Circus snarkus maximus

We resume our explication of the grand finale of Fit the Fourth (so rudely interrupted by a Belgian scientific romance) with this circus scene of Carrollian grandeur …

Ladies and gentlemen, the Greatest Show on Earth is not to be found under some ratty canvas tent reeking of sawdust, elephant dung and stale peanuts, peopled by vagrant layabouts trying to pinch a few shekels from the pockets of certain slack-jawed rubes even less aware of their undeserved position atop the Evolutionary Ladder than they are.

For shame, sir or madam, for even thinking so! This is the Amazing Circus of Mr. Lewis Carroll and what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, boys and girls, is not only the final stanza of Fit the Fourth, not only the precise median point of this Hunting of the Snark, but also proof positive that the truly greatest show on earth is that glittering spectacle which is performed within the cerebella of those who eschew the vulgar entertainments of the hoi polloi in favor of the baroque pleasures of parsing out the minutiae of this, our Snark Hunt!

Yes, minutiae, minutiae, everywhere, nor any drivel to think! This final stanzel is packed with all the gaudy tinsel of circus minutiae, the Broker tottering on his stilts, the Billiard Marker plunging through an abyss, the Boots juggling with the decapitated heads of the audience.

But all of this pales in comparison to the leonine circus beast swallowing the hapless Banker in the foreground. It is not at all a lion though, we have more intellectual tastes here; it is a chimera and it is the kind of beast found in only the better sort of circuses (or circi, if you must) such as our Snarkian Circus of Fit the Fourth or more to the point, the amazing Circus of Dr. Lao!

Yes, it is Dr. Lao’s Circus to which I'm paying homage to here*, to that shamefully unacknowledged American wellspring of what came to be called Magical Realism by certain labelistas in need of such things. Needless to say, the good Doctor Lao saw fit to provide his Circus with a chimera, and the chronicler of his Circus, the newspaperman and gun-slinger Charles G. Finney, also saw fit to explicate this mysterious beast in his compendious back-of-the-book catalogue, to wit :

CHIMERA : described by Rabelais, Flaubert and Finney.

Huzzah for the telegraphic simplicity of the 1920’s American newspaper style! But have no fear, dear reader, there’s no need for you to poke around in your breakfast Pantagruel just yet. My team of hashisheen-cum-wingéd-flying-monkey research assistants have already verified that Rabelais did indeed wonder aloud whether a chimera, swinging in a void, can swallow second intentions. From thence, it was child’s play for them to rummage through my tattered copy of the Temptation of St. Anthony, until Flaubert’s chimera warned them that if he perceived in any place a man whose mind reposes in wisdom, he would fall upon him and strangle him.

Strong juju, even for French circus folk, but so be it. The chimera, over-excited by the Billiard Marker swinging in a void, is swallowing our Banker — a devourment of second intentions† as specified by Rabelais! His first intention might very well have been to strangle his prey until he discovered that the Banker’s mind was most definitely not reposing in wisdom, being entirely taken up by various Snarkological absurdities and other marxist nonsenseries.

Very well, the show must go on! We turn to the Butcher, for despite his tearful unmanning by the Bellman, His Gills the Butcher dare not scarper off now! You can politely ignore his voluptuous agony at being sawn in half for circus sport or even his terror of the Jubjub bird and other chimeras that populate this hellish (though oddly compelling) circus, all of ‘em lying in wait for him and him alone!

All of this may well be unpleasant, yes, perhaps even vulgar, but you can't turn your eyes away, can you?‡ Schadenfreude is still the greatest show on earth!

______________________________

*Homage being used here in its Hollywood connotation of brazen looting.

† Swallowing a Snark Hunter could never be any imaginary beast’s first intention, for knowing Snark Hunters to be as mythical as chimeras, the deliberate engulfing of the former within the latter might create a self-annihilating double-negative Nonsensical Tautology. This still leaves us with the question of the Banker's ultimate destination, his reductio ad absurdam, as it were. The eponymous proprietor of the Circus explicated his chimera (of sturdy Chinese make) to the good folks of Abalone, Arizona thusly: “The chimera … has no elimination system in the sense that ordinary animals have. Instead of expelling waste matter through the bowels, he burns it up within him, and he snorts out the smoke and ashes. Yes, the chimera is its own incinerator plant”. Hence the futility of following the beast around all day, hoping to collect enough physical remnants of his prey, the Banker, for proper Christian burial. A simple ashtray would suffice.

‡ Refer discreetly to your Dictionary of Received Opinions which you always keep about your person, wherein Flaubert has the last word on the matter … CIRCUS FOLK : Use obscene practices.

