The Fairy Feller's Master-stroke

Richard Dadd is a trickster, a pre-post-modern enigma wrapped in a Shakespearean Midsummer Nightâ (TM)s Dream; an Elizabethan Puck living in a smothering Victorian insane asylum, foreshadowing and, in brilliant, Mad Hatter conundrums, entering the fragmented shards of todayâ (TM)s nightmarish oxymorons long before the artists currently trying to give them the jokerâ (TM)s ephemeral maps of discourse. The author thinks of Bob Dylanâ (TM)s â oeBallad of a Thin Man, â that cryptic refusal to reduce the warped mirrors of reality to prosaic lies, or, perhaps â oeAll Along the Watchtowerâ or â oeMr Tambourine Man.â Even more than Samuel Beckettâ (TM)s Waiting for Godot, which curiously enough comes off as overly esoteric, too studied, too conscious, Daddâ (TM)s entire existence foreshadows the forbidden entrance into the numinous, the realization of the inexplicable labyrinths of contemporary existence, that wonderfully rich Marcel Duchamp landscape of puns and satiric paradigms, that surrealistic parallax of the brilliant gamester Salvador Dali, that smirking irony of the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Robert Indiana; that fragmented, meta-fictional struggle of Kurt Vonnegutâ (TM)s Slaughterhouse Five. John Lennon certainly sensed it and couldnâ (TM)t help but push into meta-real worlds in his own lyrics. Think of â oeStrawberry Fields Forever, â â oeI Am the Walrus, â and the more self-conscious â oeRevolution Number 9.â In â oeYer Blues, â he even refers to Dylanâ (TM)s main character, Mr Jones from â oeBallad of a Thin Man.â If Lennonâ (TM)s song is taken seriously, literally, then it is a dark crying out by a suicidal man, â oeLord, Iâ (TM)m lonely, wanna dieâ ; or, if taken as a metaphor for a loverâ (TM)s lost feelings about his unfulfilled love, it falls into the romantic rant of a typical blues or teenage rock-and-roll song. However, even on this level, it has an irony about it, a sense of laughing at itself and at Dylanâ (TM)s Mr Jones, who knows something is going on but just not what it is, and then, by extension, all of us who have awakened to the fact that the studied Western world doesnâ (TM)t make sense, all of us who struggle to find meaning in the nonsense images, characters, and happenings in the song, and perhaps, coming to a conclusion that the nonsense is the sense.