Trauma, Travel, and Regeneration: Picturesque and Nonsense in Edward Lear
Left by his friend to breakfast alone on the white
Italian shore, his Terrible Demon arose
Over his shoulder; he wept to himself in the night,
A dirty landscape-painter who hated his nose.
WYSTAN HUGH AUDEN, ―Edward Lear.‖1
Edward Lear, besides having one of the most colourful personalities in the
Victorian era, was a well-known landscape painter, a dedicated traveller, and an
indefatigable nonsense writer.
During his lifetime, he travelled across much of
Europe, the Levant, and India, to remote and secluded locations less frequented by his
British peers in search of picturesque sceneries.
His complete oeuvre includes
serious illustrated travel books to Italy, Corsica, Albania, and Calabria as well as
collections of absurd limericks published under the title Book of Nonsense; landscape
paintings and watercolours of varying sizes and topics on top of the multitude of
whimsical doodles in his sketches, letters, and diaries. The drastic diversity of his
works seems to beg the question: what kind of fascinating personality is behind this
bipolar shift between stern gravity and buoyant absurdity?
One contributing factor
in the development of Lear‘s mind was his prevailing battle against epilepsy, the
―Terrible Demon‖ mentioned in Auden‘s poem.
Lear had observed his sister‘s epileptic attacks as a very young child but was
never fully prepared for the magnitude of his own violent seizures when they started
at the age of five or six.
He was constantly concerned that the attacks would
ultimately result in paralysis or insanity. The loss of physical control soon led to
psychological shame, as the Victorians still associated epilepsy with demonic
1
W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, London, Faber and Faber, 1966, p. 127.
possession or view it as a result of masturbation.
The one saving grace was that Lear
was able to keep his condition secret by means of symptomatic auras, which gave him
advance warning to retire to his own privacy before an attack occurred (Noakes
20-21). Perhaps this was the reason that Lear detested London, his hometown, for it
symbolized a place of social repression and institutional discrimination.
His
constant travels were his answer to both the physical and mental issues surrounding
his infirmity. When he travelled, not only did his health improved, but he also
seemed to feel more at home in the countryside, a sanctuary beyond the stifling
boundaries of Victorian society.
During his travels, he industriously sketched places of interest and painted
scenes of beauty, moving from one picturesque location to the next.
In one sense,
Lear‘s quest for the picturesque was a quest for the extraordinary.
In India, he
comments upon the ―hideous British utilities‖ which ―prevent and confound the
scene‖ (Indian 96). Ｗhen the location was unusual or novel, he often derived the
most pleasure out of composing both its description and depiction in his journals.
On his way to Corsica in 1868, he contemplates the need of ―the wandering painter
[…] of seeing some new place, and of adding fresh ideas of landscape to both mind
and portfolio‖ (Corsica vii-viii).
In Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica, after a dreary sea
voyage, he is dismayed to find that ―no charm either of colour or architecture in
public or other buildings salutes the eye of the painter‖ (6).
Lear‘s chief complaint is
the ordinariness of the buildings:
There are lines of respectable-looking, lofty, and bulky houses—they may be
likened to great warehouses, or even to highly magnified dominoes—with
regular rows of windows singularly wanting in embellishment and variety; but
there is no wealth of tall campanile or graceful spire, no endless arches or
perforations or indescribable unevenesses, no balconies, no galleries, as in
most parts of Italy, in the full lines of buildings here; no fragmentary hangings,
no stripes, no eastern worlds. (6-7)
Despite its lacking in ―indescribable unevenesses,‖ Lear did grudgingly ―scribe‖
down Ajaccio‘s ―magnified dominoes‖ at day break, as ―in the first hours of morning
this view [of Ajaccio] is very imposing, the vulgar detail of the houses being hidden
in shade, and the high snow mountains appearing to rise directly above them‖ (24).
Plate 2 in the Corsica Journal (Fig. 1), demonstrates Lear‘s idea of the picturesque
―unevenesses‖ that is lent to the cityscape of Ajaccio by the mountains‘ lines, without
which Lear finds Ajaccio to be too plain and bland; in other words, too ordinary.
Fig. 1: ―Ajaccio,‖ by Edward Lear, in Corsica Journal, facing p.24.
