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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 observations on the borderline cases

of grammar and linguistic usage are, however, very enlightening.

Using these three main sources, I shall try to arrive at a broader definition of

nonsense forms in literature. The result will be a measure, according to which it should


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be possible to define nonsense in works others than the Victorian classics. These non-

canonized nonsensical texts might not be as conspicuously nonsensical as the ones in

the canon, but it will still be justified to regard them as nonsense. To such texts belongs

also Woody Allen's Without Feathers.

In this dissertation, I intend to prove that in short stories collected in Without

Feathersby Woody Allenthere are occurrences of literary nonsense. They are not a

direct continuation of the tradition of nonsenseper se, the purest example of which are

Lewis Carroll'sAlicebooks; there are, however, so many occurrences of "ornamental"

nonsense that it becomes more then just a device. In Chapter 1, I discuss the three above

mentioned theoretical works on nonsense: Wim Tigges'sAn Anatomy of Literary

Nonsense and Jean Jacques Lecercle'sPhilosophy of Nonsense and Violence of

Language. I clarify their slightly differing terminology of the elements of nonsense and

establish the intersecting points of their theories. This results in creating a broader

definition of literary nonsense in terms of unresolved paradox, incongruity without a

punch line and false compensation. Towards the end of Chapter 1, I explore the

relationship between the intertextuality of Allen's texts and parody or satire. In Chapter

2, the choice of Woody Allen's texts is discussed first, shortly explaining why his

movies have been omitted and also exploring the difference between the

children's/dream world of the nonsense classics and the urban, middle-class, intellectual

setting of Allen's stories. A short explanation of the difference between nonsense and

absurdity follows. Then the theory of nonsense devised in Chapter 1 is applied on

passages from his collection of short stories Without Feathers, showing that there are

numerous instances of "ornamental" nonsense. In Conclusion, I evaluate the overall aim

of the work, thus dismissing the possibility of its being a parody or satire. Working with

basic Zen terminology and Michel Foucault's philosophical views, I will also discuss


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possible reasons why writing nonsense literature might be attractive to Allen in the

context of mostly rational Western culture. Nonsense will be presented as a way out of

the cul-de-sac of Western intellectualism and canonized culture.


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Chapter 1

"It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it is rather hard to

understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn't make

it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don't exactly know

what they are! However, somebody killedsomething: that's clear at any rate "

(Carroll 158)

One could hardly disagree with Alice in her observation that trying to understand

nonsense literature is hard. In laymen's terms, to understand means to find meaning, or

sense, the opposite of which is usually called nonsense. How then can nonsense

literature be understood? To a high degree, it can not. The aim of this chapter is not to

try to find some meaning in nonsense. Rather, means of identifying nonsense within a

text will be sought. Nonsense has a structure, or structural patterns, that can be

discerned from the canon of works agreed on as nonsense literature and made into a

theory applicable on works in which nonsense is not generally acknowledged. This

dissertation will honor the above-mentioned canon chosen by Tigges and Lecercle. It's

most essential component are Carroll'sAlice books, with which Lecercle works almost

exclusively inPhilosophy, supplemented by selected poems by Edward Lear and

Christian Morgenstern and excerpts from Marx Brothers used by Tigges.

Probably the most significant and most important feature of nonsense literature is

paradox. In nonsense literature, the reader is forced constantly to accept paradoxes at

various textual levels. The point is for the author neither to resolve these paradoxes and

chose one of the opposing sides, nor to use the formula of Hegelian dialectic and from a

thesis and an antithesis to create a dialectic synthesis. Rather, the point is to hold the

paradoxes apart, to stretch the boundary of the readers' ability and willingness to endure


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this pressure as far as possible and then a little farther. Wim Tigges in hisAn Anatomy

of Literary Nonsense describes this as follows:

[Nonsense's] most essential characteristic is that it presents an

unresolved tension, which in my definition I refer to as a balance betweenpresence and absence of meaning. This balance has to be prevalent in the

work as a whole, but frequently it also features as a device on smaller

scale within the work. Once this type of balance is signaled, it cannot be

confused with that of irony, where meaning is also frequently negated

(51).

Jean-Jacques Lecercle, in his Philosophy of Nonsense simply uses the term

paradox.

A nonsense text plays with the bounds of common sense in order toremain in view of them, even if it has crossed to the other side of the

frontier; but it does not seek to limit the texts' meaning to one single

interpretation on the contrary, its dissolution of sense multiplies

meaning. This is because a nonsense text requires to be read on two levels

at once two incompatible levels: not 'x means A', but 'x is both A and,

incoherently, B'. In other words, nonsense deals not in symbolism but in

paradox. (Philosophy 20)

However different their formulation, paradox, two incompatible utterances

standing side by side, is the paramount feature of nonsense for both authors. They even

agree on the fact that it is often conventional meaning (or common sense) and its

absence (the other side of the boundary of the common sense) that are played against

each other. The source of energy of the texts is exactly this tension, which is, however,

left standing there unresolved. A fitting simile is given by Lecercle: "The linguist is a

cartographer; the language he studies is the territory he maps out. And as the only truly

exact map would be on a scale of 1:1, and would cover the territory it represented, the

only comprehensive grammar of a language would be coextensive with the language

itself (Violence 18-20). This means that not everything that is a part of the landscape is

drawn on the map. Writing nonsense is then similar to turning rocks. Try to turn even

the least conspicuous rock in your sight that is not even marked in the map as you know

it, and all kinds of vermin start wriggling in a place where nothing of interest seemed to


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be before. Translated into literary terms, the situation is as follows: from any banal

topic, in places where initially nothing of literary value, no linguistic treasure, not even

a problematic grammatical construction seemed to be, the nonsense author creates a text

of unresolved paradoxes. This gives birth to hitherto unseen centipedes, which are

fascinating to the reader.

