SOURCE: “Literature, Philosophy, Nonsense,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 30, No. 3, July 1990, pp. 256–65.

[In the following essay, Tilghman examines the philosophical significance of nonsense in Aymé's tales of the marvelous.]

In this [essay] I want to suggest a thesis about the relation between philosophy and literature and I will do this by an examination of the role of nonsense in some of the short stories of the French author Marcel Aymé.

Nonsense became a philosophical category only in the early twentieth century and was first introduced by, I believe, Bertrand Russell with the theory of types. It was the syntactical restrictions enjoined by the theory of types that allowed Russell to charge that many of the assertions of earlier philosophers were not simply false, but in fact made no sense. Nonsense was given a deeper dimension by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus with the distinction between the sayable and the unsayable: nonsense results from the attempt to say the unsayable but, ironically, it was everything of importance in life that he believe to be comprehended under the latter. That aspect of the Tractatus was totally missed by logical positivism which sought to use the verification theory of meaning to distinguish the meaningful statements of empirical science from the nonsensical pseudo-statements of metaphysics. Wittgenstein went on to provide a still richer exploration of nonsense in the Philosophical Investigations where he locates a craving for nonsense in certain deep aspects of our language and our life. It is this craving that he believes is responsible for much of traditional philosophy which, on his view, turns out to be grounded in conceptual confusion and therefore a kind of nonsense.

Given the fact that a good case can be made that the notion of meaning and all it implies for the distinction between sense and nonsense has been the primary concern of twentieth-century philosophy, at least Anglo-American philosophy, it is surprising that in their aesthetic studies the role that nonsense has played in literature has gone almost unnoticed by philosophers. Lewis Carroll's Alice books are, of course, the obvious exception to this, but the attention they have drawn has usually been directed towards picking out the philosophical theses and jokes rather than towards the larger possibilities of nonsense as a literary device.

It may not be so surprising that literary critics and commentators have not seen those same possibilities or have not even been aware of the existence of the kind of nonsense I want to call attention to. To be sure, literature has always recognized a garden variety of nonsense that exploits made-up words, silly situations, and unlikely juxtapositions exemplified by Jabberwocky, the ‘nonsense’ verse of Edward Lear, and that American folk classic ‘I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago’.¹ What I have in mind, however, is rather different from that and can be illustrated by some of the short stories of Marcel Aymé.

Marcel Aymé (1902–1967) has not been widely read in the English-speaking world and very few of his seventeen novels, twelve plays, and eighty-three short stories have been translated into English. Aymé is generally considered to be a writer of what the French call contes des merveilleux, tales of the marvellous. What can be categorized generically as the marvellous has long been a staple of French literature. Since at least the twelfth century the literature of France has been populated by sorcerers, giants, ogres, fairies, and strange events. Literary historians have devised a number of ways of sorting out and classifying the various themes of these contes des merveilleux. Marcel Schneider, for one, distinguishes between fairy tales, horror tales, and fantasy literature.² In slicing up the domain of the marvellous it has not been recognized that one of its sub-divisions belongs to a brand of nonsense. I want to direct attention to the literary and philosophical importance of that brand of nonsense and at the same time to call attention to an interesting author who has unfortunately been neglected by English-speaking readers.

Many of Aymé's stories clearly are contes des merveilleux. One of his best known is “Le passe muraille,”³ ‘the man who could walk through walls’. A clerk of modest and regular habits suddenly discovers that he has the ability to walk through walls unhindered. Worried by this derangement in his daily life, he went to the doctor who readily diagnosed his problem and prescribed two powders together with a regimen of overwork that would surely put him to rights again. He took one of the powders but put the other aside and forgot about it. Meanwhile he began to learn that his new talent had certain advantages. He thrust his head through the wall of the office of his tyrannical boss and shouted imprecations at him. After a few repetitions of this the unfortunate man had to be taken to the mad house. He discovered that he could walk in and out of bank vaults and serve himself as he pleased. The headlines soon spoke of little else than the phantom bandit. He entered into an affair with a married woman and found it most convenient to walk directly through the wall into her bedroom. One day he suffered from a headache and so took some headache powders before going off to visit his lady love. Alas, however, it was not only a headache powder that he took, but the forgotten prescription as well. The additional dosage took effect just as he entered the wall and before he emerged on the other side. And he is still there lamenting the untimely end of his career.

