SOURCE: Sewell, Elizabeth. “‘In the Midst of His Laughter and Glee’: Nonsense and Nothingness in Lewis Carroll.” Soundings 82, nos. 3-4 (fall-winter 1999): 541-71.

[In the following excerpt, Sewell explores the themes of death and nothingness in The Hunting of the Snark and “Three Voices.”]

“Nonsense is how the English choose to take their Poésie pure.”

This sentence in one form or another keeps turning up in my pursuit of French poetry and of Nonsense over the last fifty years. I meant it originally as something of a squib, but it organized the contents of my first work of criticism, The Structure of Poetry, which dealt with that high priest of Pure Poetry, Stéphane Mallarmé, and of my second such book, The Field of Nonsense, dealing with Lewis Carroll. In the latter I cite Walter de la Mare as putting Nonsense and Pure Poetry side by side in his Lewis Carroll.

Perhaps our present date on the calendar is propitious for taking this further. We have reached and passed the centennial mark from the year, 1898, when both these men died, Dodgson-Carroll at the age of sixty-six, Mallarmé at fifty-six. Already creeps in a kind of symmetry between them, of which there is more to come. Since their deaths, each has been subject to a surge of attention and publicity. Indeed, each has become something of a cult figure, threatened, as happens so often nowadays, by huge amounts of secondary material written about life and work. I am aware, regretfully, that I am adding to the heap. The trouble is that I feel a strong sense of unfinished business: Carroll-Dodgson, despite the mass of commentaries, biographies, lectures, and articles which we have all inflicted upon him, remains an enigma.

My starting-point will be to employ Mallarmé as a stalking-horse for this Englishman, so different but exhibiting curious resemblances with his French opposite number. The two of them turn up together in the literature all the time. For example: W. H. Auden in The Enchafèd Flood no sooner turns to The Hunting of the Snark than he begins to quote Mallarmé, at some length; Jean-Paul Sartre writing about Mallarmé mentions Carroll; so does Jacques Derrida in Dissemination, more than once; Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, which pursues Carroll in labyrinthine complexity, turns to Mallarmé frequently in the process. We have here a roll-call of distinguished names already, in favor of connecting the pair, and indeed the parallels between them are many. Just to touch on a few: each man produces a long poem about a voyage or quest, Carroll's Snark and Mallarmé's Un coup de Dés; each is haunted by mirrors; each turns to games for the partial structuring of one, two, three masterpieces—the two Alice books and Un coup de Dés—the former embodying cards and chess, the latter displaying its game by its very title, “A Throw of the Dice.” Each writer is a methodologist as well as a practitioner of his own art, nonsense and poetry, for which the received term now fashionable is that such writing is “self-reflexive,” a far from self-explanatory technical term, it seems to me. Even with all this, to call on Mallarmé for help in elucidating anything, including himself, must seem slightly crazy. In prose or verse this elegant, elusive poet is fearfully difficult, as we all know who have wrestled with his work. But my point is this: Carroll, too, is extremely obscure, per speculum in enigmate, through a looking-glass darkly (and do I mean obscure or obscurantist?) in ways quite as subtle and perplexing as his French counterpart.

We need help, and behind Mallarmé come other French voices which may supply that need. There is plenty to go on, for across the Channel they have built Carroll's Nonsense, particularly the Alice books and very particularly Humpty Dumpty, into a major preoccupation over the last seventy or eighty years. Here we shall refer to a few of the contributors to the collection of essays and comments in the Cahier de l'Herne volume Lewis Carroll edited by Henri Parisot; to Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense; and to Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking-Glass. I will translate the French where it occurs unless it is clearly transparent to the English-speaking mind. On the Anglophone side we shall hear from Morton N. Cohen, Lewis Carroll: A Biography.

The initial focus of our inquiry will be Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, with a look at one or two of his “comic” or “serious” poems, amongst these his purported Tennysonian parody, “The Three Voices,” which appeared first in his collection of verse, Phantasmagoria, and was reprinted later in Rhyme? and Reason?, this time with illustrations to which we will pay particular attention. With Mallarmé we shall need to make acquaintance with Igitur, about which there will be a good deal to say when we come to it. The beginning here, however, will be to accompany our two principals, Mallarmé and Carroll, as each undergoes an oddly similar experience. (The connection between the two incidents is noted by Luc Étienne in his essay, “Les jeux de langage chez Lewis Carroll” [CH 33n7]).

