난센스의 수사학

Rhetoric of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books

In the literary tradition based on “mimesis,” nonsense, one of the important literary devices has been ignored until the Victorian era when Lewis Carroll’s Alice books enjoyed great popularity. In fact, Carroll’s nonsense helps to understand the logical fallacies and limit of the existing view on language, to recognize the possibility of autonomous and creative language as an alternative to the reflective, mimetic function of the language. However, Carroll’s nonsense has not been systematically studied and the lack of interest in nonsense features in his works keeps nonsense from developing as a useful literary device. This paper, for that reason, aims to study the general characteristic features of Carroll’s nonsense, and to show how they can have autonomous, creative function with their own rules and logic. The existing linguistic system is based on the stable semiotic relation between the signifier and the signified. Carroll’s nonsense makes it problematic by the surplus of the signifier and the lack of the signified, therefore revealing the randomness and logical blind spots in the existing linguistic system. Nonsense is a verbal play and it depends on rules and order as play does. As the object of play, language is manipulated and arranged artificially. Through this manipulation, nonsense as a play achieves its own fictional rules and makes another autonomous linguistic system of meaning seem possible. This is the specific features of Carroll’s nonsense. And the study of nonsense as a literary device shows the specific relation between the creativity of language and play.