In nonsense, paradoxes are omnipresent. As mentioned in Tigges's quote above,

tension has to be present on a large scale, within the work as a whole, but is often

present even as a small-scale device. The reader is caught in a net of meaning that

constantly seems to emerge, but never actually emerges. This can be true within a

sentence, and with the nonsense genre proper should be true within the scope of the

whole piece. Tigges shows an example of how critics trying to find an overall meaning

in a nonsense text kill it. "The Alice books, [Rolf Hildebrandt, a critic] maintains, show

an ironical attitude throughout, the moral being that one must be constantly aware of

what one is saying, and therefore according to Hildebrandt in Carroll's works the

nonsense serves an ironic aim; in other words nonsense here features as a quality, it is

ornamental" (92). In finding a (misleading) overall moral, this critic destroyed the

unresolved paradox. In other words, Tigges maintains that if the reader after having read

a book thinks "I see, the morale/point/wisdom/lesson of the book is..." then the book is

not nonsense. The tension must remain unresolved. There is no punch line to nonsense.

Since this dissertation tries to arrive at a looser definition of nonsense, its primary focus

will be what Tigges calls "ornamental" nonsense, or as in the above quote, small-scale

nonsense. In working with Allen's texts, the first goal will be to find instances of

"ornamental" nonsense in the piece. The discussion of the overall aim of the work,

which may be problematized even with canonized works of nonsense (as shown above)

will be addressed in the Conclusion.


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The characteristic tension is a crucial feature, since it is important to state at the

beginning that nonsense is not meaningless. It is exactly this standing tension between

meaning and its subversion, what marks the shifty boundary between a pure gibberish

and a piece of nonsense literature. One of the possible "meanings" of nonsense is the

tension that lasts even after finishing the piece, the labor the reader's mind is forced to

go through while compulsively searching for a conventional explanation, before being

forced to accept there is none. If the works were meaningless from beginning to end,

they would not provoke this activity and consequently would not be so attractive to

reader.

The tension does not only have to pertain between meaning and its absence.

Another paradoxical tension found within nonsense literature is the one between the

presence and absence of rules on all levels of language. Thus, rules are at the same time

observed and breached on the levels of phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics;

this includes both the set of author's rules and the reader's, which can differ. Tigges and

Lecercle agree on this point.

Tigges explains that in nonsense, it "is not a game withoutrules, but the

simultaneous presence and absence of rules; the feeling that arbitrary rules are

meticulously adhered to, but might be abandoned at any moment, is one ever-present

aspect of the balance of meaning and non-meaning." (55) Nonsense is a game with ever

changing rules and without a transcendental aim. This is a paradox in itself, because

what makes a game a game is the creation of a micro space with special rules and a

prize to win. In a realistic novel, the reader plays the game with rules, such as: I accept

that what I read is a satisfying depiction of the real world; I accept that the lives

depicted resemble the real life; I do not expect many language tricks to be played on

me; I expect the text to have a plot I probably could retell and that makes sense to me.


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In nonsense, this all may be true, at least for moments, but none of it mustbe true.

Nonsense has rules, but they can be obeyed or breached at any moment. Lecercle

concurs with two opinions.

Firstly, he states that "nonsense breaks rules not by forgetting about them, but by

following them to the letter, in a deliberately blind fashion, thus legally extending their

scope." (Philosophy 48) This treatment is subversive. It is somewhat expected to break

rules violently or treat them with a blatant disregard. If treated like this, the rules keep

standing and are still valid; it is the trespasser's obvious decision not to obey. To honor

the rules blindly and follow them all the way to areas where they are overstretched and

worn out is a much more subversive way of pointing out their arbitrariness and limits,

letting them corrode from the points where their polish is patchy.

Secondly, Lecercle connects the paradoxical position of rules within nonsense

literature to the authors themselves. "A nonsense writer, then, is a timid poet, whose

attitude towards the linguistic code is one of conformity and, at the same time,

exploitation." (Philosophy 34) It is only through the deepest respect for the rules of

language, only due to thinking along the lines of correct grammar and conventional

sense that the breaches are made conspicuous. If someone shows in depth knowledge of

the linguistic usage they keep breaching and upholding at the same time, they are

nonsense authors. Thus, nonsense as a genre is deeply conservative and non-destructive

toward the rules it breaches.

Another set of paradoxical opposites of nonsense literature obtains between form

and content. It has been already implicitly touched upon in previous paragraphs. If we

divide the linguistic analysis into the usual layers of phonetics, morphology, syntax and

semantics, the first three are more connected to the form and the last one more to what

is usually regarded as content. With nonsense, linguistic layers are often played against


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one another. Thus, in his analysis of "Jabberwocky", Lecercle concludes that on the

levels of phonetics (and phonotactics of English), morphology and syntax, everything

adheres to normal linguistics, whereas on the level of semantics, the things are more

then complicated (Philosophy 22). On the whole, we must agree with Alice, that the

poem is beautiful it sounds English, its prosody is flawless, the form is impeccable

with all the proper qualities of a ballad, but on the whole, all one can know is that

somebody killed something. On the other hand, Gryphon's "Hjckrrh!" (Carroll 100) is

an example of semantically less dubious word (it is an exclamation meaning either

astonishment or compassion with the Mock Turtle or a mixture of both), but a phonetic

impossibility. The clusteris impossible within the scope of English phonotactics, even

if in the strictest sense someone could point out that it has been produced by the

Gryphon and thus it is possible. Alas, it has notactually been produced, it has only been

written by Carroll. He tries to make the reader accept the fact that such phonetic cluster

could have been uttered as a means of expressing emotion, which it could not have and

the reader realizes this tension. This is the level of phonetics and phonotactics of

English played against the level of semantics.

It is not only paradox that makes nonsense nonsensical. A very important

structural quality of nonsensical texts is their incongruity. The incongruity of a text can

be observed from two viewpoints. From the authorial point of view, incongruity arises

when the text (the topic of the authorial intent will be addressed in Chapter 2) seems to

be going in one direction, and suddenly it turns (or even shoots off) somewhere else.

From the reader's point of view, the incongruity lies in a frustrated expectation. It can be

described as a tension between the implicit "default setting" of the mind of the reader

and the actual text. From the usual reading material, as well as from everyday

experience, the reader develops a set of patterns they un- or semiconsciously consider


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fixed, such as rules of social contact, story development, logic, grammar and linguistic

usage. These they then expect to be fulfilled.

