Grammars of Whimsy

No one seems to know the exact etymology of ‘whimsy’. Originally the word meant ‘dizziness, giddiness, vertigo’ (‘obsolete’ says the OED, quoting Charles Blount in 1656 complaining of being ‘troubled with such a whimsey in the head’, and also Thomas Middleton's play Old Law: ‘in my head already,/The whimzy, you all turne round’). From there the word came to mean crazy notions or eccentric beliefs: in 1713 William Derham declared that ‘our Inability to live in too rare and light an Air may discourage those vain Attempts of Flying, and Whimsies of passing to the Moon.’ It's a short step from that to the word meaning crazy fashions or eccentric behaviours. Macaulay’s 1848 History notes that some Cavaliers ‘had what seemed extravagant whimsies about dress, diversions, and postures.’ Since then the term has softened further, such that it now means a light-hearted playfulness and caprice, inventive triviality.

It sounds like it ought to be derived from whim, willpower’s flightier and more distractible cousin, but the etymologists say not so: ‘whimsy’, in fact, is preceded by the word ‘whim-wham’, ‘fanciful or fantastic object; figurative a trifle; in early use chiefly, a trifling ornament of dress, a trinket’, which dates from the early 16th-century. The OED provides a mini-essay on possible origins:

Etymology: A reduplication with vowel-variation, like flim-flam, jim-jam, trim-tram, all of which are similarly applied to trivial or frivolous things. The history of the group of words of which WHIM n.1, WHIMSY n. and adj., and this word are the chief members, is not clear. The existence in Old Norse of hvima, to wander with the eyes as with the fugitive look of a frightened or silly person, and hvimsa, to be taken aback or discomfited, suggests the possibility of an ultimate Scandinavian origin; but, seeing that whim-wham is the earliest recorded of the group (contemporaneously with the similar reduplicated forms mentioned above), an indigenous symbolic origin is more likely; in which case whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.

Whimsy is opposed to grave, to serious, to the timeless verities. If you tend to see the present age as a shonky falling-away from a prior golden age then you’ll likely see modernity as whimsical (Rowland Hill in 1832 advised us, sternly enough, to follow ‘the pure and simple gospel of Christ, but not intermixed with the whim-whams of the present day’). By the same token, if you have greater trust in modernity, and see the past as a kind of amateur hour, smaller scale, given to eccentric superstitions like putting pigs on trial for witchcraft or buying indulgences from the Pope, then whimsy will start to connote historical-ness, or at least the Laura Ashley, Sealed-Knot, Renaissance-Fair manifestation of it.

Michael Wood, reviewing Pynchon’s Against The Day for the LRB, records his worry, as he started chapter 1, that the novel would be a thousand page block of mere whimsy:

Many readers can’t bear whimsy and never make it far into books containing cute animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas Pynchon’s new novel had me worried … Here on page 1 is a group of boy adventurers called the Chums of Chance, heroes of a series of jolly books with titles like The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit and The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis. The narrator addresses us as ‘my faithful readers’ or ‘my young readers’, adopts a verbose and patronising diction to match.

But, he says, he needn’t have worried. As the book gets into its stride Wood finds not whimsy but something else, a little less than kitsch and more than kind:

‘Whimsy’ is not the word for any of this. Pynchon has an extraordinary, open-ended affection for whoever and whatever is not serious—that is, not wholeheartedly committed to rationality, purpose and greed. Most of his stories—and his novels are crowded with not always connected stories—are about drop-outs of some kind, or people who would drop out if they could, characters who are trying to focus their disagreements with what he calls, in his new title and throughout the text, ‘the day’. ‘He had learned,’ we are told of one character, ‘to step to the side of the day.’ Resistance to exploitation ‘must be negotiated with the day’; people who don’t know what’s about to hit them are said to be ‘pretending to carry on with the day’. Of course, ‘against the day’ also, or even chiefly, means ‘till the day comes’, and that is part of Pynchon’s point. Beyond or outside the current day is our image of its counterpart, a lure or a threat, a world far worse or far better, doomsday or deliverance or even both. A character finds himself ‘facing west into a great flow of promise, something like wind, something like light, free of the damaged hopes and pestilent smoke east of here’; and the words ‘longing’ and ‘yearning’ recur with astonishing, eloquent frequency.

