SOURCE: Beaver, Harold. “Whale or Boojum: An Agony.” In Lewis Carroll Observed: A Collection of Unpublished Photographs, Drawings, Poetry, and New Essays, edited by Edward Guiliano, pp. 111-31. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1976.

[In the following essay, Beaver explores the alleged connections between The Hunting of the Snark and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.]

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?

herman melville, Moby-Dick, Ch. 42.

It was a Frenchman who first proposed that Lewis Carroll might owe a literary debt to Herman Melville. W. H. Auden had earlier juxtaposed The Hunting of the Snark with Moby-Dick.¹ Robert Martin Adams, more recently, discussed both works within the context of a single study.² Marcel Marnat not only confronted but directly compared the two masterpieces: Whale and Snark, White Whale and Boojum, the majestic prose saga and the inconsequential-sounding ballad. “A passionate parody was it,” he asked, “or merely a teasing echo, dimly caught—with no formal parallelism in mind, of course—just for the fun of it, as a game?”³

Thus what was raised as speculation inevitably hardened in the presentation: Carroll was either adapting, or maybe countering, or even parodying, The Whale. “Symbol matches symbol and the Boojum is all the more horrible for remaining unseen.”⁴ J. M. Barrie, Carroll's heir as children's favorite, for one, had certainly read his Melville. Much in Peter Pan—above all, the clock-devouring crocodile in pursuit of Captain Hook—ultimately derives from Moby-Dick. The hallmark of Carroll's style, though, is an unselfconscious-seeming display of his own darkest designs. If he had read Moby-Dick, it is true, “he could only have done so with head spinning. Thrilled, yet at the same time feeling a profound unease. …”⁵ But had he?

Like Melville, of course, he was a master of mirror imagery. With Melville, too, he shared a wide-ranging passion for burlesque of standard authors as well as biblical sources. But where Melville was consciously manipulating his parodies, Carroll remained untouched by, even oblivious of, his deeper inversions and radical skepticism. Or so it seems. While Melville could exultingly boast of Moby-Dick, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb,”⁶ Carroll's diary reveals his ambition to publish The Snark as a Christmas poem. The strain was marked, however. Years later, introducing Pillow Problems, and other Mathematical Trifles, he owned:

… There are mental troubles, much worse than mere worry, for which an absorbing subject of thought may serve as a remedy. There are sceptical thoughts, which seem for the moment to uproot the firmest faith; there are blasphemous thoughts, which dart unbidden into the most reverent souls; there are unholy thoughts, which torture, with their hateful presence, the fancy that would fain be pure.⁷

Bedeviled by insomnia, he would worry away all night over his mathematical teasers to keep worse anguish at bay. But the inversion, twenty years earlier, had seemed merely lighthearted, surfacing backwards from the final line to a final stanza to fit that line to a finished sequence to fit that stanza. Had not “Lewis Carroll,” his very pseudonym, been assembled by a deliberate inversion of his Christian names, “Charles Lutwidge”?

The odd bolt of inspiration came on July 18, 1874, near Guildford:

I was walking on a hillside, alone, one bright summer day, when suddenly there came into my head one line of verse—one solitary line—“For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.” I knew not what it meant, then: I know not what it means, now; but I wrote it down: and, sometime afterwards, the rest of the stanza occurred to me, that being its last line: and so by degrees, at odd moments during the next year or two, the rest of the poem pieced itself together, that being its last stanza.⁸

The poem was not out in time for Christmas 1875. In March 1876, therefore, he added a small pamphlet, “An Easter Greeting to Every Child Who Loves Alice,” not “to lose the opportunity of saying a few serious words to (perhaps) 20,000 children.”

To rise and forget, in the bright sunlight, the ugly dreams that frightened you so when all was dark—to rise and enjoy another happy day, first kneeling to thank that unseen Friend, who sends you the beautiful sun. …

Cardinal Newman, for one, was quite captivated by this reversal of tone. He wrote to the daughter of the Dean of St. Paul's:

The little book isn't all of it nonsense, though amusing nonsense; it has two pleasant prefixes of another sort. One of them is the “inscription to a dear child”; the style of which, in words and manner, is so entirely of the school of Keble, that I think it could not have been written, had The Christian Year never made its appearance. The other “the Easter Greeting to every child etc.” is likely to touch the hearts of old men more than of those to whom it is intended. …⁹

But how far was Dodgson—as Charles Lutwidge or Lewis Carroll, turn him inside out or outside in—ever aware of his own envelopes and smoke screens? That initial dedication to Gertrude Chataway:

Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,
          Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well
Rest on a friendly knee. …

for all its echoes of The Christian Year and self-conscious acrostic riddling, suggests a deeper, unconscious level of inchoate lusts and fears of self-destruction—some covert sexual trauma turned to a mimic tea with muffins, jam, and conundrums.

For unlike his poetic alibi, the Baker—with his “forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,” inside the Agony—we should rouse Charles from muffins, we should rouse him from ice, should rouse him from mustard and cress, should rouse him from jam and judicious advice, and probe his conundrums and press. The obvious place to start is the “Preface”—which, like most prefaces, was written last. On Thursday, February 10, 1876, between composing his first and third diatribe on The Professorship of Comparative Philology, Dodgson records in his diary: “At night wrote a new Preface for The Snark.” That preface begins:

If—and the thing is wildly possible—the charge of writing nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line, “Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.”

As Lewis Carroll, that is, he opens on a pause—that lingering lilt on “If”—then takes us straight to “The Bellman's Speech,” confronting the blank “Ocean chart”:

He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave
          Were enough to bewilder a crew.
When he cried, “Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!”
          What on earth was the helmsman to do?
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
          A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
          When a vessel is, so to speak, “snarked.”