The role of context in our perception is a psychological issue. Psychology terms

this as the difference between upward and downward perceptive processes. The upward

processes are basically inductive. From a set of basic elementary properties, the mind

constructs the perceived object. In the downward processes, we deduce from what we

already know.

The downward processes are the basis on which our perception is

influenced by context. If you expect your classmate Sara in library every

Tuesday at three p.m., and she enters at this time, only a quick glance isenough to recognize her. Your previous knowledge led to a strong

presupposition, and only a little amount of input information sufficed for

recognition. If, however, you met Sara unexpectedly in the streets of your

hometown during the Christmas vacation, you could go trough

considerable trouble recognizing her. She is out of context your

expectation has been breached and you will have to resort to extensive

upward processing, to realize it is really her. (Atkinson 168, translation

mine)

This is not only truth for object perception context is relevant even when we

approach a text or language itself. It is not uncommon that while listening to someone,

the listener is able to fill in the ends of sentences or that it is possible to decipher the

meaning of an unknown word when in a sentence. Lecerle notices this will for

contextualization in "folk etymology", which brings the evidence of human mind

desperately trying to surpass the clash between motivation and arbitrariness of linguistic

signs (Violence 31). In Saussurean linguistics, the tie between the sign and meaning is

arbitrary the sounds in "hamburger" could describe the animal known to us as a dog or

anything else. As it is, it describes a dish originally made in Hamburg. The human mind

is, however, prone to find motivation everywhere, even make it up if necessary. Such is

the case of the originally German dish transplanted in America, too far away from

Hamburg. Thus, folk etymology connected ham, which was closer at hand, with the dish


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and allowed for creation of "cheeseburger" merely by adding cheese, while Hamburg,

the original site of making hamburgers, had not been motivated enough to survive in the

common knowledge.

In a similar manner, the reader tries to have their cognitive and linguistic

expectations fulfilled. With nonsense, this does not happen, and an incongruous

situation is created, with a significant tension between the actual material of the text and

the pattern the reader tries to project onto it. As the human mind is very stubborn in

catching even the tiniest threads of patterns it recognizes, the faintest hints of the rules it

is used to guide itself by, even very "disjointed" texts can be more likely found

incongruous than completely meaningless; in such texts, the reader trying to catch the

seemingly ever beginning continuity is frustrated almost constantly. Since it is obvious

that this is a setting in which a great tension is accumulated and possibly not resolved, it

is not surprising that incongruity is an important feature of nonsense. In nonsense, what

one gets is very often something else then one has been expecting.

Incongruity is a feature nonsense shares with humor. A greater amount of

attention is needed here, since these two genres need to be distinguished. There is

undoubtedly a large overlapping area between nonsense and humorous writing, but the

categories must not be mingled indiscriminately. The difference between humor and

nonsense lies in the management of the accumulated tension. What triggers the laughter

in humor is letting this tension be resolved in bringing in the punch line. In jokes, it is

often the case that the incongruous ending points towards an implied but not said one,

which is very often taboo. "A joke, and even a shaggy dog story, has a point; the tension

is released when we see what the joke is about, just as the tension in a riddle is released

when we see what the solution is" (Tigges 95). The listener (reader) is able to fill in this

implied space from their own experience, this resolves the tension and laughter follows.


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In nonsense nothing like this happens, the tension stays unresolved and the only thing

the reader might be able to laugh about is their own inability to see the point.

To illustrate this, I present two short examples. First: What is the difference

between a lemon and a female secretary? Well, is it not obvious? With lemon, you have

to get a piece first and than you can lick it, whereas a secretary answers the phone. And

another one (my grandma's favorite): What is the difference between a raven? Well, it

has both legs the same, especially the right one. The first example is obviously a joke

the incongruity, not saying out loud the end suggested by the structure, only highlights

the structure obviously leading to a sexual (i.e. taboo) point. The other example violates

convention several times, thus being incongruous since unexpected (a difference is

usually found between two objects; one object cannot be samer than another same one;

why do it have to be the legs, why not wings, it would be the same...), but my grandma

never earned a burst of laughter with this one. No one was ever quite sure if this had

been the whole thing, if they had missed something or what. The not fitting parts

remained obscure, the expected punch line never came and with it, the tension had

remained unresolved. It is an example of nonsense.

The incongruous nature of nonsense has a very important impact on the reader. It

is something I will term 'unsaddling'. Usually, the reader is firmly seated on the back of

the text that carries them through the landscape of their imagination. As well as in usual

conversations, the reader is able to fill in the end parts of sentences, the closer to their

end the surer. To some degree, they are able to predict where the text leads, can almost

disregard the language as a mere instrument of transmitting coherent semantic values.

With texts incongruous to the degree of nonsense, the stallion of the text is far too

powerful to let the reader just ride and enjoy the view. The flow of reader's imagination

is constantly interrupted by not fitting images, the sentences surprise the reader with


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each following word and the language is not a medium of transferring information but a

living thing quite often only further complicating the matters.

This unsaddling affects the structure and devices of nonsense literature. Firstly, it

creates an emphasis on the role of language. A reader that is unsaddled by every other

word and by the end of every sentence is more likely to catch every word, to pay

attention to linguistic subtleties and is more prone to get fascinated by the language-

play. Secondly, unsaddling the reader makes it impossible for the author to make use of

metaphors. As explained in Tigges, a metaphor itself is, like nonsense "a violation of

rules of semantics" (34). A metaphor connects two things that usually are not

connectible, and only the congruity of the surrounding meaning enables the reader to

decipher the meaning of this connection. This is not possible in the incongruous space

of nonsense. "In nonsense, the metaphor 'runs rampant' until there is wall-to-wall

metaphor and thus wall-to-wall literalness." (Tigges 34) Lecercle explains this in more

detail: "The normal procedure for dealing with semantic incongruity is to produce a

metaphorical interpretation. The calculus takes the form of a classic Gricean

implicature, and indeed, metaphor is one of the indirect speech acts studied by Searle in

Expression and Meaning. Since Richard is obviously not a lion, but the speaker is

cooperating, i.e. meaning something by this unusual proposition, another, metaphorical,

meaning must be computed" (Philosophy 62). Once the reader is unsaddled, braced for

being surprised by every following word, the semantic net of meaning usually allowing

reading some sense into metaphors is destroyed. In nonsense, everything is or might be

taken and meant literally. In a realistic novel, a penguin in connection with restaurant

would usually mean a metaphor for a waiter, since it is more likely to come across a

waiter than the real bird in a restaurant. The basis for this shift is the obviously weak


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compensation: Putting infinity and nothingness side by side does not shift us closer to

the safe landscape around balanced zero. It only creates a space full off black holes and

supernovas.