I have read Against The Day and think this is spot-on. I am currently reading a metric tonne of contemporary Fantasy, and it is troubling me with a certain whimsey in my head, partly on account of the sheer quantity of it, but also in terms of a certain preponderance of a fay, ornate tweeness. The stuff that isn't brutalist ultraviolence is, as often as not, elaborate congeries of whimwham. Presumably there is an appetite for such stuff.

Here, for instance, is C.S.E. Cooney's Desdemona and the Deep (Tor 2019)—not by any means a bad book, despite that bizarre cover-blurb praising it for being ‘festooned to the eyelids’ (I happen to prefer my eyelids unfestooned, thank you very much). Desdemona Mannering, wilful daughter of a mining millionaire, pauses her campaigning on behalf of girls with phossy-jaw in order to descend into an adjacent dimension and recover the men her Daddy gave to the goblin erl-Lord, Kalos Kantzaros King of Kobolds, in return for certain mining rights. ‘Take as many miners as you want in exchange,’ H H Mannering declares; ‘they are the tithe. That's the bargain’ [45], which is not what ‘tithe’ means, but never mind that. Desdemona passes from her Gilded Age North-America via met-by-moonlight fairies into the grottoes of the underworld, encountering on her way all manner of rococo kitschness and prose-style gildings, not all of them ridiculous. There are characters with names like Tattercoats Bubbleguts and Umber Farklewhit. There's a good deal of rather mannered levity (‘never trust sopranos, especially ones that exude sticky mucilage!’ [100]). Characters caper, literally: ‘with a caper of his shining hooves, he fluffed the remains of his apron’ [167]. All well and good, if manifestly out of favour with any natural thing, a confection rather of hammered gold and gold enamelling to, as the poet put it, keep a drowsy Emperor awake:

Desdemona and Chaz slipped away to walk in the orchard. Branches glittered. Gold. Silver. They flowered, bore fruit-like gems. Gem-like fruit. Desdemona snapped off the prettiest branches as she passed under them ... smiling wryly, Chaz followed in the wake of her demolition, silently collecting fallen boughs and arranging them in a bouquet of precious metals that sagged with jewels. [181]

It would get tiresome if overextended, but Cooney doesn't outstay her welcome. That said, there are negatives as well as positives with the brevity strategy: ‘whimsical,’ says one Goodreads reviewer, ‘but rushed and insubstantial.’ That's right, I think. It's not the artificiality that's the issue, it's the sterility. To say that your golden trees bear fruit-like gems, and then to concede that you might as well call them gem-like fruits, is to make a tacit confession that all this ornateness is interchangeable and therefore arbitrary. When Yeats speaks of his amazing, Byzantine, gold-and-jewels robot bird:

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
In glory of changeless metal

... his point is how such a contrivance fails to capture any of the ‘complexities of mire or blood’ that constitute actual living. Eternal but inert, ‘a mouth that has no moisture and no breath/I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.’ Hardly the most auspicious of Coleridgean allusions, that. Gong-tormented indeed.

What's missing, in other words, is Pynchonian transitoriness, the sense that the best stories balance stringency and acquiescence against the day: this day, the one that's already slipping away. Whimsy, we could say, is ornate without being complex, trivial without thereby banishing any of the profounder disaffections, a rotatory unadvancing mode of art (dizzying, perhaps, in that slightly nauseous sense). The issue isn't ‘cutesy’ cooties, or any emotionally-straitened reaction against sentimentality. The issue is the incapacity of this bejewelled idiom to express the yearning Wood so astutely identifies as the crucial part of the decaying lyricism of Pynchon's vast novel.

I don't mean to pick on Cooney, whose book I enjoyed and whose gorgeous sterility is perfectly fine, if you're in the mood for that kind of thing. Besides, as I say, there's a lot of it about at the moment. The trick, I suppose, is supplying your readers with something actually dizzying—properly disorienting, wrongfooting, head-spinning—rather than the kind of ersatz ditz so many of these books actually trade in. Students nowadays titter at that Milton line from Comus: ‘how Charming is Divine Philosophy!’ But the fault is in our usage, a contemporary discourse that has diluted charming into nothing more than a polished manner and a pleasant smile, and so removed it from its originary relationship to charm, to deep magic and the ability to hold your listener frozen to the spot with your glittering eye. All this, in other words, relates to the larger cultural logic of disenchantment. Once upon a time grimoires contained spells to harrow up our souls, freeze our blood, make our knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand an end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine. Now what we have are grammars, to regulate and moderate all our varieties of discourse. There's even a Grammar of Whimsy. It can be charming, but only in the modern, disenchanted and diluted sense of that word. And it can just be irksome.