Psychologists at UCSB and at the University of British Columbia make the following claim: reading texts that challenge our ability to make meaning also enhances cognitive mechanisms related to implicit learning functions. The researchers had their subjects read a story by Kafka, then tested them on detecting patterns and structures. Below is a link to a fuller report on the study in The Guardian. The findings remind me that nonsense and the surreal challenge us to do the work of creating meaning in ways that “realistic” narratives do not. Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was constructed as a sentence that produces nonsense in semantic terms, yet the minute we read it, we work hard to make sense of it by turning literal meaning into figurative meaning. “Colorless” becomes “dull” and green becomes “immature,” and so on. Is there poetry in Chomsky’s “nonsense”? And what drives us to turn the nonsensical and surreal into something meaningful?

This week, in my course on the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we read Bruno Bettelheim on the uses of enchantment and what he calls the “struggle for meaning.” Robert Darnton’s famous essay “Peasants Tell Tales” has the subtitle “The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The psychoanalyst and the historian provide competing models for constructing the “meaning” of fairy tales, with one arguing that children make psychological sense on their own of fairy tales, and the other making the case for the fairy tales as repositories of folk wisdom and programs for survival.

And to return to Kafka: his stories have often been compared to fairy tales. Patrick Bridgwater’s Kafka: Gothic and Fairytale elaborates on the fairy-tale quality of Kafka’s shorter narratives, pointing out resemblances to fairy tales and to what he calls the anti-fairytale.

Here’s to more nonsense in children’s books. And now, more than ever, I understand the importance–if not the meaning–of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep…