Fit the Fourth, Page 26, Panel 1 … the joy of snarking

"The rest of my speech" (he explained to his men)
"You shall hear when I’ve leisure to speak it.
But the Snark is at hand, let me tell you again!
‘Tis your glorious duty to seek it!

We have already nibbled upon — and spurned! — Beatrice Hatch’s assertion that Lewis Carroll had told her that the word Snark was a portmanteau of Snail and Shark. The etymology of the Snark is an entire Hunt unto itself (excellently summarized by the inestimable Bradshaw of the Future) but it seems that we are running perilously low on bullets, tinned goods and scotch-soaked mosquito netting, or so my faithful shikaris tell me … we had better return to civilization, such as it is, and seek our Snark indoors … such as these Snark Hunters pictured above are doing.

Please observe that these Hunters are relying solely upon their finely-tuned instincts to track down their perilous prey and as usual, everything’s become a hopeless jumble! The afore-mentioned Beatrice Hatch’s semiolinguistic brain-crumbs have joined in an unholy alliance with the semiographic cupcakes of the Belgian pâtissier (and chronophobe) René Magritte to create a novel yet frothy confection! Of course, such half-baked baked-goods would be incomplete without some of that double-plus-good explanatory frosting which the Critics love so; I append an explanatory (and thoroughly plagiarized) morsel here:

"I decided to paint the image of a shark . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery — the image of a snail — was joined."

Well, there you have it : an Indo-Germanic-Belgo-Anglo-Saxon layer cake of ink and words … I call it Beatrice’s Revenge, for it’s a rather heterogenous and unsettling dish best served cold, perhaps as an after-dinner dessert? Of course, Lewis Carroll’s original photographic bonbon of Miss Hatch was also a bit cloying but certain artists will always indulge their sweet-tooths!



NB. Please, America, do not crush my young nephew Leopold’s already shaken faith in The System — vote early and vote often!

Fit Two, Pages 10 and 11 as a Spread … le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau

Shhhhhh, we’re hunting Snark! We have been tracking a magnificent specimen for over eight months and I think we have it cornered now, here in the thick undergrowth of pages 10 and 11.

Weapons at the ready, we plunge in! A brief, violent struggle and we re-emerge with our prey, securely trussed and in the bag! But wait, what’s this? Not a Snark at all, but rather — Henri Matisse, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Sigmund Freud, René Magritte, Théodore Géricault, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy! Not a Snark, not even a Boojum — just a plenum of dead Continentals reeking of turpentine, cigars and cheap plonk. We return to camp with our luckless prey, chastened and humiliated.

Later that night the quintessential protosurreal big-game hunter, Louis Aragon, waxes poetic on the pleasures of the chase as he sinks deeper into his cups …

"It was a time when, meeting in the evening like hunters after a day in the field, we made the day's accounting, the list of beasts we had invented, of fantastic plants, of images bagged."

We turn to him, a knowing smile upon our lips … yes, M. Aragon, why not? We roughly thrust him into our game bag alongside the others, those other exquisite corpses … the perfect bait for a Snark! Drink that new wine now, Louis!

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!