SOURCE: Schwab, Gabriele. “Nonsense and Metacommunication: Reflections on Lewis Carroll.” In The Play of the Self, edited by Ronald Bogue and Mihai I. Spariosu, pp. 157-79. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Schwab considers Carroll's experimental treatment of language, maintaining that his work anticipates the twentieth-century movements of surrealism, modernism, and postmodernism.]

The history of nonsense literature is intrinsically linked to the history of literary realism. With the latter's insistence on the validity of the quotidian as an aesthetic object, nineteenth-century realism led to a radical redefinition of the traditional notion of mimesis. The novel is supposed to portray the life of its hero within a realistic fiction of the social world. Even the so-called psychological novel, with its attempt to evoke the “inner lives” of its characters, is still concerned with realism and mimesis.

The new Victorian genre of nonsense literature, by contrast, emerges at the beginning of a far-reaching break with the mimetic tradition. Writers begin to free the materiality of language from meaning and reference. Caring more about sounds than sense, they play with words and create silly puns or discover the pleasures of children's sound-games in order to produce nonsense. Long before the surrealists use automatic writing in their attempt to gain access to the unconscious, Lewis Carroll experiments with this very technique in order to disrupt the willful control of speech in his literary production of nonsense.¹ Surprisingly enough, Carroll's break with the mimetic tradition anticipates many new literary techniques developed later during the proliferation of multiple forms of experimental literature in the twentieth century—ranging from surrealism, data, and high modernism (especially James Joyce and Gertrude Stein) to the manifold simulacra of postmodernism.

Like all experimental literature, literary nonsense seems to draw its energies from an antimimetic affect. Refusing to serve as a “mirror of nature,” it thrives in the delirious space of the looking-glass world in which language no longer “re-presents” but mocks its very foundations and speaks on its own against rhetorical conventions, rules, and codes. Literary nonsense uses the excess of the signifier over the signified—which has always characterized the poetic use of language—in order to disturb and to recreate the relation between words and worlds and to fold language back upon itself. Rather than referring to imaginary objects and worlds, this language refers to linguistic and mental relations.² It unsettles mental habits formed by rhetorical conventions and thus induces the pleasures of both a temporary relief from the boundaries of internalized rules and an increased flexibility of mind.

And yet, this antimimetic core of literary nonsense is not predicated upon a rejection of narrative—a trend developed later in experimental literature and appropriated by certain literary theories. Even though the narratives of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass follow a dynamic of their own and are more fragmented than their realistic counterparts, it is no coincidence that Lewis Carroll—the “double” of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a Victorian mathematician of Christ Church, Oxford—has created two of the most unforgettable imaginary worlds.

I am interested here in this nonmimetic if not antimimetic relationship between words and worlds and the statement it makes about our mimetic mental habits. I therefore propose to analyze Carroll's texts as an eccentric form of literary communication, a communication which celebrates the excess that literary language is able to produce in relation to a signified imaginary world, a narrative of “mere nonsense.” This reading will explore the cultural function of literary nonsense within the larger framework of an “ecology of mind and language,” by folding the delirious space of nonsense back upon the “potential spaces”³ that it dynamically mobilizes in the reader: the dream and logic. I will end with a playful construction of a “culture contact” between two imaginary worlds that share a delight in the effects of surfaces: Victorian nonsense and postmodernism. If we filter our most cherished (theoretical?) constructions of postmodernity—schizophrenia and simulacrum—through Carroll's looking-glass of nonsense, we might perhaps discover a tacit complicity of these categories with a tradition of thinking in terms of mimetic representation that we otherwise claim to have abandoned.

Alice in Wonderland begins with a dream-like displacement of its main character. During a free fall through the rabbit-hole Alice loses the ground of her own culture and lands in a “wonderland” whose inhabitants—a weird and colorful bunch of creatures, animals, cards, legendary beings, and all sorts of nonsense characters—have their own anthropomorphic culture, live and dress like humans, and speak their language but ostensibly disregard its conventions and rules. Seven-year-old Alice encounters this world as alien, nonsensical, unpredictable, and threatening—especially since she herself, shortly after her arrival, changes so profoundly that she is confused about her sense of herself.

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass belong to the Victorian genre of nonsense-literature, a genre whose very label indicates a refusal to make sense while at the same time engaging in aesthetic communication. The denomination “I am nonsense” provides a metacommunicative frame, which claims that the refusal to make sense is meaningful. We are thus faced with the aesthetic paradox of literary nonsense as sense.

The following reading highlights a possible aesthetic experience of nonsense located in a realm which engages dream and metacommunication. This space could also be viewed as profoundly nonmimetic, as a space that carefully avoids the middle ground of an imaginary world constructed according to conventions of realism or verisimilitude. Critics have often compared the surface phenomena of Carroll's textual wonderland with the dream, the fairy tale, or the projection of an alternative world whose meaning is constituted through its differences from conventional systems of meaning in our quotidian world. As we can infer from the designation “nonsense,” these differences lie less in the order of things than in the order of sense: that is, the symbolic order.

“Where there is sense there has to be complete order,” says Wittgenstein—an assumption immediately and immensely complicated by Carroll's texts. This very assumption, in fact, remains controversial to this day, when the most diverse theories of language have challenged not only the codes and conventions of symbolic orders but the status of order itself. The most profound challenge concerns the very notion of referentiality in language and, as a side-effect, some of the most basic categories in literary criticism such as mimesis on the one hand and realism on the other.

Nonsense is a sense produced by a disorder in the system of meaning. According to Rudolf Arnheim, disorder results not from a lack of order but from a collision between different systems of order within a larger system. Nonsense can be defined accordingly not as a lack of sense, then, but as a collision of systems of meaning—a collision that invites a new relationship between the involved systems or even causes them to collapse.