The general structural patterns of nonsense explored, there are two issues of genre

qualities pertaining to the argument of this dissertation. Firstly, it is the difference

between nonsense and absurdity and secondly the question of the stories' intertextuality,

parody or satire and the relationship between these two.

As for the first concern, the patterns of unresolved paradox, false compensation

and incongruity can also be characteristic of absurdity. As Tigges maintains in his

section on difference between nonsense and absurdity: "In everyday speech, 'absurd'

and 'nonsensical' are often used as synonyms. A similar equivalence is frequently found

in discussions of nonsense writing" (126). He reviews many critical opinions on the

difference between the two genres (according to many authors nonexistent) and arrives

at a following conclusion: "The absurd, then, is the art form that conveys

meaninglessness, which is contrary to the purpose of nonsense to avoid complete

absence of meaning. Nothingness rather then monstrosity is its key concept, which

separates it from the grotesque, close as the two may otherwise be" (130). The purpose

of nonsense, in other words, is not to show that life is impossible and meaningless, that

culture/society/religion/language are of no value, and all human efforts are just a vain

attempt to fight the inevitable spin of events. The lack of sense in absurdity is

destructive, while in nonsense it is playful. As said in the section on the relation to

rules, nonsense is conformist in its core, and in relation to life or existence, the

conformist stance is affirmative rather than destructive. Carroll does not try to shed

light on purposelessness or confusion of a child's existence, he just enjoys playing with

language and narrative reality. The same can be said about Allen. His short stories are


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not destructive. The absurd quality of his urban, middle-class, Jewish writing is not to

show that the urban, middle-class, Jewish life is just a futile attempt at existence. His

stories about religion, albeit possibly agnostic, are not denying value of religion as

such, or accusing it of being empty/enslaving/too formalized or whatever derisive can

be said about religion. Allen's writing is a playful nonsense, not aggressively

destructive or inertly resigned absurdity.

The second issue concerning genre is connected to intertextuality of the stories.

The easily discernible traces of other works (e.g. works by James Joyce in "The Irish

Genius"), their forms (whodunnits in "Meet Wits with Inspector Ford") or cultural

phenomena (expressionist drama in "Lovborg's Women Considered" or classical ballet

in "A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets") combined with nonsensical elements might

indicate parody or satire. That, however, would be a superficial approach to the

connection of nonsense and intertextuality, simplified as: The author is acknowledging

the existence of other works; these works are a "serious" part of cultural heritage; the

author does not approach them "seriously", which entails he necessarily mocks them

and does not "honor" them "properly", ergo the text must be a parody or satire.

Lecercle, however finds a different tie between intertextuality and nonsense.

It is commonly presumed that first an author meant something, has said it in his

or her text, and then the reader extracts the meaning. Based on reading Carroll,

Lecercle turns this chain: There is an utterance, which inspires an author to find a

meaning, which he or she says in a new utterance. "The chain has neither origin (there

is no word of God except in a myth of origins), nor end (the task of interpretation is

never ended). The interpreter's myth is the mirror image of the myth of origins: it

claims to provide an end for the chain by identifying the right meaning and producing

the final text, so that the Good Chain (as one says the Good Book) will go from


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to point at undesirability of the themes involved (religion, middle-class society, etc.). I

leave further discussion of the presence or absence of such overall aim of stories in

Without Feathers to the Conclusion.

To sum up, several properties of nonsensical texts have been explored in this

chapter. It has been arrived at a conclusion that the constitutive elements of nonsense

writing are the unresolved paradox, the incongruity without a punch line and the false

compensation. The unresolved paradox is a tension created by means of playing

different levels of language against each other, lacking a final synthesis. The

incongruity is a means of unsaddling the reader by the text where nothing happens as

expected from presupposed context; in such text, metaphors are impossible. False

compensation is created by seemingly filling up places of missing meaning by an

excessive explanation that does not really pertain to the meaning that has been left out.

These theoretical notions will be put to use in the analysis of Woody Allen's short

stories in the next chapter. As for clarifying genre boundaries, the difference between

nonsense and absurdity lies in the texts' relationship to nothingness absurd texts strive

for it and are destructive or resigned, whereas nonsensical texts strive for balance

between meaning and its absence. Nonsense text do not exclude intertextuality either;

the possibility of a text with the elements of nonsense being simultaneously a parody or

satire must be judged by the overall aim of the text, if there is such an aim at all.


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Chapter 2

Before beginning to work on textual examples from Without Feathers, concerns

about my choice of text and of approach need to be addressed. Firstly, there is the

question of leaving Allen's films out of this dissertation. Secondly, there is the issue of

difference of setting of Allen's urban, middle-class stories and the setting of nonsense

classics, usually connected to the world of children.

