SOURCE: Holquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism.” Yale French Studies, no. 43 (1969): 145-64.

[In the following essay, Holquist examines The Hunting of the Snark as an experimental work that resists critics' attempts to interpret it as an allegory.]

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. … An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.

Swift, Gulliver's Travels

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered?

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Because the question “What is a Boojum?” may appear strange or whimsical, I would like to begin by giving some reasons for posing it. Like many other readers, I have been intrigued and perplexed by a body of literature often called modern or post-modern, but which is probably most efficiently expressed in a list of authors: Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Nabokov, Borges, Genet, Robbe-Grillet—the list could be extended, but these names will probably suffice to suggest, if very roughly, the tradition I have in mind. The works of these men are all very dissimilar to each other. However, they seem to have something in common when compared not to themselves as a class, but to past literature. In casting about for specific terms which might define this vaguely felt sense of what was distinctive and yet shared in these works, two things constantly inhibited any progress. The first was one's sense of the ridiculous: aware of other attempts to define the modern, one knew that it was difficult to do so without becoming shrill or unduly chileastic. There is a group of critics, of whom Ihab Hassan and Nathan Scott might be considered representative, who insist on an absolute cut-off between all of previous history and the modern experience. They have in their characteristically humorless way taken seriously Virginia Woolf's remark that “on or about December, 1910 human nature changed.” The work of these critics is easily recognized in the apocalyptic rhetoric which distinguishes their writing, and in the irresponsible application they make of terms derived from modern German philosophy. Some rather thick books on the subject of recent literature could easily be reduced in size through the simple expedient of excising any mention of Heimweh, Geworfenheit, and that incantatory word, Angst. So one thing which made it difficult to get at distinctive features in recent literature was the sense that it was very different from previous literature; and at the same time to recognize that it was not the end of history.

Another stumbling block, much less serious, was the constant recurrence of a phrase, which continually passed through my mind as I would read new works. I would read that Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to discover that he was an Ungeziefer, and immediately a ghostly refrain would be heard in my inner ear: “Aha, for the Snark was a Boojum, you see!” The same thing would happen when in Lolita, one discovered that all those strange men following Humbert were Quilty; or when reading in Gombrowicz that there was nothing to identity but the grimace [gęba]; and so on and on—one kept hearing “The Snark was a Boojum, you see.” Pausing to reflect on this, the association of Lewis Carroll with modern literature seemed natural enough: his name figures in the first Surrealist manifesto (1924); Louis Aragon and André Breton write essays on Carroll; the former attempts a translation of The Snark (1929), the latter includes selections from Carroll in his Anthologie de l'humour noir (1939). Henri Parisot publishes a study of Carroll in 1952, in a series called, significantly, Poetes d'aujourd hui; Antonin Artaud tried to translate the Jabberwocky song; Joyce's use of portmanteau words, without which there would be no Finnegans Wake, is only one index of his high regard for Carroll; Borges admires Carroll, and Nabokov translates all of Alice in Wonderland into Russian (Anja v strane chudes, 1923). But such obvious associations of Carroll with modern authors were not, it turned out, the reason why the Boojum kept raising its head as I read these men.

Finally, I picked up again, after many years, The Hunting of the Snark, and it soon became apparent why its final line kept popping up in connection with modern literature: Lewis Carroll's “agony in eight fits” was not only among the first to exemplify what is perhaps the most distinctive feature of modern literature, it did so more openly, more paradigmatically than almost any other text one knew. That is, it best dramatized the attempt of an author to insure through the structure of his work that the work could be perceived only as what it was, and not some other thing; the attempt to create an immaculate fiction, a fiction that resists the attempts of readers, and especially those readers who write criticism, to turn it into an allegory, a system equitable with already existing systems in the non-fictive world. In what follows, I propose to outline this pattern of resistances in some detail as it exists in The Hunting of the Snark, and then, in a short conclusion to suggest the significance the pattern may have for readers of experimental modern fiction. But before looking at the poem itself, it might prove helpful to have some background information.

Lewis Carroll is, of course, a pseudonym. Characteristically for its bearer, it is an acrostic, based on an inversion of the re-Latinized forms of his two Christian names, Charles Lutwidge. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is a fascinating object of study in himself, but in what follows I propose to mention only those aspects of his career which bear directly on the significance of the Snark poem.