The paralysis—the loggerhead self-contradiction—of the poem is essential. Every positive will be negated: forwards is backwards; earth is ocean; east is west. This is to be the first and prime lesson, literally, of “non-sense.” He continues:

I will not (as I might) point to the strong moral purpose of this poem itself, to the arithmetical principles so cautiously inculcated in it. …

Secondly, it appears, “The Beaver's Lesson” is essential. Number and nonsense, when merged in the self-reductive algebraic equation:

(x ＋ 7 ＋ 10) (1000 - 8)
—————————	- 17 = x
992

might seem to underlie the bowsprit/rudder entanglements, leading investigation nowhere. Yet arithmetical principles somehow persist. Just as the Grand Geometrician of a Masonic universe reigns in Moby-Dick, through all the global circuits of sun and whale and Pequod, through all Melville's pyrotechnic displays of contrary ebbs and flows in chapters, sentences, even phrases, so too Carroll's miniature universe, he claims, rests on number.¹⁰

Dodgson, of course, was an eminent mathematician. He was also forty-two years old in 1874 when he began the poem. But far from “Call me Ishmael” or, rather, “Call me Baker,” Carroll merely intrudes “Rule 42 of the Code” at the opening as emblematic clue. (In Holiday's illustration the number is clearly marked on one of the Baker's many boxes on the quay outside his uncle's bedroom window.)

No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm.

Which the Bellman himself had completed:

and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one.

An untouchable privacy must enshroud the captain/poet/town-crier, as he paradoxically tolls his bell, with an “oyez, oyez.” The poem is to be locked in silence as the Baker's adventure ends in “silence.” That is the third essential lesson: the clam of contradictory, destructive pressures inside the “Agony” is to be impenetrable. What next then? A few deliberate false trails, expected of the author of Jabberwocky, on portmanteau words. But even here the most relevant portmanteau remains, so to speak, “snarked.” Is it some maritime snail-cum-shark?¹¹ Or, as has been suggested, is it snarl-cum-bark?¹²

No answer. Instead, elsewhere, Carroll privately echoes the question: “Of course you know what a Snark is? If you do, please tell me: for I haven't an idea what it is like.”¹³ Or again: “Are you able to explain things which you don't yourself understand?”¹⁴ So he plays at allegory. Melville, far more obviously attracted to such learned mirror-writing, shuddered at the idea that Moby-Dick might be deemed “a hideous and intolerable allegory.”¹⁵ When Sophia Hawthorne followed her husband's congratulatory letter with more prying formulas, Melville replied offhandedly:

I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were—but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr. Hawthorne's letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole.¹⁶

Carroll, too, appears puzzled by the allegorical potential of his eight “fits.” “Periodically I have received courteous letters from strangers,” he sighed,

begging to know whether The Hunting of the Snark is an allegory, or contains some hidden moral, or is a political satire: and for all such questions I have but one answer, “I don't know!”¹⁷

In 1896, twenty years after publication, he saw published in a newspaper (so he claims):

… that the whole book is an allegory on the search after happiness. I think this fits beautifully in many ways—particularly about the bathing-machines: when the people get weary of life, and can't find happiness in town or in books, then they rush off to the seaside to see what bathing-machines will do for them.¹⁸

This is his most perverse evasion, his final smoke screen to blot that craggy landscape. For how call a work “allegory” if it contains merely a blank map—that is to say, no map, no complex interpretative guide, but (as in Kafka's The Castle) their very antithesis? If anything it seems a kind of allegory à rebours—a clue to the impossibility of any final map, a clue to mysterious, pervasive, and malicious disorder—that heralds the end of all formal allegorical vision. We gaze at our own risk till “the palsied universe lies before us a leper”! Till blinded by “the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around” the dazzled reader.¹⁹

So allegory, with Ishmael, we must reject. We would do better to follow the acrostic advice given to Marion (one of Carroll's many little friends):

Maiden, though thy heart may quail
And thy quivering lip grow pale,
Read the Bellman's tragic tale!
Is it life of which it tells?
Of a pulse that sinks and swells
Never lacking chime of bells?(20)

“Read the Bellman's tragic tale!” But who is the Bellman? His hand-bell, in Holiday's realistic representation, has suggested curious thoughts to one commentator:

It has apparently escaped notice that the Bellman's bell is an ordinary school-bell of the type used before electric bells came into use. It seems to me that Dodgson quite consciously derived his Bellman from the new secular state education of which so much was hoped.²¹

What satisfies one reader may raise a smile in others. For our analogue—that “wicked book” surreptitiously riddling and jesting with sacred texts (Moses striking water “upon the rock in Horeb”; or glimpsing the “back parts” of God)—suggests other clues. Is the Reverend Dodgson imposing the same inversion on his “tragic tale” that opens with a Bell-man and closes with the picture of a tolling bell-buoy? Is the whole Hunting of the Snark perhaps playing a deliberate (or is it unconscious?) parody of that traditional English carol popularly known as the “Bellman's Song”?

The moon shines bright, and the stars give a light:
          A little before it was day
Our Lord, our God, he called on us,
          And bid us awake and pray.
Awake, awake, good people all;
          Awake, and you shall hear,
Our Lord, our God, died on the cross
          For us whom he loved so dear.
O fair, O fair Jerusalem,
          When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end,
          Thy joy that I may see?
The fields were green as green could be,
          When from his glorious seat
Our Lord, our God, he watered us,
          With his heavenly dew so sweet.
And for the saving of our souls
          Christ died upon the cross;
We ne'er shall do for Jesus Christ
          As he hath done for us.
The life of man is but a span
          And cut down in its flower;
We are here to-day, and to-morrow are gone,
          The creatures of an hour.(22)

“Our Lord, our God, he called on us”: or transposed from church bells to hand-bell:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies—
          Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
          The moment one looked in his face!(23)

If the whole carol has, in fact, been transposed to “An Agony,” it must be—as the very title suggests—Carroll's agony, containing locked within it his whole self-contradiction of bowsprit and rudder, east and west, Jerusalem and Jabberwock, in numbed indirection.

