Brideshead Resnarked

Children who play with ships and all those other whats-its who go down to the sea in ships always come to a sticky end. It matters not if a Snark or something even less wholesome awaits them at the end, they’re all doomed, doomed to being reduced to a concoction of india ink and paper all squiggled upon by a middle-aged illustrator bent upon that very same paper!

Middle age, my fellow Snarkistas, is very much a skipping of forty years and then a bit of a pratfall when one lands upon the deck of one’s Snark-Hunting ship to find it exactly as one left it, so long ago, the exact same Carrollian ship of fools adrift in a sea of ink.

Whenever I’m asked what do I think is the meaning of the Hunting of the Snark — the 134-year old Holy Grail of Carrollian research — I simply reply : proceed without further remark.

Elsewhere on The Hunting of the Snark …
• My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to make the boojums fit the crime

Auld Lang Snarkyn

This New Year's Eve greeting from all of us at chez snarque will not only convey our best wishes for your future prosperity and happiness but more importantly, serve as a suprachromatic hypercognitive post-bibulative remedy, ie., a New Year Day pick-me-up guaranteed to open the eyes of even the most inert dionysiacs and bacchantes.

Special thanks to my 3-month old nephew, Leopold, who so kindly lent himself to the production of this garish, yet genuinely protosurrealist illustration. I have come to the conclusion that the true, genuine, singular and ineffable Meaning of the Snark can only be apprehended by a cheerfully small human being in a funny hat and plastic loincloth with an insatiable, drooling, passion for women's breasts. Nonsense is this young fellow's meat and drink!

Happy Snark Hunting in 2008, with forks and hope and railway-shares for all!

Fit One, Page 8, Panel 3

What is surrealism? The simultaneous memory of everything. What is protosurrealism? The same as above with the added frisson of remembering an impossible future.

What is the final panel of Fit the First? A protosurrealist Narrenschiff patched together from semiotic pentimenti and oneiric palimpsets, a carte-de-visite of the Victorian ideal of the future, an artifact drifting down the estuary of the Mississippi … the Amazon … the Thames … the Congo …

"We said there warn't no home like the ol' HMS Snark, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but the Snark don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on her.

"But when we reach the sea we'll build a bigger ship! What great treachery that will be! Then we shall control every bathing machine and produce history as others produce plays. I, the Bellman, the wrath of god!"

The Bellman ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Butcher, suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky — seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

"The horror! The horror!"

Fit One, Page Six, Panel Three (Italia Bella Redux)

The Beaver, who happened to hear the remark,
Protested, with tears in its eyes,
That not even the rapture of hunting the Snark
Could atone for that dismal surprise!
It strongly advised that the Butcher should be
Conveyed in a separate ship:
But the Bellman declared that would never agree
With the plans he had made for the trip:
Navigation was always a difficult art,
Though with only one ship and one bell:
And he feared he must really decline, for his part,
Undertaking another as well.

The provenance of this image is, I confess, is a hopelessly adulterated concoction of all the flotsam & jetsam which churns in my head by night:
• Corrupted retinal imprints of an Alma-Tadema confection of Egytian heirophants barging down the Nile.
• Scattered brain-crumb trail of Enobarbus channeling Shakespeare's fancification of Jacques Amyot's crib of Plutarch's précis of Cleopatra a-burning on the water.
• Thomas Mann's Deutsche Bahn-railway-schedule-precise vivisection of the disgraced Joseph's descent down the Nile in the Joseph Tetralogy.
• A muddled childhood memory of Thor Heyerdahl's voyages … over-saturated Technicolor imagery of Incan fellahin poling their islands of bundled reeds across Lake Titicaca, through Upper Egypt and down to Easter Island.
• Most importantly, the compulsion to depict accurately an object of stone floating in water, hence proving it as light as a duck and therefore, a witch.

To those who insist upon a certain logical decorum in the threads binding an image to a text, I say: pshaw! I just rummage through the cultural debris and emotional wheel ruts, happy as a tove in a wabe. If poetry is metaphor, and metaphor is image-making, then there's more critical analysis in one panel of this Snark than in the many pages of intellectual jiggery-pokery with which Lewis Carroll has been belabored through the ages.

