Revile might be too strong word.
No.
It's not.
It's probably imprecise, though. There is some literature, however, which causes me mental and physical agony. Reading it is like the metaphorical fingernails on chalkboard. My nerves tense, my ears close, my face contorts, and I feel like ice water is dropping down my spine.
I'm not talking about pulp romances or mass market westerns or out-of-the-box dungeons-and-dragons fantasy novels.
No, no.
I'm talking about this:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
And also a bit of this:
He never will know if the Gick or the Goor
fits into the Skrux or the Snux or the Snoor.
I feel like a traitor to the English speaking world. I feel as if I am turning my back on childhood itself. I feel like I am thumbing my nose at Wonder with a capital a W and Imagination with a capital I. Nevertheless, words mean things, and empty words are a paradox my spirit cannot manage. Nonsense poetry (like the above snippets from Lewis Carroll's "The Jabberwocky" and Dr. Seuss's Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?) gives me fits.
It's all Vogon poetry to my ear.
Oh freddled gruntbuggl
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
And we all know that Vogon poetry is widely recognized as the third worst poetry in the Universe.
It's a real hang-up. I recognize that it's personal, and I wage no campaign to burn all such books or to ban them from schools and libraries. It being a personal reaction doesn't make it any less real, though.
There's a real difference, two between nonsense and absurdity or surrealism. I can handle distorted reality. I can handle the shocking, impossible juxtaposition of incompatible realities. Nonsense, however, is another matter altogether. A word without meaning has no reality -- and, yet, there it is. This breaks my brain and gives me the creepy-crawlers. In fact, nonsense poetry gives me the same sense of moral indignation as riddles (which are linguistic cheats) and the same reaction of, "Did you really run out of words in our vast collection of world language?" as scat singing. But even if I set those feelings aside, I cannot wrap my mind around the use of words that are not words at all.
Isn't that just Smurftastic?
.Nevets.