Both share the same ballad meter, as if the “cross” of the one had been transformed to the riddling acrostic of the other; “fair Jerusalem” to “chasms and crags”; green fields to that “dismal and desolate valley.” As if the “green pastures” of the twenty-third psalm, pervading the carol, had been reduced by Lewis Carroll to “the valley of the shadow of death”—glum with foreboding—where:

… The valley grew narrow and narrower still,
          And the evening got darker and colder,
Till (merely from nervousness, not from goodwill)
          They marched along shoulder to shoulder.

Both move to the same bleak vision of the restless transience of life. For, as its popular title makes clear,

This carol they began that hour—
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino—
How that life was but a flower—
In spring time,(24)

is not a Christmas carol at all. This Bellman is none other than the public announcer of death—to all “for whom the bell tolls,” those “creatures of an hour,” who “are here to-day, and to-morrow are gone”; or, in the Baker's dying uncle's last words, “will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!”²⁵

The Bellman's Song, then, is a Passion carol or Atonement carol. If the Baker, like Christ, “sublime” on that crag must die, the Butcher, transcending the “perpetual passion” of the Jubjub, is restored, like Christ, to perfect harmony, which is perpetual love. But here, as at every other point of The Hunting of the Snark, paradoxes multiply. For should it not have been the Butcher who is “cut down” with his own slaughtering hatchet? Should it not have been the Baker, like his own confectioner's dough, who is “risen indeed”? One thing at least was obvious even to its earliest readers, that the names of all ten crew members began with the initial “B.” But then so did “Bandersnatch” and “Boojum.” “To B or not to B,” was that the universal fit? Snarkophilus Snobbs, with tongue-in-cheek profundity, not only pointed to this “most ultimate of all questions,” but argued that it was “answered in the universal affirmative—B at any cost!”²⁶ “An existential poem, a poem of existential agony,” Martin Gardner more recently called it, indicating that great Chain of Being from Bellman to Boots.²⁷

Carroll's Bellman is certainly “grand”; he is also “musical” as well as “thoughtful and grave.” But his most marked characteristic is that of triple repetition, a belief in the sacred power of three. As if speaking in all three persons of the Trinity in succession, he asserts in his most celebrated assertion:

What I tell you three times is true.

Such threefold verbal concentrations alone seem to carry the full weight of his authority; and his triune presence is suitably greeted at one point by “three cheers.” Yet the “Ocean chart” he brings proves a cartographical fraud—“A perfect and absolute blank!”—an uncontaminated square of whiteness, framed with chaos. Compare the pedantic German Professor of Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. He describes how his country's cartographers experimented with larger and larger maps until they finally made one with a scale of a mile to the mile:

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”²⁸

For Carroll it appeared there was no guide, no chart or clue, between everything and nothing, between all-pervasive physical reality and a self-devouring inner emptiness.

Or is it, that in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?²⁹

That blank map, like the Banker's “blank cheque (which he crossed)”—or even the circular blank reasoning of Butcher to Beaver—leads inevitably to an undermining and perverting of meaningful order, a stalemate of self-contradiction and self-confusion, a reductio ad absurdum where words too are deliberately emptied of content, blended (portmanteau-style), and tipped to their abstract, incantatory quality of blank, ecstatic sound.

What is propped at the Butcher's feet (in Holiday's illustration to “The Beaver's Lesson”) but Colenso's Arithmetic and a book On the Reductio ad Absurdum? Whether at the artist's or poet's prompting we do not know. But Bishop Colenso too had once been a mathematical tutor and author of mathematical textbooks; he too had reduced some of the deepest biblical beliefs, by means of arithmetical arguments or models, to absurdity or literal nonsense, while claiming to remain a devoted member of the Church of England. The Deacon of Christ Church, Oxford, and the Bishop of Natal had much in common. As the Bishop's arithmetical logic could dissolve the haphazard battle figures of Israelites vs. Midianites, the Deacon's far more devastating logic of absurdity could dissolve the Song of Solomon—or Isaac Watts' Divine Songs for Children, at the very least—to “the voice of the Lobster” (in Alice in Wonderland) or to “the voice of the Jubjub” in the Snark.³⁰ An Essex vicar apparently did complain, writing a letter to The St. James Gazette; but while the notorious bishop was hounded by his Victorian contemporaries, socially ostracized and excommunicated, the demure Oxford don continued to be quietly feted. One was a heretic; the other, a children's favorite. One refuted Holy Scripture; the other merely parodied it.

As with Melville, such parody was never easy to diagnose; and nonsense, especially, seemed to resist such diagnosis. Only the Butcher and the Baker, with their linked but diverging fates, could conceivably offer a key to the conundrum: both tradesmen, both reckoned dunces, both in their various ways heroic. That stout, ungainly, bewhiskered Baker, above all, is a mysterious character, and the most complex of all that heterogeneous crew. Had he “wholly forgotten his name” perhaps because that name was none other than C. L. Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll? The merest hint of his fame is immediately undercut. “There was one who was famed for the number of things / He forgot when he entered the ship. …” For the Baker is not only anally possessive (with his forty-two inscrutable boxes, neatly packed and stacked), but incurably detached. He manages to leave all his possessions (umbrella, watch, jewelry) behind on the beach; he has wholly forgotten his name; he has even lost the use of his native English, vainly signaling in Hebrew, German, Greek, Dutch—that is, gabbling in double-Dutch. He answers to “Hi!” and he answers to “Ho!” (with a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino). But it is only to “Thing-um-a-jig!”—or “Thingumbob,” to quote the Bellman's parting words—that he utterly responds, as if reduced to some irredeemable, undifferentiated, neutral blank.

