Chesterton not only claims the contrary, but also argues it excellently in his essay “A Defense Of Nonsense” (1902) with sharp wit and a lot of humor. In addition his works are teeming with paradox, a trait he shares with scriptures from mainly Eastern religions and philosophies. Both try to use this form of mental massage to grant the reader a point of view that was hitherto unbeknownst.

The nonsense he describes is actually better represented as non-sense, the opposite of sensible, useful. For in a world where balance is found only when both sides of a coin are of approximately equal weight, the balance threatens to become disturbed if only what is useful is considered valuable. Utility by itself has the strong tendency to stiffen and wither, together with a growing belief in one’s own righteousness and growing anxiety of different opinions.

Non-sense is the much-needed safety valve where people and institutions are increasingly busy checking and correcting each other. If the gaze is continuously directed outward, we become more and more a blind spot for ourselves, while sincere morality, ethics, beauty and joy can only be found exactly there. The obsession with how others (ought to) behave masks a deep seated dissatisfaction with – and fear of – our own subconscious, which translates into increasingly wanting to dominate the other. We see this in the censorship of humor in a court, church, and increasingly in the business arena and public space. But for much longer, this trend has been seen in the political arena from which the court jester has been banned already for centuries, aptly marking the allergy to feedback or criticism from the political class.

According to Chesterton, humor belongs to the people. Nobility may have beauty, religion may have morality, politics may have power, and businessmen may have money, but they cannot pretend to have what they cannot bear about themselves: jokes. The nonsense of the many contradictions of life and the pomposity of the so called upper classes forms the basis for a kind of humor that can never be understood or tolerated by those classes, namely the art of not taking oneself too seriously. Because true humor is being able to laugh at ourselves.

Introduction to G.K. Chesterton’s “A Defense Of Nonsense”

"Good literature may tell us the mind of one man, but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men," Gilbert Keith Chesterton stated in his 1905 book “Heretics,” and immediately reflects one of his greatest skills: the ability to view the world from multiple points of view. He was able to do so because he still had a quality that many of us seem to have lost: a genuine sense of wonder, like opening the lid of a pedal bin is utterly magical to a two-year-old as long as the link between the lid and the pedal has not yet been discovered. Chesterton saw a tree from a scientific point of view as a useful object for birds to nest in and from which planks could be made. But he also saw a tree from a magical point of view as a wondrous arm of the living earth that, for no apparent reason, reached for heaven.

This sense of wonder about the world, about transcending utility and efficiency (which, as we all know, are the assassins of magic and spontaneity), combined with a razor-sharp eye and a healthy dose of self-mockery, is particularly well expressed in his essay “ A Defense of Nonsense. ” Using beautiful language, he takes us on a journey that invites us to an unprecedented expansion of vision, which, when it happens, undeniably leads to relaxation of body and mind. After all, by seeing life from multiple points of view, our own point of view acquires less and less significance, and it therefore becomes less and less important to (have to) defend it against all odds. That is to say, we feel ‘the outside world’ less and less as a threat, an enemy that needs to be conquered, but more and more as an extension of ourselves.

The main work Chesterton refers to in this essay when it comes to the literature of nonsense is found in Edward Lear's collection “Complete Nonsense”. Lear is often seen as the father of the limerick and in his essay Chesterton points out why Lear's nonsense is more pure than, for example, the nonsense in Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland." Incidentally, I can wholeheartedly recommend both books!

Finally, Chesterton masterfully argues why things that are sensible, or useful, can never be miraculous. He links nonsense to religion & spirituality as the much needed counterpart, or other half, of reason, convinced of the imbalance that arises when one dominates the other. More than a century ago, he saw all the excesses that arose from the one-sided shift towards ‘the useful society’. In his essay he flawlessly argues why nonsense and spirituality, as supreme symbols of truth, are the quickest path towards relaxation and flexibility. Both through his fiction and non-fiction, he continuously tries to encourage the reader to question her or his own perceptions. I therefore consider it no more than my duty to introduce this long gone author to you, and wish you much reading pleasure with his defense of nonsense.

G.K. Chesterton, A Defense of Nonsense (essay, 1902)

There are two equal and eternal ways of looking at this twilight world of ours: we may see it as the twilight of evening or the twilight of morning; we may think of anything, down to a fallen acorn, as a descendant or as an ancestor. There are times when we are almost crushed, not so much with the load of the evil as with the load of the goodness of humanity, when we feel that we are nothing but the inheritors of a humiliating splendour. But there are other times when everything seems primitive, when the ancient stars are only sparks blown from a boy’s bonfire, when the whole earth seems so young and experimental that even the white hair of the aged, in the fine biblical phrase, is like almond-trees that blossom, like the white hawthorn grown in May. That it is good for a man to realize that he is ‘the heir of all the ages’ is pretty commonly admitted; it is a less popular but equally important point that it is good for him sometimes to realize that he is not only an ancestor, but an ancestor of primal antiquity; it is good for him to wonder whether he is not a hero, and to experience ennobling doubts as to whether he is not a solar myth.

The matters which most thoroughly evoke this sense of the abiding childhood of the world are those which are really fresh, abrupt and inventive in any age; and if we were asked what was the best proof of this adventurous youth in the nineteenth century we should say, with all respect to its portentous sciences and philosophies, that it was to be found in the rhymes of Mr. Edward Lear and in the literature of nonsense. ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose,’ at least, is original, as the first ship and the first plough were original.

