Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology by Irving Massey

Abstract

 Reviews in the ‘event’ of laughter. e Conclusion addresses competing interpretations of ‘anti-fascist’ laughter and the possibility of a ‘history of laughter’ in view of the model. eoretical material is rich and absorbing though some examples are more convincing than others—Punch and Judy, for instance, as opposed to Love’s Labour’s Lost. e book demonstrates laughter’s ideological stakes clearly but the idea that subject positions are ‘created anew’ (p. ) into ‘new hierarchies’ (p. ) by laughter will be more controversial. Unfortunately, a considerable number of typos get in the way of Bown’s lively prose. ose things aside, this is an ambitious and valuable addition to the field of humour studies because it takes laughter seriously by modelling its ideological import. D U D D Necessary Nonsense: Aesthetics, History, Neurology, Psychology. By I M- . Columbus: Ohio State University Press. . viii+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Nonsense is a subject that scholars have turned to with increasing frequency in the last decades: global politics has perhaps put our faith in the rational under strain. While few accounts escape a mention of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, the field is generally interdisciplinary, taking in psychology, philosophy, cognitive studies, and linguistics. So it comes as some surprise that Irving Massey’s new book on the topic not only admits to not having read the most recent studies, but finds cause for alarm, rather than delight, at these rich new conversations: ‘my consternation on encountering the title [. . .] can only be imagined’ (p. ), he notes of Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s e Nonsense of Kant and Lewis Carroll (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), only half in jest. e range of writers, forms, disciplines, and arguments the topic allows can be liberating and daunting: nonsense is not a subject offering obvious structures, approaches, or conclusions. Massey moves from earlier chapters on nonsense and perspective, and the relationship between inspiration and fanaticism, to the relationship between nonsense and automaticity. He paints an ambitious canvas, and the book is rich with incidental detail. We learn about the reception of Kant in England via Madame de Staël, the rich new readings that poems by Marvell and Herbert can produce when the ‘lens’ of nonsense is applied, and how Lefebvre’s and Hills Millers’ work on metaphor can help us reframe our understanding of nonsense. ere is a particularly impressive account of what Massey terms ‘perceptual nonsense’, pitching Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘inscape’ and Lear’s limericks alongside the field of neuroaesthetics. Despite the range, Massey’s project returns most oen to poetry, and the language games or gems its figurative world permits . ere is an acknowledgement of Matthew Bevis and James Williams’s recent Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), and Massey’s ideas have particular currency for thinking about Lear’s work. MLR, .,   Nonsense theorists must oen grapple with problems of tone and form: how can a scholarly study track the digressive, playful, or contradictory nature of nonsense while shaping a coherent argument? Massey offers his readers a range of ploys: his second chapter, on metaphor and nonsense, includes his own notes, compiled over forty years and complete with highlighted text, and instructions to ‘skip the most awkward passages’ (p. ). Elsewhere, there are digressions, sustained analogies between clouds and sentences, Kant’s notion of beauty pinned onto the everyday, and some striking insights on the relationship between nonsense and ritual. Yet this levity is absent at other moments. Perhaps the necessary unease that writers must have when their subject is nonsense is notable in the implicit moral judgement which hovers throughout the chapters: Massey counters his own ‘downright offensive’ (p. ) accusation that Keats’s poetry might have something to tell us on the subject. Consideration of the moral or ethical grounds of the category would have been a welcome addition. Massey’s project is wonderfully capacious and discursive, and any study of nonsense worthy of the name must balance its interdisciplinary demands with the topic’s call to play. If the open-ended and provisional chapter structures sometimes make it hard to shape a developing argument, they have much to tell us about Hamlet’s clouds. U  S...