Compared to Melville's Ishmael even, it seems a desolating self-portrait of self-alienation. Ishmael also enters the brotherhood of whaling, stripped of all possessions, with nothing but his carpetbag:

For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego.³¹

Yet at least he was still self-possessed, still able to issue his own terse challenge of anonymity. Charles Dodgson's ultimate alter ego behind screen on masking screen (hot and overdressed in seven coats and three pairs of boots) is already spiritually stripped, that is to say, nameless. Only a pathetic trust in various bourgeois securities, such as bulletproof vests or life insurance, still lingers. And he eagerly promotes those securities:

The Beaver's best course was, no doubt, to procure
          A second-hand dagger-proof coat—
So the Baker advised it—and next, to insure
          Its life in some Office of note.

“Evidently he dreaded the loss of his body heat as much as he dreaded the loss of his existence,” Martin Gardner observes. “The name Candle-ends may imply that the Baker is about to burn himself out.”³² Thus “that mildest of men” is a potentially burnt-out case—though mostly humdrum enough in outward appearance, resolutely candid (so he claims) and straightforward. His courage is “perfect” only because it is the courage of perfect despair:

“It is this, it is this that oppresses my soul,
          When I think of my uncle's last words:
And my heart is like nothing so much as a bowl
          Brimming over with quivering curds!
“It is this, it is this—” “We have had that before!”
          The Bellman indignantly said.
And the Baker replied, “Let me say it once more.
          It is this, it is this that I dread!”(33)

We only meet the Baker's uncle—that elderly double after whom he was named and who foretells his doom—at the vanishing point of death. Similarly, we meet the Baker already entranced by the infinite; trapped by the evasive, all-embracing vanishing point of mathematical perspective; engaged “with the Snark—every night after dark— / In a dreamy delirious fight.” For the inner man, far from sturdy and stout, is a quivering, disintegrating, frothy mass, consumed in an ever-repeated round of nightmares.

Yet it is this very dread that binds the “stupid” Baker and “unlettered Ishmael” (an ex-country schoolmaster) to one another. Boojum or White Whale—the same portents, the same doom threatened both. The tormented Baker faints at the mere sound of that dreaded word; “one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air” haunts Ishmael's tormented soul.

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me. …³⁴

Yet the Baker succumbs; Ishmael, exalted and magnetized by the hunt, escapes. Not only does a love pact, like the Butcher's, soothe his “splintered heart,” but in the terror of the whale chase he transcends death itself. Like Lazarus, like Christ “after his resurrection,” Ishmael can say: “A stone was rolled away from my heart … I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest.”³⁵ Only then, after that “ceremony” of self-transcendence, can he confront the teasing horror of the absurd. Only then can he confront that laughing hyena with a bantering air as a suicidal farce. The Baker's banter with hyenas, however, is a sure sign of self-deception:

He would joke with hyaenas, returning their stare
          With an impudent wag of the head:
And he once went a walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
          “Just to keep up its spirits,” he said.

Neither cool nor self-contained, the Baker is far from displaying Ishmael's “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.” Such impudent head-wagging and eye-winking is visible proof merely of a suicidal bravado; the “torrent of laughter and cheers” at his vanishing, merely the audible aspect of that same hysterically pulsing throb, or nervous “spasm,” that plunges him over the edge at last—to be released in silence.

But there are three “stupid” hunters, three overt nonintellectuals on board: the Baker, the Butcher, and the shy, lacemaking Beaver. It is these three alone who undergo the decisive, indeed overwhelming spiritual adventures. The impudent absentminded Baker succumbs; the shy single-minded Butcher paradoxically escapes his doom. While natural antagonists (the Beaver and the Butcher) alone are brought to converge, potential soulmates (the Butcher and the Baker)³⁶ are most widely shown to diverge. So, by the antilogic of this excursion into disorder, natural buddies are parted, unnatural buddies bonded and paired. “Two added to one—if that could be done!” Only Melville's Ishmael, it appears, can complete the sum: part monomaniac hunter (like the Butcher), part desperado and wag (like the Baker); the bosom friend of Queequeg and devotee or acolyte of Ahab; a resolution of each and compound beyond all.

The Butcher, too, presents an insoluble logjam of paradoxes. Fanatically obsessed, so he claims, with “Snark,” he turns out to be more single-minded than a Canadian trapper in exterminating Beavers! An even more “incredible dunce” to look at than the Baker, he nevertheless hits on his own independent and “ingenious plan” for a solo foray! No wonder the Butcher turned nervous. But his ornate overdressing for the big occasion, “with yellow kid gloves and a ruff,” seems to spring from some deeper-fixed feeling of social insecurity—or, rather, social inferiority.

“Introduce me, now there's a good fellow,” he said,
          “If we happen to meet it together!”
And the Bellman, sagaciously nodding his head,
          Said, “That must depend on the weather.”

This mixture of personal trepidation (which makes him cling so anxiously to the Bellman) with murderous monomania (for Beavers) produces restless friction, threatening a total breakdown.