In both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass the plot is framed by a form of culture contact.⁴ At a superficial level, the cultural systems brought into contact are the culture of a Victorian girl and the cultures of wonderland as well as the looking-glass world. But there is also a contact between cultural sub-systems, such as that between formal logic and the symbolic order, or the language of the dream or schizophrenia and so-called ordinary language. In her attempts to mediate her own cultural presuppositions with those she encounters in the foreign culture of wonderland, Alice becomes a pilot figure for the reader. Throughout the texts her perspective maintains a constant awareness of both cultures and their differences. Far from observing a fusion or amalgamation of different cultures or a blurring of the boundaries between them, we thus experience in Carroll's textual world a sequential chain of collisions that maintains and even highlights the boundaries, while at the same time challenging them in the production of meaning. Gradually Alice develops a perspective that can change instantly and at will between her own and the “alien” cultural system.

However, her acculturation is a merely pragmatic one: her sense of the other culture as irreducibly alien remains intact and continues to determine her responses. She learns to speak and to act “inside” while observing from the “outside.” Without ceasing to perceive the otherness of wonderland as bizarre, she nonetheless begins to experience otherness as the norm of an ‘inverted world.’ Most often the effects of otherness are produced by a particular use of language, namely a complex game of ‘referentialities’ in which the characters constantly choose references that violate the conventional use of a word or a phrase.

Carroll's texts also play with certain mimetic effects, that is, with specific similarities to forms of alternate consciousness such as the dream or schizophrenia. At the beginning and the end of Alice in Wonderland the narrator evokes the dream as a metacommunicative frame. The fiction of a completely alien and nonsensical world is thus mediated by a familiar framing perspective. Like the dream, Carroll's wonderland displays a proliferation of rhetorical condensations and displacements, as well as a high degree of visual language. Free from the constraints of linguistic codes or a mimetic reality principle, the narrated events dispense with the familiar relationship between cause and effect as well as time and space. Surprising yet smooth metonymic transitions govern a set of narrative sequences in which actions or dialogues are constantly disrupted, while seemingly unmotivated shifts are taken for granted.

The plot is governed by phantasms of changing bodies: Alice's first culture shock consists of the sudden changes of her size, and further transformations of bodies occur throughout both tests—prominent examples include a baby that transforms into a pig, an egg that becomes Humpty-Dumpty, or a cat that melts into a mere grin. Thoughts materialize as images and wishes are instantly fulfilled: the Cheshire cat can make herself partly or wholly invisible, while insects are visible from afar. Time, personified and treated like a bodily creature, may simply stop moving. Often Alice's adventures recall typical nightmares—such as, for example, her falling into a deep hole, trapped in a tiny space, or barred by a locked door. As in a dream, language is both malleable and concrete: words are condensed, dialogues stripped of their pragmatic function, meanings are displaced metonymically, are suspended or transformed; released from its ties to the pragmatics of a world of familiar causes and effects, language becomes a material that is formed and used according to different rules that must be discovered as we go along.

But a close reading reveals that Carroll's texts are very different from a quasi-mimetic representation of a dream. The dream model, in fact, turns out to be a deficient if not deceptive framing device—deceptive, however, in a significant way. While dream elements indeed help to constitute the textual world, they are organized and shaped such that they do not create a dream but nonsense. This “nonsense” is mediated by Alice's subject position, which combines the role of an active agent exposed to the hazards of culture contact with that of an observer who, instead of becoming absorbed by her dream world, stays at a safe distance. In order to gain a primary orientation to her new cultural environment, Alice uses the whole arsenal of her Victorian school wisdom—preferably logical operations and rational argumentation. Logic, or more precisely the logic of a child, is called upon to keep her from dissolving into the dream-like dissolutions and transformations of wonderland. But it is precisely with this logic that she produces nonsense.

Thus dream and logic become the first two signifying systems that collide in Carroll's text. Alice's precocious references to her Victorian book-learning and her diligent “logical” argumentations themselves appear nonsensical within the cultural context of wonderland. The wrong conclusions typical for the mechanically applied logic of a child enforce this effect. For example, Alice imagines that after her free fall through the earth, she will meet people on the other side who walk on their heads. This fantasy of a world turned upside down is at one level, of course, nothing but the literalization of an idiomatic image extrapolated from the logic of her own perspective. At another level, however, the same image playfully evokes an ironic concretization of a non-Euclidean space.

But perhaps more important than the rational result of such mental operations is the abstract trace of an effaced emotional cathexis. Each contact with a foreign culture threatens one's own constructions of a cultural identity, all the more so when, as in the case of Alice's wonderland, the foreign culture is based on modes of thought that resemble the dream. Alice has a fundamentally ambivalent experience of this dreamlike structure. While its negative effects appear to be a loss of self, its positive lures are the wish fulfillments of fairy tales. Her first experience in wonderland is a sudden transformation of her body in which fairy tale elements are mixed with characteristics that define a schizoid dissolution of the self. As in a fairy tale, food and drink display the labels “eat me” and “drink me.” As we know from fairy tales, such oral seductions always contain the threat of black magic, that is, of the use of a poison or potion that leads to an unwanted transformation. After succumbing to this oral temptation, Alice shrinks to the size of a mouse or grows instantaneously into the tops of the trees.

At the basic structural level of bodily transformations, these corporeal changes resemble schizoid sensations of the body ranging from a dissociation of body from self to the independent development of distinct body parts, which are then personified and perceived as foreign to the self. This “disorder” in the relationship between parts and whole also entails a loss of control over bodily functions, as exemplified by Alice's perception of her feet being so distant from herself that she plans to send them Christmas presents in order to make them favorably disposed toward her.

Alice reacts to these diverse images of a loss of self and body with a double strategy of rational distancing. In her favorite game, of being two persons, she enters into a rational discourse with herself in which she tries to convince herself that in her transformed body she can logically no longer be “I” but must be an other. Through this paradoxical construction, which follows the rules of logical nonsense games cherished by children, Alice nonetheless secures her “I” in a double way, a strategy which appears as a completely formalized reflex of a possible psychic economy of such pseudological operations. If Alice were right, the threatening changes in her new cultural environment would no longer affect her, but the “other.” At the same time, however, Alice also manages to maintain herself linguistically, since the act of saying “I am Not-I” presupposes within the logic of language an “I” that sustains its linguistic boundaries.

