A children’s book written by Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is considered a classic example of literary nonsense. It was the definition of this literary genre that gave me pause as I reflected upon it’s similarity to alcoholism.
Nonsense usually lives like a parasite, within the host of another genre or type of literature, and as such, can appear in many guises, such as romantic verse, alphabet, travel writing, short story, lyric poetry, journalism, and recipes. Structural strictness is often balanced by semantic chaos and polysemy. According to Wim Tigges, the effect of nonsense is often caused by an excess of meaning, rather than a lack of it. Tigges also gives a number of nonsense techniques/devices that characterize the genre, including faulty cause and effect, portmanteau, neologism, reversals and inversions, imprecision, simultaneity, picture/text incongruity, arbitrariness, infinite repetition, negativity or mirroring, and misappropriation~ Wikipedia
Along the same lines, so does alcoholism exist as a parasite within our society and families. Alone it rarely flourishes because of its inability to keep its host alive without the support of care givers and civilized support structures. Often misdiagnosed because of its devious camouflage it is identified both intentionally and accidentally as a wide variety of mental and situational problems that exist only as symptoms of the disease.
But it is the long list of devices in this definition of literary nonsense including incongruity, arbitrariness, infinite repetition, negativity or mirroring, and misappropriation that really acts as a full length mirror in this analogy. Almost anyone who has dealt with an addict or an alcoholic will be able to relate to this laundry list, especially “infinite repetition”! In a nutshell, that was me when I was drinking.
Not only did my life resemble this nonsensical genre, I had crafted my own wonderland that I withdrew into because I could no longer function in the real world. Just as Alice took a sip from the bottle labeled “Drink Me” and grew small enough to fit through the door to wonderland, I drank constantly so that I never had to return to reality.
There is one striking difference between the tales though. Alice woke up no worse for the wear, but I woke up in a desperate place called rock bottom.