On the deck of the HMS Snark, we also can see The Barrister and The Billiard-Marker playing at dice over a fragment of an aortic blood vessel which appears to have been illicitly removed from the person of the poet Dante Alighieri, whose death day is this Friday, September 14. Here's what Witold Gombrowicz, said about Dante and his Divine Comedy, another famous poem about Snarks …

"Dante was reciting his epoch, but the epoch was also reciting, and the poem is, so to speak, a double platitude, the poet simply recited what was already being recited. Something like those Sunday discussions of soccer by people gathered in bars and coffee houses. Do they really care about soccer? Not in the least. … Humanity glides along the worn ruts of articulation. An empty poem, which exists in defiance of reality and almost as if to spite it!"*

Well, doesn't that just about wrap it up for The Meaning of the Snark? I mean, simply substitute Lewis Carroll for Dante (deep inside, you know you really want to) and — voila! A poem about nothing! A drawing about nothing! And whatever it is that you read into the drawing, that's what you truly wanted all along — and thus, deserve!

Yes, yes, yes! I know that Lewis Carroll spoke no Italian outside his bathing machine. And yes, he did claim total ignorance of the meaning of his work, in English or Italian — unlike Dante (Alighieri, not "Wombat" Rossetti), who wouldn't shut up about his boojums. Frankly, I don't know what I'm doing either, it's all the rage these days and I think it's going rather well, it always does when you draw with your eyes wide shut.
_________________

*W. Gombrowicz, Diary, Volume 3, October 16, 1966, translated by Lillian Vallee, Northwestern Univ. Press, 1993. The works of Gombrowicz are ideal for name-dropping at academic and intellectual soirées, preferably from an upstairs window and attached to an anvil.
NB. The jukebox to your right has been refurbished with two curious versions of Jabberwocky, by Glenn Simonsen. One is a phonetic rendition by an Egyptian, Mr. A. Sayed, the other by Mr. Al Lawler and the Psalters. I've also included a sample of the late Roland Topor explaining the ablative absolute in High Guttural (you may remember him as Renfield in Herzog's Nosferatu, and as the animator of La Planéte Sauvage). Marie Osmond's rendition of Karawane remains, it's the high point of the Hollywood Dada phase of her career.

Fit the First, Page Four and Five as a Spread (The Meaning of the Snark!)

Meaning, meaning, meaning, nor any drop to think! Bad punnery must be excused, for The Meaning Of It All is a weighty burden for any one to bear, much less an impecunious artist wrestling with the eternal question of Snarkology. 42 will still have to do for now.

In the meanwhile, feast your eyes on this page spread and despair! It's all turned out rather nicely, the textures, the page flow, the surreal imagery redolent of nothing in particular, just the idle reveries of the middle-aged snarquiste confronted with a dwindling bank account, a paltry client list and an unrequited obsession with late-Victorian, proto-surrealist nonsense poetry.

As part of my on-going program of conducting imaginary conversations with imaginary readers, I offer the following remarks concerning the pen-and-inkery jiggery-pokery that goes on behind the scenes: I use No. 1950 Gillot pen nibs, I always keep two by me, a stiffer new one for detail & an older, springier one for the heavier bits. Very fine details are done with a Hunt 104. My flavour of ink is FW Steig acrylic artists' ink, it's reasonably black and of medium viscosity. I once preferred Pelikan but it made my throat hurt. I draw a very tight pencil on tissue (samples to be scanned and posted later) and then ink atop either denril or drafting vellum. I dislike lightboxing and bristol board for one very important reason: I make mistakes. Fixing them on bristol board involves pro-white or even paste-ups & rubber cement, while denril or vellum allows me to use my prized Rotex electric eraser. I just zap the offending work and re-ink, often more than once. Nibs are cleaned with window cleaner spray, the ammonia smell gives me Diazo machine flashbacks from the 1980s. I do plan to post more detailed scans & explanations of the practical nature of pen & inkery whenever my legions of readers clamor for it.