The collision of dream and, by extension, schizophrenia and logic characterizes not only the actions of literary characters, but also the fictional construction of the textual world and the devices that generate nonsense. Like the dream, schizophrenia, too, provides only certain structural affinities or, more precisely, a negative foil for the nonsense world. Nonsense absorbs crucial features of both the dream and schizophrenia, such as the condensation and flexibility of its images and the freedom from logical constraints. However, the precise operations of nonsense mark a clear distinction from the unboundedness of the dream or schizophrenia. Critics who have compared Carroll's wonderland or his looking-grass world with the dream or a schizoid world have often emphasized structural affinities between the two at the expense of the distinctive features of nonsense.⁵ Such equations tend to turn the dream into a referential world and nonsense into a mimetic effect. They thus totalize dream and schizophrenia as modes of experience that Carroll does evoke, but only to transform their characteristics into the decidedly different effects of nonsense. After all the dream is, as Elizabeth Sewell has convincingly argued, only an opponent in a game that nonsense plays with logic.⁶

The characters in wonderland or in the looking-glass world show a tenacious insistence on logical operations that even exceeds the one displayed by Alice herself. The caterpillar, for example, challenges Alice's logical construction of her identity with a different logic. Its simple question, Who are you? is only a pretext for a quasi-philosophical dialogue about the linguistic and psychological foundations of the self. The caterpillar's discourse reveals that Alice can say “I,” but only at the price of losing her identity. Asked to explain what she means when she says “I am no longer myself,” Alice answers: “I can't explain myself because I am not myself, you see.” The caterpillar's laconical answer, “I don't see” is characteristic in its insistence on a literality which is, of course, nonsensical, given the familiar rhetorical use of “I see.” But this “nonsense” is inspired by an implicit philosophical reflection of a formal, symbolic logic—a reflection that plays with the tension between pronoun and speaker-reference.

Due to the nonsense-characters' fanatic insistence on literality, Alice increasingly loses the rhetorical securities of her own symbolic order. This insistence on literality harbors at its core the dream of an absolutely unequivocal language, a language that is either completely formalized or else establishes an absolutely mimetic relationship to the world. Carroll's texts show that any dream of a totalized mimesis, that is, a dream that attempts to efface the difference between map and territory or signifier and signified, will in fact produce nonsense. This is epitomized in Humpty-Dumpty's absurd request that a name mimetically represent the shape of a person—a request in which he consciously uses the dream of a mimetic equation between word and object in order to assert his power over the discourse with Alice.

As Alice's internalized tacit rule of using language and rhetoric conventionally—that is, nonliterally—becomes problematic, the links between sound and sense emancipate themselves from the conventional linguistic code. The newly generated forms, however, continue to reflect upon these conventions and their cultural implications. Poems, for example, turn into parodies of Victorian education. Unmoored from their coded signification, free to follow an economy of pleasure and desire, sounds can generate significant displacements and ambiguities. The ethic of the duchess, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves,” is obviously not shared by most of the wonderland characters. Rather, they invert this ethic, an inversion which, for that matter, is in perfect tandem with the fact that the duchess's formulation itself is a sonorous echo of the English proverb “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves.”⁷

Under close scrutiny it becomes quite obvious that the characters' obsession with referentiality and literality serves—as in the case of Humpty-Dumpty—a much more mundane purpose than the pursuit of a puristic philosophy of language. One aim of their unconventional use of language, especially their mania of contesting and arguing, as well as their competition as smart-alecks—seems to be their desire to control language and communication. They entrap Alice in weird language games, the rules of which change not only from character to character but from case to case. The most salient common feature of these language games is, in fact, the characters' insistence that they determine the rules of the game and, whenever necessary, that they can change them or spontaneously invent new ones. For example, despite his preposterous request for mimetic name-shapes (ironically replicated and subverted, for that matter, in the tail-shaped tale), Humpty Dumpty has developed his own absurd philosophy of a private language, in which the meaning of a word can be defined independently from a cultural context or a linguistic convention—a philosophy that guarantees him absolute sovereignty over language and communication. The fact that he personalizes this language—assuming that verbs are proud and have a temper while adjectives can be manipulated at will—only adds to his imperial gesture of a master of language, since it feeds into his general fantasies of controlling inferior beings.

Linguistic imperialism and power are also the motifs of numerous language games played by other characters. Mutual understanding and exchange as a basis or a motif of communication is replaced by the overarching goal to use or twist specific rules and arguments in order to win the language game. To this end, the characters develop their own rhetorical system in which their favorite figure appears to be metonymy. Alice can hardly start a conversation without her “opponents” changing the conversational frame, preferably by a metonymic displacement that allows them to criticize her inadequate use of language, thereby forcing her to engage in a meta-level of conversation that focuses on its very rules. Alice's “inadequacy,” however, is the result of the deliberately “foreign” gaze of the other characters who, by ignoring Alice's linguistic and cultural context, are able to reveal linguistic ambiguities that would disappear within the adequate context.

The characters' “language-game” is thus less a Wittgensteinian “language-game” than a competitive rhetorical game based on restrictive rules and oriented toward a winner. Within the frame of this game, communication is most successful where it would fail according to the rules of so-called ordinary language or communication. The winner in this language game is the one who most successfully outsmarts the other with linguistic puns or other tricks. “Language game” thus primarily means a game with language. But in order to outsmart another rhetorically, characters must know their linguistic and cultural conventions and rules, allowing them then to focus on their weak spots. The “weakness” of language that the characters exploit for their own purposes of asserting a linguistic imperialism results from the very fact that language generates a nonmimetic referential system full of ambiguities. “Weakness” in language is produced by words that allow for a double or multiple meaning, rhetorical figures of speech or idiomatic phrases that play with double meanings, homophones or homonyms—in short, all imaginable ambiguities of language. The structural foundations of such ambiguities are precisely those domains which deviate from the characters' nonsensical insistence on a mimetic equation between words and objects and form the core of Carroll's nonsense, namely metaphor, metonymy, and metacommunication.