And then there is “Fiançailles,”⁴ “The Betrothal”. It seems that a woman had read so much Greek mythology that when her son was born he turned out to be a centaur. The father kept this shame hidden away from public view on his large estate and had him privately educated. One day when luncheon guests were strolling about the grounds they accidentally encountered the young centaur. The guests had a daughter—the first human female he had seen apart from his mother—and he was immediately smitten with her and she with him. An engagement was arranged on the spot and to celebrate the girl hoisted her skirts, climbed on the back of the centaur, and went for a trot around the estate. Both, needless to say, found the experience rather erotic. He seized the occasion to venture for the first time beyond the walls of the estate. Once beyond the grounds he had his first encounter with the realities of life when a passing policeman gave him a summons for indecent exposure. It was then that he spied a young mare in the pasture across the way. She was the first of her kind that he had ever seen and something deep was stirred in the other half of his nature. He threw his betrothed into the ditch and galloped off with the mare. Neither has been seen since.

Delightful as they are, it is not these stories that I want to talk about, but three others that treat, in a fast and loose manner, of the subject of time. These three are “La carte,” “Le décret,” and “Rechute.”⁵ “La carte” is set in Paris during the German occupation. Shortages of nearly everything make life increasingly difficult and it is decided that in the interest of efficiency time, like all else, should be rationed. Ration cards are issued. Strong and productive workers and those in necessary occupations are, naturally, given more days to exist per month than old people and those in less vital capacities. Prostitutes are allotted only seven days per month and Jews, regardless of age, sex, or occupation, are permitted to exist only a half day each month.

There are, of course, inconveniences in the new order brought about by the decree. An old man married to a young wife is in bed when his time period runs out. He returns to existence in the same place as before only to find himself between his wife and her more virile lover. In no time at all a black market in time cards has sprung up. Poor workers sell their cards to feed their families; the wealthy are buying them up and living more than their share. Some are able to amass enough tickets to live forty, fifty, even sixty days a month. Fortunately, however, another administrative decision soon cancels the programme.

The story entitled “Le décret” also begins in wartime Paris. It has long been a custom each summer to set the clock ahead an hour or two to take advantage of the extra daylight but now the authorities decide on a far bolder step. The war has become a terrible burden for all sides and so the warring powers agree—and it is a universal agreement—to set the clock ahead seventeen years in hopes that the war will have been over by that time. Once the decree takes effect it is found that the war is indeed over and fortunately another has not broken out.

The narrator must take a trip to a small rural town to visit an old friend who is ill. When he arrives in the town he is surprised to encounter German soldiers and upon enquiring for his friend is startled to learn that he is still a prisoner of war in East Prussia. He wonders whether the decree has somehow never been announced in this remote corner of the country but then the truth begins to sink in and he realizes that he really is back in 1942. He returns to Paris to find it in the throes of the German occupation; he returns to an apartment house that hasn't been built yet and he must find his old place; and he returns to children that are still small and two of whom haven't been born yet. He sees people in the streets whose acquaintance he won't make for years. He remembers all the things that are going to happen. Little by little, however, these memories of the future begin to grow dim and before long all is as it was.

“Rechute,” unlike the other two, is not a story of the occupation. The Chamber of Deputies has just passed the ‘twenty-four’ law making the year twenty-four months long. As soon as the law took effect everyone found himself exactly half of his previous age. Grandmother who was in her late sixties is now ready to go out on the town. The girl who is the principal character in the tale was eighteen and just engaged to be married; she wakes up to find herself nine years old and her fiancé thirteen. The army is suddenly composed of ten and eleven year olds whose adult uniforms swallow them and who can scarcely carry their automatic weapons. All, however, retain the experiences and habits of mind of their former ages.

