The Congruence of Carrollian Nonsense
Résumé
C'est le faict d'un Historiographe d'esplucher toutes ces considérations, & non aux Poëtes, qui ne cherchent que le possible : puis d'une petite scintille font naistre un grand brazier, & d'une petite cassine font un magnifique Palais, qu'ils enrichissent, dorent & embellissent par le dehors' Pierre de Ronsard, Préface sur la Franciade, 1572. 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1865. […] Beau […] comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie. Le Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror, chant VI, 1869. Lewis Carroll's most celebrated texts could well exemplify what John Keats famously defined as 'Negative Capability' (sic), which he saw as the defining characteristic of 'a Man of Achievement' of Shakespearean calibre: 'That is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason' (Keats 109). These intriguing territories where reason seems to vacillate and disappear, giving way to the convoluted pleasures of imagination and triggering wonderment, form the playground of literary nonsense, as elaborated by the talented mathematician and logician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). His texts possess negative capability in relation to what is usually meant by 'sense' in common parlance, although with Carroll there is always 'irritable reaching after fact & reason', since that is precisely what Alice, or the crew of the Snark, or Carroll's readership seek. Almost two centuries after they were produced, Lewis Carroll's literary inventions remain subversive at heart. Nonsense is agonistic by essence, and the conceptual irritation it unfailingly produces appears to be one of its prime motors (Lecercle 1990, 224). Carrollian nonsense is never an attempt at abolishing sense, but an investigation into the functioning of language, an experiment in 'negotiation about where and how far we can get with being sensible' (Swaab 60). A bold experimenter, Lewis Carroll takes the reader as far as he can get into the depths of language and its secret workings, but also into the sombre impalpable grounds of the human psyche. Alice's Adventures Under Ground (1862), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There (1871), and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) were beloved sources of inspiration for Louis Aragon, André Breton (who had to rely on Aragon to translate Carroll, since he could not read English), Raymond Queneau, Salvador Dali and many other surrealists, and contemporary practitioners of OuLiPo. In the entry devoted to Carroll in the Dictionnaire Abrégé du Surréalisme, Louis Aragon writes the following simple sentence: 'À une époque où, dans le Royaume définitivement Uni, toute pensée était considérée comme si Auteur
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