Fit 8, pg. 80/2 … If a snark could talk, we could not understand him

The story so far: The Rev. CL Dodgson, disguised as Lewis Carroll, has insinuated himself atop a crag whilst playing at being a Baker in an anapaestic search of a snark. His demise looms large …

Readers who have been following along at home will probably recognize the setting of this stanzel for it's the very same setting in which our snark hunt began, way back in the paleographic pages of Fit the First. Less memorable readers will have to make do with this pithy observation: that Lewis Carroll gets away with murder!

Gosh, how many poets could pass muster in any modern MBA writing program spouting off verse in which a hero clearly named as "The Baker" is then immediately re-branded as a "hero unnamed?"

Or is Lewis Carroll insinuating that one's function cannot serve as one's name? Lesser minds might dismiss all of this as overly hirsute hair-splitting of the highest order but that's the beauty of Snarkology, don't you see? It's a Big Mind/Big Beard thing … and even if you don't, you will have to admit that an Anglican deacon moonlighting as a logician whilst writing anapaestic verse devolving upon the theoretical demise of his own fictional doppelganger, it's a debauched semiotician's fantasy come true — hubba hubba!

All of which is a ghastly sort of slovenly guttersnipe's shorthand for saying that our poet's refusal to allow practical function to cohabitate with symbolic function is quite cheeky indeed! Why, it undermines the very basis of language and symbolic logic itself, it's an underminery of the very same sort as, say, an Anglican deacon-cum-logician devoting his life to the promulgation of utter Nonsense.

Form and function, the desperate wags of the Carrollian Multiverse!

Snark Sutra

Our examination of Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark is a glorious duty indeed! We few, we happy few, we band of snark hunting brothers (and sisters) have chased our prey for quite some time now … and yet … we have not seen it. Not the slightest sign of a Snark has yet appeared to us.

The Snark is a beast conspicuous by its absence, in fact, that is the only defining characteristic of a Snark which all the taxonomists have ever agreed upon.

The absence of the Snark has created, within the confines of the Carrollian Multiverse, a sort of inverse force field which re-arranges all things and beings, re-arranges them into precursors of Snark. Visual and verbal puns abound, all of them pointing directly at the Absence of the Snark.

One might say, if one is Platonically inclined, that the Snark is a pure Form struggling to be Real but which is substantiated only into puns, tricks and games … the Form of Maya, perhaps?

Or one can have a nice cup of tea, nibble a samosa and have a giggle at these solemnly occidental gentlemen seen above, mis-parsing the Carrollian Multiverse!
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NB. A really good interview with Francis Ford Coppola by Ariston Anderson here, concise and useful for all young artists in any medium …

"… I once found a little excerpt from Balzac … he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice …

… It is very important for an artist not to lie, and most important is not to lie to yourself … that will carry your personal conviction into your work … There is something we know that’s connected with beauty and truth. There is something ancient. We know that art is about beauty, and therefore it has to be about truth."

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• The joy of snarking

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.

A confederacy of jubjubs

One can never know too much about Jubjub birds, don’t you agree? They constitute an important nexus in the entire Carrollian Multiverse, occupying as they do important roles in both The Hunting of the Snark and Through the Looking Glass.

Here’s how they appeared in Tim Burton’s recent production of Alice in Wonderland, as designed by Bobby Chiu. Now please compare that splendidly hyperactive specimen of full-blown Disneyiana with this artist’s own shabby conception of a hastily-folded together scrap of paper as shown above, fluttering out of the Beaver’s reach.

Pathetic, isn’t it? The work of an utter dunce without even the excuse of a full-blown scholastic upbringing.