“Turvey Top,” a nineteenth-century nonsense poem by William Sawyer, creates an illusory world by using self-contradictions. Like Abbott’s book, the poem evokes a nonsense world in order to satirize the existing human world. It pokes fun at humanity’s foibles and misplaced values.
‘Twas after a supper of Norfolk brawn
That into a doze I chanced to drop,
And thence awoke in the gray of dawn,
In the wonder-land of Turvey Top.
A land so strange I never had seen,
And could not choose but look and laugh—
A land where the small the great includes,
And the whole is less than the half!
A land where the circles were not lines
Round central points, as schoolmen show,
And the parallels met whenever they chose,
And went playing at touch-and-go!
There—except that every round was square,
And save that all the squares were round—
No surface had limits anywhere,
So they never could beat the bounds.
In their gardens, fruit before blossom came.
And the trees diminished as they grew;
And you never went out to walk a mile,
It was the mile that walked to you.
The people there are not tall or short,
Heavy or light, or stout or thin,
And their lives begin where they should leave off,
Or leave off where they should begin.44
exercise
Introspect and Answer These Questions
1. Which type of nonsense did you like best? Which did you like least or dislike? Why?
2. What was your mental process of switching from one type of nonsense to writing another type? Describe your experience.
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21. Nash, “Geddondillo,” 23.
22. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 101–102.
23. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 136.
24. Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 22.
25. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 183–184.
26. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 183.
27. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 192–193.
28. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 69.
29. Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 97.
30. Ibid., preface (no page number is given).
31. Barrie, Peter Pan, 49.
32. Seuss, I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today, no page is given.
33. Disney, Pinocchio.
34. Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 130, 132.
35. From Carroll and Gardner, Annotated Alice.
36. Swinburne, “Nephelidia,” 245.
37. Corbet, “Like to the Thundering Tone,” 27.
38. Lear, “The Cummerbund,” 25–26.
39. Reynolds, Radical Children’s Literature, 46.
40. Benham, A Book of Quotations, Proverbs and Household Words, 449.
41. Cannon, “An Unsuspected Fact,” 242.
42. Abbott, Flatland, 11.
43. Abbott, Flatland, 14.
44. Sawyer, “Turvey Top,” 474.
Chapter 3
Nonsense and the Mind
The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
C. G. Jung
This chapter uncovers deep connections between nonsense and the mind. A descriptive map of the complex mental causes and effects of nonsense will emerge. Consequently, reading this chapter will bring the hidden, unconscious world of nonsense fully into your conscious mind.
We will learn that nonsense is often a structural element of jokes and humor. We will see that talking nonsense sometimes indicates physical or mental illness. And we will understand some important commercial applications of nonsense, including advertising.
Nonsense is also an important uncharted dimension of the personality. For instance, individuals vary dramatically in their psychological responses to nonsense of various types. Studying the exercises students completed in my courses, I discerned fascinating underlying patterns in their responses. Such patterns convince me that there are distinctive, identifiable capacities of the mind that relate specifically to nonsense.
Carolyn Wells was an eminent literary scholar and expert on nonsense who edited The Nonsense Anthology (1905). In the introduction to that work, she said, “A sense of nonsense is as distinct a part of our mentality as a sense of humor.” My research convinces me that she was right, for students who completed the exercises thereby demonstrated six latent powers of their minds.
First, they were able to recognize certain examples of written or spoken language as unintelligible, meaningless, and nonsensical.
Second, they could identify nonsense by type.
Third, they could distinguish among different kinds of nonsense according to their distinctive structural characteristics.
Fourth, they could perceive, appreciate, and describe various aesthetic, emotional, and cognitive effects of nonsense.
Fifth, they could write original creative nonsense of practically any type they studied.
And sixth, they could identify nonsense they had not studied before and characterize their structures by using the principles of typology they had learned.