As to the first point, it is a fact that while many people know Woody Allen's

movies, not many know about his short stories. Be the evidence only the amount of

criticism dedicated to his short stories as compared to publicity given to his films, Allen

is incomparably more discussed as a moviemaker than as a writer. It only seems

appropriate, then, to ask how it is possible to analyze Allen's short stories without ties to

his films. The answer is double. An important fact is that Without Feathers was

published in 1975, at the very beginning of Allen's career of a screenplay writer,

director and actor. The first movies Allen participated in were shot at the end of the

1960's, but some of them Allen allegedly hated, about some of them he said he just

enjoyed being funny ("Woody Allen" 4). In the time of publishing ofWithout Feathers,

Allen's transition from the standup comedian to a filmmaker was still in process. "The

philosophical concerns that Allen had played with in Without Feathers andLove and

Death were to find serious expression in his next feature, Annie Hall(1977), considered

by many to be the turning point in his artistic developmenthis final escape from the

constraints of commercial comedy" ("Woody Allen" 4). Without Feathers can thus be

seen as a transitional work from the career of a quite well known standup comedian to

Academy Awards winning director.


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The other reason not to tie this analysis directly to movies is that of the medium

used. For Allen's movies, allegedly as well as for his standup act, his self-presentation is

crucial.

Much of Allens nightclub humor was built on what he called "the

urban Jewish mentality...of being wracked with guilt and suffering, of

feeling one step ahead of trouble and anxiety." [...] Diane Jacobs has said

that Allens stage persona made "a virtue of his innate shyness,

proclaiming his vulnerability in unctuous disclaimers, confessions and

well-charted stammersthe idea being, who could attack this creature?"

[...] Allen established his public image so successfully that from this point

in his career onward, audiences and critics would treat the man and his

stage-screen persona as one. Despite disclaimers, Woody Allen is seen as

the same nebbish he plays and writes about, and he is clearly not bothered

by the confusion enough to fight it. He encourages it, in fact, by equippingevery character he plays nineteenth-century Russian or 1980s New

Yorker, man or child with his trademark: his own black-rimmed glasses.

("Woody Allen" 3)

This, however, can be hardly achieved in a collection of short stories. It is true

that the publisher tried to save the situation at least by putting Allen's anxious face onto

the cover of the book, but that is where Woody Allen's persona of the anxious stand up

comedian ends. This is what makes his short stories different from his movies. In a

written text, Allen cannot present himself to the reader directly, his black rimmed

glasses do not haunt them continuously, and his calculated stammer is less easy to

feign when put through the printing press. Lecercle comments on this phenomenon:

Each reader is like an actor: He or she re-enacts the original speech

act, but such reproduction is a reproduction of the same text, and at the

same time a different text, a different reading, in both senses of the term.So in fact a text not only does not need the presence of its original

speaker, but it structurally excludes it, and only accepts the inscribed, and

iterable, 'presence' of a system of places. (Philosophy 128)

This is true even for Allen. A (written) text can be interpreted beyond the

authorial intention, beyond the historical background we know the author to have lived

in, beyond the influence of the author as we are used to seeing him. Some of the stories

in Without Feathers have the form and content of a neurotic's diary, a faint shadow of


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the anxiously stammering Allen haunting them, but some are completely devoid of

Allen's "direct" presence. Allen's inability to enter the medium of a printed text,

together with the time of creation of the text are sufficient reasons to treat his short

stories separately.

As for the Jewish, urban, middle-class, New York quality of Allen's writing,

matters here are somewhat complicated. There is the question if the stories' style is not

a continuation of the tradition of Jewish anecdotes. The fact that many characters and

elements of Allen's short stories are Jewish is undeniable (Kaiser Lupowitz in "The

Whore of Mensa" or the story "No Kaddish for Weinstein"). What is obvious from

Allen's writing, however, is the fact that in his texts he approaches the Jewish streak of

his heritage in the same manner as all other streaks Western, intellectual, middle

class, self-made, American, neurotic and whichever other types could be thought of. He

plays with all of these characteristics (intellectualism in "The Whore of Mensa",

religion in "The Scrolls", neurotic in "Selections from the Allen notebooks", etc.). He

does not strive for creating a specifically Jewish witness; his writing is cosmopolitan or

at least American in philosophy of life and agnostic in relation to religion.

Secondly, there is the striking difference between the setting of the nonsense

classics and Allen's short stories. When approached superficially, this difference seems

to create a problem: Since the themes Allen works with are closer to the everyday

reality than Carroll's dream world of children's fantasies, Allen's short stories seem to

have more to say, to present a moral, a social commentary or a satirical opinion on

modern society. It is, however, the aim of my argument to show that whatever the

elements, the short stories contain patterns of nonsense. It might be said that the

difference of elements results in creation of a slightly different type of nonsense,

maybe "less nonsensical", but that concurs with my thesis statement: Not to present


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Allen as a continuation of carrollean nonsense, but as containing similar structural

patterns, which shift it very close (if not altogether) to the genre of literary nonsense.

The genre issues addressed, textual excerpts from Without Feathers can be

analyzed now. The first of the characteristic qualities of nonsense is paradox, especially

when different levels of language are made to stand out against each other. A nice

example is from "Lovborg's Women Considered": "Born in Stockholm in 1836,

Lovborg (originally Lvborg, until, in later years he removed the two dots from above

the o and placed them over his eyebrows) began writing plays at the age of fourteen"

(Allen 41). Level of graphical diacritics is put side by side with the level of the narrative

reality, which cannot be done without being noticed. It is even highlighted by the

excessive information that Lovborg found further use for his dots.

Another example of such an unfitting overlap of levels is found in a short

quotation supposedly from the ancient scrolls: "My Lord, my Lord! What hast Thou

done, lately?" (Allen 37). The clash is between the level of tense usage and

intertextuality. This exclamation to God is known from the Bible as a dramatic

expression of anxiety over the cruelty of the world. Present perfect tense, however,

aside from this usage for actions completed in the past having consequences in the

present, can mean also ongoing activity started in the past and still continuing in the

present. This double usage is the core of Allen's paraphrase of biblical quotation. We

are thus presented with a phrase that is both a dramatic exclamation and a casual chat.

In the following passage from "Examining the Psychic Phenomena", all three

main features of nonsense can be found:

Clairvoyance

One of the most astounding cases of clairvoyance is that of the noted

Greek psychic, Achille Londos. Londos realized he had "unusual powers"

by the age of ten, when he could lie in bed and, by concentrating, make

his father's false teeth jump out of his mouth. After a neighbor's husbandhad been missing for three weeks, Londos told them to look in the stove,


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where the man was found knitting. Londos could concentrate on a

person's face and force the image to come out on a roll of ordinary Kodak

film, although he could never seem to get anybody to smile.