Later in Corsica, Lear‘s appetite for extraordinariness is sated when he finally
sees the grandeur of Corsican pines in the forest of Brevella:
The colour here is more beautiful than in most mountain passes I have seen,
owing to the great variety of underwood foliage and the thick clothing of herbs;
forms, too, of granite rocks seem to me more individually interesting than
those of other formations; and the singular grace and beauty of the pine-trees
has a peculiar charm—their tall stems apparently so slender, and so delicate
the proportions of the tuft of foliage crowning them. (91)
Lear is so smitten with the wondrous sight of ―thousands of pines‖ in an
―amphitheatre‖ formed with ―two screens of stupendous precipices‖ that Lear
announces: ―a journey to Corsica is worth any amount of expense and trouble, if but
to look on this scene alone‖ (92).
These giant pine trees are shown in several vignettes in addition to a number of
full plates throughout the Corsica Journal to underline their ―singular grace and
beauty‖ (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Pines of Corsica, by Edward Lear.
Left: ―Forest of Bavella,‖ in Corsica Journal, p. 91.
Right: ―Pinus Lariccio,‖ in Corsica Journal, p.144.
Since his travels for the picturesque focused on the extraordinary, they were far
from peaceful and tranquil and were in fact constantly fatiguing and demanding.
During these travels, Lear was often beset with ludicrous circumstances, customs, and
characters.
For example, he was constantly treated with distrust and discourtesy
when he visited Calabria in 1847.
A baffled Lear later found out that the suspicion
was provoked by his arrival on the eve of a political rebellion.
Later in 1848, after
an entire day‘s travelling in the remote parts of Albania, Lear faced sleep deprivation
at the hands of cats, fleas, and camp fire:
[…] with my head on my knapsack, I managed to get an hour or two of early
sleep, though army of fleas, which assailed me as a new comer, not to speak of
the excursion cats, who played at bo-peep behind my head, made the rest of
the night a time of real suffering, the more so that the great wood fire nearly
roasted me, and was odious to the eyes […]. (Albania 231)
But what most dismayed Lear were not the hardships on land but the exasperating
trials on water.
Lear has once described seasickness to be ―bowels, stomach, toes,
mid, liver – all mixed together. It does not seem to me that actual death can be more
horrible‖ (Hyman 37).
Thus to escape from the traumatic shame inflicted by his
epilepsy, each time Lear travelled away from England, he had to suffer another form
of morbid affliction.
What is more striking is that both seasickness and epilepsy
involve the loss of certain bodily functions and control, so that in turning away from
the social repression associated with his disease, Lear had to confront a simulacrum
version of it before he reached his exotic sanctuaries.
In other words, it might be
viewed as a mode of the repetition compulsion outlined in trauma theory. 2
Hence to
satisfy his appetite for the spectacular, Lear essentially had to relive, perhaps to a
lesser intensity, the traumatic experiences of his dread disorder.
2
For a ―Freudian‖ interpretation of Freud‘s repetition of entire passages over several publications,
please see Caruth‘s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. In which, she argues
that Freud turns the book into ―the site of a trauma,‖ particularly since the passage haunted Freud (20).
In one aspect, this seems to go beyond the pleasure principle, but the
fundamental goal of Lear‘s travels, i.e. to achieve a sense of liberation, still permeates
the motivations behind them.
Such liberation is often associated with Lear‘s
amazing capability to welcome the irrational incongruities that beset his travels.
One prime example of this is documented in his travel to Albania in 1848:
We halted at the khan of Episkopí, close to a little stream full of capital water
cresses which I began to gather and eat with some bread and cheese, an act
which provoked the Epirote bystanders of the village to extatic laughter and
curiosity. Every portion I put into my mouth, delighted them as a most
charming exhibition of foreign whim; and the more juvenile spectators
instantly commenced bringing me all sorts of funny objects, with an earnest
request that the Frank would amuse them by feeding thereupon forthwith. One
brought a thistle, a second a collection of sticks and wood, a third some grass;
a fourth presented me with a fat grasshopper—the whole scene was acted
amid shouts of laughter, in which I joined as loudly as any. We parted
amazingly good friends, and the wits of Episkopí will long remember the
Frank who fed on weeds out of the water.3 (Albania 320-21)
By joining in the Epirotes‘ laughter and mirth, Lear was able to transgress cultural
boundaries and temporarily effaces his sense of alienation, which is reflective of the
alienation he suffered from his epilepsy.