Fits the Fourth and Fifth, Pages 28 and 29 as a Spread … for he to-day that hunts snark with me shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile

With this sumptuous page spread, we are taking Lewis Carroll and his Hunting of the Snark in tow across the Channel, away from the cozy confines of the Victorian British circus in which Fit the Fourth took its spills and pratfalls, and into the Gallic flâneries of Fit the Fifth, following the baguette-crumbs-trail of the Flaubertian hierophant of La Tentation de saint Antoine.

Those readers who have been following this Snark for a long time will have noticed the considerable French influence upon my interpretation, and with good reason, for my modus operandi has always been to steal from the best! And to any nogoodniks who look askance at this francophilia, perhaps thinking it misplaced in the Snark — the very heartland of English Nonsense! — I shall reply by threatening them with this stoutly bound and suitably weighty volume of Carrollian criticism which was just published by the LCSNA — Lewis Carroll: Voices From France, by the late Elizabeth Sewell.

Truthfully, this book’s genuine potential for mayhem is slight, for Sewell’s lack of jargon and academic doubletalk renders her work refreshingly amiable to all who follow the Way of the Snark. Her Snark comments are especially lucid and profitable, focussing on an intriguing comparison between that poem and the works of Stéphane Mallarmé. She finds a common denominator in their various inclinations towards the Great Nothing (le néant), that après-ultimate-double-plus-full-stop of fin de siècle literature and a classic symptom of the budding Modernism plaguing the youth of that day.

Sewell then closes in on her real prey, the deep structural and emotional relationship between Nonsense and the absolute sort of poetry that Mallarmé wrote, a poetry in which language breaks from the world, abandoning logic, syntax and even meaning, right down to the ultimate granular levels of the phonemes themselves. This rupture between words and the world and its fracturing of selves which Modernist hipsters so revel in is the defining moment of Western art and Sewell very neatly ties this back into the splintering of Carroll’s persona into our ten-fold Snark Hunters.

Afterwards, we are treated to a merry romp through the classic French obsessions with Marxist, Surrealist and Psychoanalytic critical methods, all of ‘em employed upon Carroll with varying degrees of success, and all of ‘em culminating in Deconstructionism, ie., talking about talking about talking.

For my part, I have never thought Carroll to be a precursor of Classical Surrealism such as the Comte de Lautréamont; the authoritarian Breton and the somewhat confused Aragon misread his texts and intentions. Sewell points out the congruencies but the essentially aggressive, utopian nature of Surrealism has little to do with Carroll. Perhaps we should reclassify Carroll as an protoOulipian of sorts, perhaps even a protoRousselian? In a similar vein, Antonin Artaud’s attack upon Carroll is a genuinely insouciant crypto-Romantic temper tantrum. The former accuses the latter of inauthenticity and dilettantism, of peddling a second-grade-fresh Nonsense instead of the undiluted linguistic chaos which Artaud (and certain other French critics) felt was his own Byronic, schizophrenic birthright.

In all such matters Sewell’s thoughts are invaluable, not only for her concision but for the exposure she might give younger readers to an older, gentler style of High Thinkery which she rather cheekily calls Englishness. Even more educational for the young ‘uns (and certain hypertestosteronic North American politicos) is her refusal to make this into an Anglo-French kulturkampf; instead, she assigns credit where credit is due, applauding the rigorous, penetrating taxonomy of French Carrollians, as they assigned his Nonsense to its rightful niche upon the surface of logic, words and mathematics. They also noted the Carrollian reluctance to descend any further into those depths where Messers Marx and Freud lurked (half-naked with painted faces and bones through their noses, one suspects) and where the French firmly placed their own Boojums of authenticity, nihilism and meaning.

And here is where Sewell draws her line in the sands of La Manche; on one side the bravura French approach of a vertical integration from the surface of art to the depths of culture and on the other side the English preference for a sort of sporting compromise, for a recognition of the essential Poetry of Carroll’s Nonsense. The English will always rap our knuckles to remind us that Carroll’s best work never succumbs to the aggressive, nihilism of pure logic-play. There is no vandalistic breaking through the surfaces of things to plumb the depths of the reductio ad absurdam favored by the French. Instead, Carroll’s art is always tempered by the gentle touch of Poetry, of Dream, and gosh! — perhaps even a quietly expressed belief in Goodness!

The implications of all this are left to Sewell’s readers to sort out (the mark of a genuine scholar); if you’re in the mood for the addictive rigors of French thinkery, you can search very deeply and very fruitfully indeed for a solution of sorts; or if you feel more Anglo-Irish, you can dabble happily upon the formal top-side of things, knowing that all art is at once surface and symbol and those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

For myself, I shall heed Marcel Duchamp’s warning that there is no solution because there is no problem. We few, we happy few, we band of franglais Snark chasseurs!

Fit the Fourth, Page 28, Panel 4 … it's Lewis Carroll’s Flying Circus!