In 1964, he was called in to aid police in capturing the Dsseldorf

Strangler, a fiend who always left a baked Alaska on the chests of hisvictims. Merely by sniffing a handkerchief, Londos led police to Siegfried

Lenz, handyman at the school for deaf turkeys, who said he was the

strangler and could he please have the handkerchief back. (Allen 20-21)

This is a topsy-turvy narration. The overall structure fits a description of an

unusual ability and its use in seeking justice; thus there is a thread by which the reader

can guide themselves. However, there are breaches in the content. The sentence about

the Kodak film is an example of two layers overlapping and creating a paradox. The

ability to project images onto a Kodak film is described in accounts of psychic abilities

and is in itself not surprising. It is also usual to try to make people smile, while taking

their photograph. But together, a paradoxical overlap is created between the somewhat

obscure psychic phenomenon and the usual procedure of taking pictures. As for the

incongruity, there are several spots where the reader's expectations of usual proceedings

of a narrative are broken. A man found after ten days knitting in a stove is an image that

could be cut right out of a Lear's limerick. A serial murderer leaving desserts on the

chests of his victims is a darker example of the same kind. A school for deaf turkeys is a

setting one cannot even imagine. These additions turn what could otherwise be a usual

account of a police investigation in an incongruous and tricky terrain. False

compensation is represented towards the end of the story. If the reader is presented with

a completed police investigation, he or she expects to hear the perpetrator has been

arrested (and possibly further punished). This information is missing, thus creating a

lack. This empty space is amended by the fact that the captured felon is still interested

in his handkerchief; the lacking information is still missing, while new, excessive and

useless, is supplemented.


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There is an example of two textual levels clashing in the following excerpt from

"A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets". In this short story, accounts of what is

happening on stage are given to classic ballets such as Petrouchka (here calledDmitri),

TheRite of Spring(here The Sacrifice) orThe Swan Lake (here The Spell). The plots of

the ballets are twisted, but only to such degree that the originals are still traceable. The

whole short story ends, however, in following short narrative:

"A Day in the Life of a Doe

Unbearably lovely music is heard as the curtain rises, and we see the woods on a

summer afternoon. A fawn dances on and nibbles slowly at some leaves. He drifts lazily

through the soft foliage. Soon he starts coughing and drops dead" (Allen 30). This

passage introduces the paradox between intertextuality and originality. While

throughout the preceding ballets the educated reader has been kept in the illusion that he

understands what is being talked about (although there are instances of small scale

incongruity as will be shown below), now comes the confusion. Either there is a ballet

the reader does not know, with an unbelievable plot that could be twisted into the above

excerpt, or there might be the possibility that all the previous ballets are just Allen's

creation and the reader has been mislead throughout. This short ballet does not end the

story or bring it to a climax. It presents the reader with a riddle, the answer to which

cannot be found. The passage is also incongruous, since the soppy beginning does not

prepare the reader for the brief and violent ending.

Under incongruity of the text comes the broken causality of a text where actions

do not fit the presumed line of motivation of actions or their aim leading to expected

results. Tigges terms this "telic and motivational nonsense" (Tigges 56). There are

numerous instances of telic and motivational nonsense in Allen. Basically the tension is

created by forcing the reader to ask Why (and this covers both the search for cause and


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actions of Mr. Sykes have been. It comes and says: "I'm back. You want to pass me

those raisins?"

Another example of a nice mixture of telic and motivational nonsense comes from

"A Guide to Some of the Lesser Ballets". The tension created can have several layers,

depending on the reader's knowledge of the works in question. As mentioned above ("A

Day in the Life of a Doe"), it seems obvious that no one could write ballets on topics as

ridiculous as those created by Allen, but unless one is an enthusiast, or a walking

encyclopedia of classical ballet, one can never be completely sure if some grains of

truth cannot have been mixed in. The intertextual aspects put aside, the motivations of

the characters in the text are as dubious as their aims.

Wandering around the fairgrounds is a beautiful girl named Natasha, who

is sad because her father has been sent to fight in Khartoum, and there is no war

there [dubious motivation]. Following her is Leonid, a young student, who is too

shy to speak to Natasha but places a mixed green salad on her doorstep every

night [dubious aim]. Natasha is moved by the gift [dubious motivation] and

wishes she could meet the man who is sending it, particularly since she hates the

house dressing and would prefer Roquefort [very dubious motivation]. (Allen

25)

The motivation of Natasha's grief is made dubious by the addition of the state of

affairs in Khartoum. It would be perfectly all right for a daughter to be sad if her father

goes to war or when he is lured to a trap under the pretext of being sent to a nonexistent

war. Neither happens here. On the contrary, what seems to make Natasha sad here is the

fact that her father cannot fight. While she should be rejoicing, she is sad and the reader

is confused about both her and her father's behavior. It would also fit perfectly in our

pattern of a (possible) ballet plot if a young man in love placed a rose on the doorstep of

his beloved, but what makes him give her food? Such a modern one as a mixed green

salad with dressing, for that? The fact that Natasha is moved, quite strongly, over the

salad is dubious to the same extent as is her desire to meet the mysterious donor only to

order him to change the dressing. There are points of the plot where the reader senses a


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right motivation (a shy youth afraid to speak, a daughter loving her father, gifts on the

doorstep) but all such points are corrupted by the incongruity of the passage.

An example of creating paradox between the level of transliteration and historical

events is found in "A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience". The Russian

Revolution erupted "when the serfs finally realized that the Czar and Tsar were the

same person." (Allen 70) This example exploits the tension people tend to feel between

arbitrariness and motivation in the relationship of the signifying and signified.

