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Masaryk UniversityFaculty of Arts
Department of Englishand American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Jakub Tuek
Nonsense and Unreason in the Proseof Woody Allen
Bachelors Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D.
2008
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I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
..Authors signature
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I would like to thank Mr. Hardy for cooperative and constructive approachand my wife for patience during the writing process.
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Table of Contents
Introduction............................................................................................. 4
Chapter 1 ............................................................................................... 10
Chapter 2 ............................................................................................... 25
Conclusion ............................................................................................. 37
Works Cited ........................................................................................... 42
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Introduction
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Should the beholder have poor eyesight, he
can ask the nearest person, which girl looks good.
(Allen 64)
Woody Allen is an American movie director producing almost regularly one film
every year for the last four decades; many of his movies have been very well received
by both the audience and the critics, and have won prestigious awards. This is what
many people know about the neurotic man in black rimmed glasses, which is the face
Woody Allen has been presenting to the world. Not so many people have read Woody
Allen's short stories and I was not successful when trying to find a work of criticism
dealing with them. This might seem to indicate that the short stories are not worth
dealing with. In postmodern literary criticism, however, the literary value has become a
vague term and many works are no longer treated with the "basic scorn for the popular
text that grows from the postclassical judgment that prior knowledge of hegemony
precludes the need to look seriously for answers within the text" (Grimsted 568). This
opinion I readily accept. I intend to analyze Woody Allen's Without Feathers,
disregarding the fact that Allen's short stories might be perceived as mere fun, pseudo-
intellectual prattling, self-indulgent trash or combination of all these three. This is, in
my opinion, a very superficial reading of Woody Allen. It might not seem fruitful to
input any more intellectual work in analyzing trash, but on the other hand it might be
precisely what the short stories need to gain some value. "To say that the value of any
cultural analysis is related to the thoughtful intensity given to the artifact is both to say
the obvious and to say what needs to be said most in the classical and postclassical
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popular culture debates" (Grimsted 563). In other words, in postmodern criticism the
value is in the eye of the beholder and his/her willingness to analyze.
Without Feathers is a collection of short stories published in 1975. The individual
stories issued before in various magazines and are very varied. Formally, there are
notebook excerpts ("Selections from the Allen Notebooks"), encyclopedic/educational
articles ("A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets"), artistic literary attempts ("The Early
Essays"), whodunits ("Match Wits with Inspector Ford") and other types of texts.
Frequent themes are culture ("Lovborg's Women Considered" or "If the Impressionists
Have Been Dentists"), urban society ("No Kaddish for Weinstein"), history ("A Brief
Yet Helpful Guide to Civil Disobedience" or "But SoftReal Soft"), religion ("The
Scrolls") or language ("Slang Origins"). None of this is, however, of real importance for
the analysis of the work, since its main feature is nonsense. Once this statement is taken
in consideration, it is analyzing the genre of the work that is the key to its correct
understanding. Nonsense is nonsense, and trying to analyze its themes, motifs, plots,
ideas or contents of the texts is useless. It is characteristic of literary nonsense that the
themes and formal properties of the text are only means of perfecting the structure.
Nonsense literature is characterized not by the meanings of its elements, but by the
patterns in which these elements are organized. For correct reading and understanding
ofWithout Feathers, it is essential to prove that it has the structure of nonsense.
To be able to do this, a theory of literary nonsense is needed. Working with
nonsense, however, is a slippery job and trying to create a "bulletproof" theory is very
difficult. Any theory of nonsense cannot be very far from patchy at best, as nonsense
theorists tend to agree. In this dissertation, I work with theoretical texts by two authors,
Wim Tigges and Jean Jacques Lecercle. They both analyze nonsense structurally, which
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is the reason why their works are of interest for my argument. Their approach, however,
differs in the degree of striving for coherent theory of nonsense as a genre.
In his essayAn Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, Wim Tigges tries to define
nonsense quite strictly. He starts by reviewing and commenting on past nonsense
criticism and continues by creating his own theory of nonsense as based on canonized
works by Lear, Carroll, Morgenstern, the Marx brothers and others. He is also very
intent on delineating what nonsense is and what nonsense is not (in the second and third
chapters of the book, pages 47 to 138). He tries to arrive at a state where clear lines
could be drawn between the genres of nonsense, joke, the absurd, parody, satire,
grotesque, surrealism, dada, fairy tale, nursery rhyme, myth and light verse. This
precision has a double edge. Tigges certainly gives answers to some of the questions
about structures of nonsense literature especially helpful is his notion of "unresolved
tension" (as will be explained below), which is also the basis for differentiating between
nonsense and other genres. On the other hand, his meticulous approach results in a very
close adherence to the heritage of the founding fathers of nonsense, Lewis Carroll and
Edward Lear. In Chapter 4 of the essay, he divides all works of nonsense into two
streams "learean" and "carrollean". This might be seen as a setback from the point of
view of this dissertation, since it virtually proclaims the death of nonsense as a
productive genre; all there is to nonsense has already been created by either Lear or
Carroll and has only been developed little further by other long dead authors. As the
argument developed in this dissertation shows, I cannot quite agree with this view; my
definition of nonsense will not be as strict as Tigges's and therefore I will only use those
chapters of his book that deal with the formal properties of nonsense.
Jean Jacques Lecerle's contribution to nonsense criticism is double: He deals
directly with Victorian nonsense in his bookPhilosophy of Nonsense. The Intuitions of
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Victorian Nonsense Literature. Here he does not try to broaden up the canon of
nonsense works, but applies a strictly linguistic approach to nonsense. This bears fruit,
since as said above, to work with nonsense, we must get over the fact that it mostly does
not make sense. An analysis on the levels of phonology, morphology, lexicology and
pragmatics, to the highest possible degree cut off from the level of semantics, which is
the most problematic in the case of meaning, allows Lecercle to observe patterns of
nonsense in the classics of the genre. As with Tigges, the setback of this approach is its
limitation to dealing only with the canonized works, that is almost exclusively with the
Alice books. InPhilosophy, Lecercle does not try to create a theory of nonsense
applicable to other works; he just presents a new approach to the canon.
Lecerle's The Violence of Language is a counterweight in the sense that it does not
deal only with the genre of nonsense, but with all kinds of instances where language
does not behave as people would like it to. In Violence, Lecercle shows the problems
both the scholar and the common speaker can have with language. Scholars try to set
borders to language, but must constantly face the problem of white spots on the map,
the instances that are outside all prescriptive systems of rules the rules of correct
grammar, the usage or the generative principles. Speakers must often face the fact that
despite their wish, language is not in their possession, not an obedient tool, but a thing
that seems alive in their mouths; the relationship between a language and a speaker is
one of mutual shaping at best. These broad observations are complemented by
structurally explicated examples. The problem with Violence of Language is that only a
small portion of it pertains directly to nonsense. Its
