The Snark From Another Planet

All aboard! At one and the same time, the Bellman delivers himself from an impending watery grave, snatches a coveted berth aboard the H.M.S. Snark, tingles his bell to signal our departure and introduces the Beaver, who is busily engaged upon her salubrious lace-making.

I am aware that readers assume the Beaver to be a He. Carroll's text is ambiguous on the point, only using the masculine (possessive) pronoun in the plural to refer to the Beaver and another (usually the Butcher). In his Annotated Snark, Martin Gardner concurs on this important grammatical point, which is reinforced in my mind by its aesthetic rightness.

Inasmuch as the Snark is an imaginary animal and thus its clochetic pursuer triply so, and inasmuch as beavers are usually riparian, sedentary and unimaginably disinterested in travel and the needletrade, be it resolved: 

No Bellman can step into the same river twice, for there is no Bellman, nor any river (or else he could step into it twice) and hence, all other passengers of any vessels upon these waters are also unreal, or at least up for some ontological gender-bending.

QED, the Beaver's a She and not a He and any arguments to the contrary are futile, for nothing will come of nothing. Speak again of this matter and I will invoke my Aristotelian rights: nature abhors a void, especially a kingly third portion (AKA the artists' Law of Thirds). Now stop learing at this nice drawing and get busy googling Heraclitus and Shakespeare, the bookends of occidental thinkery.

Wag the Snark

The Dramatis Personae of this Snark GN continues … immediately to the right of the Bellman is the Broker, AKA Karl Marx. To the latter's right is the Billiard-Marker, AKA Raymond Roussel. If — and the thing is wildly possible — the charge of drawing nonsense were ever brought against the illustrator of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on this panel. Messers Marx and Roussel were both notable figments of each other's imagination, each believing the other an opiate of the masses or a mass of opiates. 

The treason of reality, so scandalous, so flattering! Or even better, to paraphrase Magritte (who knew a thing or two about snark hunting), CECI — IL N'EST PAS UN ARTIST.

One Snark to Find Them and in the Darkness Bind Them

Page two of The Hunting of the Snark GN is a veritable rogue's gallery of Nonsense Wallahs … from right to left (semitic justification has been applied for at the appropriate government agencies): 


The Boots, AKA Charles Darwin
The Bonnet, AKA Friedrich Nietzsche
The Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger
The Broker, AKA Eric Satie
The Bellman, AKA The White Knight AKA Sir John Tenniel

The observant reader will detect a pattern here: all of the B-Boyz must have been alive during Carroll's lifetime. 

If memory serves, Satie enjoyed creating miniscule models of houses shaped out of lead, which he kept in a cabinet in his home. He would periodically advertise these houses in the local newspaper — making no mention of their actual size — and would take great delight in ushering the prospective home-purchaser into his parlor, and there solemnly presenting him with the unexpected lilliputian house. One can imagine Nietzsche's reaction to this — the Gallic humor! the German silence!

Satie's aptly-named piano piece, Vexations, is an ideal soundtrack for la vie snarque, and so here is a full, unabridged performance of it. If only Satie had made this into an opera, it would have saved humanity from the dullard doldrums of everything else.

The Color of Three

The second panel of my Snark GN … self-explanatory, I should think. The Quebecois, tripartite motif is reinforced by the element of stealthy moisture. Both the fleur-de-lys and water (and what is the color of this water? It is the color of water) are attributes of monarchy, the former being an attribute of the ancien regime and the latter being referred to by the Sun King in his infamous pronouncement: apres moi, le deluge. 

The Bellman is given to royal diktats of this sort which he legitimizes with a Christian, trinitarian strategy. The hunting of snarks is not peasant's sport, it is the sport of kings. Pshaw to the separation of church and state that was once so ballyhooed by our American cousins. What ho! saddle up, the last man afield is a prole! Ditto for the women, eh?

Alt-Snark!

A theatrical start to this GN version of The Hunting of the Snark, and one that I hope Lewis Carroll would have appreciated. The unreality of the stage (compounded by, in this instance, the unreality of all things internet) is the best starting point for a Snark hunt. 

Charles Darwin 

The mentally astute reader will note that the Boots is Charles Darwin (definitively responsible for the unreality of god) and that the Bellman is the White Knight from Through the Looking Glass. 

The White Knight

The more astute reader will know that the White Knight was a self-portrait of the cyclopic Sir John Tenniel, illustrator of Through the Looking Glass. 

The most astute reader will remember that the Boot's pose is that of St. Anthony in Grunewald's Temptation of St. Anthony, a compelling depiction of the unreal visions inflicted by the unreal nemesis of an unreal deity upon a real believer. What I tell you three times, eh?