Alice in Wonderland is, then, a text about literality. Strictly speaking, the characters' language games place a taboo on metaphor. In all of their dialogues, the characters in wonderland seem to obey the tacit rule that one must—literally—say what one means and mean what one says. They in fact use this very rule strategically in order to produce deliberate “misreadings” of Alice's metaphorical speech. Moreover, they indulge in metonymic language-games and in displacements of a word from its context in order to take advantage of the resultant linguistic ambiguity. Whether the characters insist upon a literality that defies linguistic conventions or upon a linkage between sound and sense that defies context, they invariably blame Alice for ambiguities and require that she adhere to a literality which they themselves are far from applying. Their insistence on literality plays out the ideal of symbolic logic: the notion that there could exist a logically constructed language so formalized that it would be completely free of ambiguity.

From a different perspective, this ideal of symbolic logic converges with the ideal of mimetic unequivocality. In both cases language would provide an absolutely infallible map for reading the world. The characters oppose the ideal of such a formalistic or else a completely “mimetic” language to the ambiguities of so-called ordinary language. If each word and each utterance had only one logical or one mimetic reference that would remain the same through all possible uses, there would be no metaphorical or metonymical speech, since metaphor and metonymy play with multiple meanings and displacements of meaning. The characters thus challenge what belongs to the most habitual forms of rhetoric, namely to say one thing and to “mean” another.

The second dimension of Carroll's nonsense, metacommunication, functions in a similar way. Metacommunication emerges in the space between map and territory and presupposes an acknowledgement of their difference. In the characters' dialogues, metacommunication follows as a logical consequence of their verdict on metaphor. At the very moment that characters render the tension between “saying” and “meaning” explicit, they simultaneously discard the initial frame of communication and establish a metaframe within which they communicate about communication. Whether through their obstinate insistence on literal meanings, their sophistic game with metonymic displacements, or their playful shifts from one level of communication to another, they always seek to destroy an established frame of discourse—in most cases the one established by Alice. The dialogues thus become “metalogues.”⁸

The master of this strategy is Humpty Dumpty, who already sets up his questions as linguistic traps:

“How old did you say you were?” […] “Seven years and six months.”—“Wrong!” […] “You never said a word like it!”—“I thought you meant ‘How old are you?’” […] “If I'd meant that, I'd have said it.”

(p. 265)

Such strategies of argumentation lead to an artificial metalinguistic discourse that takes advantage of our unconscious use of habitual forms of speech. According to de Saussure, we acquire the use of such forms of speech as a kind of tacit knowledge that never becomes conscious. When we turn this tacit knowledge into an object of metacommunication, we create an artificial practice of speech that precludes any spontaneous communication. Under certain conditions, the only possible escape from internalized patterns of communication is to establish a metacommunication about the conditions and patterns of communications. But to shift systematically and regularly to a metacommunicative level and to consciously bring to mind and challenge the tacit rules of speech, as the characters in wonderland do, means to give up any regular communicative exchange. In this sense, the characters resemble a driver who consciously reflects on every single act of steering a car and becomes incapable of driving.

The characters' metacommunicative language games thus unsettle the referential relations within speech. Its pragmatic dimension is shifted toward the games with language and the strategies of metacommunication as such. In conjunction with the characters' insistence on literality and univocality, this metacommunication sharply distinguishes the language games from the dream, which ignores the logical exclusion of contradiction and hierarchical distinctions among different levels of communication. The dream acknowledges only its own frame, which marks a different mode of consciousness and experience. Within this frame, the dream elements interact with each other in a highly flexible and nonhierarchical way, thus producing the condensations and displacements that characterize the dream's mode of representation.

Alice, however, does not dream; she rather falls with her waking consciousness into the different culture of the wonderland, which has many resemblances to but as many differences from the dream. One of the most crucial differences is its inhabitants' obsession with logic. As we have seen, Alice's adventures in wonderland are based on a collision between these different orders. The order of the dream collides with the order of logic, and both are mediated through but also collide with the order of Alice's Victorian culture—which by now forms a kind of impossible or lost middle ground. Alice measures the speech of the characters in wonderland according to the norms of her own symbolic order. But in its confrontation with the different order of dream and logic, this very order is in a way threatened by its own extreme poles, namely, its origins in the dreamlike primary processes of early infancy and its utopian ideal of univocality and the self-identity of formalized logic.

During Alice's adventures in wonderland, the collision of her symbolic order with dream and logic performs a parody of this symbolic order by turning it into nonsense. At the same time, however, dream and logic form a complementary challenge for Alice, since she must reconcile both their order and the new order of the wonderland with her own symbolic order. On the one hand, the affinities between the wonderland and the dream force Alice to learn how to dedifferentiate her own system of order, to deal with condensations and displacements, and to tolerate the dissolution of familiar boundaries and identities or unities. On the other hand, the affinities with logic and especially the taboo placed on metaphor and idiomatic speech force Alice to satisfy the requirements and differentiations of a metacommunicative language game that questions the very premises of her own discursive practice. From both directions, the dream as well as logic, the means of communication are “distorted” (in the double sense of a productive Verfremdung and a practical disturbance of communication). Both threaten to undermine communication, since both the refusal of metacommunication as well as the reduction to metacommunication generate a communicative aporia. Paradoxically, however, the insistence on literality, which ultimately plays with a refusal of metacommunication, produces a veritable proliferation of metacommunication. This convergence creates the discursive energies of Carroll's nonsense.