The girl's fiancé now scorns the child of nine for, as he says, between nine and thirteen there is an abyss and he reminds her that they are divided by certain physiological realities. Later on, with the aid of her brother, she forces him to reveal those physiological realities which turn out, alas for him, to be in proportion to his scrawny thirteen year old frame. As we should expect, the class of newly created children is restive, there is disorder in the streets, the army of children—let's not say ‘infantry’—cannot be relied upon, and eventually the twenty-four law is repealed and all is returned to where it was before.

Unlike the other stories, these three exploit a kind of conceptual nonsense and do not simply trade in fantasy and whimsy. It is the kind of nonsense that results from misusing the word ‘time’ and its friends and relations by assimilating its grammar to that of some other concept. Thus time is spoken of in the way that we speak of commodities that can be bought and sold, rationed and hoarded, and so on. Or the notion of moving the clock up for summer time is assimilated to rescheduling an event or changing its venue. Or time is treated as if its dimensions were subject to legislation as the dimensions of the football pitch can be changed by action of the rules committee. What Aymé has given us in each of these tales is a picture of time, i.e., the word ‘time’ is incorporated into a series of descriptions that are appropriate only for another notion.

What is perhaps the most familiar picture of time that we often make use of is that of a river upon which our life and the world is carried from past to future. As a poetic conceit this is certainly harmless and sometimes may even be apt. Gripped by this picture, nevertheless, we may be led to push the figure into doing duty for which it was not intended and begin to ask questions about it that we would ask about real rivers: how fast does time flow and might its rate change? Is there some high ground or vantage point from which we might see what is around the next bend in the future? Might we not turn the barque of our lives around and paddle back upstream? While these are exactly the questions we want to ask about rivers, they have no application to time; no sense has been given to them. An innocent trope can lead us to ask ‘What then is time?’ and we find ourselves in nonsensical metaphysical speculation.

It is this very idea of a picture that is the basis of Wittgenstein's criticism of traditional philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations. Philosophical problems are said to arise when language goes on holiday [§38] and thus is not doing its usual job, that is, when the use of certain expressions is mistakenly assimilated to that of others so that these expressions turn out to have no use, no role to play in either language or life. Thus are born those misleading analogies that are the stuff of philosophical theories, those pictures that hold us captive [§109] and prevent us from seeing the world aright. In the stories I have just mentioned Marcel Aymé is exploiting—deliberately—exactly the kind of nonsense that Wittgenstein believes is the very stuff of philosophical theory.

The illusion of sense surrounds many of these events. We may think we can imagine a sudden transformation in which everyone has a body just like the one he had at half his age, or people vanishing for so many days each month and then reappearing. It is tempting to comprehend all this under the traditional category of fantasy and to think it is one with what the wicked witch does in changing the prince into a frog. We hide all the difficulties by whispering ‘Magic!’ and think no more about it.

Whatever the intelligibility of any of that, the nonsense at work in the stories that I want to consider enters with the description of the goings on as alterations in time brought about by legislative enactment. It is as if these descriptions are offered as explanations of the strange events: ‘Why is Josette in “Rechute” suddenly a little girl again?’ we ask and are told that it is because they passed that law doubling the length of the year. It is important to focus our question on the right target. It is one thing to note that a piece of legislation cannot bring about a physical change, no act of Congress by itself can increase the length of the Mississippi River; that is an empirical truth. In addition to the legislative enactment it would require digging new channels and raising new levees. We can describe clearly what it is that the act of Congress cannot by itself bring about. Can a law nevertheless change the year? Our inclination is to say no. We can always divide the year into twenty four rather than twelve months or decide to count two revolutions of the earth about the sun as one year instead of two, but that changes only how we count birthdays—recall the unfortunate chap in The Pirates of Penzance who was born on February 29 of a leap year—but that is not at issue and in any event temporal processes continue the same. (What would it be like if they didn't?) Since no other sense has been given to the expression ‘changing the year’ we cannot say what it is that the piece of legislation is supposed not to be able to do.

