AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 2

In THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1, I outlined the three principal ways authors rationalize their fictional departures from consensual reality:                                                                                                                                                                                                           (1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."                                                                                                                                                                             

 I also wrote of a major distinction between the first two rationales and the third:                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd.                                                                                                                                 In essence, the first two rationales are "quasi-rational," because they are patterned after rationales, both magical and scientific, that can be and have been used to justify the nature of phenomena in this our "real world." "Just because," however, is "non-rational," in that there are really no rules but those the author arbitrarily declares, like Roger Rabbit claiming that he cannot perform certain actions unless they're funny-- presumably, funny to whatever audience Roger is playing to.                                                                                                                                                    But just because a nonsense-world is thoroughly without rational content, that does make it without relevance to the human condition. In my review of Lewis Carroll's "Alice books," I listed five types of tropes Carroll used to give the mad, anything-goes phenomena of Wonderland and of Looking-Glass Land their own "internal logic." Whatever efforts, conscious or subconscious, Carroll took to make his mad fantasies have human relevance provide a loose parallel to the "labour and thought" which Tolkien felt should inhere in a consistent "secondary world." I plan to put these observations to a test in a forthcoming mythcomics post, in which I will endeavor to show how a particular "nonsense fantasy" author managed to encode internal logic into his freewheeling descents into lunacy.