Full fathom five thy snark lies

NB. Before we get snarking, I urge you to read Tom Spurgeon's interview with Alexander Theroux, whose book, The Strange World of Edward Gorey is being re-issued by Fantagraphics.

Needless to say, I'm a Gorey-maniac and the interview is worth reading, especially for any one contemplating a life in the world of book illustration. At one point Tom asks Alexander why Gorey was (and is) so neglected by comix fans … I think I'll raise my inky hand and answer that one: because too many comix readers are visually infantilized from childhood by a relentless barrage of visual crap … the depth and complexity of good cross-hatching overwhelms their medulla oblongatas. Just a thought.

Meanwhile, back on Snark Island …

The Butcher’s ingenious plan is accomplished, as we see above, by first opening one of the doors of perception that are so handily scattered about my GN version of The Hunting of the Snark. Beyond this door lies a dismal and desolate valley where he can sally to his heart’s content, undisturbed by his too-frequent fellow man.

These sort of desolate Valleys of the Shadows of Various Deaths weighed heavily upon Victorian sensibilities, lurking as they did amidst the poetry of Lewis Carroll, Kings David-and-James and Lord Tennyson alike. Vast armies of betanomic chasseurs, semi-anointed sinners and gin-pickled light-cavalrymen were regularly herded into their several depths, there to endure the shot and shell of secular and sacred verse competing mano a mano, or to be more exact, pied à pied. Strong stuff but the Butcher seems up for it, he fears no evil nor anapests at all — what ho for the crystalline noggin of feckless youth!

If all this sounds a bit too allusive for you, why, there’s another picture done by another artist, a long time ago, of another inquisitive Carrollian protagonist bent upon making her own separate sally. It’s a very good drawing and I have half-a-mind to snatch it away from its rightful owner and carry it off to some desolate spot unfrequented by man where I can copy it to my heart’s content, by printing it in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen … an infinite plenum of poetical kings, lords, dons and even nudists charging forth from this very door, all of 'em dragooned into our Snark Hunt!
__________

NB. Those are snarks that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer an inky-change

Fit Three, Page 19, Panel 2 … my object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to make the boojum’s fit the crime

"I skip forty years," said the Baker, in tears,
And proceed without further remark
To the day when you took me aboard of your ship
To help you in hunting the Snark.

The story so far … there once was a Snark … but it will be a Boojum, alas!

The Baker is suffering from what we now know to be angst. Once upon a time we would have pinned the label of big, fat crybaby upon him but these are dangerously litigious times for us thought-criminals.

Boojum-angst was first used as a legal defense by the Baker’s legal counsel, the Barrister, AKA Martin Heidegger, in his seminal brief (naughty boy) : Sein und Zeit. He excused the Baker’s regression into a second childhood with the then-novel defense of angst, which he explained as an objectless and generalized dread occasioned by the growing presence of Nothing. The boojum, a nonexistent being, fit this description nicely and the Barrister won an acquital for his client on the grounds that he was an idiot anyway. We shall see more of the Barrister’s weasel-skills in Fit the Sixth.

From whence comes this fashion to label all things boojum in the German language? Angst, schadenfreude, strafe (straffen), weltschmertz — all of ‘em teutonic and hardly a laugh in the lot. May we quote the poet Heinrich Heine (finally getting some good reviews in the notoriously anti-Heine NYT) on this subject :

"… the Germans have the curious custom of always attaching a thought to whatever they do.”

Schnitzel for thought, indeed! All it needs is this mustard-like condiment, from the cupboard of the truly inspired and genuinely missed American illustrator, Edward Gorey :

"I have a dumb theory that a creative piece of art is only interesting if it purports to be about something and is really about something else."

Milord, the defense rests in its usual, pretzel-like position. Like the Baker, at play in the ontic fields of the lord, to all the above charges of unlawful boojumizing and multiple neologizing we shall plead : ignorance, madam, pure ignorance. Or in the very best Clochetic-cum-Orwellian manner : ignorance, madam, double-plus pure ignorance.