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PARADOX

by Don L. F. Nilsen

and Alleen Pace Nilsen

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GILBERT AND SULLIVAN

• Gilbert and Sullivan often relied on paradox for comic effect. In The Pirates of Penzance, they composed a song about paradoxes:

How quaint the ways of paradox!At common sense she gaily mocks!A paradox, a paradox,A most ingenious paradox!Ha! ha! ha! ha!

(Nilsen & Nilsen 219)

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GREEK PHILOSOPHERS

• The Greek philosophers often wrestled with paradoxes.

• The most famous was credited to the Cretan philosopher Epimenides: “All Cretans are liars.”

• Epimenides was a Cretan. Therefore, If he is lying, then the statement must be true. But if the statement is true, he must be lying.

• (Nilsen & Nilsen 219)

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PARADOX VS. CONTRADICTION

• Paradoxes are statements that seem contradictory, unbelievable, or absurd, but in some sense are nevertheless true.

• Because paradoxes highlight breakdowns in our expectations of a logical universe, they are sources of both delight and consternation as the human mind works to figure out how people can in good faith talk about a “large mouse” running between the legs of a “small elephant” or can make sense out of the Yiddish curse, “He should drop dead, God forbid!”

• (Nilsen & Nilsen 219)

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SIGNIFICANT PARADOXES FROM THE 16TH CENTURY TO THE 20TH CENTURY

• Sits he on ever so high a throne, a man still sits on his bottom. (Michel Elyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592)

• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. (Jonathan Swift, 1667-1745)

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• I laugh, so that I may not cry. (Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, 1732-1799)

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. (Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900)

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• !!There ain’t any answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer. (Gertrude Stein, 1874-1946)

• The vital question today is not whether there will be life after death, but whether there was life before death. (Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1990)

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Visual Paradox

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References:

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Language of Paradox." Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Robert Con Davis, and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1989, 32-42.

Falletta, Nicholas. The Paradoxicon. New York, NY: John Wiley, 1983.

Fry, William F., Jr. "Humor and Paradox." American Behavioral Scientist. 30.1 (1987): 42-71.

Gans, Eric. Signs of Paradox, Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1980.

Leiber, Justin. Paradoxes. London, England: Duckworth, 1993.

Morreall, John. “Aristotle and the Paradox of Tragedy.” Delta Epsilon Signa Journal 24.2 (1979): 50-56.

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Nilsen, Don L. F. "Parody, Paradox, Nonsense, and Legends." Humor Scholarship: A Research Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993, 101-112.

Nilsen, Don L. F. "'The Seriousness of Humor' And Other Antithetical Paradoxes." California English 20.5 (1984): 14-15 and 22.

Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Don L. F. Nilsen. Encyclopedia of 20th Century American Humor. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.

Rescher, Nicholas. Paradoxes. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing Company, 2001.

Poundstone, William. Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge. New York: Anchor, 1988.

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Seward, Samuel S. Jr. The Paradox of the Ludicrous. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ Press, 1930.

Shaw, David W. Elegy and Paradox. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Shershow, Scott Cutler. Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy. Amherst: Univ of Mass Press, 1986.

Stainsbury, Richard Mark. Paradoxes. Cambridge, England: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1988.

Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London, England: T. V. Boardman, 1949.