Fit 7, pg. 75/1 … raise high the snark beam, carpenters

What better way to celebrate Boxing Day than to ogle this salacious image of Karl Marx in blackface doing a disjointed, Nonsensical Carrollian bump and grind?

Lesser-minded readers will reach for their politically correct smelling salts or even their attorneys but well-oiled Carrollians will heave a self-satisfied sigh of relief at all of this, for they know that in this, Fit the Seventh of our GN version of the Hunting of the Snark, the Banker has been transmogrified twice! First by this artist, who has been depicting him throughout this Snark as Karl Marx and second, by his nemesis, the Bandersnatch, who has reversed his various Caucasian, upper-crust British Victorian polarities into those of a rupee-less, paan-chomping Hindustani rickshaw wallah slumming his way through the salad days of the British Raj.

All of this is per the instruction of the Admirable Carroll, naturally, so don't look askance. He wrote it all down in black and white anapaestics, in a coded message entitled The Hunting of the Snark which this artist then de-ciphered into anapaestic, Protosurrealist crosshatchings of the darkest, inkiest splendor.

It is horrible and senseless and rather confusing, this Carrollian Multiverse we call the Snark and as the observant reader can see below, its gravitational perturbations are rippling through the very fabric of time and space as we speak. Observe this oddly-shelved copy of our Snark which was spotted at a bookstore, endeavouring to say what its tongue could no longer express …



Thanks to the talented and keen-eyed poet Sommer Browning for alerting us to this curious incident and please, if the person responsible for this shelving is reading this, accept my heartfelt thanks. I salute your innate sense of Surrealist horror, your senseless grimace at the pigeon-holing, soul-crushing dictates of modern commerce.

Carroll rubbing shoulders with Sappho and Ovid, the mind boggles deliciously.

NB. Sommer wrote a good essay on Steve Martin (my favorite American comedian) at the Rumpus. What better way to waste your employer's time this busy week than by reading her perceptive take on America's only genuine Surrealist … plus Brother Theodore, of course …

Fit 7, pg. 72/2 … on your marx, get set, snark!

Framing devices are the very meat & drink of this illustrator's Snark, the very fritter-my-wig, as the Great One, Lewis Carroll, would have said. Careful examination of the above stanzel will reveal that the previous stanzel (72/1) is embedded within this one and that both of them are themselves the culmination of a 7-image train ride that departed an Old English Garden Party to arrive in an Old Delhi Railway Station, ca. 1876.

From whence comes this illustrator's penchant for the visual recursion of pictorial embedding? Was he lost as a child in a funhouse mirror? Was he reared by a family of Russian Matroushka dolls? 

Or does he simply believe in giving his readers good value for money? So many illustrators today practice a sort of pictorial minimalism, cutting back on wasteful expenditures of either conceptual or visual complexity. Minimalism is all the rage these days with most commercial artists (understandably so when most of us are paid less than pizza delivery drivers) which means that this Snark's maximalism is the new minimalism. 

The embedding of images within images and the dizzying vertigo induced by inflicting this unexpected pulling back of frames-within-frames allows the reader to rush madly ahead, like the Banker and even to be finally be lost to view if they so desire. And an unseen reader, that is the maximum desired effect of the genuine protosurrealist artist.

In short, if you can lose yourself in my Snark whilst seeking that very same Snark, my work in this Carrollian Multiverse will have been done and I can go to other worlds and places where illustrators are desperately needed to take naps on their readers' sofas, drink up all their readers' scotch, and borrow their readers' cars without permission. QED and all that, huh?

Naked Snark Lunch

Deadlines are still pressing (inking a particularly numinous cheeseburger, amongst other things) and so I must present you with a reprise of an earlier analysis of the above stanzel …

Our favorite poet and Eminent Victorian Lewis Carroll has given us the late 19th-century equivalent of certain ubiquitious American psychobabbitries : do all that you know and try all that you don’t.

A peculiar prescription for a peculiar creature, a call of sorts to a half-hearted High Anglican Debauchery aimed at the titillation of the thinking classes. And what titillates the thinking (and unthinking) classes the very most? What is it they dream of, with their eyes wide shut … is it the Female of the Species?

Most likely. And shame on ‘em too, boo hiss boo! Objectifying women with their shameless gaze! These Surrealists, they are a menace to polite society in every city and a blight upon the land in every which way.