Dodgson's whole career can best be understood as a quest for order, in some ways not unlike that of the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass. He begins his career as a student of mathematics, and was for many years a teacher of the subject in Christ Church College, Oxford. In his later years even the precision of Euclidian geometry failed to satisfy his lust for order, and he turned to symbolic logic. There are many anecdotes which further point up his compulsive orderliness: when he had packages to be wrapped, he drew diagrams so precise that they showed to a fraction of an inch just where the knots should be tied; he kept congeries of thermometers in his apartments and never let the temperature rise above or fall below a specific point. He worked out a system for betting on horses which eliminated disorderly chance. He wrote the director of Covent Garden telling him how to clear up the traffic jams which plagued the theater; to the post office on how to make its regulations more efficient. And after having written all these letters (more than 98,000 before he died), he then made an abstract of each, and entered it into a register with notes and cross references. When he saw the first proofs of Alice in Wonderland, he refused to accept them because, as his illustrator Tenniel had pointed out, they were not clear enough, a scruple which, however, did not keep him from selling the 2000 copies of this rejected printing to an American publisher, for whose colonial audience he felt the plates were adequate. When going over the plates for the illustrations to his last books, Sylvie and Bruno and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, prepared by the artist Harry Furniss, Dodgson put them under a microscope in order to count the lines in the etchings. And then, in a gesture that is pure Nabokov, he compiled an index for these novels, complete with listings for “crocodiles, logic of” and “frog, young, how to amuse,” all arranged from A (“Accelerated velocity, causes of”) to W (“wilful waste, etc., lesson to be learnt from”). It should be clear that Dodgson's life, in the large outline of his whole career and in the smallest details of his everyday existence, was dominated by the quest for a more perfect order. I will return to the significance of this point in a moment. But one further aspect of Dodgson/Carroll's existence should first be mentioned. It concerns the necessity of the slash or hyphen which one must use when referring to this author. That is, he is both Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, student (or Fellow) of Christ Church, and Lewis Carroll, author of books of nonsense.

Queen Victoria herself became aware of the split when, having been delighted in 1865 by Alice in Wonderland, she asked that a standing order be left for the author's next book; in 1866 she was not amused when she was given Dodgson's formidably technical Condensation of Determinants. Another revealing story is told by one of the child friends from Dodgson's later years, Isa Bowman, who grew up to write a book about her benefactor. As a young girl he took her to see one of those static panoramas so beloved by the Victorians. It was a diorama of Niagara Falls, with the figure of a dog in the foreground. Dodgson amused her by spinning a tale in which the dog was really alive, but trained to stand motionless for hours on end. He “… added other absurd details about the dog, how, if we waited long enough, we should see an attendant bring him a bone, how he was allowed so many hours off each day when his brother, who unfortunately was rather restless, would take his place, and how this badly behaved animal on one occasion jumped right out of the panorama among the onlookers, attracted by the sight of a little girl's sandwich, and so on. Suddenly he began to stammer and looking round in some alarm, I saw that a dozen grown-ups and children had gathered around and were listening with every appearance of amused interest. And it was not Mr. Carroll but a very confused Mr. Dodgson who took me by the hand and led me quickly from the scene.”¹ Much has been made of this dichotomy between Mr. Carroll and Mr. Dodgson, and psychoanalytical studies, such as Phyllis Greenacre's Swift and Carroll (New York, 1955), suggest that the man was simply a schizophrenic who found a unique means of adjustment.

A more balanced view has been provided in what are probably the two best studies of Carroll: Elizabeth Sewell's The Field of Nonsense (London, 1952) and Alfred Liede's Dichtung als Spiel (Berlin, 1963, 2 vols.). These two critics have suggested that the split between Dodgson and Carroll is only an apparent dichotomy, quickly resolved if one sees that there is a common pursuit at the heart of each avatar, a Drang nach Ordnung which Dodgson/Carroll sought in mathematics and logic, in the strictly ordered life of an Oxford scholar, in the severely proper existence of a Victorian gentleman—and last but not least, in nonsense. In fact it was in nonsense that Dodgson's compulsion toward order found its most perfect expression, a point that has also been made by a professor of logic at Leeds University, Peter Alexander.² I would further add that the most nonsensical nonsense which Carroll created is The Hunting of the Snark. There is an ascending progression toward the apex it represents in 1876, from the first Alice book (1865) through the second (1872); and all the work after the Snark was a decline, a falling away which is painful in the last books, Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893).