This entry seems devoid of the usual jokes and tomfoolery for the simple reason that we live in a cold, cruel and harsh world, a world in which, to give examples, I've read somewhere (will post the URL eventually) that the Disney Corporation is contemplating some new, even "better" Lewis Carroll-themed audiovisual extravaganzas. This is in addition to the long-awaited Marilyn Manson version of the same. Huzzah! This way to the laughing gas, ladies and gentlemen!

Fit One, Page Five, Panel One

He would answer to "Hi!" or to any loud cry,
Such as "Fry me!" or "Fritter my wig!"
To "What-you-may-call-um!" or "What-was-his-name!"
But especially "Thing-um-a-jig!"
While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,
He had different names from these:
His intimate friends called him "Candle-ends,"
And his enemies "Toasted-cheese."

The penultimate crew member, the Baker, AKA Lewis Carroll, the man with the foolish grin keeping perfectly still with the eyes shut tight in his head to see the world spinning around.

Perhaps the Baker is a boojum of sorts! The authorial nature of the Snark is obvious now, and what makes it especially tasty (as tasty as toasted-cheese-wig-fritters) is the gentle (but very thorough) dissolution of the author into his internal, safely nonsensical world. This panel illustrates the central premise of the Snark. We see the Baker in the stylized pose of the-fool-at-thought, his eyes shut for he has no need to see the Snarkian landscape — he is the Snarkian landscape, and later tonight, when the topic of supper is broached, why, he's on the menu, on the table, he's the knife and he's the waiter!

Where will it all end? What does it all mean? Is Lewis Carroll an proto-existentialist grappling with a multiply-fractured Other generated from and concealed within himself, exhausted by a pseudo-Gnostic quest played out amidst a desolate wasteland littered with the semiotic debris of a long-toppled Victorian imperium? Or is he just this guy, you know?

Credits: Mr. Carroll appears courtesy of himself (and within himself). Mr. Carroll's wardrobe courtesy of Boutique Loplop, footwear courtesy of Chez Pied, hair styled and deep-fried in hot fat by Salon René, animals styled and trained by Bwana Dali.

Fit the First, Page Two and Three as a Spread (The Meaning of the Snark)

Pages 2 and 3 in their final layout, type included. No hand lettering, for now I'm using ITC Garamond Condensed by the great Tony Stans, a classic ITC face (which also dates the artist for those who keep track of such things). I must also mention that the display fonts used on the opening Fit the First Page are Selfish and Downcome, designed by a very talented Brazilian, Eduardo Recife. His work is rather good and can be found here. Truthfully, the ITC font is a minute shade too light, too phototype. If I could find a compressed bodycopy, as tight and legible as ITC GC and a darker color to balance my linework, with the same Victorian, slightly faux-letterpress aroma of Recife's work, I will change the Garamond.


The initial conceit of the Snark is properly launched. The theatrical, self-contained staginess of the Snark, its insistent play-acting, makes a stageboard and footlights opening motif inescapable. Carroll loved messing about with boats and amateur theatricals both, I have chosen the most economical means to effect both modes of transportation. The play's the thing, damn the torpedoes!


And now, it's time to ask: what does it all mean? What's with this Snark, was Lewis Carroll embarking on some psycho-Freudian, hypo-ontological, extra-existential crypto-quixotic crusade? If a college freshman searching for inspiration for a theme paper on the Hunting of the Snark were to consult these pages, what would I tell him? Should I confide to him or her that the Snark's meaning can be approximated best by regenerating all 5,065 words of the original text into a matrix roughly congruent in morphology, syntax and grammar to the original, the generation process beginning on or about July 18, 1874? And will the resulting text file provide an optimized WYSIWYG explanation of the meaning of the Snark, assuming of course that one has not yet taken religious orders but that one does have minimal pedagogical experience in college-level mathematics (also assuming that one "reads" the resultant codex with a false recursive memory of having composed it oneself whilst seeing it for the first time)? Must I also hint that the physical location of this generation process is unimportant, that anywhere in the rain while wearing scratchy woolens and mudcaked wellingtons will do? Questions, questions, nary a hint of an answer! Take heart, all ye who yearn for answers , such questions — like laughter — are probably doomed to disappear.