“Be a man!” said the Bellman in wrath, as he heard
The Butcher beginning to sob.
“Should we meet with a Jubjub, that desperate bird,
We shall need all our strength for the job!”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Greatest Show on Earth is not to be found under some ratty canvas tent reeking of sawdust, elephant dung and stale peanuts, peopled by vagrant layabouts trying to pinch a few shekels from the pockets of certain slack-jawed rubes even less aware of their undeserved position atop the Evolutionary Ladder than they are.

For shame, sir or madam, for even thinking so! This is the Amazing Circus of Mr. Lewis Carroll and what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, boys and girls, is not only the final stanza of Fit the Fourth, not only the precise median point of this Hunting of the Snark, but also proof positive that the truly greatest show on earth is that glittering spectacle which is performed within the cerebella of all those who eschew the vulgar entertainments of the hoi polloi in favor of the baroque pleasures of parsing out the minutiae of this, our Snark Hunt!

Yes, minutiae, minutiae, everywhere, nor any drivel to think! This final stanzel is packed with all the gaudy tinsel of circus minutiae, the Broker tottering on his stilts, the Billiard Marker plunging through an abyss, the Boots juggling with the decapitated heads of the audience.

But all of this pales in comparison to the leonine circus beast swallowing the hapless Banker in the foreground. It is not at all a lion though, we have more intellectual tastes here; it is a chimera and it is the kind of beast found in only the better sort of circuses (or circi, if you must) such as our Snarkian Circus of Fit the Fourth or more to the point, the amazing Circus of Dr. Lao!

Yes, it is Dr. Lao’s Circus to which I'm paying homage to here*, to that shamefully unacknowledged American wellspring of what came to be called Magical Realism by certain labelistas in need of such things. Needless to say, the good Doctor Lao saw fit to provide his Circus with a chimera, and the chronicler of his Circus, the newspaperman and gun-slinger Charles G. Finney, also saw fit to explicate this mysterious beast in his compendious back-of-the-book catalogue, to wit :

CHIMERA : described by Rabelais, Flaubert and Finney.

Huzzah for the telegraphic simplicity of the 1920’s American newspaper style! But have no fear, dear reader, there’s no need for you to poke around in your breakfast Pantagruel just yet. My team of hashisheen-cum-wingéd-flying-monkey research assistants have already verified that Rabelais did indeed wonder aloud whether a chimera, swinging in a void, can swallow second intentions. From thence, it was child’s play for them to rummage through my tattered copy of the Temptation of St. Anthony, until Flaubert’s chimera warned them that if he perceived in any place a man whose mind reposes in wisdom, he would fall upon him and strangle him.

Strong juju, even for French circus folk, but so be it. The chimera, over-excited by the Billiard Marker swinging in a void, is swallowing our Banker — a devourment of second intentions† as specified by Rabelais! His first intention might very well have been to strangle his prey until he discovered that the Banker’s mind was most definitely not reposing in wisdom, being entirely taken up by various Snarkological absurdities and other marxist nonsenseries.

Very well, the show must go on! We turn to the Butcher, for despite his tearful unmanning by the Bellman, His Gills the Butcher dare not scarper off now! You can politely ignore his voluptuous agony at being sawn in half for circus sport or even his terror of the Jubjub bird and other chimeras that populate this hellish (though oddly compelling) circus, all of ‘em lying in wait for him and him alone!

All of this may well be unpleasant, yes, perhaps even vulgar, but you can't turn your eyes away, can you?‡ Schadenfreude is still the greatest show on earth!

NB. Happy birthday to our dear Lewis Carroll! This week (January 27th, to be precise) marks his 177th birthday … which number, if divided by 42, leaves us with a quotient of 4.2 ! And some people still doubt that there's an underlying order to Life, the Universe and Everything in It — gosh!
______________________________

*Homage being used here in its Hollywood connotation of brazen looting.

† Swallowing a Snark Hunter could never be any imaginary beast’s first intention, for knowing Snark Hunters to be as mythical as chimeras, the deliberate engulfing of the former within the latter might create a self-annihilating double-negative Nonsensical Tautology. This still leaves us with the question of the Banker's ultimate destination, his reductio ad absurdam, as it were. The eponymous proprietor of the Circus explicated his chimera (of sturdy Chinese make) to the good folks of Abalone, Arizona thusly: “The chimera … has no elimination system in the sense that ordinary animals have. Instead of expelling waste matter through the bowels, he burns it up within him, and he snorts out the smoke and ashes. Yes, the chimera is its own incinerator plant”. Hence the futility of following the beast around all day, hoping to collect enough physical remnants of his prey, the Banker, for proper Christian burial. A simple ashtray would suffice.

‡ Refer discreetly to your Dictionary of Received Opinions which you always keep about your person, wherein Flaubert has the last word on the matter … CIRCUS FOLK : Use obscene practices.