That these stories of Aymé's are built around a piece of nonsense has not been recognized by his commentators. Jean-Louis Dumont, for example, says that ‘Aymé has found in the concept of time the possibility of a notion contrary to the one men have of it’⁶ and again, ‘his intentions are neither to horrify nor terrify his reader; he simply wants to make him laugh by upsetting the natural order of things’.⁷ This is surely wrong. He has not presented us with another possibility at all nor has he upset the natural order which he would have to do by suggesting some alternative order. If he is talking nonsense, then he has removed all place for a new possibility or revised order of things. What we laugh at is the nonsense wrapped up in a picture that radiates the illusion of sense. Each of these stories is an extended conceptual joke.

Equally off the mark is Graham Lord's comment that “La carte” is in part ‘a pseudo-philosophical glance at the relativity of time’.⁸ The relativity of time belongs to the esoteric reaches of physical theory and has nothing to do with Aymé's playing fast and loose with our ordinary ways of talking. To be sure, “Le décret” mentions several theories of time, including relativity, but that itself is all part of the joke.

Although it is not specifically about Marcel Aymé, the following remark of Marcel Schneider's is revealing:

It is science itself which restores fantasy to the universe rationalized by the encyclopedists and from which the scientism of the 19th century had pretended to extort its secrets, not only in inventing prodigious machines and means of destruction which disorient thought, but also in rendering precarious, vacillating, and illusory all the certainties on which scientists had built their edifice and which serve as religious dogmas for modern man.⁹

Schneider is obviously referring to the replacement of Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time by Einstein's relativized ones, to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and quantum theory with its particles that aren't anywhere or are two places at once, to Gödel's theorem, and the like. In other words, twentieth-century science is supposed to have done a great many of the very things that the fiction of fantasy has done. It is in this spirit that Graham Lord mentions, apropos of Aymé, ‘this questioning of what is often regarded as stable and absolute’. Jean Cathelin, for another, sees him as writing a kind of science fiction, only doing it better than the likes of Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov.¹⁰

In the next paragraph after these reflections on modern science Schneider suggests that the French may have something to learn from Lewis Carroll whom they had hitherto dismissed as merely a children's writer. The juxtaposition of these topics implies that Lewis Carroll may be one of those who have put the conceptual certitudes of our world in doubt. This has to be a misreading of the adventures of Alice. We recognize Carroll's nonsense as nonsense precisely because we see it against a background of sense. Carroll's point in playing with nonsense is not to put anything in doubt or to entertain any new conceptual possibilities, but is to remind us where sense is to be found.¹¹ And so it is, I think, with Marcel Aymé. His play with the nonsense about time is intended to remind us of what the conceptual restraints on our lives really are.

Everyone is agreed that something more, quite a bit more, is going on in these stories in addition to the time fantasy. By and large the critics are right about the nature of this something more—at any rate, it is not necessary to dispute any of the details of it with them. Of “La carte” Cathelin says:

the satire here is at once social, philosophical and political; the fantasy here serves only to highlight more intensely character traits in a time of penury, of an inhuman and ferocious bureaucratism which believes that in order to find a solution to no matter what problem it is enough to regulate something.¹²

It is worth pausing to add that one of the explicit themes of “La carte” is the resentment of the narrator, a writer, at being included in the decree along with these other ‘useless’ ones. Writers are characterized as among the ‘consumers whose maintenance is not compensated for by any real return’. The narrator admits that he would have expected the decree to apply to painters and musicians. Aymé's playful but not quite unobtrusive proposition is that writing (and reading) are in danger of being understood as uncompensated, or improperly compensated, consumptions of time. We might reasonably take this story as making an issue, however playfully, about the importance of writing and about whether, in particular, it is worth the time that it takes.¹³

