The little fishes’ answer was
‘We cannot do it, Sir, because—’
…
And he was very proud and stiff:
He said, ‘I’d go and wake them, if—’
…
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but—34
Nothing in the context of the poem gives any clue as to what might conceivably follow the dashes and complete the sentences. Readers are left with no basis for imagining, even vaguely, what the missing information might be.
Humpty Dumpty is an ideal character for personifying this type of figurative nonsense, for when no intelligible basis is provided for reconstructing what sort of thing might follow the interruption, an aposiopesis can become nonsensical. In other words, there is no way to put a sentence that is a nonsensical aposiopesis back together again. Similarly, it is impossible to put a broken egg like Humpty Dumpty back together again.
In scenarios such as the farmer who menaced the stranger or the father at his son’s wedding, we can plausibly guess what sort of thing the speaker might have said next. In routine cases like those, an aposiopesis is intelligible, meaningful, and makes sense. However, the poem “Humpty Dumpty,” recited, excludes any hint as to how the aposiopetic sentences might be completed, and that made the sentences aposiopetic nonsense.
A literary critic who highly praised Carroll’s work nonetheless singled out Humpty Dumpty’s poem for some harsh words. He said that this particular poem is “not good nonsense.”35 Similarly, my students reported that the poem grated on their nerves, perhaps because of the repeated interruptions.
This kind of analysis could be made for many other figures of speech that writers like Lewis Carroll used nonsensically. For instance, Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) used alliteration to augment the effect of categorical nonsense in his poem “Nephelidia.” The title echoes the Greek word for clouds, and Swinburne’s alliteration magnifies the cloudy, misty, smoky, confusing effect categorical nonsense has on the mind. The lines below are typical of the poem:
From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through
a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers
with fear of the flies as they float.36
Metaphor is often cited as the quintessential figure of speech. Metaphors are figurative comparisons; they compare one thing to another disparate thing. We can understand a metaphor because we can potentially translate it into an equivalent literal meaning. If no equivalent literal meaning can be provided, an attempted metaphor lapses into categorical nonsense. Concrete examples below illustrate this principle:
Aunt Florene is a pillar of her community.
Uncle Hamperd is a pig.
Their son Lester is a time bomb.
Their house is an excrescence on the landscape.
The meanings of the metaphors above are transparent. We could rework each metaphor into more literal words that mean the same thing. We could substitute literal meanings for the metaphors.
Aunt Florene reliably helps others in her community, and they respect and look up to her.
Uncle Hamperd is lazy, greedy, and slovenly, and he eats too much food.
Their son Lester is an angry person who is bound to act out violently someday.
Their house is run-down and decrepit and surrounded by junk and high weeds in the yard.
Metaphors like these make sense to everyone. No problems arise when we try to rephrase them in literal terms. Sometimes the situation is not so straightforward. Consider the following sentences:
Aunt Florene is an ethereal banana.
Uncle Hamperd is a prancing abstraction.
Their son Lester is an iridescent equation.
Their house is a total potato.
The sentences look like metaphors. They are striking because they are puzzling, though, not because they express an interesting insight. The sentences show that when metaphors cannot be backed by literal equivalents, they turn into categorical nonsense.
To recap, understanding figurative meanings depends on being able to specify equivalent literal meanings. During the Watergate crisis, people instantly understood John Dean’s graphic metaphor, “A cancer is growing on the presidency.” Yet, unless one knows relevant background information, the metaphor appears to be categorical nonsense, for a governmental institution cannot have a physical ailment.
Similes are also figurative comparisons. Unlike metaphors, though, similes use the words “like” or “as” to make the comparison explicit. My favorite nonsense poem is composed primarily of unintelligible similes. Bishop Richard Corbet (1582–1635) wrote this astonishing work to serve as his epitaph. Each of its three stanzas consists of four nonsensical similes and ends in a self-contradiction. The first stanza is as follows:
Like to the thundering tone of unspoke speeches.
Or like a lobster clad in logic breeches.
Or like the gray fur of a crimson cat.
Or like the mooncalf in a slipshod hat;
E’en such is he who never was begotten
Until his children were both dead and rotten.37
Soraismic Language
Soraism is a figure of speech that mixes elements of more than one language, which sounds like a recipe for incomprehension, yet some soraisms do make sense. Consider the following sentence:
Hey, garçon, pour some more eau in my glass and bring moi deux more of those fried oeufs, s’il vous plait.
Anyone who understood both French and English would grasp the speaker’s meaning. Sentences like these may indicate ignorance or affectation, but at least they are meaningful and intelligible. Other times, however, soraisms are meaningless, unintelligible nonsense. For example, consider the following sentence:
Moi, deux some fried belle in garçon, and eoufs those my glass, s’il vous plait.
This sentence is meaningless nonsense to those who speak both languages. Accordingly, soraismic nonsense is a meaningless, unintelligible admixture of elements from two different languages. Writers sometimes use this formula deliberately to create nonsense.
Usually writers who create soraismic nonsense do so for its comic effect. For example, Edward Lear wrote a funny soraismic nonsense poem called “The Cummerbund.” The poem mixes English with words he heard while traveling in India. I placed an English translation beside each Indian word in the excerpt printed below. That way, it is easy to see that the combined effect of the English words and Indian words is nonsense.
She Sat upon her Dobie [washerman]
To watch the Evening Star
And all the Punkahs [fan] as they passed