These considerations return us to the affinities I emphasized at the outset between nonsense and the dream or schizophrenia. Both the dream and schizophrenia are characterized by a certain literality of words and language. Freud has described the schizophrenic's use of language as a confusion between Wortvorstellung (the representation of a word) and Dingvorstellung (the representation of a thing). For the schizophrenic, the word is a thing. But this is precisely why the schizophrenic is threatened with a dissolution of the boundaries between self and world. Language no longer mediates between interior and exterior spaces or self and other; it becomes other and turns into an object that invades the self and effaces its boundaries. Carroll's text not only plays with literality, but activates it in conjunction with the typical fears and dissolutions of schizophrenia: fantasies of the distortion and fragmentation of the body, confusions between parts and whole, autonomous functioning of organs, discontinuities between parts and whole, distortion or reification of language—in short, with all those forms of dedifferentiation, which also characterize the primary processes. The decisive factor, however, is how the text molds and integrates these forms of dissolution. For like the dream, schizophrenia in Carroll's text is only an agent in a language-game, the effects of which are derived from asserting the hegemony of logic within a cultural frame.

Literality is an important strategic element in these logical games, since the ideal of a formal logic is oriented toward the univocality of a completely unambiguous meaning. Because it effaces any ambiguity between signifier and signified, a literal meaning would fulfill this ideal. But the literality of a logician is very different from that of a schizophrenic; furthermore, the literality played out by the characters in wonderland draws upon both systems without fitting into any one of them. The crucial difference between the use of literality in nonsense and schizophrenia lies in the fact that for the schizophrenic the word becomes an “object” invested with materiality, depth, and a phantasmatic corporeality, while for the nonsense-characters the word is an empty literal surface, a mere container of meaning that resembles a “thing” only in the sense of its own reification. Both nonsense and schizophrenic discourse efface the rhetorical space between signifier and signified, then, but they do so in very different ways.

In Logique du Sens, Gilles Deleuze has outlined the basic differences between Carroll's nonsense and schizophrenia. The comparison between these categories has been inspired by what Deleuze calls “traps of resemblance.”⁹ For Deleuze, Carroll's language is a surface effect, while the language of schizophrenia—exemplified by Artaud's polemical rewriting of Carroll's Jabberwocky—inscribes itself into the depth of the body and absorbs its cathexis. Schizophrenia remains the “other” of nonsense, but an other that is never allowed to penetrate through the surface of nonsense. Deleuze reads Artaud's remark “there is no soul in Jabberwocky” (“il n'y a pas de l'âme dans Jabberwocky”)¹⁰ as an indication of the general emotional emptiness and flatness of Carroll's text. This quality distinguishes it dramatically from the empassioned discourse of the schizophrenic which, emptied of meaning, pursues less the recuperation of meaning than the destruction of the word.¹¹ The effects of this schizophrenic discourse reach below the surface of language and, in fact, destroy the surface of language:

Non-sense no longer releases any surface-meaning: it absorbs and swallows all meaning both at the level of the signifier and at the level of the signified.¹²

The schizophrenic's destruction of the word also effaces its linguistic functions:

Not only is there no longer any meaning, but there is also no longer any grammar or syntax and ultimately even no more literally or phonetically articulated syllables.¹³

Deleuze shows how, by contrast, Carroll depends upon a strict grammar. As I argued earlier, Carroll also depends on maintaining the boundaries between self and other or a word and its meanings—including those boundaries which his characters challenge for their own strategic purposes. This is why Deleuze plays Artaud's depth against Carroll's superficiality, and why he follows Artaud in rejecting Carroll's safe distance from the schizophrenic other that haunts his text. Artaud attributed this distance to an “English snob” about whose text he remarks: “This is the work of a man who ate well and one feels this in his writing.”¹⁴

This juxtaposition of Carroll and Artaud may be given another turn. A decade and a half after the publication of Deleuze's critique, Jean-Jacques Lecercle uses Deleuze's reading of Artaud against Carroll in order to charge Deleuze with being a “Romantic philosopher.” In Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Lecercle writes:

One might say that, in Logique du Sens, Deleuze is turning into a Romantic philosopher, abandoning the classicism of the historian of philosophy and finding his own critical way by crossing the frontier with literature in style, content and general attitude. Of course, Deleuze's Romanticism is, at best, odd. In the broadest possible terms, one can describe Romantic theory and practice as based on a contrast between poetry, or the language of emotion and subjectivity, and science, or the language of rational argument and objectivity.¹⁵

If we draw out the implications of Lecercle's argument, we might conclude that what Deleuze criticizes in Carroll through Artaud is that Carroll the scientist, has won over Carroll the poet—even when the scientist Dodgson relinquishes his logical rigor to Carroll the poet. In this respect nonsense would be generated through a tension with poetry, a tension brought about by another collision between two signifying systems and rhetorical practices, namely the two cultures of science and poetry. But Lecercle reminds us also that Carroll's nonsense does not leave us indifferent, and that in order to account for its pleasures we must understand its grounding in what Lecercle calls délire.

While Deleuze foregrounds the contrast between schizophrenic discourse and nonsense, délire rather emphasizes the link between the two. Deleuze defines the relationship between signifier and signified according to a dialectic of lack and excess. Lecercle discovers this dialectic as a central characteristic of nonsense:

Too much signifies, and too little is signified; The abundance of words balances the lack of meaning. After all, délire is first characterized by logorrhea, an unceasing flow of words, indicating that communication is no longer possible.¹⁶

In this respect, delirious speech could be characterized by its severing of any mimetic ties to the referential space of the “signified.” And yet in Carroll these ties are never really given up. Instead of logorrhea or a free flow of words or sounds we have a sequence of constant disruptions of the signified, which, rather than a flow, creates a movement of violent shifts—shifts of the kind enforced by the nonsense characters when they require Alice to abandon the frame of familiar rhetorical conventions. Lecercle addresses this problem when he discusses the paradox of nonsense, namely the proposition “I mean not to mean.” Conceptually, such paradoxes can be solved using the theory of logical types, that is, by distinguishing levels of text, the framing and the framed. Lecercle, however, argues that literary paradoxes of this kind cannot be solved by the theory of logical types:

