AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 1

I'll commence this assault upon the Domain of Nonsense, this attempt to make nonsense make sense, with a contrasting example drawn from J.R.R. Tolkien's signature effort to defend his conception of fantasy from all those who have sought to downgrade that uber-genre. I will build upon my discussion partly on the points I made in the COMPENSATION CONSIDERATIONS essay-series, beginning here, though that series did not address the concept of nonsense fiction. But instead of rehashing those essays, I'll confine this essay to a quick re-examination of Tolkien's illustration of the way authors create what he called "arresting strangeness."                                                                                                                             "Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that receives literary praise.  To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode."-- ON FAIRY-STORIES.                                                                                                                                                Okay, fair enough. It takes special effort to imagine a world where a phenomenon of our "Primary World," the sun that appears to most persons on Earth as yellow, is actually green. No argument there. But what if you have--                                                                                       

                                                                                                                Can one make a world with a polka-dot sun credible? If such a sun is depicted, particularly in a medium that can show rather than describe it, it will certainly seem strange to the reader and arrest any expectations that this is a world like our own. But a sun with a precise polka-dot pattern-- or even something more random, like the spots on a leopard-- is unlikely to seem credible in any way. The polka-dot sun is strange, but it departs from a causally coherent world so radically that one cannot make it credible in itself. At most, an author can posit that the world with a polka-dot sun is one where anything can come into existence "just because"-- which will lead me into Part 2 of this aesthetic endeavor.