The Snark is the most perfect nonsense which Carroll created in that it best exemplifies what all his career and all his books sought to do: achieve pure order. For nonsense, in the writings of Lewis Carroll, at any rate, does not mean gibberish; it is not chaos, but the opposite of chaos. It is a closed field of language in which the meaning of any single unit is dependent on its relationship to the system of the other constituents. Nonsense is “a collection of words of events which in their arrangement do not fit into some recognized system,”³ but which constitute a new system of their own. As has recently been said, “what we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence of meaning between itself and other signs … The prior whole which Saussure is talking about cannot be the explicit and articulated whole of a complete language as it is recorded in grammars and dictionaries … the unity he is talking about is a unity of coexistence, like that of the sections of an arch which shoulder one another. In a unified whole of this kind, the learned parts of a language have an immediate value as a whole, and progress is made less by addition and juxtaposition than by the internal articulation of a function which in its own way is already complete.”⁴ My argument here is that The Hunting of the Snark constitutes such a whole; it is its own system of signs which gain their meaning by constantly dramatizing their differences from signs in other systems. The poem is, in a small way, its own language. This is difficult to grasp because its elements are bound up so closely with the syntax, morphology, and, fleetingly, the semantics of the English language.

Some illustrations, taken from Carroll, may help us here. In the book which most closely approximates the completeness of the system in the Snark, Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty says in a famous passage: “‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that's all.’” This last remark is a rebuke to Alice, who has not understood the problem: it is not, as she says, to “make words mean so many different things.” It is to make a word mean just one thing, the thing which its user intends and nothing else. Which is to be master—the system of language which says “‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’” or Humpty who says it does mean that, and in his system, only that. Nonsense is a system in which, at its purest, words mean only one thing, and they get that meaning through divergence from the system of the nonsense itself, as well as through divergence from an existing language system. This raises, of course, the question of how one understands nonsense. It is a point to which I will return later; for the moment suffice it to say that if meaning in nonsense is dependent on the field it constructs, then the difference between nonsense and gibberish is that nonsense is a system which can be learned, as languages are learned. Thus the elements of the system can be perceived relationally, and therefore meaningfully, within it. Gibberish, on the other hand, is unsystematic.

What this suggests is that nonsense, among other things, is highly abstract. It is very much like the pure relations which obtain in mathematics, where ten remains ten, whether ten apples, ten horses, ten men, or ten Bandersnarks. This is an important point, and helps to define one relationship of nonsense to modernism. For it suggests a crucial difference between nonsense and the absurd. The absurd points to a discrepancy between purely human values and purely logical values. When a computer announces that the best cure for brain cancer is to amputate the patient's head, it is, according its system, being logical.⁵ But such a conclusion is unsettling to the patient and absurd to less involved observers. The absurd is a contrast between systems of human belief, which may lack all logic, and the extremes of a logic unfettered by human disorder. Thus the absurd is basically play with order and disorder. Nonsense is play with order only. It achieves its effects not from contrasting order and confusion, but rather by contrasting one system of order against another system of order, each of which is logical in itself, but which cannot find a place in the other. This distinction may help to account for the two dominant modes of depersonalization in recent literature. The absurd operates in the theater, where the contrast of human/non-human serves to exploit the presence of living actors on the stage. Nonsense, understood as defined above, dominates in prose fictions, where the book may become its own hermetic world, its own laboratory for systematic play, without the anthropomorphizing presence of actors. Thus the difference between, say, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and the same author's Comment c'est.