According to structural linguists, this relationship is arbitrary, and thus it should be

nothing out of the ordinary that to one meaning two spellings could be ascribed (or two

different words altogether). Common sense tends to differ, though, by prompting, "If it

spells differently, it has to be something else." Both cases, as well as many other

"monsters", are frequent in language. There is dolphin andporpoise, two different

words with as overlapping a denotation as possible, there isyou and ewe, differently

spelled, and (thus?) meaning something very different, in its graphical essence not so

different form the Czar/Tsar problem, and there is apparently with its two meanings

almost antithetical. The relationship between words, spellings and meanings is

precarious, as authors of nonsense love to show.

Incongruity of a text is also created by not honoring the boundaries usually taken

for granted. When reading, the reader is always trying to create a frame, to find the

boundaries within which the text operates. Nonsense texts do not honor such

boundaries. As will be shown, boundaries can be defied in several ways. The most

obvious is shooting off, to cross the boundary into other, far lying areas and possibly

never to come back. Another type of play with boundaries can be not reaching them;

this is especially possible within the frame of intertextual reference, where the boundary

is not created by the reader, but shared with the original text. Frames of reference can


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also overlap, confusing the reader as to where they are situated at the moment. A non-

territorial approach to play with boundaries is also contained in the technique of false

compensation; this technique exploits the implicit limit of information (un)necessary.

And as said above, a result of the incongruity of a text is crushing the idiomatic or

metaphorical use of language by taking metaphors literally. All of the above mentioned

aspects of achieving incongruity via the play with boundaries can be discerned in the

following quote (brackets are mine again):

As one goes through life, it is extremely important to conserve funds, and

one should never spend money on anything foolish, like pear nectar or a solid-

gold hat [off]. Money is not everything, but it is better than having ones health[not reaching]. After all, one cannot go into a butcher shop and tell the butcher,

"Look at my great suntan, and besides I never catch colds," and expect him to

hand over any merchandise. (Unless, of course, the butcher is an idiot.) [excess

of information] Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons

[overlapping]. Not that it can buy happiness. Take the case of the ant and the

grasshopper: The grasshopper played all summer, while the ant worked and

saved. When winter came the grasshopper had nothing, but the ant complained

of chest pains [not reaching]. Life is hard for insects [lack of information]. And

don't think mice are having any fun, either [off]. The point is, we all need a nest

egg to fall back on, but not while wearing a good suit [two broken idioms].

(Allen 63)

The instances of shooting off the playing field are clear. While pear nectar can be

considered a rightful representative of the category of unnecessary luxuries, a solid-gold

hat is definitely not a matching complement from the same category (not talking about

the pure weight and thus sheer impossibility of such a garment). Its presentation takes

us off the course of the narration. Mentioning the mice after the fable is also off,

because while the defective morale of the fable at least contains the elements of the

preceding story, the mice are only an off-shooting elaboration along the "animals"-line.

Not reaching is in this text connected to proverbs and sayings. From these, the

reader expects to re-learn a lesson already known to us from the real life or, like in the

second instance, only to once again, more plainly state the lesson of the fable. The

parable about the ant and the grasshopper is an example of not reaching the proper


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boundaries since we know along what lines the story should proceed the industrious

shall be rewarded and the lazy shall suffer. This not reaching is highlighted by the

disjunctive "but" in the sentence, signaling to us that the ant's destiny will be different

(that is more prosperous) then the grasshopper's, but it is not; an "and" would be more

proper here, but would not repair the breach by much.

The sentence marked as overlapping is nonsensical for similar reasons, but the

element of overlapping is even more prominent in it. There is one frame in which the

reader expects to move from the beginning of the sentence, in essence similar to the

sentence "Money is not everything, but..." Should the sentence be completed in

something like "Money is better than poverty if only for the piece of mind/for the

feeling of security /for the not talented /for those who don't have anyone to love," the

boundaries would have been observed and made proper use of. Over that frame, the

other part of the sentence is superimposed, also quite correct if in some right context

like "Marriage is right/I'd do it/One should not submit to consumption, if only for

financial reasons." But if put together, these two sentence parts create paradoxical

hybrid of two overlapping frames of reference that do not work together.

The explanation why having one's health is less than having money is finished by

a sentence that is excessive. It seemingly tries to hold the example within the field of

normality, showing that a butcher willing to accept good health as payment is stupid.

The whole construction, however, is idiotic and thus the parenthesized sentence is an

excessive effort at a wrong place. On the other hand, "Life is hard for insects" is hardly

a suiting morale for a fable. A fable is supposed to have connection to human life, a

morale should help the reader live their lives. From this point of view, this morale is an

example of lack of significance. As shown in the above section on false compensation,


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the excessive information of the first part of the story is hardly compensated by a lack in

the following one.

The paragraph is finished by two broken idioms. A nest egg usually means savings

or some other thing one can rely (or "fall back") on in life. Allen breaks idiomatic usage

by forcing the literal meaning onto the reader. A person sitting on an egg in a nest in

their best suit is hardly compatible with the morale of "one needs to feel materially

secure in order to be happy in life." As said above, metaphors do not work in nonsense.

In nonsense, everything is taken literally. And it is definitely a disaster to sit on a nest

egg in one's best suit.

In this chapter, the theoretical notions of unresolved paradox, false compensation

and incongruity without a punch line were applied to the text of Woody Allen's Without

Feathers. All these patterns, and often their combination, were discerned. Thus it is

clear that there are numerous instances of "ornamental" nonsense in the text.


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Conclusion

The masters asked awkward and unanswerable questions; they made fun of logic and

metaphysics; they turned orthodox philosophy upside down in order to make it look

absurd.

(Humphreys 117)

In the preceding chapters, the key formal properties of literary nonsense have been

identified and then applied on the text of Woody Allen's Without Feathers. Although

the New York, common-man setting of his stories gives the text a different appearance,

the discerned patterns of nonsense coincide with the notions of unresolved paradox,

incongruity without a punch line and false compensation Wim Tigges and Jean-Jacques

Lecercle discerned in the nonsense canon, especially the Lewis Carroll'sAlicebooks.