This act of accepting the nonsensical nature
of the situation is indeed what, perhaps unbeknownst to Lear, enabled him to recover
from and reconcile with his own ailment.
In fact, I believe his affinity towards
nonsense became a coping mechanism for him to deal with his traumatic
experiences—a mechanism that pervades his letters, diaries, and works.
In a letter to his personal friend, Lear himself confesses, ―It is queer (and you
3
The common folks in Albania, the Epirotes in this case, generally led a secluded life at this period of
time. Excepting those who were learned and well-travelled, the majority did not know of England and
typically refer to Lear as the ―Frank.‖ Here, Lear‘s unconventional spelling of certain words, such as
―extatic,‖ already displays his nonsense play of words and sounds which is discussed later in the
chapter.
would say so if you saw me) that I am the man as is making some three or four
thousand people laugh in England all at one time […]‖ (Strachey 144). From the
existing photographs and drawings of him (Fig. 3),
Lear appears to be an ordinary man with little visual
sign of his penchant for nonsense; in fact, Lear
never viewed himself as a nonsense writer by
profession.
However, this does not stop Lear from
being crowned as the ―Father of Nonsense‖ by
many critics.
For example, G. K. Chesterton states
that Lear ―is both chronologically and essentially
the father of nonsense; we think him superior to
Lewis Carroll‖ (65), and The Spectator also claims
that ―the laureate of all nonsense- poets—Edward
Lear—was
the
initiator
of
the
practice‖
Fig. 3: ―Edward Lear, 1865‖ in Davidson,
Edward Lear, plate facing p. 158.
(―Word-Twisting versus Nonsense‖ 492).4
The most prevalent form of nonsense composition for Lear was perhaps the
limerick, a form of short poetry stamped with Lear‘s peculiar conventions: the most
noticeable being his preference to start the first line with an unnamed person from a
location that is almost entirely paralleled in the last line. For instance:
There was an Old Person of Burton,
Whose answers were rather uncertain;
When they said, ‗How d‘ye do?‘ he replied, ‗Who are you?‘
That distressing Old Person of Burton. (Complete Nonsense 78)
4
Some critics argue that Lear is influential not only to nonsense literature, but to humorous writings in
all forms. For instance, William Baker argues that T. S. Eliot was influenced by Lear more than
Tennyson in some of his comic verses (564-65).
and:
There was an Old Person of Hurst,
Who drank when he was not athirst;
When they said, ‗You‘ll grow fatter,‘ he answered, ‗What matter?‘
That globular Person of Hurst. (95)
In most of the limericks, the whole sense, or nonsense, of the poem is packed into the
adjective in the last line.
Sometimes, the encapsulating adjective is difficult to
appreciate and create a disjunction between word and meaning. While it is easy to
think of the Person of Hurst as being ―globular‖ due to his excessive drinking, the
word ―distressing‖ does not seem to fit the limerick it appears in.
It is unclear
whether the Person of Burton is distressed or whether he is distressing the people that
greet him.
In fact, why ―distressing‖ and not some other more appropriate words
such as ―impolite‖ or ―befuddled‖?
After the initial glance, what is deceptively plain
turns out to be intriguingly delicate. These key adjectives are chosen by Lear to
subtly signal a sense of incongruity that prompts the reader to reconsider the meaning
of the whole limerick.
If we re-examine the word ―globular‖ in this context, the
word is as problematic as ―distressing‖ since it is virtually impossible for a person
with four limbs and a head to be completely spherical.
While one might be able to
appreciate the humour in such a description, the word ―globular‖ is still a verbal
distortion of reality and connotation.
Another significant ―Lear-ism‖ that Lear applies to his limerick is the
ubiquitous and ambivalent ―they,‖ who appear to be elusively malevolent towards the
protagonists.
This has caused some serious considerations from later critics, who
often argue that Lear‘s limericks are textual locales for the struggle between self and
society, individuality and conformity.
