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Autoaesthetics: Strategies of the Self After Nietzsche (review)

on its surface. Contrary to what Rieke implies, I suggest that a text qualifies as a piece of nonsense when it relaxes the tightness and exposes gaps (often through its linguistic acrobatics) which invite, rather than obscure, a meaning. Nonsense to be nonsense needs the kind of space that is available in metaphors. It cannot really exist when there is both a mesh of sounds and puns on the surface and a dense and intricate web of references underneath. There have to be breathing spaces in which the nonsense exists for its own purposes and through which it can emerge. In fact, I wonder if nonsense is ever on the surface of a text. When one reads a piece of nonsense, there is a certain superficial meaning that immediately, unwittingly, asserts itself. It is only when one tries to dig though the gravel of its words that each phrase or syllable tumbles over the other and obscures the "sense." Perhaps my remarks are too closely married to nineteenth-century views of nonsense and to their examples. In a way, though, I wish that Rieke had addressed the question of the relationship between nineteenthand twentieth-century nonsense. I am reminded of Klaus Reichert's 1974 study of nonsense (Lewis Carroll Studien zum Literarschen unsinn) in which he makes the interesting point that after the period beginning with Lear and ending with Carroll, nonsense is no longer needed, for it and its idiosyncrasies have been absorbed into regular literature. Reichert suggests that twentiethcentury literature has "caught up" with Victorian nonsense writing. The implications of his words would have added an interesting dimension to what I think is in most respects a most suggestive and satisfying book.