They are utterly unlike the respectable, petit-bourgeois Protosurrealist Snark-Hunters whom we see above, scrupulously averting their reifying gaze from La Snarque Nue concealed from them in my forest of lines. Would it surprise you to learn that I have entirely drawn the above with my eyes also firmly shut, trusting only in the animal-instincts of my feral pen to guide me safely through the labyrinth of lines in which the Snark has so cunningly concealed herself?

The politics of snarking!

The world of steampunk and the world of my Protosurrealist version of Carroll's Snark are not that far apart and so, when the French SF author Jean-Christophe Valtat launched a spirited defense of the former genre on MobyLives, I felt compelled to toss in my own 42-cents-worth. The discerning folks at MobyLives were good enough to post my diatribe here, and I hope it generates an immense, angry, passionate mob of be-goggled and crinoline clad youngsters to descend upon somebody other than me like those Assyrian wolves upon the fold that some poet once warned us about.

Snarks of the world, unite!

More sentimental verse from the Admirable Carroll, who knew full well how to tug at the heartstrings of his Victorian audience with the most maudlin blather any anapestic poet has ever mustered up.

However, we Protosurrealists are made of sterner stuff! Yes, we are dabbing at a tear or two at the corner of our eye … yet it is not the sudden outbreak of flowers and chocolates twixt Beaver & Butcher that moves us so. It’s the eye-strain brought on by the wearisome days we’ve spent inking all those floorboards and velour curtains.

The ship in the background, required by the poet’s careless mention of a billowy ocean in the verse, was a further source of discomfort … we’ve half a mind to insist upon the creation of a Royal Society for the Protection of Artists to curb this rash of excessive authorial description which blights our once fair land. Huzzah for minimalism, we say!

The Preface and Fits One and Two in their entirety … that he was born it cannot be denied, he ate, drank, talked snark & died

My Hunting of the Snark as it exists so far — the Preface and Fits 1 and 2 — can now be downloaded in an easy-to-read PDF here.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

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! But I digress …

Should we ask the Snark what Lewis Carroll meant? The Snark’s reply is, of course, the entire text of The Hunting of the Snark, excluding the Preface. Since the Snark and Carroll are ultimately the same, the Carrollian answer of one word and the Snarkian answer of 5,065 words are ultimately equivalent, an astonishing feat of commutative compression and expansion!

This business of looking into the wrong end of the telescope is the essential premise of protosurrealism, that obscure school of art which has been previously defined here as the 21st-century application of 19th-century answers to 20th-century problems. The protosurrealist telescopes his postmodern Surrealist past into the Victorian intellectual’s expected future, and as his past becomes his future, his nostalgia becomes his anticipation! Nothing is wasted!

The excellent and truly well-read nnyhav has rightfully pointed out the similarities between protosurrealism and ‘pataphysics. The difference lies in purpose : the latter was a strategy of defiance towards the pre-War culture of Europe and a precursor of Surrealism, the former is exactly the same things but 100 years too late.

Protosurrealism, like Pierre Menard writing Don Quixote, has no history or future, it’s always now and its now is always then. For this poor Snark whose very purpose in life was unknown to his creator, what better habitat for him than the pre-anachronism of protosurrealism? At last, the Snark will have a refuge where he can dwell on his comforting memories of the future and look forward to the past he will never have.
_____________________________________________

