The Snark Without Qualities

If you’ve been assiduously following our graphic novel version of The Hunting of the Snark, you will have noticed a steady accumulation of visual details as the story progresses. Such a gradual amplification of things is what the critics call fritter-my-wig or even what-you-may-call-um and believe me, it’s all the rage in the right sort of literary circles.

However, we ‘umble visual artists, (fixated as always on more alimentary matters) call such an accumulation of visual tchotchkes "chicken fat". The late, great Will Elder coined the term whilst inking a drowned fly into a late night rendering of Harvey Kurtzman’s matzoh-ball soup as a practical joke. After a bit of the usual overheated vaudeville cross-talk-cum-haberule®-brandishing and some soft-shoeing with the Pro-White on Elder’s part, the moniker stuck and generations of artists have been ladling the chicken fat (or even schmalz if it’s germane to the proceedings) into their more soup-like drawings ever since.

All of which is a very convoluted and uselessly byzantine way of saying that you should keep a close eye on the progression of our Snark Hunt for it’s growing ever richer in unsaturated animal lipids such as chicken fat and Martin Heidegger. Naturally, one wonders what Lewis Carroll would have made of all our messing about with his otherwise perfectly normal recipe for a bowl of soup … would he have smacked his lips appreciatively at the our addition of the accurately-besmocked and bestyed pigherder Witnesses demonstrating the swineless vacuity of this comic operetta of a legal farce? Would he have slurped greedily at the tasty bits of the timeless humour of Mister Piggy’s magnum opus hoisted aloft before the proceedings like some sort of philosophical pearls before swine?

Or would Mister Carroll have paused in mid-luncheon, his spoon poised at his lips, and angrily demanded this artist to explain post haste what this other bird, this nonchicken and perhaps even swan-like bird masquerading as a legal bagpipe is doing in our collation of a Snark Hunt?

Alas, for Mr. Carroll and his delicate Victorian sense and sensibilities! This unexpectedly swannish creature is probably the grotesque and unexpected consequence of this artist using second-grade-fresh chicken fat in his cheapster drawings, a fly-by-night chicken fat cunningly adulterated with etymological preservatives of unknown provenance.

Yes, dear reader, this sudden outbreak of swans and bagpipes is no accident, on the contrary, it is a Significant Detail! Curiously, the word "sound", deriving as it does from the Old English word "swan," (properly, the sounding bird) seems to provide a perfect excuse for this artist to wreak further havoc on the entire chicken fat paradigm and perhaps even clear the way for a future swan-fat thing-um-a-jig. Or something along these metaphorically miscegenated lines of reasoning which so bedevil this production of the Snark …

Without error or flaw indeed, eh?

The Conqueror Snark

 Melodramatic courtroom scenes are the crack cocaine of modern cinema and television; the average viewer must have a regular dose at certain intervals or they will soon lose interest in whatever televisual dog’s-breakfast is being served ‘em by the sweaty-palmed, hysterically gibbering minions of Hollywood or Bollywood or whatever-wood they happen to find themselves lost in quasi-Dantesque peril (pause for breath here).

However, our watchword for today is — eschew the obvious! Pester me not for your cheap thrills of courtroom antics leavened by lurid, torn-from-the-headlines social issues! You shall have none of that here and I do not care if you lapse into oddly compelling convulsions. Instead, you shall have a wholesome bit of this week’s episode of Lewis Carroll’s Snark Hunt, in which we find the Barrister heaving onto his hind legs before an English judge and jury, all for the benefit of a porcine defendant of no fixed address. There are no lurid social issues being mooted about in this courtroom, just the sweaty business of Man vs. Swine with a pinch of Desertion to lend it all an air of forensic veracity,

Good lord, I hear you mutter, everyone looks like everyone else, what’s going on here? Fret not, dear reader, you are not hallucinating nor is this artist suffering from idiopathic monofacia, in fact this is a prime example of what legal experts call habeas corpus (or more correctly, habeo corpus, for the benefit of congenitally officious readers).

Yes indeed, we have here the body and the face of the Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger, multiplied ten-fold so that he can simultaneously play all the necessary roles of this Carrollian nightmare of a courtroom drama. In doing so, not only do we cut down on unnecessary expenditures of our favorite brand of second-grade-fresh, reheated cafeteria-style india ink but we can also avoid the bothersome necessity of accurately drawing the many different faces of a full complement of judge, jury, defendant, spectators and string section.

Good lord, I hear you mutter, string section? Why yes, a string section and I think they are playing something rather jolly, a spritely tune which could even serve as an overture to the impending legal machinations of Messers Heidegger, Heidegger, Heidegger and Heidegger (gesundheit). It sounds rather like a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan and the hypernaturally eagle-eyed reader will have already noted the bit of foolscap in the Barrister’s hand upon which we can observe that hark, the hour of ten is sounding!

Cryptically sound advice indeed, for it might serve as both an indicator of the numerical quantity of Heideggers facially cluttering the landscape and more to the point, perhaps even the opening verses of Gilbert and Sullivan’s forensic benchwarmer, Trial By Jury.

The well-oiled Carrollian will sigh appreciatively at all this, knowing as they do that Carroll once harbored designs of collaborating with Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan. These designs were crushed by something or the other, such was (and is) the topsy-turvy world of the crushing theater.

It is only now, over 130 years later, that the reader can judge for himself what such a collaboration might have looked like as he peruses our artistic reconstruction of a Carroll and Sullivan collaboration. I suggest that with glass in eye, you observe in a melodiously crosshatched manner that Heideggers with anxious fears are abounding, breathing hope and fear — for to-day in this arena, summoned by a stern subpoena, the Snark shortly will appear.

The sleep of reason produces snark!