Lewis Carroll is one of the most important figures in the movement Ortega y Gasset has called the “dehumanization of art.” Kafka was not the first to reduce his hero to an integer; his K has an earlier analogue in one of the many essays Dodgson wrote on Oxford university issues. In 1865 the Regius chair in Greek fell vacant, and Dodgson used the occasion as an inspiration for a little paper called “A New Method of Evaluation of π”: “Let U=the university, G=Greek, and P=professor. Then GP=Greek Professor; let this be reduced to its lowest terms and call the result I. Also let W=the work done, T=the times, p=giving payment, π=the payment according to T, and S=the sum required; so that π=S. The problem is to obtain a value for π which shall be commensurate with W …”

“Let this be reduced to its lowest terms …” What Dodgson has expressed here in satire is a fundamental principle of his nonsense. For to reduce a word to one meaning is surely to reduce language to its lowest terms. The effect is to create a condition of what the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky has called ostranenie, or “making it strange.” But, again like so much modern literature, the effect in the Snark is not just to estrange a character or an event, but to estrange language itself. The technique is usually employed to render some familiar action unfamiliar by describing it naively, as if perceived for the first time. And this is what nonsense does to language. But it has a purpose for doing so, one which Merleau-Ponty has hinted at in another context: “If we want to understand language as an originating operation, we must pretend never to have spoken, submit language to a reduction without which it would once more escape us by referring us to what it signifies for us, [we must] look at [language] as deaf people look at those who are speaking.”⁶ Or, it should be added, look at language as children or Lewis Carroll look at language.

In order to understand “language as an originating operation” we must, in other words, see it as a process, as a system in itself. By so doing, one becomes aware of its capacity to present us with something new. But in order to achieve this state of radical linguistic innocence it is necessary to put aside all expectations which arise from the habit of creating meaning through systems other than language. Perception has recently been defined as being “primarily the modification of an anticipation.”⁷ The unfamiliar is always understood in terms of the familiar.⁸ This may seem a bit opaque, but it is really quite simple, and an operation we engage in and see performed every day around us. The most common example of it in literary criticism is found in the work of critics who bring to bear on any given text a procrustean system, the sort of thing T. S. Eliot had in mind when he referred to the “lemon-squeezer school” of criticism. A rigidly Freudian critic will never perceive a dark, wet setting as anything but a womb symbol, or an object which is slender and vertical as anything but a phallic symbol, regardless of the fact that, in the system of the text he is treating, the former is a bower in a forest, say, or the latter a cane or spear. This critic has not seen bowers or spears in the one system because his expectations are a function of another system. In order to see a new thing we must be able to recognize it as such, and this is done by the willed inhibition of systems we have learnt before coming upon the novel object, an act performed in the service of learning new systems. If this is not done in literary criticism, all texts become allegories. The Odyssey ceases to be an epic system with properties peculiar to it alone, and becomes an Allegory of Quest; Gulliver's Travels ceases to be a satiric structure with its own distinctive features, and is turned into an allegory of Swift's psychological development, an orgy of Freudian Anality; Dostoevsky's novels become equally orgiastic allegories of Sin and Redemption.

Critics of Lewis Carroll have possibly developed this allegorical urge to its ultimate limits. Phyllis Greenacre, a practicing psychiatrist, cannot forget that Dodgson loved to photograph little girls in the nude, with results for her interpretation of the Alice books which are as predictable as they are unfortunate.⁹ Louis Aragon, in a 1931 article in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution does a Marxian interpretation of the Alice books, notable for such insights as: “in those shameful days of massacre in Ireland … human liberty lay wholly in the frail hands of Alice …” William Empson has combined Freudian and Marxian techniques in his reading, “The Child as Swain.”¹⁰ Alice experiences birth trauma, and her tears become amniotic fluid; commenting on the famous scene at the end of Through the Looking Glass where Alice pulls off the tablecloth, sending plates, dishes, and guests hurtling to the floor, Empson remarks, “It is the High Table of Christ Church we must think of here …”¹¹ A. L. Taylor makes the Alice books into that easiest to find of all allegories, the Christian.¹² I have argued that the Alice books are less perfect nonsense than The Hunting of the Snark; therefore they are less hermetic, less systematic in their own right, and thus more porous to other systems.

