Only connect

Edward de Bono

The Raven and the Writing Desk Francis Huxley (Thames and Hudson £3.95)

Book reviewers are a particularly arrogant and fat-headed breed who assume that an author has written a book especially to please them—and I make no exception for Myself. At first sight, and then at second sight, I disliked the book I am about to review here. And yet it is very good. There have been so many studies of Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderlandt hat [was dismayed b,Y the idea of yet another. The analysis has already gone so far that a book published earlier this year examines his supposed faneY for young girls. I dislike nit-picking and worrying, in the sense of a dog worrying !I dead rat or a scholar worrying a few years 1.11 the life of some obscure poet. I also dislike complexity for the sake of complexity, and prefer the broad sweep of an eagle's eye to. the burrowing of a beetle. And yet having (1,,Iselosed all that, has a reviewer who pre'ers the restraint of Georgian architecture the right to bitch about Baroque ?

The book grows around the riddle, 'Why

a raven like a writing desk ?' that was asked by the Hatter at the Mad Hatter's tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. No answer .was given. So the whole book concerns itself with the possible answers that might have been suggested if we follow the rules of Nonsense. Francis Huxley explores these rules as he detects them in Lewis Carroll,and as he perceives them himself. It needs saying at once that Nonsense is a very serious 'natter. It is certainly not the absence of sense, un-sense or bad sense. Nonsense is a

k i euliarly acute form of sense because it s

?ne that is liberated from the inhibitions of `°nsensus and experience. b The flavour of the book may be enjoyed ,Y a quick viewing of the possible answers eu3 the riddle, ranging from the direct to the ,14..ntie. Why is a raven like a writing desk ? u',ause they both should be made to shut sp• 'Because Poe wrote on both' (also from b:rn Loyd, the puzzler). 'Because Each

gins with an E' (James Michie).

b.tiut this is straightforward riddling (or ddelling, from Dean Liddell whose ,:itighter was Alice). As the author says, 111e shall permit ourselves to extend the ii,,,aning of raven into ravenous, which the nidtter must have been if tea was his only On the other hand, `if we subtract 1.;`ed. King" from "writing desk" the it,rnalnder will quite take away one's wits: 10,3, vv, The possibilities multiply : 'we cannot the opportunity of giving yet another answer to the Riddle here, by coniting raven and writing desk to the nearly

perfect anagram of "Giant Screwdriver"' (very relevant to the chapter on 'Coupling'). Then there is the silver nitrate used in Carroll's hobby of photography and the anagrammatic 'Title is Raven.' Finally there is a geographical explanation based on towns with which Carroll or Liddell were associated: this draws in Ravensworth, the Tees, the Esk, the Dee and Ravenglass in a flurry of virtuosity.

The book is much more than a crossword puzzler's enjoyment of hints and significances. Wittgenstein comes in early: for in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have been able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have been able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can therefore only be drawn in language and what lies the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.' Poor Wittgenstein, who did not really know what nonsense was.

The book is divided into different sections, each of which explores particular 'rules' and 'forms' of nonsense: 'We may say that we have done the same: we have made the Riddle disappear into a surd, into a portmanteau, and into the Boojum.' The key to Nonsense is given on page 132: 'Our best answer is via Humpty Dumpty's "Impenetrability!" This conversation-stopper, as we noted in chapter six, originated with Professor Bartholomew Price, who held that it was impossible for two particles of matter to occupy the same space at the same time. But then we showed that this cannot hold good for Nonsense, whose particles are mutually inclusive rather than mutually exclusive.' Ordinary logic is built on the rather tedious rule of contradiction. Nonsense slides through this rule as easily as a neutrino through 180 yards of steel.

Nonsense is the logic of connection whereas sense is the logic of context. By 'context' we can mean experience. It is like erecting a tent and fixing the guy ropes. The stable tent is fixed by a number of connecting guy ropes that connect it firmly to its surroundings in all directions. But if there is only one connection the tent is unstable. In Nonsense it is enough for there to be only one connection. The connection may be based on the sound of a word or the spelling, as in a pun, or on how the word can be transformed. We can invent our own rules of connection. Nonsense becomes humour when a second strand loops back to connect the provocation with the origin. The riddle popular amongst young school children in New South Wales (but not elsewhere in Australia) goes: 'What is red but is not there?' Answer : 'Bloody nothing" The second connection implying that it is a

The disquieting thing about Nonsense is that it threatens and upsets our feelings of 'significance.' Since 'significance' is the basic currency with which our perception traffics with the environment, this is a serious matter. We can go along with Francis Huxley as he sorts out Lewis Carroll's intentions and as he unravels, in detective style, the possible significances that Carroll has wittingly or unwittingly woven into his work. We even accept the psychoanalytical view that there may be subconscious significance which Carroll would himself deny. But we are still in a Platonic context, searching for the truth that lies there if only we can find it. There comes a moment, however, when we refuse to accept that significance is being discovered. We begin to feel that it is not there at all, but that it is being created. And so of course it is. We can always create significance by creating rules of connection and then finding them exhibited by coincidence. Consider the following passage from the book : With this is mind, let us seek elsewhere for the number 4. . . and its half. As we have mentioned, the story entitled 'Novelty and Romancement' starts off on a Friday, the 4th of June, at half past four p.m. Carroll began writing this story on 21 January, 1856, when he was six days short of his 24th birthday—and 24 is of course 42 reversed. He must have met Alice for the first time later on in the year of 1856, and she would then have been four years old. She was born on Tuesday, 4th May, 1852, while the boating trip on which her adventures underground were told took place on Friday. 4th July.

And this goes on and on. Elsewhere in the book are examples of those types of connections and significances that numerologists are so skilled at creating. The connection is always there once it has been revealed. And one thing sensibly leads on to the other.

This creation of significance is the hallmark of paranoia. That is not to say that all Nonsense Masters are paranoid, but that paranoids are masters of significance. Events that are apparently unconnected for other people are suddenly revealed to be closely connected by the paranoiac. We are so used to discovering truth and significance that we fail to pay attention to the creation of significance, to the joyful harvesting of coincidence. Nonsense is an addiction to significance. Which does not make the book easy reading because Francis Huxley behaves like an addict, and the reader is left like a gunman in a field full of startled hares wondering which ones will circle back again within range. Most of them do. My own flat answer to the riddle is that both raven and writing desk are closely related to raving and that madness is not an absence of sense but an excess of it—for if you have significance in all directions you have context in none.