Mallarmé and Carroll, respectively, are taking a solitary walk, the former on a city street in 1864, the latter on a Surrey hillside in 1874. (Again, a small chime of dates.) Suddenly into each head, out of nowhere, there flashes a series of words, adjudged immediately by the recipient to be nonsense.

What Mallarmé hears is:

          La Pénultième
Est morte

set out in that form as if a fragment of verse.

What Carroll hears is:

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Each man has left a record of his startled reaction. Mallarmé comments, “lambeaux maudits d'une phrase absurde” (“confounded snippets of an absurd phrase” [416]), but he is caught. He tries murmuring the words over and over to himself uneasily, reaches some resolution by means of images while gazing into an old shop-window, and puts all of this, with much else besides, into a prose-poem, “Le Démon de l'Analogie,” ending with the outcry that he is somehow doomed to wear mourning garb for “l'inéxplicable Pénultième” (418). In the course of his poetic meditation he picks out, twice, for comment the syllable “nul” from the Penultimate's name, or to be more precise, not the syllable but the sound, le son. Mallarmé is the poet who desires to expunge meaning from words, and he is already on that trajectory. Yet the meaning comes through to us nevertheless—null and void, the Void itself. Nothingness—this is our first major theme here. We shall seek and find it in Carroll's equally mysterious oracle.

Like his fellow-poet, Carroll recognizes the message to him, “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see,” as a line of verse. He describes his reception of it in his 1887 essay “Alice on the Stage”: “I know not what it meant, then: I know not what it means now: but I wrote it down: and some time afterwards the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line” (qtd. in Gardner 12). The four-line stanza which he constructed backwards from the given words was complete four days after his downland walk. It runs as follows:

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.

(561-64)

The whole poem of The Hunting of the Snark, so its author says, developed backwards from this line and this stanza. He stubbornly denied up till the last years of his life that he knew what it meant or indeed that it meant anything but Nonsense. That stanza, the germ of it all, gives us interruption of speech, a cutting-off of euphoria (we shall meet the abrupt end of “glee” again, in “The Three Voices”), and a sudden final disappearance. Nothingness, here also.

The Hunting of the Snark is much less well-known than the Alice books, and perhaps I should say a word or two about it first. It tells of a voyage or quest undertaken by a group of ten men, nameless, identified only by the name of their callings, a Butcher, a Banker, a Barrister, and so on. All the titles begin with the letter B, a feature which Carroll refused to explain. This and the aim of their expedition are the only things that hold them together. Their leader, the Bellman, provides them with a map which they much appreciate for its simplicity, “a perfect and absolute blank,” but warns that some Snarks are Boojums, whereupon the Baker faints, having been instructed by his uncle on this point:

“But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
          If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
          And never be met with again!”

(209-12)

The Baker in the course of the actual hunt which they all undertake does come upon a Snark, it does prove to be a Boojum, and in the final climactic stanza the Baker vanishes.

Nothingness, “worst to all, the dreadful Boojum of Nothingness,” says Auden (38), and Martin Gardner, in his Introduction to The Annotated Snark, adds, “The Boojum is more than death. … It is final absolute extinction … the void, the great blank emptiness” (23). If Carroll is indeed pointing in this direction in the Snark poem—“It is easy to unearth the cult of the void and of nothingness in the poem,” says Jean-Jacques Lecercle (“Une case en avant” 41)—that is curious and interesting, for it sets him alongside of French and indeed European concerns rather than those of English-speaking circles. In his excellent study of literature dealing with the void, with nothingness in the nineteenth century, his book titled so admirably and uncompromisingly Nil, Robert Martin Adams claims that this is a French rather than an English preoccupation: “If the English are backward with regard to Nothing … the French are surpassingly audacious” (243). Gardner believes that Carroll thought a great deal about death and the possibility of his own non-existence, and points out that even in the Alices there are disappearances and jokes about death. We might want to remind ourselves of the electric conversation between Alice and Tweedledum, where the latter tells her that the sleeping Red King is dreaming about her and if he were to wake, “you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle.” (Through the Looking-Glass 120). (Mallarmé's Igitur is trying to edge its way in here, but must wait a little while.)