But even the Snark has not escaped the allegorist. Alexander Taylor sees it as an anti-vivisectionist tract¹³ and Martin Gardner, in his otherwise fine annotated version, suggests a crude existentialist reading, full of Angst's, and in which the Boojum somehow becomes the atomic bomb.¹⁴ A former dean of the Harvard Business School has argued that the poem is “a satire on business in general, the Boojum a symbol of a business slump, and the whole thing a tragedy about the business cycle.”¹⁵ I will not go into F. C. S. Schiller's theory, which states that the Snark is a satire on Hegelian philosophy, because Schiller presents his theory as a send-up. But even W. H. Auden has said that the Snark is a “pure example” of the way in which, “if thought of as isolated in the midst of the ocean, a ship can stand for mankind and human society moving through time and struggling with its destiny.”¹⁶

Now there is something remarkably wrong about all this. Dodgson himself would be astounded. We have his word that “I can guarantee that the books have no religious teaching whatever in them—in fact they do not teach anything at all.”¹⁷ It may be that, knowing how drearily and relentlessly didactic Victorian children's books were, readers have not been able to accept that the most famous representative of the class is without uplift of one sort or another. However a quick comparison of Alice or the Snark with Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies (1863) should be enough to convince any unprejudiced reader of the fact. Kingsley's book, it will be remembered, ends with Tom, the erstwhile fairy, “now a great man of science [who] can plan railroads and steam engines, and electric telegraphs and rifled guns, and so forth.” Not content with this, the author adds, to his little readers in the attached “Moral,” “… do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it, too, like a true Englishman.”

Lewis Carroll does not cloy in this way because he had a very sophisticated image of his audience. One may be highly specific about what the word child meant to Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. It meant first of all a girl; further, a girl between the ages of ten and thirteen, who belonged to an upper-middle class family; was beautiful; intelligent; well dressed and well behaved. Anything else was not a child. Now it is obvious that such a restricted view of children cannot be the same one which animates Lewis Carroll the author. Rather, this audience is conceived not in terms of chronology, but as a state of perceptual innocence and honesty. Children are the proper audience of nonsense only to the degree that they let strange things remain strange; to the degree they resist forcing old systems on new, and insist on differences rather than similarities. The allegorists who have written about the Snark without having seen it are obviously long past such a state of open potentiality.

The best argument against the Snark's allegorization remains, of course, the poem itself. The interpretation which follows is based not only on the poem itself, but on the various ways in which it is itself. That is, the poem is best understood as a structure of resistances to other structures of meaning which might be brought to it. The meaning of the poem consists in the several strategies which hedge it off as itself, which insure its hermetic nature against the hermeneutic impulse. Below are six of the many ways by which the poem gains coherence through inherence.

1. The dedication poem to Gertrude Chataway appears at first glance to be simply another of those treacly Victorian set pieces Dodgson would compose when he abandoned nonsense for what he sometimes thought was serious literature. But a second reading reveals that the poem contains an acrostic: the first letter of each line spells out Gertrude Chataway; a third reading will show that the initial word in the first line of each of the four quatrains constitute another acrostic, Girt, Rude, Chat, Away. This is the first indication in the poem that the words in it exist less for what they denote in the system of English than they do for the system Carroll will erect. That is, the initial four words of each stanza are there less to indicate the four meanings present in them before they were deployed by Carroll they at first convey (clothed, wild, speak, begone) than they are to articulate a purely idiosyncratic pattern of Carroll's own devising.

2. Another index of the systematic arbitrariness of the poem is found in the second quatrain of the first Fit: “Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: / That alone should encourage the crew. / Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice: / What I tell you three times is true.” The rule of three operates in two ways. First of all it is a system for determining a truth that is absolutely unique to this poem. When in Fit 5 the Butcher wishes to prove that the scream he has heard belongs to a Jubjub bird, he succeeds in doing so by repeating three times. “'Tis the voice of the Jubjub!” Now, there will be those who say that there is no such thing as a Jubjub bird. But in fact, in the system of the Snark poem, there is—and his existence is definitively confirmed through the proof which that system itself provides in the rule of 3. In the game of nonsense that rule, and only that rule, works. The system itself provides the assurance that only it can give meaning to itself.

The rule of three also operates as a marker, indicating that the intrinsic logic of the poem is not that of extrinsic logic which operates in systems outside the construct of the poem. In other words, it is a parody of the three components of that core element in traditional logic, the syllogism. As an example of this, take an exercise from Dodgson's own book, Symbolic Logic (1896): “No one has read the letter but John; No one, who has not read it, knows what it is about.” The answer is, or course, “No one but John knows what the letter is about.” The third repetition “'Tis the voice of the Jubjub,” has the same effect in nonsense that the third part of the syllogistic progression has in logic. The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines a syllogism as a major and a minor premise, “with a third proposition called the conclusion, resulting necessarily from the other two.” If you begin with nonsense, and its conclusion, like the syllogism, results necessarily from the beginning, you also end with nonsense. The progression is closed to other systems. It is not, incidentally, without significance for Carroll's play with words that the etymology of syllogism is a portmanteau from the Greek syllogizesthai (to reckon together) and logizesthai (to reason) which has its root, logos.