* I might reply that the Snark means : 'Pataphysics, Adlocutio, Alberto Savinio, Alexandra Xie Kitchin, Alfred Jarry, Andrei Vyshinsky, Aristotle, Arnold Bocklin, Assamese Curry, Atlas Press, Augustus Caesar, Bathing Machines, Benjamin Péret, Blaise Pascal, Boojum Tree, Book of Revelations, Buddhist Stupas, Carl Reiner, Charles Dodgson, Clochetic Rule of Three, Coconino County, Comte de Lautrémont, Constantin Brancusi, Dante Alighieri, Dora Maar, Douglas Adams, Easter Island Moias, Edgar Allan Poe , Edouard Manet, Eileen Agar, Elmer Fudd, Epistemology, Eric Satie, Etymology, Eugène Delacroix, Exquisite Corpse, Flann O'Brien, French Language, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Herriman, George Orwell, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gin-Driven Ink-Pens, Giorgio de Chirico, Golden Eagle Beer, Goon Show, Gustave Flaubert, Hans and Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Henri Michaux, Henry Holiday, Heraclitus, Heinz Edelmann, Hieronymus Bosch, His Master's Voice, Igor Stravinsky, Italo Calvino, Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Jean Benoît, Joseph Bonnet, Joseph Welch, Juan Miro, Karl Marx, Kiki de Monparnasse, Krazy Kat, La Guida di Bragia, Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, Louis Aragon, Récamier, Man Ray, Mark Antony, Martin Heidegger, Matthias Grünewald, Max Ernst, Mel Brooks, Michelangelo, Nautch Girls, Nectarines, Old Scratch, Omnium, Orientalism, Oscar Dominguez, Paranoaic-Critical Method, Peter Greenaway, Piero di Cosimo, Plato, Poutine, Procris, Protosurrealism, Père Ubu, Railway Surrealism (Anglo-Italianate), Raphael, Raymond Roussel, René Magritte, Robert Walser, Salvador Dali, Scholasticism, Sebastian Brant, Shakespeare, Sigmund Freud, Sir Alma-Tadema, Sir John Tenniel, Socrates, Stephane Mallarmé, Sylvie and Bruno, The Globe and Mail, The Isle of the Dead, The Line of Beauty, The Number 42, The Rake’s Progress, The School of Athens, The Ship of Fools, The Snark as an Ontological Argument for a Godless Universe, The Temptation of St. Anthony, The Third Policeman, The Yellow Submarine, Théodore Géricault, Turin, Une Semaine de Bonté, V.I. Lenin, Valentine's Day, Vincent van Gogh, W.H. Auden, Walt Whitman, William Hogarth, Witold Gombrowicz and Yves Tanguy.

Some readers may call all of the above just logorrheiac-name-droppings rife with an surfeit of posthumous collaborations (AKA plagiarisms), shot through and through with half-truths, quarter-truths, and even eighth-truths and of course (my personal favorite as an independently impoverished artist), a brazen contempt for the clearly stated wishes of the hapless author, expressed by indulging in a particularly vicious (and Flaubertian) brand of semiotic and typological miscegenation hitherto only seen in the utterly depraved final days of the Roman Empire!

But you can’t say that because I said it first and now I got dibs on it! Plus, all those big words — they could put your eye out!

Fit Two, Pages 12 and 13 as a Spread … il est toujours préférable de ne pas dessiner avec un mort

The languid pacing and incongruous imagery of this Fit, exemplified in the cunningly delineated page-spread seen above, is a perfect example of what a recent edition of a certain Canadian newspaper’s Book Review referred to as a "posthumuous collaboration". I must tip the soiled brim of my sauerbraten-stained turban-cum-tuque in genuine respect at the linguistic dexterity of the joining-together-today-in-the-sight-of-god-and-man-of-these-two-words: posthumuous collaboration.

The mind boggles. But afterwards, it resumes its reconsiderations and rereflections. Must it cavil and carp so? Is not a posthumuous collaboration with the dead also the postmortem plagiarism of the dead upon the living? Or perhaps even the prenatal borrowings of the as-yet-unborn intra-reincarnative? In fact, dear reader, may we not say, in truth, that all art is but a posthumuous collaboration with a penurious but talented past, an artists’ community of the not-so-grateful-dead which is willing to overlook our modern deficiencies as long as the check is in the mail?

For too long, certain narrow-minded artists have Canadianized the living and the dead into twin solitudes. Pshaw to all that! As the late, great, Douglas Adams* once noted, life is wasted on the living. It’s high time we frittered away the time and energies of the dead! Tally ho to posthumuous collaboration and the Boojum of Originality!

___________________________

* Mister Adams was gracious enough to assent to a prior posthumuous collaboration with me, vide Fit One, Page Four, Panel Two. And as nyhav (an occluded 'pataphysician, I suspect) astutely noted earlier, Protosurrealism is in many respects a posthumuous collaboration with Alfred Jarry. However, it shall be noted that Protosurrealism intellectually predates ‘Pataphysics, an anachronistic precaution necessary to create that frisson of uncertainty as to who is colloborating with whom … and who is post- and who is pre-mortem.

NB. I encourage all readers interested in Lewis Carroll to visit and bookmark the newly-launched blog, Let "Universe" Be "Books", a production of the associate editor of the LCSNA's "Knight Letter Journal". Onwards and upwards, with forks and hope!

Fit Two, Page 10, Panel 3

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
"They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best —
A perfect and absolute blank!"


Yet another shameless Magritte pastiche, and not the last one to grace these pages, I'll wager. Shameless — the 10th Muse of Protosurrealism!

