This thesis examines the literary relationship between James Joyce and Victorian
nonsense, particularly Lewis Carroll. Tracing the defining characteristics of literary
nonsense beyond the Victorian period, it aims to assess what we mean by 'literary
nonsense', and to evaluate the terms of Joyce's nonsense inheritance. The thesis is
divided into four chapters:
Chapter One: "'A letters from a person to a place about a thing": The Nonsense
Letter.' This chapter looks at central nonsense themes of miscommunication, the
(mis)construction of meaning, textual play, and the inadequacies and absurdities of
epistolary conventions. My research draws on personal letters from Joyce, Carroll, and
Edward Lear, as well as examining the relationship between fictional letters and their
host texts, and delivering a detailed analysis of the Finnegans Wake letter in its various
guises.
Chapter Two: "'Mocked majesty": Games and Authority.' This chapter explores
the various forms of authority in nonsense, from autocratic monarchs to omniscient
authors, and from the parental or pedagogic authority of adults over children to the rigid
and unspoken rules of children's games and discourses. The various species of games
we find in the work of both Carroll and Joyce are analysed, from the tightly ordered
playworlds of chess, cards, and games with logic and language, to the rough-and-tumble
hijinks of the Finnegans Wake children's twilight street games.
Chapter Three: '''Jest jibberweek's joke": Comic Nonsense.' This chapter begins
by exploring the Kantian model of incongruous humour we find in the nonsense double
act, examining how both Joyce and Carroll emphasise and exploit the double nature of
the joke, using it to generate the vaudevillean dialogues and comic contrasts between
the many 'collateral and incompatible' pseudocouples who populate the nonsense
terrain. It goes on to address the dark underbelly of the comic, identifying a Hobbesian
meanness at the heart of nonsense humour. A treatise on the bad pun concludes the.
chapter, moving from Carroll's portmanteau words to the pun-infatuated jokescape of
Finnegans Wake.
Chapter Four: 'Nonsense and the Fall.' This chapter offers a unique reading of
literary nonsense asa philosophical answer to the FalL Nonsense texts betray an almost
morbid obsession with falling; literal and symbolic falls are a central theme of both the Wake and the Alice books, and falls into language, madness, chaos, and forbidden
knowledge are staples of the nonsense condition. Ontological crisis and semantic
collapse are among this chapter's themes, as it investigates why it is a general and
necessary condition of literary nonsense to be always hovering on the edge of the abyss,
and forever toying with its own destruction.