It is a curious fact that we have in English no proper word for Nothingness. The French call it le néant, and it shows up all over the place. I hope memories are saying, “Yes, yes, L'Être et le Néant, Jean-Paul Sartre,” and whatever else á propos may come to mind; and Carroll and le néant meet delightfully in the French translation of A. L. Taylor's contribution, “Alice et le Professeur,” in the Cahier de l'Herne collection, where the author says, “I seem to see him [Carroll] perched on his velociman, raising his top hat and going away, zigzagging, towards le néant” (238). (The velociman was one of Carroll-Dodgson's more peculiar inventions, a kind of tricycle that one steered by a curved bar behind one's back and that pitched one into the road if the rider made the slightest attempt to lean forward.)

I know of only two places where Carroll mentions Nothingness as such. One is in “The Three Voices,” and it can wait until we get to that poem. The other is in “Photography Extraordinary,” 1855, a parody in verse of three styles of novel-writing; the third is “The Spasmodic or German School,” the Gothic as we might say. The last line of the six which mock this brand of literary effusion is, “Nothingness is my destiny!” (18). Since “The Three Voices” is also a parody (some critics consider The Hunting of the Snark a parody as well—a parody of classic epic narrative of voyage and adventure), one is led to wonder whether that literary device is employed by Carroll to serve as a “surface”—Gilles Deleuze calls Carroll the master and surveyor of surfaces (LS 93)—to be used here as a cover from others and possibly from himself of what is holed up in his own mind. Morton Cohen believes that Dodgson's staunch Christian faith would render impossible the belief in an ending of life in the void (Lewis Carroll: A Biography 410). This seems to me arguable in view of John Donne, as solid an Anglican as one could find, who confesses, “I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne / My last thred, I shall perish on the shore.” If Dodgson felt this fear, he might not tackle it directly, one surmises, but by indirection and at second-hand. Deleuze, Lecercle, Antonin Artaud especially, berate Carroll for his timidity, but the self-protection seems very characteristic of the man. If we want an example of direct confrontation with personal annihilation, Nothingness, le néant, we certainly have it in Mallarmé and to him we now return.

In the middle 1860s Mallarmé had begun life as a school teacher, in Tournon and later in Besançon and Avignon. He hated his work to which he was plainly unsuited, but he had a wife and child to support. Desperately unhappy, he seriously contemplated suicide. Knowing his own vocation to be poetry, he learned English in order to approach more deeply the work of Edgar Allan Poe, and he began thinking about the nature of poetry and language, as he would do all his life. In this situation he writes a letter to his friend, Henri Cazalis, in which he speaks to him (and to us) about Nothingness. The date is April 1866. Mallarmé is twenty-four. This is what he writes:

Unhappily, in digging this deep into poetry I have encountered two yawning gulfs, which throw me into despair. One of these is Nothingness … and I am still too devastated to be able to have faith in my own poetry and to get back to the work which this shattering notion has made me abandon.

(696)

In a later letter to Cazalis, he adds an unforgettable image of his state of mind at this time:

I further confess, but to you alone, that I have to keep looking at myself in the mirror here in order to think, and that if it were not opposite the table where I am writing you this letter, I should once again revert to Nothingness.

(714)

Le Néant, and he gives it a capital letter. “Softly and suddenly vanish away” if the looking-glass were not there. Lewis Carroll's encounters with nothingness, if that is indeed what they were, are oblique and tangential compared to this. He sends his little alter ego through the looking-glass where she confronts going out like a candle but slides past it. Otherwise Carroll faces nothingness only in the form of parody. Mallarmé has more to say to us, this time in the form of fiction.

Igitur ou la Folie d'Elbehnon, to give it its full title, was found, labeled Déchet, or “Rejected,” among the poet's papers and was not published till after his death. Its composition is dated between 1867 and 1869. The mysterious title is unexplained. “Elbehnon” is thought to echo Elsinore, and there are faint traces of Hamlet in the text. “Igitur” has been variously interpreted; my own money would go on Lucretius: “Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,” which the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations translates as “Death therefore is nothing to us nor does it concern us a scrap”—the position of the chosen name between Nil and Mors, Nothing and Death, seeming very appropriate.

