Thursday, December 16, 2010

Foucault's Snarkulum



For a few weeks I've been linking to various other Snark postings of mine around the internet. This was to create a sensation of overwhelming Snarkery, of ubiquitous Boojumery around the world and thus trigger the dreaded Global Cognitive Nonsense Overload that Lewis Carroll once warned us of.

Having done that, we'll return to simpler pleasures, such as wondering why I saw fit to embellish Fit the Fourth with the above frontispiece.

Devoted readers will know that in my GN version of the Snark, the Snark itself is never seen directly. This is as the Admirable Carroll wished it. Instead, I always show the Snark as Eye, a carefully disembodied Eye. This simple pun affords my simpler readers no end of puzzled delight.

There is an Eye concealed above but even better, the entire crew of the HMS Snark is also present. Glassy-eyed perhaps, but present.

Upper row, left to right:
The Broker, played here by Erik Satie
The Beaver, played here by Castor canadensis
The Boots, played here by Charles Darwin
The Baker, played here by Lewis Carroll
The Bonnet Maker, played here by Friedrich Nietzsche

Bottom row, left to right:
The Barrister, played here by Martin Heidegger
The Butcher, played here by an Easter Island moia
The Billiard Marker, played here by Raymond Roussel

And directly underneath:
The Banker, played here by Karl Marx

And standing upright:
The Bellman, played here by Sir John Tenniel/The White Knight/Lewis Carroll

What do all these characters have in common? Some subtle allegorical scheme of postmodern ontology? A multilayered literary puzzle of mind-mangling proportions? An Illuminati's coded message to his zombie Carrollian followers?

No, it's really quite simple! They are hapless Protosurrealist cannon fodder caught up in my Nonsensical struggle to dominate the anapestic reaches of the Carrollian Multiverse …

In short, they are there because they're there.

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