Yet, clearly, this does not work for the kinds of tests which are classified as literary, or for our delirious tradition. They resist the distinction, they deliberately blur the frontier, they organize a game of mirrors in which the question of who speaks, and at what level of signification, can never be satisfactorily answered.¹⁷

Lecercle sees the literary paradox of “I mean not to mean” rather solved by the effects of délire in language:

So the absence of intended meaning, the lack of a signified, is balanced by an excess of signifiers which in turn creates meaning. […] In the excess of signifiers, language speaks on its own. Deleuze's conception enables us to understand this genesis of sense, the presence of délire as a necessary part of language.¹⁸

I believe that we may go one step further than Lecercle. I would argue that Carroll often produces this excess of signifiers precisely by engaging the theory of logical types, that is, more concretely by having his characters distinguish between levels of text and between framing and the framed. Rather than residing in “the preverbal psychic expression of somatic drives”¹⁹ as it does in schizophrenic discourse, délire in Carroll resides in the effects of a pastiche of the theory of logical types, in the characters' deliberately inappropriate distinctions between levels of texts and in malicious confusions between framing and the framed. One could say that Carroll contains the effects of schizophrenic délire within the surface of a language that is not a mirror of nature but a mirror of rhetorical conventions gone mad.

Because of their communicative structure, the specific ways in which Carroll's texts exploit rhetorical affinities with schizophrenic dissolution are strikingly relevant. One could read this structure as an early literary response to a very specific form of cultural schizophrenia. The very same linguistic operations that form the core of Carroll's nonsense—namely metaphor, metonymy, and metacommunication—coincide with what Freud, Bateson, Lee, and others have identified as the specific failures of schizophrenic communication. These theories argue that, unable to identify metaphors, the schizophrenic takes them literally and treats them as reality. Moreover, the double-bind of schizogenic communication places a taboo on metacommunication.

This taboo placed on metaphor and metacommunication also characterizes the communicative patterns that the characters in wonderland impose upon Alice. And yet, they treat the rhetorical conventions of metaphor and metacommunication in a decidedly different fashion from the schizophrenic. While the latter is unable to identify these modes of speech, Carroll's characters use them obsessively in order to claim univocality or in order to introduce ever new metacommunicative frames. This is why instead of producing the discourse of a schizo they simply produce nonsense. On the other hand, as we have seen, this very nonsense draws some of its energies from playing with affinities to schizophrenic discourse. In this respect Carroll's nonsense appears as an abstract parody of schizophrenic discourse achieved by its logical inversion.

Alice is right, then, to complain about the characters' strategies to drive her insane. However, as the Cheshire cat pointedly remarks, everybody is insane in wonderland. The cat's attempt to logically prove its own insanity confirms this statement—albeit against the grain of the logical argument—since it uses a pseudologic that turns out to be the classical parody of logic.

“A dog's not mad. You grant that?”—“I suppose so,” said Alice. “Well, then,” the cat went on—“you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.”

The Cheshire cat's proof of its own madness consists in a distorted syllogism, which in turn typifies schizophrenic logic. Paradoxically, the proof therefore turns out to be both right and wrong at the same time, since the wrong logical conclusion is evidence for what had to be proved in the first place.

The flawed argumentation of the Cheshire cat exemplifies the characters' logical games and metacommunicative abstractions in general. It reveals that, while formally being an instrument of differentiation and abstraction and thus generating a counterbalance to the dedifferentiations of dream and schizophrenia, the metalogical games in fact turn out to be mere the inverse of the same rhetorical and cultural problem. Both the characters' logic and metacommunication are full of confusions of logical types, wrong logical conclusions as well as systematic confusions of levels of communication. This false logic paradoxically produces displacements and distortions that in some respects resemble those of the dream. In a similar way, the obsessive games of shifting the frame of communication ultimately generate a general dissolution of frames. Logic and metacommunication thus lose their absolute polarity with the dream or with schizophrenia. Their opposition is effaced by nonsense.

How then does this nonsense affect Carroll's readers, who are both outside the frame of wonderland and outside the frame of Alice's own symbolic order? What is the language game that the text plays with its readers? While at first glance this game may resemble the language games played by the characters, its effects accomplish yet another inversion. Like Alice, Carroll's readers must experience the inadequacy of their communicative competence and discover the rules of a “foreign” language game. They must expose themselves to the diverse processes of dissolution and dedifferentiation as well as to the effects of a flawed logic and a renunciation of metaphor.

But in contrast to Alice, the reader may experience these games as a source of pleasure, since they appear in the tamed form of a narrative that is framed as nonsense. According to Freud, the pleasures of nonsense result from the fascination with what is prohibited by reason.²⁰ Nonsense reopens the pleasurable sources of language that tend to seep away once the dominance of the function of judgement is established within language.²¹ In order to rejoice in this pleasure we must, as Huizinga has argued, “slip into the soul of a child and prefer the wisdom of a child to that of an adult.” Originally written for children, Carroll's nonsensical language games share basic features with childhood games. They develop within a closed psychological frame in which primary and secondary processes may playfully interact or merge with each other.

Carroll's game is a game with language that uses linguistic rules and rhetorical conventions as its elements in order to generate an artificial speech located in a realm that partakes of the primary undifferentiation of the dream, the secondary differentiation of the symbolic order, and the tertiary differentiation of symbolic logic. Aesthetically, this game draws upon all three of these domains and plays with transgressing the boundaries between them. Carroll's pleasure is based on making mockery of restrictive systems of order—the symbolic order of Victorian culture, the codes of language, and the formalistic order of symbolic logic alike. In this respect, nonsense creates affinities not only to play but also to jokes. Like the joke, nonsense draws its effects less by engaging our reflective consciousness than from a spontaneous if not unconscious insight.