The story, if that is what it is—its author calls it a conte—concerns a solitary figure (a young man? the poet himself?) who occupies an extremely dark room which is fitted up with a clock whose hands stand at midnight, a candle, an open book or grimoire (a book of spells), a mirror, and heavy curtains and upholstery. Such properties reappear frequently in Mallarmé's later poems, but these are early days yet and the description seems more reminiscent of a setting in Poe. Now, what happens? The solitary starts to move, and begins a descent from the room by means of a series of staircases (there is a hint of bats in the air along the way, and are these spiral stairs?). The one touch of relief in all this gloom, as welcome as it is unexpected, is the young man's thinking he might slide down the stairs astride the banisters, although forbidden to do so by his mother! Once he reaches the bottom, by whatever method of locomotion, we learn that he is in the tomb of his ancestors, where there awaits him a small glass phial containing a drop of Néant. This he swallows and then lies down to die on the ancestral ashes, having blown out the candle and cast a throw of dice.

I defy readers' memories not to be activated by another narrative. “Down, down, down,” and then again, a paragraph later, “Down, down, down,” and next, “There are no mice in the air … but you might catch a bat,” and what of the little glass bottle—does it not have a label round its neck inviting one to drink, though perhaps at one's peril? (Alice's Adventures 6). And the candle that is blown out? In Igitur that is an image of self-imposed death, in Alice's case only a wondering thought: “‘It might end, you know,’ said Alice to herself, ‘in my going out altogether, like a candle’” (Alice's Adventures 9). The image recurs in Through the Looking-Glass and at a key moment, when Tweedledum and Tweedledee point out to Alice the sleeping Red King and tell her she is just a figure in his dream, and “If that there king was to wake … you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle!” (Through the Looking-Glass 120). Death and nothingness, but in Igitur the narrative goes further, for the death is self-inflicted. Here difficulties arise. Can we go forward on this path with Lewis Carroll? If we can, that will provide the second principal theme of our inquiry here.

Taking it step by step, we can admit that Carroll does seem to have thought about death a good deal; that he thought about nothingness, if under figures and wraps, maybe; but suicide? To suggest that may appear positively outlandish, but there is evidence on the subject, and the French may be helpful here. They certainly seem, to an English reader at any rate, to be much given to thoughts of suicide. I hope that making a connection between the French and suicide may stir memories: “Yes, yes, Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus, etc.” Other voices speak here: Jacques Lacan remarking from the psychoanalytic standpoint that existentialism presents a vision of personality that realizes itself only in suicide (6); Sartre citing Igitur as “pioneering suicidal absurdism” and adding that long before Camus, Mallarmé felt that suicide was the fundamental issue facing man (145); George Steiner discussing Rimbaud's message of aesthetic self-destruction and “the death-dance of Artaud, the somber licence of the suicidal” (145). Are we, the English, “backward,” in Adams's great phrase, about suicide as about nothingness? Memory serves up a very standard English method of dealing with the unpleasant and unwelcome, namely laughter. Witness Chesterton's wonderful “Ballade of Suicide” with its refrain, “I think I will not hang myself today,” or the Tit Willow song in The Mikado. Carroll contributes to this vein in a strange chapter, No. XXIV, of Sylvie and Bruno: the little elfin boy Bruno dresses up as Hamlet in a stage performance, begins the second great speech on suicide, “To be or not to be,” and unable to proceed further, turns head-over-heels a number of times. He metes out this treatment to a line from Macbeth and one from King Lear. So much for suicide, and tragedy, a word we shall encounter later when we look at French views of “The Three Voices.”

Dodgson-Carroll being who he is, we need not expect to come upon direct discussion of suicide in his work. The only mention of it that I am familiar with occurs in the long, curious preface to Sylvie and Bruno where he speaks of a number of literary projects he would like to see carried out. One of these is a collection of sacred and secular passages from various sources, suitable for memorization. He then quotes from “that most interesting book, Robertson's Lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, Lecture XLIX” as follows:

If a man finds himself haunted by evil desires and unholy images … let him commit to memory passages of Scripture, or passages from the best writers in verse or prose. Let him store his mind with these, as safeguards to repeat when he lies awake in some restless night, or when despairing imaginations, or gloomy suicidal thoughts, beset him.

(Sylvie and Bruno 497)

One cannot help feeling that mention of such thoughts in what seems so inappropriate a setting must refer to the author himself rather than to any hypothetical adult reader Carroll may be envisaging. Morton Cohen documents fully from the surviving Carroll diaries the man's repeated, wrenching admissions of self-reproach, and directs attention to what Carroll called his “serious poems,” which he published and republished throughout his life, poems such as “Stolen Waters” and “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” (Lewis Carroll: A Biography 202-05, 224-226). To quote the first:

Yea, when one's heart is laid asleep,
          What better than to die?
So that the grave be dark and deep.

