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Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark

We are all familiar with the Alice books and they are undoubtedly Carroll’s masterpiece. But he did not just write about Alice, the rabbit and the Red Queen. The Hunting of the Snark is similarly appealing and fascinating, though perhaps not as famous. Two aspects of this work militate against its popularity: unlike the Alice books, the Snark is written in verse; there are some strange words which will puzzle the reader not acquainted with the Jabberwocky poem which appears in Alice through the Looking Glass. The reader must work hard to extract some satisfying meaning from the strange happenings and the eccentric characters she encounters in this journey of discovery.

There is no clear narrative line we can follow. The first stanza is indicative of what we can expect in the rest of the poem:
‘Just the place for a Snark!’ the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

Where are we? This question is never answered, but we can safely deduce we have been on board a ship, have reached our destination and are being led by the Bellman who looks like a town crier in the illustration that accompanies the text. The illustrations are particularly impressive, but just as in the Alice books, they sometimes only contribute to the mystery that surrounds this enigmatic text.

We soon learn the professions of all the members of the crew: Bellman, Bonnet-maker, Barrister, Broker, Billiard-maker, Banker, Beaver, Baker and Butcher. The prevalence of the letter ‘B’ is only one of the puzzles for we also have strange creatures like the Boojum and Bandersnatch. In fact, we know that the germ of the poem came to Carroll after a walk when, what seems a nonsense line, came into his head: ‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’ This is now the last line of poem so that it seems Carroll was working backwards, and this may somehow explain the oddness of the story.

The second stanza informs us that we are here to hunt the mysterious Snark:

‘Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice;
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.’

The Bellman is including the first mention of the Snark in the opening stanza. The Bellman’s rule-of-three is invoked later to establish the presence of the Jubjub, a strange creature indeed! It is obviously a bird of sorts and has some peculiar qualities. The Jubjub is a ‘desperate bird,’ it lives in ‘perpetual passion’ and never takes a bribe. We are assured that its flavour when cooked (it must, therefore, be edible) is more exquisite than that of ‘mutton, or oysters or eggs.’ We are even told how to cook it: ‘you boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue’ and you ‘condense it with locusts and tape.’ Jubjub appears in the OED where it is a dialect word meaning ‘the trot of a horse.’ Nevertheless, it is more likely it is related to the nightingale whose call is traditionally rendered as ‘jug, jug.’ In Eliot’s The Waste Land, the word has sexual connotations.

What about the Snark, the ostensible object of our search? Henry Holiday, whom Carroll chose to illustrate the poem, wanted to include a sketch of the creature, but Carroll refused to give the reader any idea about the creature’s appearance. However, the author decided to give us some hints about this mythical creature. ‘Snark’ could be a portmanteau word (Carroll was excessively fond of joining words together to create neologisms) for ‘snail’ and ‘shark.’ Another suggestion could be ‘snarl’ and ‘bark.’

As the Bellman and the crew approach their destination, their leader gives them a pep talk and reminds them of the five unmistakable traits by which they may recognise the Snark. They are: first, the way it tastes (meagre and hollow, but crisp); second, its habit of getting up late (it frequently breakfasts at five o’clock tea and dines the following day); its slowness in taking a jest (it always looks grave at a pun); fourth, its fondness for bathing machines (one of which it always carries about); fifth, its ambition. You should now have no trouble identifying the Snark!

Our poem is an adventure story; its vocabulary reflects the excitement of the voyage and the innovative nature of the search for a fabulous beast. Carroll has cannibalised the Jabberwocky language of ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ We, therefore, encounter ‘galumphing:’ ‘the Beaver went simply galumphing about.’ OED acknowledges Carroll as the inventor of this word with the meaning of ‘gallop, triumphant.’ There may also be a suggestion of ‘lumping and ‘laughing.’ ‘Beamish’ appears in the line, ‘And oh beamish nephew, beware of the day.’ OED gives it as a sixteenth century word meaning ‘radiant, shining brightly.’ ‘Frumious Bandersnatch’ is especially challenging. The first word combines ‘fuming’ and ‘furious.’ The name of the creature is made up of ‘banders,’ one who leads or leagues, and snatch, so that the overall meaning is a beast who specialises is snatching banders. In the Snark poem the creature terrifies the Banker by grabbing him with his ‘frumious jaws.’ This fierce mythical animal is immune to bribery and moves very fast!

Carroll had been nursing his godson who was suffering from tuberculosis at the time he composed the poem. He does not connect his godson’s illness with the Snark poem, but they are certainly intertwined. Why else would Carroll choose for his subtitle ‘An Agony, in Eight Fits’? Agony is here used in the old sense of a struggle that involves great anguish, bodily pain and death. Fit has the double meaning of convulsion and a canto. Carroll had already punned on the word ‘fit’ in the first Alice book, during the trial of the Knave of Hearts when the King quotes the poetic line, ‘before she had this fit’ and when the Queen retorts she never had any fits, he quips, ‘then the word doesn’t fit you!’ We ask ourselves: why should a poem, intended to divert and amuse, full of hilarious episodes, jingles, extravagant words and absurd characters, end so tragically?

For it turns out that Snark hunting is a treacherous occupation. Our heroes encounter frightful animals along the way: the Jubjub, a dangerous bird with a high, shrill screech; the Bandersnatch with its savagely snapping, ‘frumious’ jaws. The Bandersnatch attacks the Banker, but the rest of the party drive it off. Finally, as evening comes on, the Baker, out ahead of the pack, stumbles across the Snark from the top of a crag. He pursues it, plunging courageously into a chasm:

‘It’s a Snark!’ was the sound that first came to their ears,
And seemed almost too good to be true.
Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
Then the ominous words, ‘It’s a Boo-‘

and then nothing, but silence. The is no sign of the brave Baker-he has vanished. We are left with unanswered questions: has he been gobbled up by the Snark? Has he just disappeared down the chasm? Has he decided he’s had enough and abandoned the hunt? The mystery thickens when we read the final stanza:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away-
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

The word ‘boojum’ has been related to ‘fi, fo, fum’; also with ‘boo’ and ‘boohum.’ There could also be a hidden reference to ‘bogieman,’ if we recall that ‘old Bogy’ was a name for the Devil.

The voyage of the Snark has meaning; it’s not just nonsense, but the meaning must be subterranean. The journey probably represents the journey of life, but the message is not one of despair, despite the tragic ending. The undertaking is a grand adventure, like life. Critics assure us the poem is more about ‘being’ than ‘meaning’. Carroll was more interested in entertaining, in engaging the aesthetic sensibilities and the emotions, than in instructing, preaching or devising clever meanings.

At times we may feel like the crew when the Bellman produces the ‘ocean chart’ after pooh-poohing ‘Mercator’s North Poles and Equators’-the chart is ‘a perfect and absolute blank’ so that they are ‘all at sea!’ Carroll knew that the Victorians considered laughter suspect, fun was equated with sin, humour judged irreverent. But for our author there was room for fun and nonsense, and they did not diminish either the seriousness of life or the intensity of one’s religious convictions. But the reader should comb the poem meticulously and then decide if it has a deeper meaning which has eluded the experts!

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