The snarking of the hunt

THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll, a graphic novel by this artist and here explained page by page, panel by panel. Today's panel is part of page 59, the final page of Fit the Fifth …

The attentive reader will notice that in this panel, as in the last two panels, we have been undergoing what specialists in this sort of thing call a Transition. Beginning with an ur-schoolroom redolent of the worst Boschian horrors that any academia could have on tap, we shifted into a theatrical backdrop, then flitted through a hasty visual flashback of various preceding Fits and now find ourselves in a pastoral sort of setting, evocative of an English garden party frequented by exactly the sort of Carrollian riffraff one always finds lurking about at such affairs.

Gosh! This Transformation business is mickle hard to pull off, it’s certainly easier for the likes of poets such as Lewis Carroll to shift quarters if they wish, it’s merely a question of them upending a spare thesaurus and rummaging about with a few new adjectives and suitable prepositions. For us picture-wallahs, it’s a whole different story! The extras have to be chosen and then costumed, the appropriate locales have to be researched and then reproduced at considerable expense, then there’s lighting and makeup, why, the catering alone is an logistical boojum!

In this case, we’ve arranged for some currently unemployed peons from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to serve drinks and snacks whilst the Fellowship of the Snark mill around in period costumes with various Protosurrealist floozies glued to their arms, all of ‘em muttering rhubarb-rhubarb-custard-custard to give it all that air of Carrollian verisimilitude.

Of course, in the Good Old Days they didn’t call it a Transition, it was a Metamorphosis back then and it was all the rage in pre-Christian circles. You couldn’t go outside for the morning paper without bumping into someone’s teenaged daughter bursting into foliage or regressing into a giant spider; such goings-on were pure catnip for the poets of that time and I think it’s safe to say that the advent of monotheism put the kibosh on a considerable source of innocent merriment for both gods and mortals.

All of which brings us to the semi-belated point that in some subliminal manner, Lewis Carroll’s High Anglican penchant for Nonsense verse is really the sneaky pagan’s taste for Metamorphosis resurgent in the usually sacrosanct domain of Logic and Semiotics! As always, I’ll eschew further elaboration of this particular observation out of respect for the sausage-stuffing-phobia of any decent reader towards such crypto-Bismarckian literary goings-ons.

I shall confine myself to remarking that Metamorphosis is a fine thing, a double-plus-fine thing to liven up any bit of illustration or verse you might have handy; perhaps the Beaver and Butcher’s unexpected metamorphosis into the very best of friends is just the sort of versification needed to bring back the salad days of wine, women and Pagan Nonsense …

Beware of snarks baring greeks

This stanzel has already had its fair share of analytical pummeling (go ahead, I know you like to watch), but we artists know that it’s best to kick a drawing when it’s down and so I present you with this tasteless, additional bit of post-pummeling pudding :

This stanzel is a perfectly cooked example of a big-shot Greek philosopher, So-crates as he’s known to Bill & Ted, being roasted and basted on the spit of my crowquill until he cries out « Μπάρμπας » and admits that he is the Father of Nonsense and not Philosophy, the big faker!

I’ll leave the expository details of my cunning argument to whomever is in need of an quickie thesis for their doctoral dissertation. Let’s just say for now that all this Socratic business of Forms, all this wordy confusion between meaning and structure, first begat Plato (seen here in the Form of Charles Darwin seen here in the Form of the Boots) and then begat all of Western Philosophy — and then begat Nonsense, the idiot man-child cowering in the linguistic basement of that slum-lord Plato’s grubby cave!

Words, words, words, they mean nothing and everything at once and let’s face it, in a wrestling match between Ontology and Nonsense, who are you really going to put your money on? Yow!

Nonsense ex Machina

The Machines rule, their word is law and their rendition of The Hunting of the Snark is nonsense of the highest order — nonsense without a soul!

The following stanza of the Snark has been submitted to the Machine-Translation Tractor Beam:

This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.