(77-79)

And the second:

The brightness of thy day hath gone:
What need to lag and linger on
          Till life be cold and gray?

(46-48)

Cohen characterizes the second poem as “another rueful monologue with suicidal and sexual intimations” (226). I think there is another hint of these same preoccupations in the poem which gives its name to Carroll's last collection, The Three Sunsets and Other Poems:

As when the wretch, in lonely room,
          To lonely death is madly hurled,
The glamour of that fatal fume
          Shuts out the wholesome living world—

(73-76)

If this does not mean a suicide victim gassing him- or herself, what else can it mean?

We are moving among shadows, but there is one poem, a long narrative published in Phantasmagoria and again in Rhyme? and Reason?, that lends a good deal more substance to what we are after. With it comes also a marked divergence of views between French and English-speaking critics. This is “The Three Voices.” When Carroll was writing it, he was twenty-four. It is generally accepted as a parody of Tennyson's early poem, “The Two Voices,” which appeared in his Poems in 1833, when he was twenty-four. May I remind us that Igitur was composed by Mallarmé when he was twenty-five. Something holds these three together. We will start with the earliest, the Tennysonian effort.

“The Two Voices,” hardly among Tennyson's best-known works, needs a little introduction. It is 154 stanzas long, each stanza taking the form of 3 lines rhyming aaa bbb and so on. For nearly all its length it consists of a dialogue between the poet and an inner voice arguing strongly in favor of suicide. At the 135th stanza another voice breaks in, presumably the second voice of the rather misleading title, which counsels patience and hope. The poet listens at his window—it is Sunday morning—hears church bells and sees a young family walking to church in quiet confidence, and himself goes outdoors into the spring landscape and more cheerful thoughts, accompanied by the second voice. It is, I have to say, a dismally unsuccessful production. Christopher Ricks quotes Tennyson himself as saying, “When I wrote ‘The Two Voices’ I was so utterly miserable, a burden to myself and to my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’” Ricks goes on to point out that suicide is a constantly recurring theme in Tennyson's poetry, and he lists 26 poems, some of them among the poet's best-known, such as “Enoch Arden,” “Locksley Hall,” “Maud,” and “The Princess,” where the theme of suicide is treated (96-99).

The question we must now ask is: what persuaded Carroll, who knew Tennyson's work well and admired it, to choose this particular poem, with its drum-beat of suicide through nine-tenths of its length, for a mirroring work-over? Can it be considered a parody? But then—what is a parody? That question seems fairly straightforward, but the term wobbles under one's hand. Lecercle says that parody is the method by which Nonsense relates to “high literature” (Philosophy through the Looking Glass 139), but must the intention be to make the original ridiculous, as the OED proposes? Beverly Lyon Clark, discussing Carroll's practice, claims that his parodies may act merely as a reminder of another work with no intention of satire, or may just supply a “scaffolding” for a different version (66, 69). Last and possibly the closest to the point here, William Empson suggests that Dodgson's choice of originals for parody must mean: “In my present mood of emotional sterility the poem will not work, or I am afraid to let it work, on me” (263). A scaffolding perhaps, in the borrowing of the verse form in “The Three Voices,” the triple rhymes, the slightly varied title, a merciful shortening of length, 108 stanzas as against Tennyson's 154. A protection against the direct theme of suicide? That we shall have to look into. For the present, let us look at what happens in Carroll's' “Three Voices.”

A thoroughly cheerful man is sitting on the beach at the sea's edge. There comes a puff of wind which blows off his top hat and deposits it in front of a woman, described only (and mystifyingly, though with a hint of “Stolen Waters” where the man's seduction occurs amongst trees and the woman turns into a terrifying hag) as:

          one who stood
Like maid enchanted in a wood
Frowning as darkly as she could.

(7-9)

She skewers his hat right through the crown with her “huge umbrella, lank and brown” (10) and returns the ruined appendage to him. (The Freudian implications are too obvious to need comment.) He is upset since he is invited to a dinner party later that day, at mention of which she decries dinners and eating in general, as also the rather feeble puns and jokes with which he parries her attacks. (Is she possibly a Snark? One of the “five unmistakable marks” of the species is disapproval of jests and puns.) Their exchanges continue, aggressive on her part, and so ends the first section, labeled confusingly “The First Voice”—for is the voice his or hers or neither's?

