Nasty, snarkish and short

This stanzel is the only overtly political stanzel in the entire Hunting of the Snark and as such, affords us a rare glimpse into the political workings of Lewis Carroll’s mind. Unfortunately, the oddly menacing figure of the mono-eared Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, is somewhat obscuring our political view of Carroll, who is shown here vamping as the White Knight doing an off-hand impersonation of Sir John Tenniel channeling the Bellman.

Concealment is the holy grail of all political discourse and as we’ve shown earlier, this stanzel is doing a splendid job in that direction. The Bellman’s offer of free booze to his constituency is in the jolly tradition of democratic alcoholism through the ages, whilst Van Gogh’s cue card is a splendid summation of the Pavlovian tendencies of the Common Man, and yet no one seems the wiser.

And how could we? How could the electorate get any wiser, in this, the most perfect of all possible political worlds?

Fit Two, Page 14, Panel 2 … for the Bellman is an honourable man;

He served out some grog with a liberal hand,
And bade them sit down on the beach:
And they could not but own that their Captain looked grand,
As he stood and delivered his speech.
"Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ears!"
(They were all of them fond of quotations:
So they drank to his health, and they gave him three cheers,
While he served out additional rations).

The Shakespearean quotation will be familiar to all poetical and political earmongers. The Bellman has been depicted in the definitive Roman pose of imperial authority known as the adlocutio, which has been visually modified here to prove, amongst many other things, that everything old is new again.

Clothed in the rhetorical and semiotic crypto-imperial habiliments of Marxist-Leninism, the Bellman not only demands his auditors’ ears but even their arms so that he may throw them (their arms, not his audience) across the shoulders of the tottering capitalist-running-boojums and assist them into an early grave. This odd affinity (an unelective affinity?) towards Comrade Lenin is no accident, it allows us to make a second auricular reference to the rumored waxen ear which has replaced the genuine, damaged article on Lenin’s embalmed corpse.

The ear motif receives its third and final reiteration (thus fulfilling the Clochetic Rule of Three) in the somewhat maimed person of Vincent van Gogh, who stands behind Comrade Bellman (somewhat in the manner of the Laputian flappers, methinks) to encourage the enthusiasm of all concerned with his sinister aura … of menacing risibility.

Their audience, the proletarian hunters of the Snark, react to all this intellectual palaver as expected. Drinks all around and afterwards, dancing on the upper decks for the lower ranks! Huzzah for His Nibs the Bellman, huzzah for the Snark, huzzah for the revolution!
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NB. Heartfelt thanks to the LCSNA for their very kind mention of this never-ending Snark Hunt of mine in the latest issue of the Knight Letter. With forks and hope we ink onwards and upwards!