In many ways, its comic effects resemble those of the joke. In both cases, a sudden insight may open a channel to the unconscious. But this is also the point at which they differ. While the joke makes its point by playing with an unconscious understanding of social taboos or cultural repressions, nonsense plays with internalized rules of language, rhetorical conventions, or modes of thought. The latter are also unconscious—not in the sense of a dynamic repression, but in the sense of habitual modes of thought or unconscious rules of language, which, according to de Saussure, never reach consciousness, even though they are acquired culturally.

This difference between nonsense and the joke also accounts for the fact that nonsense does not share the cathartic effects of the joke. Nonsense may once in awhile generate laughter but, as Elisabeth Sewell has argued, laughter is not essential to it. Its pleasures derive from a less dramatic subversion of our categories and habits of thought. Both the joke and nonsense challenge the symbolic order: the former by mobilizing unconscious desires or fears, the latter by questioning our very systems of meaning. If during this process nonsense establishes, as in Carroll's case, a secondary closeness to the unconscious it is because the latter uses any rupture of the symbolic order and any deviation of the code for its own purposes. In Carroll's case the links to the unconscious are further enforced by the previously described affinities to the dream and schizophrenia. Logic and the pleasure principle meet in a space where the pedant's delight in the controlling functions of order, categorization, differentiation, and segmentation implodes, transforming into the complementary delight in chaos and subversion. Nonsense rediscovers those pleasures in language which the child knows before it must succumb to the function of judgment and the dictates of linguistic codes.²²

In contrast to the joke, the pleasures of nonsense are not consumed by a spontaneous insight. Instead of an affective catharsis, nonsense rather generates an impulse further to reflect upon or reconstruct what offered itself to a spontaneous understanding. This in fact happens in a very specific sense. As we have seen, the characters' language games are governed by metacommunication. If these games generate an impulse in the reader to reflect upon their conditions and effects, that is, an impulse to “understand” nonsense, then we can say that Carroll invites the reader to enter into a metacommunication with the text itself.

Strictly speaking, this communication is a metacommunication about metacommunication. Apart from illuminating the functioning of language, the conditions of successful or unsuccessful language games, or the internalized rules of language, nonsense also reveals the functions of metacommunication as such. While for the characters metacommunication is a strategy to win the language game against Alice, it produces a double effect on the reader: During a spontaneous reception, the reader enjoys the cunning of language and symbolic order, but during a metacommunication with the text, he or she may turn nonsense into sense. The history of literary criticism on Carroll testifies to this second form of response. Carroll's texts have not only become classics of children's literature but also standard works, which to this very day are referred to by philosophers, mathematicians, linguists, and literary critics who have followed its invitation to metacommunication.²³

The metacommunication with the reader gains a specific relevance in relation to the “other” of Carroll's text, namely dream and schizophrenia. With its framing label “I am nonsense,” the text creates a receptive disposition that the dream ignores and that is precluded from schizogenic communication. If the schizophrenic were able to identify metaphor and metonymy or use metacommunication, he or she could escape the traps of a communicative double bind. With its self-designation as nonsense, literary nonsense by contrast offers already an invitation to metacommunication. The reader thus is compelled to activate precisely those modes of consciousness which the dream and schizophrenia lack. One could even be tempted to speak of a schizoid experience with built-in therapy. Like Alice, the reader must perform acts of both differentiation and dedifferentiation. Nonsense generates pleasure by a curious admixture of both receptive activities.

It is true that literary nonsense breaks through conventional frames; but instead of succumbing to the anarchy of unboundedness, it replaces them with different ones, which often result from a privileging of rigid linguistic rules over more flexible rhetorical conventions. Precisely in this respect, nonsense may teach us an important lesson about the “ecology of signs,” since it illustrates that the overly rigid use of linguistic rules and the attempts to eliminate the ambiguities of language do not strengthen but, on the contrary, undermine its communicative functions. Nonsense, one could say, thus beats the system with its own means by imploding it from within. Rather than resulting from a rebellion against law and order, dissolution and anarchy are produced by an overly rigid insistence on rules.

Nonsense stretches the receptive dispositions of readers in two directions. The formal dedifferentiations, with their affinities to the dream and schizophrenia, appeal to the unconscious while the metacommunication increases self-reflexivity and the conscious awareness of tacit rules and conventions of speaking. In this respect Carroll's text anticipates certain features of the highly experimental texts of Modernism. Nonsense forms an alliance between dream and logic in order to challenge the boundaries of so-called ordinary language. But at the same time, nonsense is never truly subversive in a radical sense. The formal procedures of nonsense contain and neutralize its subversive potential. The threatening aspects of a schizophrenic dissolution, for example, are not only contained aesthetically but also psychologically. Nonsense even plays dream or schizophrenia and logic against each other: logic domesticates the dream, even as the dream undermines the rigid boundaries of logic. Neither one is allowed to dominate the other. Their collision transforms both into nonsense.

This chain of arguments leads us back to Elizabeth Sewell's thesis introduced at the beginning of this essay: that literary nonsense rather refers to mental relations than to a world of objects. We may now specify this perspective and say that rather than “referring” to mental relations in a quasi-mimetic way, nonsense establishes a metacommunication about mental relations. The difference lies in the fact that nonsense operates at a higher level of abstraction—even when it is most playful and paradoxical.

This metacommunicative aspect of literary nonsense will be reactivated in multiple ways by the later forms of experimental literature, which—as Michel Foucault and Hans Blumenberg have pointed out—are characterized by an aesthetic coexistence of an opening of language toward the unconscious (the dream) and a high degree of formalization (logic). Historically, we will see a change in literary experiments with the boundaries of language. The aesthetic potential of dream and logic will be freed for literary experiments with more serious cultural claims than Carroll's nonsense games. While Carroll developed his nonsense techniques at a time when realism was at its height in British literature, in later experimental literature both the opening of literary language toward the unconscious and its abstract formalization break with the conventions of mimesis and literary realism by creating new spaces of literary communication. They insist on “making sense” with literary forms of speech that resist specific cultural codifications. These literary experiments still rely on self-reflexivity and metacommunication, but less in order to obtain a secondary stabilization of their communicative systems than to reflect the blind spots of these systems.