The mid-section is entitled “The Second Voice,” and the question of whose voice still holds. The talk now becomes more philosophical and abstract; she is going on and on, he increasingly reduced to incomprehension and puzzled passivity by how “ceaseless flowed her dreary talk” (128) yet seemingly too stunned to depart. When at last he rouses himself to respond, this is what comes out:

Mind—I believe—is Essence—Ent—
Abstract—that is—an Accident—
Which we—that is to say—I meant—

(151-53)

Three lines of total incoherence while she never stops haranguing him. He next imagines the guests at the dinner party he should have joined at long last deciding to eat, having waited for him for three hours. Finally he leaves his female tormentor, wondering why he had not done so earlier.

The title, “The Third Voice,” ushers in the final section. In place of “that woman dread” he now has to listen to an inner whisper in his own mind, no less accusatory and ambiguous than the woman had been, and his case goes from bad to worse. He weeps copiously as this inner voice addresses him, and ends up prostrate and in despair, consumed by an unknown guilt—“Alack … what have I done?”—as morning passes into noon and evening and night. At the very end the Third Voice murmurs within him, “Her fate with thine was intertwined,” and the narrative concludes with these words (and in this typography):

Yea, each to each was worse than foe:
Thou, a scared dullard, gibbering low,
AND SHE, AN AVALANCHE OF WOE!

(322-24)

I can see no way of regarding this poem as a parody of Tennyson's lugubrious but eventually edifying “Two Voices.” The only thing I can make of it, illustrations and all, is that it is the story of a man demolished, indeed destroyed, by a chance encounter with a woman.

The poem's fate in the hands of English and American critics is curious. They accord it brief comments, categorizing it as parody, and brush it off. Examples: Edmund Wilson, in his essay, “C. L. Dodgson: The Poet Logician,” says that Carroll “produced in ‘The Three Voices’ a masterpiece of intentional parody” (202). Morton Cohen calls the poem “a witty parody of Tennyson's ‘The Two Voices’” and characterizes it as “a humorous parody … embodying a bravura display of Platonic metaphysics” (50, 72). I am aware of only one longer commentary on the poem, Peter Blundell Jones's essay “An Examination of ‘The Three Voices.’” He calls this work of Carroll's a remarkably complex poem, and says that “it stands out as the most serious and philosophical of Carroll's poems before ‘Alice,’ but has suffered amazing neglect” (5).

The first thing to say about how certain French critics approach “The Three Voices” is short but crucial—they pay real attention to it. They do not slide past it as a parody and no more; neither do they dub it witty or humorous. Quite the contrary.

We will start with Pierre Sabourin in his essay “Louisa Caroline,” which draws on his earlier Lewis Carroll et ses Phantasmes: Psychopathologie. At the beginning of “Louisa Caroline,” Sabourin quotes the first stanza of “The Three Voices” in English, in his French text:

He trilled a Carol fresh and free
He laughed aloud for very glee
There came a breeze from off the sea.

Then, having given a capital letter to “Carol” he draws attention to the odd “collusion” of this noun with the nom de plume which Dodgson had assumed in agreement with one of his editors and which was attached to the published “Three Voices.” I mentioned earlier in connection with “The Hunting of the Snark” that we should meet laughter and glee again, abruptly broken off. Here they are—in Carol/Carroll's own story perhaps—for Sabourin asks where the narrative voice comes from and adds, is it not as if Carroll were being spoken, or sung in this poem by his double (160)? We recall that the Snark reference, “In the midst of his laughter and glee,” is thoroughly sinister, occurring as it does in the last verse, first germ of the whole, and recounting the fated Baker's sudden final disappearance. Having started his essay with “The Three Voices,” Sabourin returns to it at the end, and at greater length. He quotes in French translation the poem's last six stanzas, from where the original begins:

What? Ever thus, in dismal round,
Shall Pain and Mystery profound
Pursue me like a sleepless hound

down to the grim last line of all, quoted here a little while ago, which the French renders as “une avalanche de catastrophes.” This is the Third Voice's disturbing explanation of the victim's misery, and Sabourin comments that it expresses the antagonisms at the heart of psychic reality and bears witness to the irreducibility of human suffering (169). With that note in mind we move on now to the next French voice, cited by Sabourin and by so many others in Carrollian pursuit, Gilles Deleuze.