In 1938, Angus Davidson observes that ever
since the publication of Lear‘s Book of Nonsense, there existed speculations about the
limericks having ―a symbolical, or a political, meaning‖ (20). To Davidson, the
limericks are ―a foundation of human experience‖ (195), and he offers a reading of
Lear‘s limericks by discussing the poignancy of Lear‘s ―they‖:
What a world of implication there is in Lear‘s ‗they!‘ ‗They‘ are the force of
public opinion, the dreary voice of human mediocrity: ‗they‘ are perpetually
interfering with the liberty of the individual: ‗they‘ gossip, ‗they‘ condemn,
‗they‘ are inquisitive and conventional and almost always uncharitable. (196)
Davidson‘s analysis of ―they‖ closely follows Aldous Huxley‘s 1920 observation that
―they‖ represents the ―Right-Thinking Men and Women‖ of society (169).5
Huxley
and Davidson‘s initial excursions into the meaning of Lear‘s ―they‖ prompted later
scholars to pursue this line of reasoning and to define ―they‖ as the often oppressive
social norm. George Orwell references Huxley‘s notion of ―they‖ and appends to it
his own reading: ―‗They‘ are the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in
bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing‖ (182).6
Perhaps because of their fragmentary nature and diverse content, the limericks
were very difficult to evaluate even for nineteenth-century reviewers.
Most
contemporary reviewers of Lear discussed at length the characters in his nonsense
stories, songs, alphabets and even botany, but were taciturn about the interaction
between the eccentrics and ―they.‖ For instance, The Saturday Review sums up the
two books of limericks in one sentence: ―Another lasting charm which breathes
5
Huxley‘s article was originally published in The Athenaeum, and later reprinted in On the Margin:
Notes and Essays in 1933. The pagination given here is for the latter.
6
As Anne Colley points out, Orwell uses ―realists‖ to mean ―those who are anti-art‖ (Critics 12).
Orwell‘s essay was originally published in Tribune 21 December 1945, and was later reprinted in
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1950.
through the book is the gallant spirit of so many of the characters, and their noble
disregard of any of those inconveniences which ensue upon the indulgence of
personal eccentricity‖ (―Lear‘s Book of Nonsense‖ 361).
The reviewer of The
Spectator is one of the few who expresses concrete opinions on the subject: ―A
noticeable feature […] is the harsh treatment which the eccentricities of the
inhabitants of certain towns appear to have met with at the hands of their fellowresidents. No less than three people are ‗smashed‘ […]‖ (―Lear‘s Nonsense-Books‖
1251). The reviewer‘s indignation at the maltreatment of the eccentrics may be
viewed as a precursor to Davidson and Huxley‘s stance.
Ina Rae Hark argues that while sufficient evidence can be proposed in favour of
the limericks portraying ―social conflict‖ (―Victorian Angst‖ 114), there are limericks
that do not always conform to the principle of an oppressive body suppressing
individuals without provocation.
As her evidence, Hark cites one of Lear‘s
limericks:
There was an Old Person of Buda,
Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder;
Till at last, with a hammer, they silenced his clamour,
By smashing that Person of Buda. (Complete Nonsense 93)
Rather than the presumed one-sided persecution enforced by the society upon the
individual, the ―Old Person of Buda‖ actively challenges the tolerance of the society
by ceasing to conform.
Hark finds that sometimes the difficulties of the individual
are ―ills that are in fact self-generated‖ (―Victorian Angst‖ 122).
Furthermore, there
exist several limericks in which the protagonists are safed or are accepted by ―they.‖7
7
For instance: the ―Old Person of Prague‖ is cured by ―they‖ (Complete Nonsense 86), and the ―old
person of Shoreham‖ pleases ―them‖ by buying an umbrella and staying put (355).
The deviating endings in Lear‘s limericks cause Hark to conduct a more thorough
analysis in her 1982 critical biography of Lear.
She observes that there are ―several
facets‖ in ―the relationship between the individual and ‗them‘‖ and catalogues six
modes of correlation between behaviours of the individual and the outcome or
society‘s reaction (Edward Lear 30). There is a degree of accuracy in her claim that
whenever readers observe certain patterns in the limericks, ―the poet throws in an
exception to upset them,‖ and that this kind of ―final unpredictability is at base very
frightening‖ (51).
Every time a critic defines Lear‘s ―they,‖ he/she tends to overlook the fact that
this pronoun is used much more broadly than simply as a referential pronoun to
designate the people of a certain place.