“Be a man!” said the Bellman in wrath, as he heard
          The Butcher beginning to sob.
“Should we meet with a Jubjub, that desperate bird,
          We shall need all our strength for the job!”

“Be a man!” That terse reprimand—and “that desperate bird” suddenly swooping into the poem—mark the peripeteia or turning point. The Butcher's shy dependence is converted to resolution and independence; his dumb obsession changes to intellectual resourcefulness; his nervous blubbering (having survived the Jubjub) becomes tears of “delight.” Even a confrontation with pastoral, in this context, must be inverted to a dismally shadowed valley, a desolate nightmare-haunted country, invaded by a scream. Pitched higher and higher to a “shrill,” “shuddering” spasm, that “nervousness” is at last dissolved in an echo of lost childhood.

He thought of his childhood, left far far behind—
          That blissful and innocent state—
The sound so exactly recalled to his mind
          A pencil that squeaks on a slate!

So the peripeteia is confirmed almost simultaneously by the anagnorisis, or recognition:

“'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!” he suddenly cried.
          (This man, that they used to call “Dunce.”)
“As the Bellman would tell you,” he added with pride,
          “I have uttered that sentiment once.
“'Tis the note of the Jubjub! Keep count, I entreat;
          You will find I have told it you twice.
'Tis the song of the Jubjub! The proof is complete,
          If only I've stated it thrice.”

It is a recognition not only of the Jubjub but the Bellman's grand triadic repetitions. Now the Butcher's role is proudly patterned after the Bellman's role, perhaps even after his “musical tone” in that rapturous ascent from “'Tis the voice” to “'Tis the note” to the exalted height of his great argument, “'Tis the song …”

At that word his monomania for Beavers is transformed from a killer's passion to a lover's. Kindred souls marching shoulder to shoulder in that narrow valley, their bond is celebrated with that holiest of bridal rites from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon. For cementing the friendship, however, another ritual is required:

“The thing can be done,” said the Butcher, “I think,
          The thing must be done, I am sure.
The thing shall be done!”

Merely to contain that erotic frisson (by a childhood trauma) cannot be foolproof; the charged, pent-up emotion must still be abstracted (by the contemplation of pure number). As W. H. Auden put it:

The Beaver and the Butcher, romantic explorers though they are, who have chosen to enter a desolate valley, where the Jubjub bird screams in passion overhead, and the creatures from The Temptation of St. Anthony surround them, escape from the destructive power of sex sublimating it into arithmetical calculations based on the number 3.³⁷

Only now does the Butcher turn “genial.” Only now, ensconced in that Platonic haven, can he shrug off “all laws of propriety.” Only now that he has grasped the mystic import of the Bellman's repeated trinities can he also reject the whole confining semeiology of social etiquette:

“What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
          Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
          “They are merely conventional signs!”

Having transcended those intimidating conventions, those self-devouring inhibitions of “Society,” the Butcher, it seems, is free. But that impudent wag of a Baker, who can only bake “Bridecake” unhappily, is trapped. No wedding bells, no Song of Solomon for him! Only a jangle of contraries! For in Baker and Boojum, as in Butcher and Beaver, natural opposites again fuse. Not for salvation this time but for an unholy rape. Bedridden, ponderous, grave, what else is the Snark but a prude? Why else “its slowness in taking a jest”? Why else “its fondness for bathing-machines, / Which it constantly carries about”? What else is “Snark” but the converse of “wag” with whom the Baker (for all his protective anonymity, seven coats and three boots) will collapse by a kind of reciprocal, almost algebraic, cross-cancellation of terms?

All Carroll's descriptions of the Boojum, on Henry Holiday's evidence, “were quite unimaginable, and he wanted the creature to remain so.”³⁸ For a Snark, as “The Barrister's Dream” suggests, is a confused mass of self-contradiction: part counsel, part judge, part jury; now acting for the defense, now ruthlessly condemning that selfsame client—who had, in any case, “been dead for some years.” Is the “Dream,” then, a premonition of “The Vanishing”? Is the pig's fate, yet another deserter, a shadow image of the Baker's? For he plunges to his annihilation through a looking-glass, as it were, whose mirrored reversal merely seems to reflect his own inner turmoil of self-obliteration. The Baker's very heroic posture, “erect and sublime” on that neighboring crag, was prefigured by the Snark, sublimely erect, on passing sentence: “When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night, / And the fall of a pin might be heard.” Such a vanishing—like Kafka's fable of the man before the law, as Robert Martin Adams observed—implies:

that only he could discover the Snark for whom it was bound to prove a Boojum. The conditions of the problem were such as to lead inevitably to the destruction of its solver, while those who were immune to the consequences could not solve it in the first place.³⁹

But the Butcher, in his newfound wizardry, could surely have confronted the problem. If he was immune to the consequences, it was only because he had moved into a realm beyond those paradoxical terrors of the infinite that engulf the Baker:

“In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been
          Enveloped in absolute mystery,
And without extra charge I will give you at large
          A lesson in Natural History.”

The same insight that reveals the name of the Jubjub, in fact, provides a simultaneous and deeper insight into the nature of the Jubjub, striking through the enveloping mystery—the perpetuum mobile or creative pulse of Nature itself.⁴⁰

“As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird,
          Since it lives in perpetual passion”:

But that “absurd” never-ending sexual trauma of desperate passion has far wider connotations, it turns out, than a mere fascination with fashion and the aphrodisiac flavor of oysters and egg white. Such sexual knowledge, once gained (as Adam and Eve discovered), is absolute: “But it knows any friend it has met once before.” There is no going back on that recognition, no evading the Jubjub. Sexual drives, on the other hand, cannot be roused at will or at random: “It never will look at a bribe.” Nor must sexual lust be confused with true love, or charity. “And in charity-meetings it stands at the door,” though it is an aspect of true love and, if distinct, closely linked to it. The Jubjub itself contributes nothing to that spiritual element of true love, called charity: “And collects—though it does not subscribe.” But to survive at all in its human context, true love must pay the Jubjub its dues—pay homage, that is, to the pressures of sex in all its passionate, disturbing forms.