Hardly a household name in English-speaking circles. Michel Foucault, whom we do claim to have some knowledge of, has said that perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian. Be that as it may, it does seem to me that Deleuze's The Logic of Sense is, despite its intimidating complexity, required reading for any serious student of Lewis Carroll. Lecercle's words about this work may be helpful here:

The text grows and multiplies in an extremely disquieting manner. … There is an element of provocation in Deleuze's use (and abuse) of Carroll: the naïve Carrollian (including the present author) will hardly recognize his beloved text, and will think—with reason—that the philosophical onus which Carroll's texts are made to bear is crushing them. But, hopefully, he will in the end be grateful for some new insights.

(96, 155n5)

For our purpose here, Deleuze's most important statement on “The Three Voices,” as dark in tone as those of Sabourin, runs as follows:

Finally, in relation to the whole of Carroll's work, the tragic poem, “The Three Voices” is of particular importance. The first “voice” is that of a severe and boisterous woman who creates a terror-filled scene of nourishment; the second voice is terrifying as well, but has all of the characteristics of the good Voice from above which causes the hero to stammer and stutter; the third is the Oedipal voice of guilt, which sings the terror of the result in spite of the purity of the intentions (“And when at eve, the unpitying sun / Smiled grimly on the solemn fun, / ‘Alack,’ he sighed, ‘what have I done?’”).

(359n1)

So now we have tragedy in this whole work, with terror couching in each part of it. Deleuze returns to the poem in the very last paragraph of the main text of The Logic of Sense, picturing there a figure “one-third Carroll” writing in the sand (so we are apparently still on the sea-shore like the unhappy man in the poem). Deleuze then goes on to quote, but set out as if it were disjointed prose rather than verse, the extraordinary stanza which begins, “Mind—I believe—is Essence—Ent—” uttered by the man, “neglecting Sound and Sense” in the Second Voice section (Deleuze 248).

These three lines are unlike anything else that I can recall in Carroll's Nonsense. The Third Voice speaks of “gibbering” in the penultimate line of the whole poem, and applies that to the sufferer of all this. Now another commentator may speak and right to the point, Lecercle saying categorically, “Nonsense texts never dissolve into gibberish” (Philosophy through the Looking Glass 140). If this is not Nonsense, is it perhaps real life? Dodgson as is well-known suffered from a speech impediment. Cohen in his biography deals with this fairly extensively, and remarks at the end of the book, “perhaps his failure to correct his speech impediment was the overarching symbol of his entire life” (Lewis Carroll: A Biography 533). For Deleuze, however, to stammer and stutter—his phrase for the incoherence of the man in “The Three Voices”—can be seen as a way to freedom, to break up old conventions, to make language itself stutter (he cites Kafka and Beckett as examples of this), and to open the possibility of becomings and transformations.

Our next concern will be to see what happened to this tragic and somber “parody” of a suicidal original, its darkness well recognized by its French observers, when it acquired its illustrations by the American artist, Arthur Frost, in Carroll's collection Rhyme? and Reason? in 1883.

There have been times during my study of “The Three Voices” when I have asked myself whether any of the English and American critics who deal with it have paid any attention at all to Frost's drawings. It would be quite possible not to have, for the first collection in which the poems appear, Phantasmagoria and Other Poems, is not illustrated. Carroll regretted this, and accordingly approached Frost, who accepted the commission “to draw me a few pictures for one or two short poems (comic)” (Cohen, Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections 95). That last epithet is of interest. Carroll sanctioned fourteen drawings for “The Three Voices.” Later he realized this was probably too many in proportion to the rest of the book, but said of the fourteen, “they are so brilliantly good, I cannot possibly omit one of them.” He had actually objected to one of Frost's drafts for the closing illustration of the poem, and sent his own “scrawl of an idea I have for a half-page picture … for the last verse of the ‘3 Voices’” (Cohen, Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections 398, 309). We shall look at this later.

Frost paid no attention to this prompting, following in the footsteps of Carroll's earlier illustrators who similarly shrugged off the author's suggestions. Carroll's aim was, as always, to keep total control of proceedings, as is essential in Nonsense operations, but here something ironic happens. It is the artists whom he wished to subjugate (we shall look at Frost and Tenniel) who seem by virtue of their art to penetrate the subject better than the author could understand it himself—or could understand himself? So Frost lays before him, or sneaks past him, illustrations of the supposed “comic” work which turn “The Three Voices” into tragedy, agree with French interpretations, and perhaps illuminate Carroll/Dodgson in ways he may not have apprehended. Or did he? With this most accomplished concealer it is hard to know.

