Fit the Fourth, Page 25, Panel 3 … when they talk’d of their Raphaels, Correggios & stuff, he shifted his boojum & only took snuff

"’Tis a pitiful tale," said the Bellman, whose face
Had grown longer at every word:
"But, now that you’ve stated the whole of your case,
More debate would be simply absurd.

There comes a time when even poets such as the Talented Mister Lewis Carroll draw a blank, as the saying goes. Yet such deficiencies seem to have not bothered him a jot or tottle in the long run; he simply brewed up a fresh pot of tea, chewed reflectively upon his quid of paan and sooner or later, he would come up with the poetical goods and fend off the Boojums at the door.

However, when an ink-slinging wretch such as I draws a blank, adverse professional consequences can result. Drawing a blank may be suitable behaviour for those blessed artistes who frolic in the Elysian Fields of MOMA or the Tate but for us illustrative hacks bent over our drawing boards in the sweaty back-forty of Dante’s Inferno (Circle 8, Subsection 5, Barrators and Flatulants) such antics are the stuff of which bankruptcies are made of.

When deadlines press and the ol’ brainbox is running on fumes, remember the scuola metafisica’s dictum to draw only that which cannot be seen. The main thing is to keep one's pen busy, just bash on regardless, no thinking required … always bear in mind the words of a certain master debater and politician who once declared that he did not care what the facts were.

Who can argue with that, eh?

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The Lewis Carroll Society of North America has very kindly invited me to give a talk about this version of the Snark at their next meeting in NYC, October 25th, 2008. For further details, download the indicated PDF in the Meeting Section of the LCSNA site. The event has several other very interesting speakers scheduled and promises to be a rare treat for all concerned. As for myself, I am having Gussie Fink-Nottle-type anxieties of the Market Snodsbury Grammar School+cheap gin+orange juice species, but I'm sure that the good people of the LCSNA know what they're doing under the circs.

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Fit the Fourth, Page 24, Panel 2 … timeo Snarquae et dona ferentes

"It’s excessively awkward to mention it now—
As I think I’ve already remarked."
And the man they called "Hi!" replied, with a sigh,
"I informed you the day we embarked.

A strange brew: a pastoral melancholy of the gods resurgent, a fête galant of the ancien regime, the reveries of Lewis Carroll and an obscure illustrator.

The Fellowship of the Snark has succumbed to the most delicious ennui, the most languid douceur possible … it is impossible, amidst the heady scent of perfumed bowers and amorous glances, to even speak that hateful word Boojum … far easier for the Boots to nibble on his ladylove’s niobic neck, far easier for the Butcher to lead the gallant company of andromachean mannequins and embryonic homunculi down the verdant lawn towards the wondrous, gilded barge whose pilot, the Bellman, will steer them to the sanctuary of Cythera, that isle of enchantment where all things distasteful softly and suddenly abrade away into their constituent semioglyphs …
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Attention U.S. illustrators, photographers and designers: whilst the American public's hit-and-miss attention is focussed on the financial brouhaha in Congress, the Orphan Works Bill is speeding its way to a final vote. This bill is a blunt instrument crafted by various business interests for the purpose of optimizing their legal right to pay creatives as little as possible. Our ability to defend and profit from our copyrights will depend entirely on our financial ability to hire sufficient legal talent to enforce "reasonable diligence" in court(s) after the fact, a hopelessly abstract right indeed! If you wish to contact your congressman and express your displeasure to him or her concerning this bill, go here.

Fit Three, Page 17 … look on my snark, ye mighty, and despair!

The Baker, immer très über-courant, now practises psychogeography upon himself! Psychogeography — the urban flâneur’s deliberate mapping of his internal world upon the external world through which he flânes — it’s all the rage! The Baker’s zen-like state of internal vacuity is no impediment to the above process, he simply reverses the procedure. When one’s mind is entirely given up to all things snark, causal logic is a mere bagatelle.*

On the sand, half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lips once proved a disquieting muse to the snark-hunter P.B. Shelley. The uncertainty of the poet crystallizes into the philosophical banana-peel of Romanticism upon which Surrealism eventually slipped and fell (cogitatus interruptus in medias snark).

The Baker knows none of this for his cerebral cortex is being overwhelmed by a shocking revelation of the secretive, amorous gigantism of the inanimate world towards the animate world … the love song of a rubber glove for its plongeur, the melancholy and mystery of a street lusting for a solitary Turinese pedestrian … an entire world whose very mind is as solely and entirely snark as his own!

Oh, gentle Baker, forever parsing the Snark’s enigma of arrival … when this riddle is solved, your tale will come to a devilish end …
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* There are those psychogeographistes who insist on navigating their way, for example, through a suburb of Utrecht with only the aid of a street map of central Rome. None of this is to be confused with mere confusion, a paltry condition unworthy of the true snark hunter and smacking more of those be-boojumed unfortunates whose wives insist that they stop and ask for directions.

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 One, Page Six, Panel Two (Italia Bella!)

He came as a Butcher: but gravely declared,
When the ship had been sailing a week,
He could only kill Beavers. The Bellman looked scared,
And was almost too frightened to speak:
But at length he explained, in a tremulous tone,
There was only one Beaver on board;
And that was a tame one he had of his own,
Whose death would be deeply deplored.

Alberto Savinio had this to say about animals such as the Beaver who are always trying to draw attention to themselves:

"Totemism is a sign of the dignity that animals once enjoyed, a testimony that the earth was once a paradise … our memory of the time when animals lived with us as companions and equals contains the most encouraging idea of the future of the world, an idea that lets us glimpse, beyond the contraction of peoples into themselves, their expansion into a common brotherhood, and finally their new merging with the animals in a paradise regained."

In this panel we see the final and ultimate member of the crew, the Butcher, apparently menacing the Beaver in an umbrous manner while she is at her innocent play. Is the Butcher truly malevolent towards the Beaver as the text insinuates or is he pursuing that childish dream of Eden which she rolls before her? Universal brotherhood of sentient beings or ignominous immolation at the hands of a petrified maniac?

Clues abound: the (conveniently) protean decor of the HMS Snark, indeed, the entire mise en scène is redolent of the fashionably unsettled piazzi of Turin, a place notorious for the alpine fogs which beset and befuddle its inhabitants. A similar metaphysical ennui settles heavily over both the Beaver and the hinted-at Butcher, perhaps they are in that liminal state which Savinio alludes to, struggling to emerge from a crepuscular present of totemic mementos into a future Paradise Regained? Is Lewis Carroll hinting at eschatalogical program of redemption here? Is the Hunting of the Snark really a music-hall species of the Divine Comedy, the Snark is Beatrice, the Baker is Dante and the crew of the HMS Snark, a multicephalic crypto-gnostic Virgil?

Or is it all just a load of rubbish, just the useless odds and ends found inside an Oxford don's stolen and pilfered portmanteau, disparate rubbish strewn about the windswept paving stones of an Turinese piazza by a disappointed thief who had been posing as a railway porter on the Bragia trunk line, the better to prey upon Englishmen doing the Grand Tour? Savinio had this to say about the dodgy sort of things that can spring out of a fellow's portmanteau on a chilly Piedmontese morning:

"Romanticism: the terror of nature, its forests, its tempests, its dawns, its splendors … surrealism: the internal terror of a man, his forests, his tempests, his dawns, his splendor."