engleski

“A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium”: Time, Nonsense, and Humour in the Works of Edward Gorey

In the picturebooks of American illustrator and author Edward Gorey (1925- 2000), time and place are curious, fluid categories, sometimes shifting from one panel to another within the same work. And while the question of where the action is taking place in Gorey’s picturebooks is certainly never easy to answer, the question of time often requires even more considerable deliberation. Gorey’s stories seem to be set in a time that is “vaguely Victorian, Edwardian, and Jazz Age all at once” (Dery, 2018), while Gorey himself frequently claimed in interviews that his works were set in or around 1910 (Shortsleeve, 2002), with his own style of illustration usually compounding the problem, since it “looks so Victorian- cum- Edwardian English that many folk believed him to be English—and dead long before his actual demise” (Heyman, 2017). It is the aim of this paper to explore how Gorey’s manipulations of time and conflations of various periods (Victorian, Edwardian, the Roaring Twenties, but also with occasional incursions of elements from more recent decades) rely on anachronisms, paradoxes, and absurdities characteristic for literary nonsense in order to achieve a comically unstable timeframe. Gorey’s humour will be traced as it emerges out of his “refraction” (to borrow Lecercle’s idea on parody in nonsense), nonsensical ironic quotation or inscription of several periods’ signifiers onto each other, resulting in a polyphonic “false millennium” that stretches across Gorey’s oeuvre.

children's literature ; Gorey ; time

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