Yet even that seething power is based on mathematical laws—on an infrastructure of equations and symmetrical proportion, which is the very matrix of matter.

“You boil it in sawdust: you salt it in glue.
          You condense it with locusts and tape:
Still keeping one principal object in view—
          To preserve its symmetrical shape.”

Interpreted in gospel language, this might run: For verily I say unto you, that with locuses (or loci) and tape measures for sawing and glueing together the wooden rods to construct the framework of a regular polyhedron you discover the skeletal or X-ray image that shapes and controls the whole flighty enigma of the Jubjub.⁴¹ Wrapped in this playful doubletalk is the same tremendous question at which Blake pounded:

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?(42)

This “perpetual passion” is no longer Christ's of “The Bellman's Song” (“for the saving of our souls”) but the Jubjub's (for our bewilderment). The Jubjub's symmetry, not Christ's cross, now seems to align on a single intersection “charity” and “passion,” those two key concepts of all hymns of atonement.

Sobs of “delight,” after that rite de passage, are answered by “affectionate looks.” For lovers' tears and lovers' songs without words confirm this intense, unorthodox companionship—or at-one-ment. Thus cannibal Butcher and his prey, like Ishmael and his South Sea cannibal at the Spouter-Inn, are mated:

How it is I know not; but there is no place like
a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.
Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom
of their souls to each other; and some old couples
often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning.
Thus, then, in our heart's honeymoon, lay I and
Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.(43)
And when quarrels arose—as one frequently finds
          Quarrels will, spite of every endeavour—
The song of the Jubjub recurred to their minds,
          And cemented their friendship for ever!(44)

“Be a man!” the Bellman had warned. But their return “hand-in-hand” confounded even him. Now all roles were reversed. Now he himself was “unmanned”: only momentarily, of course, and not with nervous dread—not the Butcher's inferiority complex at all. With “noble emotion” he speaks the peroration in a formal thanksgiving: “This amply repays all the wearisome days / We have spent on the billowy ocean!”

But it is the Butcher who has the last word. His is the final recognition at their final appearance in that craggy landscape.

“There is Thingumbob shouting!” the Bellman said.
          “He is shouting like mad, only hark!
He is waving his hands, he is wagging his head,
          He has certainly found a Snark!”
They gazed in delight, while the Butcher exclaimed,
          “He was always a desperate wag!”
They beheld him—their Baker—their hero unnamed—
          On the top of a neighbouring crag. …

Now the Butcher is the unacknowledged hero. The dunce has passed his initiation with a new and heightened awareness,⁴⁵ while the Baker (their so-called hero) is reduced in ironic contrast, on his high-raised perch as melodramatic clown, to antihero. That jovial pun not only unsettles the Boojum in the gathering dusk (it may only just have had breakfast!), and so insures the rest of the crew,⁴⁶ but in delivering the peroration over the Baker pronounces his epitaph. For “Fry me!” or “Fritter my wig!” or “Toasted-cheese” (call him what you will) is “desperate” in the same sense as the Butcher had declared the Jubjub “a desperate bird.” Perpetually overstewed like the Jubjub, overheated in his seven coats, he too lives “in perpetual passion.” What the Butcher alone seems to recognize is that such boisterous impudence cries out for nervous dissipation; that the Baker's sexual heat—without mathematical insight, uncontrolled to affection—is doomed.

Of the Bellman's crew only the Butcher (with his ruff and yellow gloves) and the Baker (with his multiple coats and boots) could conceivably be ranged among the Jubjub's disciples, whose “taste in costume is entirely absurd— / It is ages ahead of the fashion.”⁴⁷ With his mountain of lost luggage and lost identity, in fact, this desperate Baker seems as victimized by the Jubjub as the Butcher. As Baker of “Bridecake” exclusively, who was more exposed to its heart-piercing screech? The Butcher, with his “blissful” childhood memories, could overcome that awful shudder, but one must assume the Baker had an unhappy childhood. The Bellman unfortunately cut off the Freudian preliminaries:

“My father and mother were honest, though poor—”
          “Skip all that!” cried the Bellman in haste.

Without a lost Eden of childhood memory, without his “forty-two boxes” even (of harmonious numbers), what could the Baker assert against that shrill assault? How could be mathematically tune that “scream” to a “voice,” a “note,” a “song”? The Butcher's algebraic formula

(x ＋ 7 ＋ 10) (1000 - 8)
—————————	- 17 = x
992

is a triumphant, if irrelevant, proof of identity, that X = X; something of which the Baker, who had identified himself in terms of names and chattels (to his loss), was quite incapable. Harmony equals Number equals Identity equals Love. Each is related to each; and whoever attains one, attains all.