What remains to clarify is whether the identified nonsense patterns are a sign of Allen's

text being nonsensical enough to be classified as nonsense literature or whether it is

only "ornamental" nonsense used as a device of literary parody or satire. The evaluation

of an overall aim of a work is, however, a complicated analytic procedure, and even

more so in the case of satire or parody; as was shown, even the works accepted as

nonsense by most critics can be analyzed as satire by others. Since in this dissertation

there is not enough space for the inductive method of positively excluding the

possibility of Allen's stories being a parody by textual analysis, I will have to use a less

precise deductive method of stating the desired result and finding an explanation for it.

Let us suppose that the aim of the stories is not to mock some supposed

imperfection of the cultural phenomena (extra-sensual entities and experiences, literary

history, art, or religion) or concrete works of art (be it poetry, ballet, drama or

whodunits). What then could be the reason for juxtaposing unreason to intertextual and


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cultural allusions? The answer might be called a way out of the cul-de-sac of Western

intellectualized culture.

Reason and unreason is a polar couple created by the dualistic development of

Western thinking. It is typical of such couples to glorify one pole and suppress the other

(such as preferring spirit over matter in the classical Cartesian couple or God over man

in religion etc.). Michel Foucault, who observes this development, comments as

follows:

[...] madness, which had for so long been overt and unrestricted,

which had for so long been present on the horizon, disappeared. It entered

a phase of silence from which it was not to emerge for a long time; it wasdeprived of its language; and although one continued to speak of it, it

became impossible for it to speak for itself. Impossible at least until

Freud, who was the first to open up once again the possibility for reason

and unreason to communicate in the danger of a common language, ever

ready to break down and disintegrate into the inaccessible. [...] Madness

forged relationship with moral and social guilt that it is still perhaps not

ready to break. (Foucault 69)

Unreason, as the beginning of the slippery slope leading to madness, has been

also excluded from the Western culture. Christianity, the predominant Western

religion, one function of which was dealing in some way with phenomena surpassing

the human intellect, was first highly rationalized and then it from various reasons

continually lost influence over peoples' lives. Thus, unreason has not been received

well in Western culture. This shows on the very question of Allen's text being satirical:

Since Allen incorporates nonsense in his stories, the presupposition is that he wants to

mock, to desecrate or even annihilate the object. Unreason is dangerous and destructive

to Western thinking and when used, it is assumed that it is used like a weapon.

This is a difference from other systems of thoughts, such as Zen. It has to be stated

right away that I do not think there are any direct ties between Zen and Allen's short

stories. Zen, however, is based on using unreason not as a way to assert reason (as

would be the case in using nonsense as a means of satire), but as a means of


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complementing and surpassing reason. It is a system based on pluralistic unity, not on

duality, and thus reason and unreason communicate freely, being two parts of a higher

unity. "Consider now the intuition, the faculty beyond the sway of opposites, which

moves on the plane of direct experience. It KNOWS with an inner certainty quite

maddening to the mind, which, with intellectual arguments, dares to disagree"

(Humphreys 9). The intuition is beyond the fight of reason and unreason and is only

reached by uniting them. This mostly means breaking the already established rule of

practical reason: "[] we have, beyond the senses, the emotions, and beyond them the

workaday practical mind. This analytic, concrete mind is sooner or later used by a

higher faculty, the abstract or synthetic mind. [] Between the lower and the higher

aspects of the mind is a bridge in the crossing of which the faculty of Buddhi, the

intuition, begins to illumine the intellect" (Humphreys 10). The traditional instrument

used for surpassing rationality, uniting it with unreason an allowing the intuition to

shine upon them is the koan.

Koan is structurally a nonsense, something that logically cannot be. It usually has

a form of a short story or a question that is nonsensical. An example could be this

question: "Consider a live goose in a bottle. How to get it out without hurting the goose

or breaking the bottle? The answer is simple 'There, it's out!'"(Humphreys 17). This is

a story without a point, possibly analyzed as false compensation: While a "reasonable"

answer is still missing (and possibly cannot be provided, since the situation is insoluble

by the faculty of intellect), another one, excessive, intuitive is supplemented. The result

is not a clarification, but a further confusion and until the pupil reaches satori, the

moment when his intuition subdues reason, the tension remains unresolved. A koan is

what nonsense and Zen have in common: A text that defies reason and creates a tension

that cannot be resolved by intellect. I am not going to continue by saying that the


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literature of nonsense is supposed to teach its readers the lessons koans do. Koans are

just an example of working with nonsense in a productive way.

Accepting the possibility of unreason functioning not as a negation of reason, but

as a way out of the grasp of the imperfect faculties of the intellect while still possessing

it, Allen's combination of cultural phenomena and nonsense does not end up in satire. In

Allen's stories, it is obvious that Allen is well-equipped with knowledge of selected

parts of the canon of Western cultural heritage, a heritage permeated by the emphasis on

reason. He simultaneously realizes that neither the knowledge of classics nor the reason

are all-important. This is even highlighted by the common-man setting of the stories.

Allen is an intellectual who likes his knowledge and his intellect, but at the same time

he realizes that life can be lived without much of either and its quality does not need to

be lowered. By mixing and contrasting the knowledge of the reason-based culture with

nonsense, he is able to pay tribute to the heritage he values, while somewhat lowering

himself from the pedestal of a well-read know-it-all and somewhat self-critically

admitting that the knowledge he possess is not everything.

This concludes the question whether the general aim ofWithout Feathers is

derisive and its genre is a parody/satire, or whether it is a basically aimless and playful

example of literary nonsense. The stories combine frequent occurrence of "ornamental"

nonsense, characterized by unresolved paradox, incongruity without a punch line and

false compensation, with intertextual and cultural reference, but the goal is not desecrate

the source text. The juxtaposition of culture of reason with the technique of unreason

gives Allen the opportunity to create a playful text in that he can flash his knowledge,

which he values, while maintaining a distance from it and from the label of a serious,

brooding intellectual. The connection to cultural phenomena is a marked difference


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between Without Feathers and nonsense classics, but the effect is similar honoring

reason/cultural heritage by playfully defying it on its own playfield.


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