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Monday, May 19, 2008
Snarkiana
Verbum sap: Mahendra Singh’s superb protosurrealist edition of The Hunting of the Snark (or the first two cantos thereof) is now available to download in a handsome pdf format. You need to peruse this if you have not already. It is a thing of startling beauty.
One of the things Singh gets right in his illustrations is the balance between the too-literal and the too Max-Ernst-y oblique. Somewhere in the middle is the best place to excavate the strangeness and solidity (the solid strangeness, the strange solidity) of Carroll’s poem. So Henry Holiday, the original illustrator (with whom Singh’s own edition exists in a fertile dialectic) tends towards the former: as, famously, when he illustrates “They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;/They pursued it with forks and hope” by drawing the crew not only carrying actual thimbles and forks and also accompanied by the allegorical figures of ‘care’ and ‘hope’:
On the other hand eschewing representational sense altogether would also miss the point of the poem. As Singh notes, it’s easy to overplay the complexity and allusiveness of ‘what the Snark means’. Really, it’s simple.
Whenever asked what the Snark meant, Lewis Carroll always replied: I don’t know. Huzzah for these cheeky Victorians and their tautological transparencies in which the meaning is the meaning, they never cease to baffle the small-minded and delight the light-hearted!
We could put it another way: it’s obvious what the Snark is. The Snark is a monster. Now, monster is an interesting word. It derives from the Latin, monstrum, which means (I pluck Lewis and Short from my shelf) ‘a divine omen, indicating misfortune, an evil omen, portent’. This word is in turn from moneo: ‘to teach, instruct, tell, inform, point out; to announce, predict, foretell’. Originally a calf (say) born with two heads would be a monster in the sense of being ominous: through it the gods would be trying to tell us something. Though the word now has the connotation of a large and terrifying fantastical beast, the earlier meaning still haunts it. Godzilla, say, is a monster in the contemporary vulgar sense, but also in the sense that he is trying to tell us something (in his case, something about the evils of nuclear testing). What Carroll’s monster teaches us concerns the process of enquiry itself: what it means, as Singh notes, is meaning itself ... unless, of course, it is a boojum in which case the monster means the devouring of meaning, the meaningless cry (Latin, boo, ‘to cry aloud, roar’). Either that, or a boojum is a cow (jum short for jumentum, the Latin for draught-cattle; and bo, from bos, ‘ox, bull, cow’), a cow being the size of our problem after all. Imagine how disappointed you’d be if you went to all that trouble to find a Snark only for it to turn out to be—a cow. Do you think you’d be disappointed enough to softly and suddenly vanish away?
Comments
Thank you, Adam, for your very kind words about my ever-so ‘umble Snark.
As you say, the light touch is critical in all the arts and Carroll’s Snark is a good example of the benefits of restraint.
I find your remarks on the Boojum very interesting! I think your thesis of Carroll as a cow-hugging crypto-Hindu will make our fellow snarkologists take notice indeed!
Onwards, with forks and hope!