It is much the same with “Le décret.” The nonsense about remembering the future directs attention to something important about life and human relations. Think how our relation to another is altered when we know what is going to happen to him; that the company has, for example, already decided to fire him and you are bound not to tell him. The narrator's reflection that ‘youth which has nothing to learn is not youth’ is a reminder that our concept of youth is not simply a chronological one, a matter of from these years to those, but is in addition the concept of a moral, that is, a human condition, a stage on life's way, if you would. This very same reminder is what makes “Rechute” such a wonderful commentary on the nature of childhood and the logical conditions that make the relation of parent to child what it is. The authority of the parent over the child is not merely a matter of discrepancies in size and physical competence, but is in part a function of the moral incompleteness of the child who must be guided and led and pushed and prodded not only into the paths of righteousness, but also into satisfying the daily necessities of life. This is brought home to us by representing the moral competence of the adult clothed in the body of a child. The unfortunate composite being is forced to submit to the direction and correction appropriate to a child and the result can only appear as degradation to the adult in child's clothing.

Aymé's stories must not be understood as offering speculative theses about the nature of time, theses which careful examination show to be nonsense. The stories do not advance theories that could demand examination independently on their own merits. Aymé is using nonsense deliberately to say something about the human condition. What is going on in his stories must be distinguished from the inadvertent introduction of nonsense into literature where the aim is to present a piece of philosophy. Sartre's La Nausée is a case in point. There is little doubt that Sartre meant La Nausée to present metaphysical theses about the nature of the world, that everything in the world is contingent and therefore human practices have no justification, and so on. As philosophy this is elementary confusion and scarcely worth the effort of straightening out. In using his novel to state philosophical theses Sartre falls victim to all the snares and delusions of that kind of philosophy. Fortunately for his readers it is possible to take the novel as offering something other than metaphysics. When we read it carefully in order to follow the fortunes of its hero we sense that Roquentin's worries about necessity and contingency, being and becoming, may be better understood as the manifestation of his dissatisfaction with the lack of direction in his own life and his repugnance at the bourgeois culture of Bouville. What is presented as philosophy becomes instead the vehicle for the expression of what in the most general terms can be described as a mood or frame of mind and is thus not really philosophy at all.

What I have been saying about philosophical theses in literature is in direct opposition to a view of the relation between the two held by Peter Jones. In Philosophy and the Novel Jones says, ‘I do not examine the literary embodiment of the philosophical views I abstract from the text, … I do not consider the particular contexts within the novel which occasion the philosophical utterances. …’¹⁴ When we look closely at the context in which those supposedly philosophical remarks occur we do not find them conveying philosophical theses at all, but instead expressing or describing some observation about the course of the world or human relations. It is only when they are taken out of context that they can appear to be theses.

It will be instructive to end with a comparison of Aymé's way with nonsense and the way of a philosopher who had learned much from Wittgenstein about how to expose nonsense by telling stories. I am referring to O. K. Bouwsma who raised to an art form the technique of teasing and tickling us with nonsense by telling stories intended to produce philosophical insight, a technique that others practice at their peril. Aymé never explains to us that his nonsense is nonsense. He lays out a situation with a perfectly straight face and proceeds to talk about things just as if they did make sense and were the most ordinary in the world. It must dawn on us that it is all nonsense. To get the point we must already have a nose for it, a quickened sense of the queer, as it were. Aymé, after all, is teaching us about people and not about nonsense. He is teaching us about people through the medium of the nonsense of conceptual jokes.

Aymé's literary practice is thus rather different from Bouwsma's philosophical practice, the fact notwithstanding that Bouwsma's practice is also very much a literary one. We can see this in his article ‘Descartes’ Evil Genius'¹⁵ where the Evil Genius undertakes to deceive the innocent and unsuspecting Tom. His first evil essay in that direction is to make everything out of paper. For a time Tom is deceived into thinking that the flowers, his beloved Millie, and even his own body are real, but before long he is undeceived by suspicious crinklings and tearings. Bouwsma makes it explicit that this story trades on our ordinary understanding and familiar use of words such as ‘deception’, ‘illusion’, ‘real’, and the like; in this part of the story we find whimsy, but not nonsense.

