Wonderland Without Alice
By Stefan Kanfer
THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK by Lewis Carroll
Annotated by Martin Gardner; William Kaufmann; $18.95
LEWIS CARROLL: A CELEBRATION edited by Edward Guiliano; Potter; $17.95
On July 18, 1874, a shy Oxford don visited his sisters at Guildford, in the south of England. There, part of a poem came to mind. It was only eight words long, but the phrase would haunt generations: "For the Snark was a Boojum, you see." Charles Dodgson subtitled his completed work "An Agony in Eight Fits," but it is really the final volume of an unintended trilogy, a trip to Wonderland without Alice.
She is scarcely missed. Here Dodgson, again under the nom de plume Lewis Carroll, is in full control of his genius. Gone is the Victorian treacle, the sentiment that seeped through his earlier writings. In its place is a premonitory feeling of dread. As always in Carrolliana, logic lies on one side and absurdity on the other. Between the two, humor leaps like a spark, illuminating the strange journey of an impossible crew (nine men whose occupations begin with B, plus a Beaver) in search of an inconceivable creature. It will ultimately consume one of them. At the end, there is no convenient awakening from a dream, as in Alice's adventures, no consolation of an afterlife. All that remains is "a torrent of laughter . . . Then, silence." The Hunting surfaces in Finnegans Wake and powerfully influenced T.S. Eliot. Auden compared it with Moby Dick and advanced it as a metaphor for "mankind and human society moving through time and struggling with its destiny."
Yet in recent years, the Snark has been as hard to find in bookstores as it was on the ocean. The hard-cover book has been out of print for a decade. Now, on the occasion of Charles Dodgson's sesquicentennial, the matter has been rectified with Martin Gardner's frabjous Annotated Snark. In its oversized, endlessly informative pages, Gardner, author of The
Annotated Alice, explains Carroll's rhymes and references and brightens the strange engravings of Henry Holiday. The choice of Holiday, Gardner says, was a classic Carrollian irony. In his day (circa 1870) the illustrator was renowned as a designer of stained-glass windows, among them a Crucifixion and Ascension that still stand at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Manhattan.
Today he is remembered chiefly because of some whimsical decorations for a nonsense epic. Although he lacks the spidery draftsmanship of Sir John Tenniel, who brought the Alice books to life, Holiday lends the tale an ominous air and a sense of open-ended allegory.
What is one to make, for example, of the Beaver and the Butcher as "They returned hand-in-hand, and the Bellman, unmanned/ (For a moment) with noble emotion,/ Said 'This amply repays all the wearisome days/ We have spent on the billowy ocean!' " Or: " 'I engage with the Snark--every night after dark--/ In a dreamy delirious fight:/ I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,/ And I use it for striking a light:' "
Freudians agree with Joyce, who called the poet "Lewd's carol." For them, the don's love of prepubescent girls (the book is dedicated to Gertrude Chataway, 8) is an invitation to ransack The Snark for buried erotica. Professors have professed to find satires of Christianity, economics and editors ("It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:/ And it always looks grave at a pun").
G.K. Chesterton thought Carroll's nonsense worthy of "sages and gray-haired philosophers . . . in order to study that darkest problem of metaphysics, the borderland between reason and unreason, and the nature of the most erratic of spiritual forces, humor . . . That we do find a pleasure in certain long and elaborate stories, in certain complicated and curious forms of diction, which have no intelligible meaning whatever, is not a subject for children to play with; it is a subject for psychologists to go mad over." Gardner's interpretation would seem to agree. By Snark time, Darwin had undermined Britain's sense of religious and secular order. The loss of certainty, Gardner believes, "pecks at the heart of Carroll's poem." The Snark "is the void, the great blank emptiness out of which we miraculously emerged; by which we will ultimately be devoured; through which the absurd galaxies spiral and drift endlessly on their nonsense voyages from nowhere to nowhere." Gardner ends his closely reasoned essay with the reminder that one of the U.S. nuclear missiles is called the Snark. So much for the dark side of the Carrollian vision. Typically, there is a sunnier view, expressed by the poet himself: "The one I like best . . . is that [the Snark] may be taken as an allegory for the pursuit of happiness."
It is a goal the poet never reached. In Lewis Carroll: A Celebration, essays chart the journey from Dodgson/Carroll's Pillow Problems, games of logic designed to beguile his hours of insomnia, to the great Wonderland where people and animals act out large-scale fantasies on a disturbing dreamscape. In the beginning, his compositions are light entertainments, but soon the unconscious takes over. By the end, the works and the words have fled the nursery for the university and the dictionary. Today Carroll with his nightmare trials, his invented words ("chortle," "gallumph," "uffish"), his guilty searches and seizures, stands as a founder of black comedy and absurdist thought, an author translated by Louis Aragon and Vladimir Nabokov, as contemporaneous, in his own way, as Kafka.
The illustrators are represented with samples of their hilarious accompaniments; so is the vast cast of immortals: the Knave of Hearts, the Jabberwock, Father William, Humpty Dumpty, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But as both the Snark and the Celebration aptly demonstrate, none of the characters is as strange, as varied and, finally, as puzzling as the conservative religious prude, the photographer of nude nymphets, the ultra-conventional logician whose books uprooted the world he embraced. And none is more challenging, not even the Boojum, than the unassuming figure who more than a century ago took a solitary stroll on a Surrey hill and walked into literary history.
--By Stefan Kanfer
Excerpt
"The Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness.' "
-- Stefan Kanfer
Excerpt
"The Snark is a poem about being and nonbeing, an existential poem, a poem of existential agony. The Bellman's map is the map that charts the course of humanity; blank because we possess no information about where we are or whither we drift. The Snark is, in Paul Tillich's fashionable phrase, every man's ultimate concern. This is the great search motif of the poem, the quest for an ultimate good. But this motif is submerged in a stronger motif, the dread, the agonizing dread, of ultimate failure. The Boojum is more than death. It is the end of all searching. It is final, absolute extinction, in Auden's phrase, 'the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness.' "
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