.....

Quite apart from the vagaries or inspirations of his illustrator, Carroll's “Three Voices” makes its theme clear: the woman comes near to destroying the man by appropriating what should be his phallic symbol and assaulting his property with it; then, worse, she assaults his manly powers of discourse with her verbal attacks. The outcome stands in the text, not just in Frost's sinister drawings:

And, sickened with excess of dread,
Prone to the dust he bent his head,
And lay like one three-quarters dead.

(283-85)

With Tennyson's near-suicidal accompaniment in the background, we can return now to Mallarmé and lay alongside the moribund “Three Voices” persona the figure in Igitur who, too, lies down to die, his arms crossed, on the ashes of his ancestors at the end of his disjointed story. He has performed his own ritual, thrown the dice, closed the magic-book, blown out the candle, drunk from the little phial the drop of Néant. Nothingness, that very word inhabits “The Three Voices” also, Carroll's second use of the term we mentioned earlier. “Towering nothingness,” says the woman in the Second Voice section (170). That un-English concept—we seem to have come full circle in our own inquiry here.

We have been moving here among shadows but something emerges from them—that Carroll's shadows have recognizable kinship with the darkness towards which Europe has been moving over the last hundred years. The fixation upon nothingness, néant, Heidegger's Nichtigkeit, is part of it, as is the attack upon meaning in language (think of Humpty Dumpty). So too, I fear, may be the familiarity with cruelty which is so apparent in Nonsense, including Carroll's Nonsense (think of the Walrus and the Carpenter). Graham Robb in his outstanding study, Unlocking Mallarmé, says of modern poetry as foreshadowed in that great Frenchman's lifework that it is “an increasingly self-referential, suicidal art” (217), while Michael Holquist says of Carroll that he is “one of the most important figures in the movement Ortega y Gasset has called ‘the dehumanization of art’” (152). Carroll's shadows and Europe's resonate. Yet how odd this is when one looks at this quintessential Englishman who went abroad only once in his whole life and whose library, such as we know of it in sale catalogues after his death, shows no interest whatever in European culture, literature, or thought.

He remains a secret, or rather, he retains his secret. Do the French understand this more clearly than ourselves? We have sampled only three or four of our Carrollian neighbors, but many more are present: the Surrealists, amongst them André Breton, who claimed Carroll as an ancestor of their movement, and Louis Aragon, who translated the Snark and tried to recruit Carroll for the Revolution; Henri Parisot, the doyen of Carroll studies and translations; Antonin Artaud, who pays Carroll the tribute of hatred; Jean Gattegno, scholar and translator in his turn; Jacques Lacan, who takes time out from psychoanalytics to give a radio talk on Christmas Day, 1967, with the title “Lewis Carroll, Master of Playing Truant from School” (Sabourin 168n16). Ecole buissonnière is the French phrase for that—escape into the bushes, into the wood where things have lost their names and the soldiers keep falling over one another. Was Lacan quoting Breton who called Carroll the first teacher of how to play truant?

Master of hiding and evasion, of appearing and disappearing (think of the Cheshire Cat)—a whole method for this, for escape. “What fascinated us was the possibility of escaping the constraints that weigh on supervised thought,” says Breton (42). It still does, as so many of us can attest. Carroll's next appearance, more than once, seems to hover in the region of the new chaos science. What he, and we, will make of that remains to be seen.

Works Cited

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———. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Edward Guiliano. New York: Avenel, 1982.

———. “The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits.” The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. 177-207.

———. The Letters of Lewis Carroll. Ed. Morton N. Cohen and Lancelyn Green. London: Macmillan, 1979.

———. “Photography Extraordinary.” Collected Verse of Lewis Carroll. New York: Macmillan, 1933. 38

———. Sylvie and Bruno. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. 491-654

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———. “The Three Sunsets.” The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll. 829.

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———, ed. Lewis Carroll: Interviews and Recollections. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1989.

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———. “Une case en avant, deux cases en arrière.” Parisot 41-50.

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———. “Louisa Caroline.” Parisot 159-69.

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