Having failed in his first attempt the Evil Genius tries again and this time succeeds, but only too well. All conceivable tests for flowers and Millie turn out positive. The Evil Genius suggests to Tom that nevertheless he is being fooled about all those things, but Tom naturally fails to understand his evil insinuations. The criterion of reality and, consequently, of deception being invoked by the Evil Genius now proves to reside in a sense possessed only by Tom's Adversary. In other words, he does not mean what we mean when we speak of real things and deceptions and their ilk and, furthermore, by the terms of the story we can never know what he means. Now the nonsense has entered and Bouwsma can point out to us how Descartes' talk of the possibility of total illusion is the result of the misuse of language—our language—and that it is really without sense. Bouwsma has used these stories to instruct us in the nature of nonsense, how it can get started and the mischief it can work.

Bouwsma, following Wittgenstein, sees the task of the philosopher as one of turning disguised nonsense into patent nonsense [PI, §464]. The point of this exercise is not merely to remove impediments to theorizing or to permit the beauty of clarity to shine through, but is to remove impediments to seeing the world aright, to seeing other people and ourselves aright and this kind of understanding has much to do with how we are to live our lives. And, I would add, with how we are to allow literature to enter our lives.

In his stories Marcel Aymé exploits patent nonsense, but it is nonsense that passes for neither philosophical theory nor philosophical therapy. Anyone who has developed a philosopher's nose for the use and misuse of language is in a position to distinguish what Aymé is doing in these tales from fantasy and the marvellous and to note its conceptual nature as well as its kinship with the confusions of traditional philosophical theory. And especially are we now in a position to appreciate how this species of nonsense can be a vehicle for conveying important insights about human beings and their lives and problems.

There may not be enough literary examples of the kind of conceptual nonsense I have been talking about to justify identifying it as a distinct genre, nevertheless there is a significant role for it to play in literature. If this recognition of this role has no other result, it should at least lead us to rethink the spectrum of possible relations between literature and philosophy.

Notes

1. I was born about ten thousand years ago, And there's nothing
   in this world that I don't know.
   I saw Peter, Paul, and Moses
   Playing ring around the roses;
   I can whip the guy who says it isn't so. (And so on.)

2. Marcel Schneider, La littérature fantastique en France (Paris: Libraries Arthème Fayard, 1964). Schneider's book is a useful survey of the marvellous in French literature.

3. In Le passe muraille (Paris: Gallimard, 1943).

4. In En arrière (Paris: Gallimard, 1950).

5. La carte and Le décret are both published in Le passe muraille; Rechute is in En arrière.

6. Jean-Louis Dumont, Marcel Aymé et le merveilleux (Paris: Debresse, 1967), p. 122. (All translations from the French are mine.)

7. Dumont, p. 177.

8. Graham Lord, The Short Stories of Marcel Aymé (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1980), p. 48.

9. Schneider, p. 391.

10. Jean Cathelin, Marcel Aymé (Paris: Debresse, 1958), p. 145.

11. Or perhaps he should be understood sometimes as pointing out the mischief that can be occasioned by inattention to sense and conceptual restraint. The White Queen, for example, favours a system of justice in which the punishment, i.e., imprisonment, comes first, followed by the trial, with the crime coming last. And it is all the better if the crime is not committed at all. This, of course, is to make nonsense of the notion of punishment, not to mention the notion of justice, since the concept of punishment is logically linked to that of wrong doing. We can, nevertheless, imagine imprisonment for crimes not committed—actual examples unfortunately abound. This bears a suspicious resemblance to the idea of ‘preventive detention’ advocated by some upholders of the law in the name of justice.

12. Cathelin, p. 146.

13. I owe this understanding of the story to Timothy Gould.

14. Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 148.

15. In Philosophical Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).