I have been thinking about the meaning of nonsense recently and whether or not something is truly nonsense, or whether we just haven’t been offered the knowledge to make it into something that makes sense to us. Often times older literature, such as Shakespeare, can be seen as nonsense to someone who wasn’t offered the knowledge to understand the meaning of what is actually being said. But when pondered and discussed, we can make connections and often make sense of the literature at hand, despite it being difficult to understand. Often times in class I would listen to the conversations at hand and initially be incredibly confused, but when I thought about the conversations post-class I would uncover so much knowledge simply as a result of my classmates comments within discussions. By educating myself on the things that I thought were nonsense in class, I was even able to make some blogs out of the topics discussed. In this post I would like to discuss the “nonsense” within Percival Everett’s novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier and his poetry book, re: f(gesture).
When we look at the novel, I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett there is one character who seemingly speaks nothing but nonsense: Percival Everett (more widely known in the novel as Professor Everett). Professor Everett taught a class called The Philosophy of Nonsense, which Not Sidney had enrolled in during his time at Morehouse University. During this time, Professor Everett seemed to constantly spew actual nonsense most of the time, but Not Sidney soon realized this was not the case. He had learned so much from his supposed nonsense, through episodes of learning such as Professor Everett’s mentioning that Not Sidney should avoid becoming “a sheep”(Everett). This piece of knowledge ran into Not Sidney later in the novel when he decided to join a fraternity and saw that the hazing and abuse was not worth becoming a sheep in a sense. Professor Everett offers Not Sidney the advice that if he can “imagine that he doesn’t have limitations” (Everett). Contextually, this advice seems like something nonsense filled, but Not Sidney takes this advice and carries it with him throughout the novel, moulding it in his own interpretation into something much more significant, perhaps something much more sensical. Although Professor Everett seems to be filled with nonsense, his words actually carry meaning when pondered by Not Sidney.
Looking into Percival Everett’s poetry novel, re: f(gesture) can offer us some insight into the idea of what nonsense actually is. I want to look specifically at poem 5 in the set of poems titled, Logic. When I first looked at this poem, and honestly most of the poems in this poetry novel, I was confused as to what it really meant. At first it looked like pure nonsense, but after a discussion in class I discovered that it could have many possible underlying meanings. The poem goes as follows: “From rags and dust- a rat is formed in the cellar. It was not there before. Only rags and dust.”(Everett). While discussing this my classmate Liz brought up that this poem conjured up the theory of spontaneous generation, which I had mentioned in my past few blogs. Since I had the opportunity to ponder this with my classmates, the nonsense that I originally saw in this poem slowly faded into something that I could make sense of.
My question at hand is whether or not true nonsense exists. Is anything truly nonsense if we can ponder and research to our hearts content? I believe that nonsense only exists because we allow it to exist. Since someone believes something is nonsense, it is nonsense in their eyes until proved otherwise. When we look at literature and the idea of nonsense surrounding complex literature, can we even categorize it as nonsense? Nonsense is all about the perspective of the person who is taking in the supposed nonsense. It is only nonsense if we allow ourselves to believe it is nonsense, and it only begins to make sense once we educate ourselves on the subject at hand.