After several passes through the force fields of the Machine-Human Semiotic Interface, we are left with this bit of faux-Zen, quasi-Brownian prosodic motion:

They are not the period of diffidenza;
But they have, the end to make the material
so that the controls of the very direct concept
of this good one for the sea in the past
deciding to that they happen and
this ku acoustic of signaler is the turbulent flow.

The human once known as Théodore Géricault, along with the semiotic residue of his Raft of the Medusa is now fed into the Machine …



Then once more, the Machine Force Field is lowered upon this hapless relic of French Romanticism … leaving us with this ugly artifact of pure visual nonsense …



So beautiful … so dangerous … The Hunting of the Snark in the Age of the Machine!

The Big Sleep

They say that the sleep of reason produces monsters but what does the sleep of monsters produce? The denizens of Alice’s Wonderland and the Looking Glass World must fit, perforce, the latter description and we shall wonder aloud: of what does Nonsense dream?

The dream-world of Alice is the world of the Snark, for although the Snarkian Multiverse is a dependency of Nonsense, it is clearly a distortion of the quotidian Victorian reality of Alice’s waking world, and as such, it is the nightmare of monsters, even such small-beer monsters as the Walrus and the Carpenter.

This is the secret allure of hunting the Snark, this is why the majority of Carrollians prefer the purity of Alician Nonsense … we Snark Hunters have gone over to the Dark Side where Nonsense is always tainted by an alien Reality — the Victorian reality of Bakers and Billiards and Butchers and ultimately, the Boojum of death!

Fit the Fifth, Page 38, Panel 1 … as Gregor Samsa awoke one morning he found himself transformed into a gigantic snark

Such friends, as the Beaver and Butcher became,
Have seldom if ever been known;
In winter or summer, ‘twas always the same —
You could never meet either alone.

The attentive reader will notice that in this panel, as in the last two panels, we have been undergoing what specialists in this sort of thing call a Transition. Beginning with an ur-schoolroom redolent of the worst Boschian horrors Christ Church could have on tap, we shifted into a theatrical backdrop of sorts, then flitted through a hasty visual flashback of various preceding Fits and now find ourselves in a pastoral sort of setting, evocative of an English garden party frequented by exactly the sort of Carrollian riffraff one always finds lurking about at such affairs.

Gosh! This Transformation business is mickle hard to pull off, it’s certainly easier for the likes of poets such as Lewis Carroll to shift quarters if they wish, it’s merely a question of them upending a spare thesaurus and rummaging about with a few new adjectives and suitable prepositions. For us picture-wallahs, it’s a whole different story! The extras have to be chosen and then costumed, the appropriate locales have to be researched and then reproduced at considerable expense, then there’s lighting and makeup, why, the catering alone is an logistical boojum!

In this case, we’ve arranged for some currently unemployed peons from Alice in Wonderland to serve drinks and snacks whilst the Fellowship of the Snark mill around in period costumes with various Protosurrealist floozies glued to their arms, all of ‘em muttering rhubarb-rhubarb-custard-custard to give it all that air of Carrollian verisimilitude.

Of course, in the Good Old Days they didn’t call it a Transition, it was a Metamorphosis back then and it was all the rage in pre-Christian circles. You couldn’t go outside for the morning paper without bumping into someone’s teenaged daughter bursting into foliage or regressing into a giant spider; such goings-on were pure catnip for the poets of that time and I think it’s safe to say that the advent of monotheism put the kibosh on a considerable source of innocent merriment for both gods and mortals.

All of which brings us to the semi-belated point that in some subliminal manner, Lewis Carroll’s High Anglican penchant for Nonsense verse is really the sneaky pagan’s taste for Metamorphosis resurgent in the usually sacrosanct domain of Logic and Semiotics! As always, I’ll eschew further elaboration of this particular observation out of respect for the sausage-stuffing-phobia of any decent reader towards such crypto-Bismarckian literary goings-ons.

I shall confine myself to remarking that Metamorphosis is a fine thing, a double-plus-fine thing to liven up any bit of illustration or verse you might have handy; perhaps the Beaver and Butcher’s unexpected metamorphosis into the very best of friends is just the sort of versification needed to bring back the salad days of wine, women and Pagan Nonsense …