BRAINSTORMING (LOONY TUNES) FOR NONSENSE CHAP.

One of the characteristics of the genre of nonsense is the rejection of metaphor
Heads of the Town largely is written in nonsensical style verse
Where does Spicer say he rejects metaphor? (in the Lorca letter?) Is 'rejecting' connection, which I take to mean metaphor, for metaphoric devices are all about connection, Spicer's rejection of metaphor? Ideas, language, rather, words 'stick' to objects, so objects correspond...
One gets the idea early, before the serial poems, that Spicer rejects metaphor by making a ridiculous or nonsensical metaphor of comparing writing a poem to the length  of a hat of his nephew and to the width of spoiled writing

'I speak language' vs. 'language speaks' is the dichotomy Spicer uses (as pointed out [not re Spicer] by Lecercle (p. 165)) and plays with
We come up against a brick wall when we merely point out the contradictions implicit in Spicer's verse, as I did in his stuff on Surrealism

However, what we have lurking in Spicer's verse is what the genre of nonsense is all about, the ideal object; for,... (see p. 165, Lecercle)

"Conversation, dialogue and verbal struggle are the explicit or surface manifestation of the constitutive dialogism of the text" (p. 191, Lecercle).

The complacency with which this bitch has a tenacious hold on me, and it was only a night in a thousand and one that has and will not come, and the dread lies there in the corner as completion, coitus, perishes, kills the immediate and never really is, the foreshadowing of the coitus never arrives at the center but is that circumference which is nowhere, everywhere and elsewhere at the same time and place, another dimension hovering above.

back to Lecercle
the exhaustiveness of meaning is deconstructed in nonsense as well as the author's "intention of meaning" (p. 190) but the genre of nonsense does not really constrain the speaker as the form of any genre usually does (what Lecercle implies), although there are its own constraints in nonsense
the author of nonsense "means to say nothing, or he means not to mean (p. 190). This deconstructs the exhaustiveness of meaning and the intention of meaning...in so doing "both the theme of the utterance and the intention of the speaker are at best secondary and at worst nonexistent (one should rather say they have dissolved)" (p. 191).
Consequently, the generic constraints  come to the forefront and these constraints become the true theme of the text, "and the voice, or voices, that are heard in it. This is the specific polyphony of nonsense" (p. 191)

the telephony of Spicer's nonsense (heading for diss.)

p. 116: How much intention can the speaker control, [how much intention can he exert on control? To put it nonsensically] is the question Lecercle raises and this directly relates to what Spicer says about getting rid of intentions
The question for Spicer would be, could he voluntarily (intentionally) switch on or off the transmissions?

What is the relationship btwn meaning & saying? (pp. 118-

p. 124: subversion & support is the dialectics that characterizes literary nonsense

non-sense, as distinguished from nonsense, is "a text which is said, and certainly not meant" (p. 124), and so nonsense is non-sense or is a nonsense text only paradoxically non-sense because "it means not to mean?" (p. 124)
Lecercle poses the question, is there expression in excess of meaning?

non-sense = something which is said but in no way meant (p. 125)

Duchess's theory of meaning is that meaning precedes saying

Searle: whatever can be meant can be said, which denies inexpressibility or the ineffable

"true nonsense would not be expression and meaning, but expression without meaning" (p. 126)

a fictional utterance is not an assertion--at best a non-serious assertion--and so is not like a truth proposition in philosophy (p. 127)

in writing fiction the author 'pretends' to assert and so the assertion must be judged from the author's intention, in other words, there is always a meaning-as-intention behind the saying (utterance) "There is no dire without voulire dire" (p. 127)

Lecercle goes from the Duchess's theory, meaning is the origin of saying, to "saying as the source of a proliferation of potential meanings" (p. 130), a "Saying-Meaning-Saying chain where an Ur-text inspires a meaning that results in a text

Spicer's notion of transmission as coming not from an Ur-text or mythical origin of a primeval text from God is actually an embodiment of the paradox of 'I speak language' versus 'language speaks', meaning that "no one means the multiplicity of utterances that may be derived from the text, no one except the free play of language, as the receptacle of multiple intertextual chains" (p. 133). Thus we have "a theory of the emergence of texts, and therefore of nonsense texts, as the output of intertextual chains" (p. 134).

perhaps "Lowghost" is what Lecercle refers to as "corpses, dead metaphorical remnants of forgotten scientific theories" (p. 156) or Lakoff & Johnson call 'ontological metaphors'