SOURCE: “Literature, Philosophy, Nonsense,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 30, No. 3, July 1990, pp. 256–65.

In the following essay, Tilghman examines the philosophical significance of nonsense in Aymé's tales of the marvelous.

In this [essay] I want to suggest a thesis about the relation between philosophy and literature and I will do this by an examination of the role of nonsense in some of the short stories of the French author Marcel Aymé.

Nonsense became a philosophical category only in the early twentieth century and was first introduced by, I believe, Bertrand Russell with the theory of types. It was the syntactical restrictions enjoined by the theory of types that allowed Russell to charge that many of the assertions of earlier philosophers were not simply false, but in fact made no sense. Nonsense was given a deeper dimension by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus with the distinction between the...