But the Baker attains none. Like the Beaver at its crisis, he “fairly lost heart, and outgrabe in despair,” until quivering, quaking, desperately confused, his Snark becomes that ultimate dread, the all-encompassing mirror image, or expunging Boojum. The crew gaze their last at his sublime erection, at a pitch of shuddering passion that had originally set him off so courageously on his quest. Lacking is the symmetrical balance—that “musical tone” of the Bellman's cajoling presence, that hold on the ultimate woof and warp of existence. His terrible disintegration must be read in contrast to the Butcher's and the Beaver's idyll, reinaugurated forever in memory of the Jubjub's song, forever cemented. Thus the obvious Freudian significance of the Baker's final release with the disintegrating effect of a pent-up orgasm, as he collapses toward the Boojum in “a torrent of laughter and cheers”: one moment “erect and sublime” on that neighboring crag; the next, “(as if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm.”⁴⁸ As the Butcher's and the Beaver's inseparable friendship at the Jubjub's evening appearance proved sexual, so does the Baker's wild twilight collapse toward the Boojum. The creative and destructive forces of sex at root are one.

But that terrible disintegration must also be read in conjunction with the Banker's fate: whose “fit” precedes the Baker's; whose name is distinguishable by only a single letter. Compared to the Butcher, the Baker is antihero; compared to the Banker, the Baker is truly heroic. Both are “inspired with a courage.” The Baker's is “perfect,” however; the Banker's, mad. The oppressive “dread” of the one becomes “that fear-stricken yell” of the other. Terrorized by the Bandersnatch, the Banker offers cash—with a skip and a hop and a flop—till at last he faints, as the Baker had earlier fainted at the mere mention of the Boojum. “It is just as I feared!” declares the Bellman, solemnly mocking such fear. The nightmare visions of the one introduce the groveling terror of the other, as this snatch-and-grab raid on a Banker plays farcical prelude to the Baker's vanishing. His mad shouting, hand waving, and head wagging across that distance among those mountainous crags seems almost a parody at first, an exhilarating burlesque of the other's “senseless grimaces,” word chants, and restless hands. Certainly the crew, which had viewed the Banker's transports with “horror,” views the Baker's mysterious signaling “in delight”—until that awesome, sublimely mock-heroic disappearance.

Far from vanishing, the Banker (a Bandersnatch is no Boojum), merely turns blank, a sort of photographic negative, a black-and-white print in reverse: with black face (for white) and white waistcoat (for black) in perpetual “full evening dress” jibbering con imbecillità.⁴⁹

Down he sank in a chair—ran his hands through his hair
          And chanted in mimsiest tones
Words whose utter inanity proved his insanity,
          While he rattled a couple of bones.

So white turns black; a rich man, poor man; and the Banker, on that pivotal B, to Mr. Bones playing his black-and-white minstrel castanets whose hollow rattle picks up from his prattle clickety-click, clickety-click ad infinitum.

Such is the range and complexity of this great poem that seems at times almost a meditation on some of those earlier heroic voyages by Carroll's American contemporaries—Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. The Baker, in the end, seems not so much like another Ishmael or Ahab as another Arthur Gordon Pym swept across that mysterious polar vanishing point of white light; the Banker with his castanets seems like nothing so much as a wittily revised version of Melville's poor demented Negro, the Pequod's bellboy, little Pip!⁵⁰ Wholly explicable nevertheless on its own portmanteau terms, as Carroll's “Preface” makes clear, The Hunting of the Snark needs no external clues nor allegorical key, but like Moby-Dick (its closest analogue) is symbolically self-contained, concealing its own best and sufficient commentary.

Notes

1. W. H. Auden, The Enchafèd Flood (New York: Random House, 1950).

2. Robert Martin Adams, Nil, Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void during the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), Chs. 4 and 6.

3. “Parodie rageuse ou seulement réminiscences lointaines, ordonnées (cela va de soi) sans souci de parallélisme strict, dans la sérénité d'un divertissement détaché?” Marcel Marnat, “Du serquin au cachalot blanc,” in Lewis Carroll, ed. Henri Parisot (Paris: Cahier de L'Herne, 1971), p. 132.

4. “Symbole pour symbole, il double le sien et le Boujeum est d'autant plus terrible qu'on ne l'a jamais vu.” Marnat, p. 131.

5. “Il n'a pu le faire qu'avec vertige, avec passion. Mais aussi un terrible malaise. …” Marnat, p. 130.

6. To Nathaniel Hawthorne, 17 November 1851, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. M. R. Davis and W. H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), p. 142.

7. Lewis Carroll, Pillow Problems, and other Mathematical Trifles (London, 1893).

8. Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” The Theatre, April 1887.

9. The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Cassell, 1953), II, p. 345.

10. “The last level of metaphor in the ALICE books,” Martin Gardner concludes, “is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician.” The Annotated Alice (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960), p. 15.

11. As Beatrice Hatch claims on the authority of Lewis Carroll himself: Strand Magazine, April 1898, pp. 413-23.

12. By Stephen Barr in The Annotated Snark, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 45. All recent readers owe a special debt to Martin Gardner's edition, reprinted by Penguin Books in 1967. Future references to The Hunting of the Snark are to this edition.

13. To Florence Balfour, 6 April 1876, A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends, ed. Evelyn M. Hatch (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 98.

14. To Mary Brown, 2 March 1880, Hatch, p. 165.

15. Moby-Dick, Ch. 45. All references to Moby-Dick are quoted from Moby-Dick, ed. Harold Beaver (London: Penguin Books, 1972). In deference to the large number of editions in use, I cite chapter number only, not page.

16. 8 January 1852, Letters, p. 146.

17. Carroll, “Alice on the Stage,” The Theatre, April 1887.

18. To “The Lowrie Children,” 1896, Hatch, p. 243.

19. Moby-Dick, Ch. 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Most of the preceding paragraph is quoted from my introduction to the Penguin edition of Moby-Dick.