And on the sixth Fit, the Barrister slept.

Played here by the notorious Continental steamer, Martin Heidegger, (right Zeit up and left Sein down) the Barrister has been overwhelmed by the fumes of cheap plonk and the Beaver’s well-turned ankles and has sunk into a torpid slumber upon a thickly inked lawn.

Our reader, who eschews cheap drink and chorus girls in favor of the headier vintages of Carrollian verse, will note that the Barrister has been furnished here with dreams in the plural. He or she will nod knowingly, perhaps even smugly, for every Carrollian worth their mustard and cress is cognizant of the Master’s mysterious penchant for dreams.

In fact, Lewis Carroll never met a novel or poem in which he didn’t feel obliged to stuff in the odd bit of dreamwork to move the plot along, and by providing the luckless Barrister with an multiplicity of dreams our poet may be betraying his own crypto-Hindu sympathies! Classical Hindu epistemology, bursting at the seams as it does with a nightmarish superfluity of dreams and illusions, all of ‘em nested one within the other, would have been pure catnip for the likes of Carroll.

This artist is aware that there are those amongst us who will object to the above theory, they might mutter darkly about a certain virulent strain of Neo-Platonism run amuck on the playing fields of Eton from which Carroll may have been infected, rather than some curry-inflected metaphysics hailing from god knows where. Well, they can toss their Neo-Platonic influences into the dust bin as far as we’re concerned, for it’s Hinduism which has the pukka goods on Runaway Idealism and this Floating Metadream We Call Life. Like the Red King in Through the Looking Glass, we are all of us, readers, artist, poet and Barrister, dreaming of one another and if we ever do wake up to find out what’s Real, well, what is Reality anyway, huh?

After mentally digesting all of this, the less tolerant reader will start things off by giving this over-heated illustrator a gentle boxing about the ears and a light touching up with a lead featherduster. They will then will reach for their Bradshaw of the Future (our preferred etymological opium den) and look pensive whilst they peruse the pedigree of the word "dream", a word which in Old English meant "joy" or even curiouser and curiouser, "music".

Tossing aside their Bradshaw with an insouciant pshaw, the less tolerant DR will then gird their loins and push their way past the more tolerant DR (still asleep and reeking of cheap plonk and ankles, no doubt) and towards the well-inked anthropomorphic forks afflicted with the Amorous Gigantism of Inanimate Objects, the Beaver’s size 9 chukka boots, the winged goblets and obligatory bar of soap, the Man-Ray-smiles and the cloth-headed judge-and-jury — all of ‘em merely a smokescreen for the 9-piece band ensconced in their band-shell in the background of this etymological-cum-epistemological mis-en-scene!

And what is this joyful music that our dream orchestra* is producing for the benefit of our dream Barrister? Is it the melodious warblings of some Hindustani songstress afflicted with a keening adenoidal distress? Is it the rock ‘n roll oompah-oompah of some hipster, Platonic cave-dwellers? To find out, dear readers, stay tuned for next week’s episode of The Hunting of the Snark!
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*Our readers might even be more bewildered than usual to learn that this illustrator is afflicted with the syndrome of musical dreaming; for many years his dreams have been provided with a sort of involuntary cinematic soundtrack, not of his choosing although usually of a classical nature. On occasion a bit of pop rubbish gets by, the theme to Star Wars or suchlike, but this artist is the sort of high-minded fellow who thinks nothing of walking out of a bad film or dream.

Snarkness at Noon

 Well, isn’t this jolly, all of us having our tiffin in this lovely English garden waiting for the sun, and if the sun don't come, we’ll get a tan from standing in the English rain. What a clever way with words these Brits have, always joking around and making light of the darkest (and wettest) situations. Here we are, in the very thing-um-a-jig of a Snark Hunt, crosshatching to the left of us, crosshatching to the right of us, and our merry lads have seen fit to burst forth into song, a semimelodious bit of Old English galdor reminiscent of the salad days of Aethelred the Unready and suchlike skaldic mumbo-jumbery.

All of which affords this illustrator a bit of artistic license sufficient to render a thimble, some forks, an esperant anchor, a smile and some soap, ie., five-sevenths of the afore-mentioned Snarkic prophylaxes. He’s also taken the liberty of laying on some cakes and ale (on an illustrator’s meager salary of a moon and sixpence) and has even hired a band-cum-bandshell, all of which should provide sufficient innocent merriment for the B-Boyz and their Protosurrealist demimondaines, at least enough to show ‘em that this illustrator cares.

Naturally, this illustrative care increases our stanzel’s Combined Snarkic Prophylactic Level (CSPL) to six-sevenths, which fraction, when its numerator and denominator are multiplied, provides us with the number 42, a number mooted by some to be The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything in It.

Lewis Carroll thought enough of the number 42 to provide it with a comfortable home and small pension, way back in the Good Old Days of Fit the First. There are certain small-minded persons who will always look askance at such instances of numerophilia, they will mutter darkly of alphanumeric miscegenation and cryptokabbalistic cabals and all that sort of thing which they suspect is always going on at parties like the one pictured above. Which is why those sort of people never get invited to this sort of party, huzzah!

And so, ladies and gentlemen and sundry weirdos, proclaims this illustrator as he sways drunkenly onto his feet, I propose a toast!

Let’s hear it for Lewis Carroll (tipsy shouts of hear, hear!) … the best Anglican maths-tutor-cum-nonsense-wallah Oxford ever produced (gurgled cries of approval emanating from a giant thimble full of wine) … a true friend of man and anapest alike (slurred bleats of rhubarb-rhubarb, custard-custard) … and the most important Victorian poet to ever use the words 'railway-share'! (exeunt all, with general bedlam, light to variable).