Illustration of the Dong with the Luminous Nose: Edward Lear

It is true in a certain sense that some of the greatest writers the world has seen—Aristophanes, Rabelais and Sterne—have written nonsense; but unless we are mistaken, it is in a widely different sense. The nonsense of these men was satiric—that is to say, symbolic; it was a kind of exuberant capering round a discovered truth. There is all the difference in the world between the instinct of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser’s moustaches something typical of him, draws them continually larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look like on the present Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of absence of mind. We incline to think that no age except our own could have understood that the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing, and the Lands of the Jumblies were absolutely nowhere. We fancy that if the account of the knave’s trial in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had been published in the seventeenth century it would have been bracketed with Bunyan’s ‘Trial of Faithful’ as a parody on the State prosecutions of the time. We fancy that if ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ had appeared in the same period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.

It is altogether advisedly that we quote chiefly from Mr. Lear’s ‘Nonsense Rhymes.’ To our mind he is both chronologically and essentially the father of nonsense; we think him superior to Lewis Carroll. In one sense, indeed, Lewis Carroll has a great advantage. We know what Lewis Carroll was in daily life: he was a singularly serious and conventional don, universally respected, but very much of a pedant and something of a Philistine. Thus his strange double life in earth and in dreamland emphasizes the idea that lies at the back of nonsense—the idea of escape, of escape into a world where things are not fixed horribly in an eternal appropriateness, where apples grow on pear-trees, and any odd man you meet may have three legs. Lewis Carroll, living one life in which he would have thundered morally against anyone who walked on the wrong plot of grass, and another life in which he would cheerfully call the sun green and the moon blue, was, by his very divided nature, his one foot on both worlds, a perfect type of the position of modern nonsense. His Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians. We feel the whole is an escape into a world of masquerade; we feel that if we could pierce their disguises, we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March Hare were Professors and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental holiday. This sense of escape is certainly less emphatic in Edward Lear, because of the completeness of his citizenship in the world of unreason. We do not know his prosaic biography as we know Lewis Carroll’s. We accept him as a purely fabulous figure, on his own description of himself:

‘His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat.’

While Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is purely intellectual, Lear introduces quite another element—the element of the poetical and even emotional. Carroll works by the pure reason, but this is not so strong a contrast; for, after all, mankind in the main has always regarded reason as a bit of a joke. Lear introduces his unmeaning words and his amorphous creatures not with the pomp of reason, but with the romantic prelude of rich hues and haunting rhythms.

‘Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live,’

is an entirely different type of poetry to that exhibited in ‘Jabberwocky.’ Carroll, with a sense of mathematical neatness, makes his whole poem a mosaic of new and mysterious words. But Edward Lear, with more subtle and placid effrontery, is always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean. There is a genial ring of commonsense about such lines as,

‘For his aunt Jobiska said “Every one knows That a Pobble is better without his toes,”‘

which is beyond the reach of Carroll. The poet seems so easy on the matter that we are almost driven to pretend that we see his meaning, that we know the peculiar difficulties of a Pobble, that we are as old travellers in the ‘Gromboolian Plain’ as he is.

Our claim that nonsense is a new literature (we might almost say a new sense) would be quite indefensible if nonsense were nothing more than a mere aesthetic fancy. Nothing sublimely artistic has ever arisen out of mere art, any more than anything essentially reasonable has ever arisen out of the pure reason. There must always be a rich moral soil for any great aesthetic growth. The principle of art for art’s sake is a very good principle if it means that there is a vital distinction between the earth and the tree that has its roots in the earth; but it is a very bad principle if it means that the tree could grow just as well with its roots in the air. Every great literature has always been allegorical–allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The ‘Iliad’ is only great because all life is a battle, the ‘Odyssey’ because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

There is one attitude in which we think that all existence is summed up in the word ‘ghosts’; another, and somewhat better one, in which we think it is summed up in the words ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ Even the vulgarest melodrama or detective story can be good if it expresses something of the delight in sinister possibilities–the healthy lust for darkness and terror which may come on us any night in walking down a dark lane. If, therefore, nonsense is really to be the literature of the future, it must have its own version of the Cosmos to offer; the world must not only be the tragic, romantic, and religious, it must be nonsensical also. And here we fancy that nonsense will, in a very unexpected way, come to the aid of the spiritual view of things.

Religion has for centuries been trying to make men exult in the ‘wonders’ of creation, but it has forgotten that a thing cannot be completely wonderful so long as it remains sensible. So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats, to the astonishment of the park-keeper.

Everything has in fact another side to it, like the moon, the patroness of nonsense. Viewed from that other side, a bird is a blossom broken loose from its chain of stalk, a man a quadruped begging on its hind legs, a house a gigantesque hat to cover a man from the sun, a chair an apparatus of four wooden legs for a cripple with only two.

This is the side of things which tends most truly to spiritual wonder. It is significant that in the greatest religious poem existent, the Book of Job, the argument which convinces the infidel is not (as has been represented by the merely rational religionism of the eighteenth century) a picture of the ordered beneficence of the Creation; but, on the contrary, a picture of the huge and undecipherable unreason of it. ‘Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?’

This simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook. The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.

Jolly greetings, and a warm gratitude for the enchanting works of Mr. Chesterton,
Erik Stout