Sir John Tenniel

The Temptation of St. Anthony, Grunewald

Hark, 'Tis A Snark!

After spending ten weeks focusing upon each of the Snark Hunters in their turn, it is time to turn our attention to She Who Must Be Obeyed … yes, the Snark itself!

The Encylopedia Snarkiana defines Snarkus Snarkensis as a colorless, odorless, tasteless, soundless and bodyless entity designed to fluster illustrators with its annoying penchant for self-contradiction and nonexistence.

The Hunting of the Snark defines a Snark in its usual evasive manner, employing an impressive array of half-truths, demi-truths, pseudo-truths and mini-truths. We shall examine these laughable attempts at Factualism at greater length over the coming weeks, but for now we present you with the above inky approximation of a Snark as a sort of semiotic apertif designed to whet your appetite for something or the other.

This drawing of a sketch of a xerox of a fax of a Snark is the very drawing with which my graphic novel version of the Snark commences, the notorious frontispiece to Fit the First, notorious since this is not at all the sort of landing Lewis Carroll probably had in mind.

Very well, we will have our little jokes at the expense of the Admirable Carroll but when one is commencing a hunt, it is customary to inform one’s fellow hunters of what it is exactly that they should feel free to aim at. Teleology is the secret of good marksmanship.

Indeed, there was much chewing of pencils and tugging at fetlocks on this artist’s part as he contemplated this particular dilemma, he endured sleepless nights of carefully feigned slumber as he concealed from his wife the mental turmoil which so agitated his overheated mind.

In the end, bereft of inspiration, the above drawing was hastily tossed off in the hopes that no one would notice its lack of meaning. The management apologizes in advance for any dashed hopes on the reader’s part, no doubt so many of you had eagerly seized upon this image, excited at the hopes of discovering the Snark’s true identity at last, after 138 years the Holy Grail of Snarkology would be in your sweaty grasp at last — and then you gasped aloud, oh, the horror! the horror! — you cried out in your despair! — the Snark … it is Eye!

Profiles in Nonsense: The Baker

The Admirable Mister Carroll would have his little surprises for The Hunting of the Snark certainly seems nothing but surprises. Of course, aside from certain unfortunate mishaps, such as sudden insanity or total annihilation, most of Mister Carroll’s Snarkian surprises tend towards the cheerily nonsensical and comfortably numb variety.

This is because he was a master craftsman and knew full well that a bit of well-oiled authorial surprise keeps the groundlings happy enough to stick through the heavy going of the more intellectual bits, such as plot or thematic development. (Mister Burton, are you taking notes?)

Like revenge or cheap plonk, surprise is best served cold, and so we’ll stick to Carroll’s master plan and introduce the final member of our Fellowship of the Snark as Carroll did … vaguely, mysteriously, even confusingly … the Baker!

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
With his name painted clearly on each:
But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
They were all left behind on the beach.
The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pairs of boots — but the worst of it was,
He had wholly forgotten his name.



Do not be alarmed by the curious fact that the above drawing depicts Our Mystery Snark-Hunter’s 42 boxes on the beach as being labeled with the Chinese ideogram for "candlestub" known as “xié”. Simply remain calm while I remind you that our Mystery Snarkistadore's alias of “candlestub” will be revealed at a later date. And do not panic if you happen to know that the boxes and the girl with the fan are directly taken from one of Carroll’s own photographs, a portrait of Alexandra “Xie” Kitchins posing as an off-duty Chinese tea merchant.

Keep your cool, dear reader, even if the gentleman at the easel should prove to be the late and sorely missed British author Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy proved conclusively that the Answer to the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything In It is 42. Above all, take no notice of the curious coincidence of the painting of a box that he is working at. It is labeled with a variation upon Magritte’s famous anti-dictum, “this is not my box” and is itself a play upon the Belgian’s seminal work, The Human Condition I.
It cannot harm you, simply move around it cautiously whilst noting the utter absence of the seven coats and six boots mentioned in the verses. They are unworthy of inclusion in this drawing, owing to the fact that since the clothes make the man, the commutative principle of haute couture allows the man to make the clothes. Therefore, the sartorial and ontological nudity of this man (still un-named, un-manned and un-drawn) is his own lookout. No doubt, if left alone, nature will have its way and his coats and boots would multiply and eventually replenish his wardrobe (the commutative spirit of Victorian men's fashion was biblically fecund) and he will find himself the proud possessor of 42 coots and boats. QED, eh?

Surprise and anticipation, the twin bogeymen of Nonsense poets and Hollywood scriptwriters alike! Stay tuned, dear readers, for next week's exciting episode!