20. The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1965), p. 854.

21. Alexander L. Taylor, The White Knight (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1952), p. 159.

22. The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1928, rpt. 1964), No. 46. “The Bellman's Song,” a popular favorite, was frequently reprinted in broadside form during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

23. Snarkophilus Snobbs, alias F. C. S. Schiller, in the parody issue, Mind!, 1901, though absurdly identifying the Butcher with Mohammedanism and the Banker with Judaism, more or less lighted on this key: “In the leading figure, that of the Bellman we easily recognize Christianity, the bell being the characteristically Christian implement, and the hegemony of humanity being equally obvious.” In this context, I also like Snobbs's comment on the opening stanza:

    “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.

    “The meaning evidently is that Christianity ‘touches the highest part of man and supports us from above.’”

24. Shakespeare, As You Like It, V, iii, 27ff.

25. Since Lewis Carroll so carefully vetted—and vetoed—the illustrations, I assume, with Henry Holiday, that the uncle's “last words” were literally pronounced on his death bed.

26. F. C. S. Schiller in the parody issue Mind!

27. The Annotated Snark, p. 28.

28. Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), Ch. 11. The passage is quoted by Martin Gardner in The Annotated Snark, p. 57.

29. Moby-Dick, Ch. 42.

30. “The voice of the turtle” (Song of Solomon ii, 12) becoming Watts's “the voice of the sluggard” (1715), which Lewis Carroll first parodied in “The Lobster Quadrille” (Alice in Wonderland, Ch. 10). See Martin Gardner, The Annotated Alice, pp. 139-40.

31. Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 April 16, Letters, p. 125.

32. The Annotated Snark, p. 51.

33. Unlike the Butcher, who will triumphantly master the Bellman's triple repetition, the Baker wildly overshoots that score (to the Bellman's alarm) first by a fourfold, then desperately raised to a sixfold, repeated stake.

34. Moby-Dick, Ch. 41.

35. Moby-Dick, Ch. 49, “The Hyena.” See my Commentary, pp. 798-99.

36. For their common origin in another macabre voyage of the nursery, cf.

    Rub-a-dub-dub,
    Three men in a tub,
    And how do you think they got there?
    The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-maker,
    They all jumped out of a rotten potato.
    'Twas enough to make a man stare!

37. The Enchafèd Flood, pp. 86-87.

38. Henry Holiday, “The Snark's Significance,” The Academy, 29 January 1898. Lewis Carroll, that is, rejected Holiday's fine illustration of the Boojum as some kind of monstrous, bloated, maniacal walrus.

39. Nil, p. 98.

40. Succeeding where Ahab, the Baker's analogue, so dismally and suicidally fails: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!” Moby-Dick, Ch. 36.

41. I accept and follow the geometrical interpretation given to this concluding stanza by John Leech. See The Annotated Snark, p. 81.

42. William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Experience, 1794.

43. Moby-Dick, Ch. 10, “A Bosom Friend.”

44. I am assuming, of course, that the Butcher and the Beaver, in Martin Gardner's phrase, “became a pair of ship buddies.” In an otherwise masculine crew, the Beaver is certainly odd man out—always neutrally referred to by Carroll as “it.” The idea that the Beaver might actually be feminine must have been influenced by the illustrations. For it was Henry Holiday who first added those whimsical touches of elevating “care” and “hope” to the status of female allegories. (Carroll at first demurred, but was completely won over. See “The Snark's Significance.”) It was a small leap, then, for a reviewer like Andrew Lang to conclude that Holiday's “drawing of the Beaver sitting at her bobbins is very satisfactory, the natural shyness of the Beaver in the presence of the Butcher being admirably rendered.” (The Academy, 8 April 1876.)

    But Lang was peculiarly unresponsive to the poem. For the Butcher and the Beaver, though natural antagonists, from the start showed affinities: both “shy,” both easily moved to tears, both stupid looking, both independently hitting on the same ingenious, foolhardy plan. Despite the blood-curdling image that he projects, it is the Butcher who starts nervously fussing and dressing up at the Bellman's signal for action, while “the Beaver went simply galumphing about”—galloping triumphantly, that is, portmanteau-style. The Beaver too, in the Bellman's judgment, had often “saved them from wreck.” In fact, after the Butcher's epiphany into the nature of number (and number of nature), their mutual discrepancies became more rather than less acute than that obvious antagonism of the opening. Thus their occasional quarrels. At the climax the Beaver is still as physically restless as ever, “bounding along on the tip of its tail,” while the Butcher is enrolled as ship's wag. An intellectual now, he can patronize the Beaver's “poor brains” and worse schooling with an affectionate bid at popularization. Though the Beaver's disarming confession that “It had learnt in ten minutes far more than all books / Would have taught it in seventy years,” suggests its own sudden surge of mathematical virtuosity in converting the biblical “three score and ten,” or lifetime, to exactly seventy.

45. The Butcher may even have been meant to spoof that other illiterate butcher—from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales—the Tichborne claimant. A bit of farcical icing, at any rate, was provided by Henry Holiday, who clearly caricatured Edward Kenealy, the claimant's counsel, in the role of the Barrister.

46. As Martin Gardner proposed: The Annotated Snark, p. 94.

47. The maker of Bonnets and Hoods, though a man of fashion, is himself most soberly dressed in Holiday's illustration.

48. Cf. Ahab's heroic pose: “when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron …” Moby-Dick, Ch. 135.

49. Printed on the sheet music lying upside down at the Banker's feet in Holiday's design.

50. “Leave him here to his fate—it is getting so late!”
              The Bellman exclaimed in a fright.

    Cf. black Pip, that “timorous wight,” so “gloomy-jolly” deserted by Stubb: another Mr. Tambo with his tambourine singing snatches of Old King Crow; another fearful coward crazed in a confusion of black and white; another “castaway.”