Even more shameless — this insistence that the crew of the HMS Snark use the French language for navigational purposes when it is clearly evident to anyone who has ever been lost at sea that English is the natural language of confusion. This is easily verified. Stand on a streetcorner in any francophone city and ask a stranger: where am I? If necessary, pull at shirtsleeves and wave your arms, speak very slowly while pronouncing every phoneme at the utmost decibel level.

I shall be observing you from inside the comfortable vantage point of a nearby bottle of plonk. Do not make eye contact with me or else — sapristi! Garçon, call the police, this crazy-man-anglais-cowboy-streetperson is bothering me!

Words, words, words … if only they had the decency to cover themselves up, like the Bellman & Company. They have no loyalty, they can't be bothered to mean anything anymore, they're shameless!

Fit One and Two, Pages 8 and 9 as a Spread … Dessin Nouveau

The most astute reader will have noted that five weeks have elapsed with nary a quotation nor quip from The Hunting of the Snark. What does all this mean? From whence come these images of the HMS Snark drifting rudderless, porpoiseless, perhaps even cucumberless in the salad season?

This is no sin of omission. This is artistic license run amuck … we are reading between the lines* … we are drawing between the words (to dispense with the words in a graphic novel one must dispense with the novelty of grafting words). We are doing — dessin nouveau! So just chill, baby, and dig this frabjous double-page spread.

___________________


NB. Kudos to Mister Nnyhav, who has correctly pointed out the similarities between 'pataphysics and the still-evolving school of Protosurrealism. However, one must always remember that the latter invariably requires the deliberate substitution of one's past for one's future. Ergo, 'pataphysics is a reaction before the action of Protosurrealism.

*Remember, snarkology recapitulates parisology. Parisology is the subaudition of the protosurreal. Protosurrealism is resipiscence before the fact (eg. antediluvian postlapsarianism, subterrannean ultramontanism, etc).

Fit One, Page 8, Panel 3

What is surrealism? The simultaneous memory of everything. What is protosurrealism? The same as above with the added frisson of remembering an impossible future.

What is the final panel of Fit the First? A protosurrealist Narrenschiff patched together from semiotic pentimenti and oneiric palimpsets, a carte-de-visite of the Victorian ideal of the future, an artifact drifting down the estuary of the Mississippi … the Amazon … the Thames … the Congo …

"We said there warn't no home like the ol' HMS Snark, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but the Snark don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on her.

"But when we reach the sea we'll build a bigger ship! What great treachery that will be! Then we shall control every bathing machine and produce history as others produce plays. I, the Bellman, the wrath of god!"

The Bellman ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Butcher, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Fit One, Pages Six and Seven as a Spread (What is Protosurrealism?)

What was Surrealism? An escape into perpetual dreams, perpetual revolution, perpetual reinvention, perpetual renewal through the device of the unconsciousness playing peek-a-boo with the artistic imagination, yes, yes, all the 20th century neuroses say look at me — the Surreal! The end result? The 21st-century post-postmodern artist manqué, addressing his fussy postcards from the hipster Present to the slaughterhouse of the Past. So much diffident worrying over the langorous finessing of … absolutely … nothing.

Protosurrealism says fiddle-dee-dee to all of the above. An artistic movement destined to occupy its proper alphabetized station between Postmodernism and Surrealism, but with far less formalities, Protosurrealism is imbued with the breezy style of the perpetual flaneur who is always "hello-I-must-be-going", an artistic movement which appears before Surrealism but happens after it.

In short, Protosurrealism is the 21st-century application of 19th-century answers to 20th-century problems!

Example: the double-page spread shown above. A classic example of 19th-century realistic pen & ink textual illustration, a style where nothing is left to the imagination because there is no imagination involved. The artist draws what he sees, nothing more, lest he be late for his tiffin.

And what does he see? He sees a 20th-century reader assuming that lexical and symbolic playfulness must really be confusion and alienation masquerading as nonsense — because the 20th-century reader always fears that everything is about himself! And even better, this reader begats a 21st-century reader who knows that everything is about himself.

What else does the Protosurrealist see? He sees a library full of universal histories of dreams to draw upon. The fact that they emanate from his past yet are always unexpected is the essential quality of being proto-anything, much less surrealism. And so, the Protosurrealist mollifies the neurotic tendencies of the 20th-century past with an academic performance of 19th-century draughtsmanship, delineating the cultural artifacts of Surrealism with the same precision as a bowl of flowers in a still-life. He then takes a quick peek at the calendar to ensure that this is the year 2007 and voilà!

Protosurrealism! Our future buries our past in a perpetual present!