From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Literary nonsense refers to a genre of literature, whether poetry or prose, that depends on a balance of sense and non-sense, on order and chaos. It usually presents a topsy-turvy world but is distinct from fantasy. Often, though not necessarily humorous, nonsense has a kind of humor derived from a different source than a joke: nonsense is funny because it does
not make sense, as opposed to most humor which is funny because it
does. Nonsense usually lives like a parasite, within the host of another genre or type of literature, and as such, can appear in many guises, such as romantic verse, alphabet, travel writing, short story, lyric poetry, journalism, and recipes. Structural strictness is often balanced by semantic chaos and polysemy. According to Wim Tigges, the effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. Tigges also gives a number of nonsense techniques/devices that characterize the genre, including faulty cause and effect, portmanteau, neologism, reversals and inversions, imprecision, simultaneity, picture/text incongruity, arbitrariness, infinite repetition, negativity or mirroring, and misappropriation. Michael Heyman has added to this list nonsense tautology, reduplication, statement of the obvious, and absurd precision . Nonsense can exist as a genre, in which many nonsense devices are used to create a careful balance, or it can be used as a device, in which case the text may be quite sensical with only moments of the nonsense effect. Sometimes this kind of writing is inaccurately referred to as "
nonsense verse", which is inaccurate not because nonsense verse does not exist, but because nonsense can appear in non-verse forms.
