FORE-WORDS

Into the Labyrinth

Like many another wild and anarchistic wanderer of our shattered times, I spend a lot of time asking myself questions that are officially classed as “nonsensical" by the Cambridge custodians of linguistic analysis. I ask, for instance, why are there 12 eggs in a grocer's box and 12 citizens in a jury box or why Nagasaki is mentioned in conjunction with uranium in a book published in 1939—or why attitudes toward the female breast correlate closely with attitudes toward war and conquest. Naturally, as the Cambridge group warns, such nonsense questions lead to nonsense answers.

Some of the nonsense answers that have amused and delighted me are collected in this anthology. If there is a thesis hidden in these random explorations, it might be that nonsense has its own meanings and that Lewis Carroll, the fantasist, was just as wise as Charles Dodgson, the logician, who happened to inhabit the same body as Carroll. Or it might be that nonsense and poetry are inescapable parts of human experience as long as we have two hemispheres in our brains, one logical and the other intuitive. Or it might be that dialectical Marxism (Groucho variety) can answer questions that sane sober people can't even ask in the first place.

I have added a running commentary, here and there, which sets these pieces in their historical context, expands them, adds new thoughts, or just exemplifies the sad fact that, like most writers, I cannot resist any opportunity to explain my explanations.