In fact, Lear sometimes uses ―they‖ or
―them‖ quite loosely to denote any number of animals, birds, daughters, or sons.
times, ―people,‖ ―folks,‖ and ―crowds‖ are used in place of ―they‖ or ―them.‖
At
It is
quite remarkable that such a loose usage of the word can provoke critics to conduct
detailed analyses in search of a particular significance.
What most critics do not take into account is the fact that the controlling word
in the last sentence is often deliberately displaced with a less than optimal or
appropriate one. While in the case of the Person of Buda the key word is a verb
rather than an adjective, it is still misleading even though the word seems to create no
sense of ambiguity within the text of the limerick.
This becomes much clearer when
we consider the illustrations that appear alongside each and every limerick—
illustrations that are often summarily dismissed by literary critics. The significance
of the limerick and its illustration is at times more intimate and integral than just the
words of the limericks themselves, and this is why Anne C. Colley, one of the
contemporary authorities on Lear, dubs such composite works as ―visual-verbal puns‖
(―Reversal‖ 297).
Thomas Dilworth later echoes Colley‘s claim of the importance of
the images by refusing to call Lear‘s nonsense ―limericks,‖ or even ―illustrated
limericks,‖ and insisting on the term ―picture-limericks,‖ so as to stress the equal
status of word and image (42).8
Thus if we consider the ―picture‖ that the Buda
limerick illustrates, there is a distinct lack of seriousness in the smashing of the
Person of Buda, as ―they‖ hold the hammer at an awkward angle that appears to
convey a mild reprimanding than a direct bludgeoning (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: ―Old Person of Buda‖ by Edward Lear,
Fig. 5: ―Old Person of Chester‖ by Edward Lear,
in Complete Nonsense, p. 93.
in Complete Nonsense, p. 74.
In addition, the ease in which ―they‖ wield the huge mallet seem to suggest that it is
not made of dense metal but of some lighter, perhaps softer, material.
Take another ―violent‖ limerick for example (Fig. 5):
There was an Old Person of Chester,
Whom several small children did pester;
They threw some large stones, which broke most of his bones,
And displeased that Old Person of Chester. (Complete Nonsense 74)
8
Although Dilworth believes that ―illustrated-limericks‖ necessarily ―implies a subordination of the
pictures to verse‖ (42), the word ―illustration,‖ in a broader sense, probably does not portend to such
subjugation. Instead, ―illustration‖ and ―the illustrated‖ denote a sense of interdependence exactly
because the meaning of the word suggests that the two parts coexist as an integral whole.
As sinister as these children are, Lear‘s limericks probably did not anticipate William
Golding‘s Lord of the Flies.
In the illustration, the circles that the children are
dispersing, look like bubbles or certain mellow, perhaps malleable, substance that do
not appear lethal.
It is also arguable that the Person of Chester, ―globular‖ as he is,
has received any injuries or actually possesses any bones at all. Otherwise, he would
not be just ―displeased‖ by the bone-breaking harassment.
In essence, violence and
oppression are hollow verbal threats that carry little or no visual significance in Lear‘s
nonsense. They are guises similar to the misleading encapsulating key words in the
last sentence of his limericks, guises that distort and displace meaning and
significance to safeguard his nonsense world.
A world saturated with eccentrics,
outcasts, and bizarre logics to the extent that those who are ostracized become the
norm.
Lear‘s nonsense is a land populated by epileptics, a land free of
discriminations, and, most of all, a land filled with regenerative laughter.
As Lear grew older, he spent less and less time in England.
He resided briefly
in Rome, Corfu, Malta, Cannes, and finally settled down in San Remo.
From 1856
till 1869, he still visited England almost annually, but once he settled down in San
Remo around 1870, his visits became less frequent.
At the advance age of 61, Lear
managed to travel to India in 1873, and stayed there for over a whole year.
His later
travels seemed less of an escapism but rather more of an inner exploration as some of
his most memorable nonsenses such as ―The Cummerbund‖ and ―The Arkond of
Swat‖ were composed in this period.
When Lear passed away in 1888, it ended his
physical fort-da game of travelling from and to England, but the mental fort-da, as we
have seen in his critics‘ responses, continues to be played out in his readers‘ minds.
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