Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature

Bc. Jakub Tuek

Nonsense and Unreason in the Prose of Woody Allen

Bachelors Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.

2008

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. ..
Authors signature

I would like to thank Mr. Hardy for cooperative and constructive approach and my wife for patience during the writing process.

Table of Contents

Introduction............................................................................................. 4

Chapter 1 ............................................................................................... 10

Chapter 2 ............................................................................................... 25

Conclusion ............................................................................................. 37

Works Cited ........................................................................................... 42

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, pseudointellectual 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

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 of Without 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

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 essay An 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 book Philosophy of Nonsense. The Intuitions of

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. In Philosophy, 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

be possible to define nonsense in works others than the Victorian classics. These noncanonized 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 Feathers by Woody Allen there are occurrences of literary nonsense. They are not a direct continuation of the tradition of nonsense per se, the purest example of which are Lewis Carroll's Alice books; 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's An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense and Jean Jacques Lecercle's Philosophy 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

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.

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 killed something: 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's Alice books, with which Lecercle works almost exclusively in Philosophy, 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 his An 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 between presence 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 to remain 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 without rules, 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 must be 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 cluster is 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 not actually 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 is enough 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 languageplay. 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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link of a black-and-white apparel. In nonsense, a penguin in a restaurant is nothing out of the ordinary, even if playing the lute. Last but not least of the general strategies of nonsense authors is false compensation. Lecercle describes this as lack and excess of information. In speaking about the nonsense poem In the Gloaming, Lecercle notices the unbalance that there is between its perfect prosody and its nonsensical meaning and concludes: "The lack of structure at one level (here, the semantic level) is amply compensated by excess of structure at other levels (here the syntactic and prosodic levels). Lack of sense here is always compensated by excess or proliferation there. This is the central paradox" (Philosophy 31). This is a device nonsense authors use to hold the reader at the text. If the text were a complete chaos at all levels, no tension would arise. If a partial lack is compensated by excess elsewhere, the text seems to have meaning. Two processes go on at the same time in the nonsense texts, adding meaning here and subtracting there. This should logically put the text in balance. But it does not, since in nonsense the added information often does not fit in the place where something is missing. To use the language of mathematics, the method of lack and excess is similar to trying to balance an equation. To truly preserve balance means to either add to both sides, or to subtract from them. What happens in false compensation is adding at one side and subtracting from the other. This only deepens the abyss between the values of respective sides of the equation. Back to literature: If the reader is feeling a lack being created somewhere, and is "compensated" by useless excessive information at another place, they are even more confused then before the process started. The procedure does not resolve the unbalanced situation, it only heightens the strain. Tigges notices this in this statement: "Could one think of a better example of empty space (both infinity and its reversal, nothingness) as a nonsensical device?" (73) This shows the nature of false

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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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meaning to saying, [...]" (Philosophy 132). Lecercle thus presents an endless chain of amended intertextual inspiration, in which there is not much value ascribed to finding the "true" or "initial" authorial intention. Following this view of the limited originality (that is intertextuality) and indefinite meaning (non-existence of the final interpretation) of all texts, Lecercle formulates another paradox of the nonsense text. "This paradox I have formulated as 'I speak language' ([...] there is a sense in which the principle of expressivity is correct) versus 'language speaks' ([...] no one means the multiplicity of utterances that may be delivered from the text, no one except the free play of language, as the receptacle of multiple intertextual chains)" (Philosophy 133). Lecercle describes nonsense as a text where apart from the meaning of the author there is a space for meanings no one intended. The concentration of intertextual chains ends in such multiplicity of possible meanings, that "the meaning", or sense, is lost. In nonsense, unplanned meanings are meant to arise the authors of nonsense let the meanings of the language play flourish on the places of distorted intertextuality of their works. Based on this view of nonsense "as the output of intertextual chains [...] that subvert the dominant conception of language as an instrument of expression and communication," (Lecercle, Philosophy 134), it seems less evident that Allen's stories must be a parody or satire. It all depends, according to Tigges, on the fact, whether there is an overall derisive aim to the stories. "If my definition of nonsense is valid, it will be easy to show, how 'a nonsense' can be distinguished from an ironical statement, a satire, a parody [...]. Satire has the point of attacking or showing up an undesired situation or event. Parody satirizes a subject text, whose weaknesses (usually formal) come under attack" (95). Allen's stories, then, would be a parody, if their nonsensicality were used to point at a weakness of the intertextual counterparts, or satire, if they were

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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 of Without 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 and Love 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 equipping every 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 husband had 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 his victims. 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 called Dmitri), The Rite of Spring (here The Sacrifice) or The 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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effect) has the character acted like this?, and never giving any answer. Motivational and telic nonsense often come together, since mixing nonsensical motivations with dubious aims is very effective in creating incongruity. One of the best examples of motivational/telic nonsense is the behavior of Mr. Albert Sykes's spirit in "Examining Psychic Phenomena". Emphases in square brackets are mine. I was sitting having biscuits with some friends [no motivation] when I felt my spirit leave my body and go make a telephone call [dubious aim]. For some reason, it called the Moscowitz Fiber Glass Company [dubious aim]. My spirit then returned to my body and sat for another twenty minutes or so [no motivation], hoping nobody would suggest charades [no aim]. When the conversation turned to mutual funds, it left again [dubious motivation] and began wandering around the city [no aim]. I am convinced that it visited the Statue of Liberty and then saw the stage show at Radio city Music Hall [dubious aim]. Following that, it went to Benny's Steak House and ran up a tab of sixtyeight dollars [dubious aim]. My spirit then decided to return to my body, but it was impossible to get a cab [dubious motivation]. Finally it walked up Fifth Avenue and rejoined me just in time to catch the late news [dubious aim]. (Allen 17) The nonsensicality of this piece of text lies in the futility of the reader's effort to understand why the ghost acts as it does. When dealing with paranormal activity, we expect unusual behavior from the entities involved, not sightseeing, entertainment and food consumption. Their motivation should lie in the realm of help, vengeance, punishment, contact with other worlds or other spirits, and such activities usually connected with human soul/spirit. The aim should be something more dramatic than eating without paying or hoping no one would suggest charades. The motivations and aims of this wandering spirit are topsy-turvy. They mirror the actions of spirits within bodies, but they should not; they mirror the actions of the spirits without bodies, but only as the world behind the looking glass mirrors Alice's own. The text is incongruous by this mirroring, and the tension is never resolved. There is no point, no morale. The spirit never comes and says how miserable the world of mortals is, or how low the

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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 and porpoise, two different words with as overlapping a denotation as possible, there is you 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 nonterritorial 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 solidgold 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's Alice books. 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 was deprived 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 of Without 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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Works Cited:
Allen, Woody: Complete Prose. London: Picador, 1997. Atkinson, Rita L. (Ed.): Psychologie. Praha: Portl, 2003. Carroll, Lewis: Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Throughout the Looking Glass. London: Pan Books, 1947. Foucault, Michel: Mental Illness and Psychology. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Berkeley: U of California, 1987. Grimsted, David: "The Purple Rose of Popular Culture Theory: An Exploration of Intellectual Kitsch" American Quarterly 4 (1991): 541-78. JSTOR. 28 Feb 2008 <www.jstor.org/search>. Humphreys, Christmas: Zen Buddhism. London: Mandala, 1976. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques: Philosophy of Nonsense. The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature. London: Routledge, 1994. ---. The Violence of Language. London: Routledge, 1990. Tigges, Wim: An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. "Woody Allen." World Film Directors Vol. II. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1988. "crimes.pdf". 28 Feb 2008 <http://csac.buffalo.edu/crimes.pdf>

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