Edgar in Wonderland: Elements of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe

The names of Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe would seldom appear together as literary kindred spirits. While Carroll\u27s imaginative tales have delighted generations of children and continue to provide vivid bedtime story memories, Poe\u27s tales produce equally vivid nightmares. A comparison of the two writers\u27 works, however, leads to the startling realization that despite their apparent differences, Carroll and Poe used the same tools and techniques to explore the same epistemological and existential questions. Like artists dipping into the same colors and simultaneously painting the same psychic landscape, they created eerily similar literary canvasses. Carroll has long been recognized as a Nonsense writer. Nonsense as a literary genre is a game in which the playing pieces are verbal signs and symbols--the elements of language. In her book Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, Susan Stewart has identified five operations of Nonsense: reversals and inversions (inversion of categories, inversion of metaphor, discourse that denies itself, movement between levels of discourse); setting boundaries of discourse (a marking off of a particular time and space); play with infinity (repetition, quotation, nesting, circularity); simultaneity (paradox, puns, portmanteau words, macaronic text, doubles); and arrangement and rearrangement within a closed system (anagrams, secret languages, codes, games). Using Carroll\u27s two Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark as a basis for comparison, the reader will find each of these five operations abundantly represented in Poe\u27s fiction as well. A demonstration that Nonsense techniques are operative in Poe\u27s works offers a valid new dimension of critical appreciation for his art; ultimately, however, the stylistic criteria--the how of Nonsense--are merely signposts to a more significant aspect of Nonsense: the why. Nonsense offers an escape into an autonomous world free from common sense and the restrictions of conventionality. When we make sense of our world and our life experiences, we arrange those elements--by means of language--into a meaningful relationship with each other. Nonsense, then, is a function of order and relation rather than of meaning. Nonsense is not the absence of sense, but a subversion of conventional linguistic, temporal, spatial, emotional, or ethical forms accepted as sense. Thus an understanding of the work of Nonsense helps to illuminate other aspects of the writer\u27s mind and personality. Both Carroll and Poe repeatedly disrupted conventional patterns of order. The disruption of linguistic patterns may represent the intellectual appeal of the game of Nonsense. The disruption of other common sense patterns--physical, psychological, social, moral--reflects the emotional appeal of Nonsense. Ideas or experiences which are too dangerous or too painful to approach in common sense form may be safely explored, analyzed, and, perhaps, defused, in Nonsense form. Both writers\u27 preoccupation with dreams, questions of identity and origins, madness, death or annihilation, and the unnatural or grotesque leads to the tantalizing suggestion that in Nonsense, these dramatically different men sought refuge from the same psychic impulses