Klaus Reichert has argued that Carroll's nonsense can be read as an anticipatory parody of modernism.²⁴ The textual adventures in wonderland may seem like a parody of the fragmented, playful, yet also highly self-reflexive devices of literary modernism. Edith Sewell points out that nonsense is produced by a segmentation and fragmentation of elements that pertain to an indivisible whole. If we then read nonsense as an anticipatory metacommunication about literary devices developed later, nonsense may reveal an important insight into the aesthetic coexistence of an opening of literary language toward the unconscious and its self-reflexive formalization. In finding ways to communicate how these different aspects belong together and cohere in a larger cultural context, the new experimental forms of literature have made use of Carroll's devices. But they also have moved beyond the mere production of nonsense in order to enter into a literary language game which expands the boundaries of a codified symbolic order as well as a long tradition that valued literature mainly for its mimetic functions.

We might well argue that Carroll marks the beginning of those far-reaching challenges to our cultural notions of mimesis and representation which culminate in what we have come to call the simulacra of postmodernism. But then we seem to have come full circle: If our conventional rules and perceptions fail to distinguish the signifier from the signified or the simulated from the real, are we then not exposed to confusions between map and territory or words and objects similar to those experienced by Alice in wonderland? The “surface-intensities” that Frederic Jameson evokes as characteristic of postmodern experience, in fact, recall the délire of nonsense. But if the simulacrum is postmodernism's privileged form that displaces “re-presentations,” have we then not entered a phase of inverted mimesis?

I would prefer to turn the question around and ask: Is the privileging of the category of the simulacrum in current critical theories not perhaps rather indicative of the fact that we tacitly continue to harbor a notion of mimesis at the core of our critical apparatus? And the same could, in fact, be argued for the category of postmodern schizophrenia. Our inclination to posit and then tag the fragmented and hallucinatory surfaces of postmodern culture with labels such as “simulacrum” and “postmodern schizophrenia” betray a desperate urge to “re-territorialize” them within a space that is radically “other,” yet at the same time uncannily familiar. The designation of “simulacrum” allows us to harbor the illusion that we are always elsewhere and that the realities we inhabit are “only” simulated—albeit with the perfect mastery of a mimetic artist. The designation of “schizophrenia,” on the other hand, helps us to evaluate the overwhelming sensation of increasing intensities and fragmentations with a familiar “pathology,” which remains nonetheless irreducibly other.

Our critical approximation of either Victorian nonsense literature or postmodern culture with the pathologies of schizophrenia may then be seen as a “mimetic fallacy,” a move to recuperate these forms of literary practice within a tradition from which they have broken away. This mimetic fallacy enacts a critical evasion, sparing us the pains of actually encountering them on their own terms. In his introduction to The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner writes: “The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.”²⁵ In this formulation, both life and nonsense lose their cutting edge. By sheer coincidence, this “idiot mathematician” may then well have anticipated some of the most pertinent features of a “postmodern simulacrum of schizophrenia”—but the willful simulation also saves him and us the tortures of a schizophrenic experience.

Regarding this tacit sibling-rivalry between mimesis, simulacrum, and schizophrenia, it seems interesting that Deleuze historically played out the depth of Artaud's modernist “discourse of the schizo,” while the postmodern literary forms rather engage in the play of simulacra and surface effects. Could it be that what some critics call “postmodern schizophrenia” is a form of pastiche whose affinities to the phenomenology of schizophrenia are rather based on what Deleuze calls “traps of resemblance”? And, in consequence, does what Jameson calls the “waning of affect” in postmodern culture not rather resemble more the “safe play” of nonsense than the existential abyss of schizophrenia? Or do I with this construction fall into the same kind of romanticism that Lecercle criticized in Deleuze? But if, on the other hand, this were true, then we could expand Reichert's statement and say that Carroll's nonsense may also be read as an anticipatory parody of postmodernism and its enchantment with simulacra and effects produced at the surface of language.

Notes

1. Cf. Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965, “Introduction,” p. 8.

2. Cf. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense, London: Chatto and Windus, 1952, Chapter 1, pp. 1-6.

3. I evoke this term in order to recall D. W. Winnicott's assumption that literature opens up a “potential space” between the social and the inner worlds of the reader. Cf. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, London, 1971.

4. I use this term in the broad sense defined by Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, where Bateson argues that not only the concrete encounter between different cultures can be considered as a form of culture contact, but also the contact of different systems within a specific culture (as, for example, the contact between nuclear family and school system).

5. Cf., for example, William Empson, “The Child as Swain,” in Donald J. Gray, (ed.), Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 1971.

6. Cf. Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense.

7. Cf. also Martin Gardner's annotations, p. 121.

8. Cf. Bateson's “metalogues” at the beginning of Steps to an Ecology of Mind.

9. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969, p. 113.

10. Ibid., p. 114.

11. Ibid., p. 118.

12. Ibid., p. 122 (my translation).

13. Ibid., p. 122 (my translation).

14. Quoted from Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p. 114; (my translation).

15. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass. Language, Nonsense, Desire, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985.

16. Ibid., p. 107.

17. Ibid., p. 110.

18. Ibid., p. 111.

19. Ibid., p. 111.

20. Cf. Sigmund Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” Studienausgabe, p. 119 “Reiz des von der Vernunft Verbotenen.”

21. Ibid., p. 123.

22. Cf. Freud, “Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten,” p. 119.

23. Cf. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965.

24. Cf. Klaus Reichert, Lewis Carroll. Studien zum literarischen Unsinn, Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1974, pp. 7-39.

25. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, p. 15.