3. The same effect of an arbitrariness whose sense can be gleaned only from the poem itself is to be found in the various names of the crew members: Bellman, Boots, Bonne-maker, Barrister, Broker, Billiard-marker, Banker, Beaver, Baker, and Butcher. They all begin with a B. And much ink has been spilled in trying to explain (from the point of view of the allegory a given critic has tried to read into the Snark) why this should be so. The obvious answer, if one resists the impulse to substitute something else for the text, is that they all begin with B because they all begin with B. The fact that they all have the same initial sound is a parallel that draws attention to itself because it is a parallel. But it is only a parallel at the level where all the crew members on this voyage will be referred to by nouns which have an initial voiced bilabial plosive. In other words, it is a parallel that is rigidly observed, which dramatizes itself, but only as a dynamic process of parallelism, and nothing else.

4. Another way in which the poem sets up resistances which frustrate allegory is to be found in the fifth Fit. The butcher sets out to prove that two can be added to one. “Taking three as the subject to reason about— / A convenient number to state— / We add seven and ten, and then multiply out / By one thousand diminished by eight.

The result we proceed to divide, as you see, / By nine hundred and ninety and two: / Then subtract seventeen, and the answer must be / Exactly and perfectly true.”

And in fact the answer is perfectly true—but it is also what you begin with. The equation begins with 3—the number the Butcher is trying to establish—and it ends with 3. The math of the equation looks like this:

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

[This] simplifies to x, or a pure integer. The equation is a process which begins with no content and ends with no content. It is a pure process which has no end other than itself. It is thus perhaps the best paradigm of the process of the whole poem: it does what it is about. It is pure surface, but as Oscar Wilde once observed, “there is nothing more profound than surface.”

5. A fifth way in which the poem maintains its structural integrity is found in the many coinages it contains, words which Humpty Dumpty defines as portmanteau words, two meanings packed into one word like a portmanteau; words which Giles Deleuze, in the most comprehensive study of Carroll's significance for language, Logique du Sens, has so charmingly translated as “les mots-valises.”¹⁸ Carroll, in the introduction to the Snark writes, “… take the two words ‘fuming’ and ‘furious.’ Make up your mind that you will say both words, but have it unsettled which you will say first. Now open your mouth and speak. If your thoughts incline ever so little towards ‘fuming’ you will say ‘fuming-furious;’ if they turn by even a hair's breadth towards ‘furious,’ you will say ‘furious-fuming;’ but if you have that rarest of gifts, a perfectly balanced mind, you will say ‘frumious.’”

“If you have that rarest of gifts, a balanced mind …,” in other words, you will find just the right word, and not some approximation. In the seventh Fit, when the Banker is attacked by the Bandersnatch, the bird is described as having “frumious jaws.” And the Banker, utterly shaken, chants “in mimsiest tones,” a combination of miserable and flimsy. For a bird which exists only in the system of nonsense, adjectives used to describe objects in other systems will not do; they are not precise enough, and so the system itself provides its own adjective for its own substantive. Since only the Banker has ever been attacked by a Bandersnatch, it is necessary to find a unique adjective adequate to this unique experience: thus ‘mimsiest.” This attempt to find just the right word, and no other, resulting finally in coinages, is another way in which Carroll's search for precision, order, relates him to language as an innovative process in modern literature. Carroll speaks of “that rarest of gifts, a balanced mind” as the source of his experiment. In our own century it was a man remarkable for not possessing that gift who has best expressed the pathos of its absence in the face of language. In one of his fragments Antonin Artaud says “there's no correlation for me between words and the exact states of my being … I'm the man who's best felt the astounding disorder of his language in its relation to his thought.”¹⁹ Carroll's portmanteau words are revealing not only for the way they participate in the self-insuring autonomy of the poem. They also provide an illustration of how Carroll's nonsense is grounded in a logic of surface. The portmanteau word is not only a combination of two definitions, it is a combination of two systems, language and logic. Mention was made earlier of Saussure's insight into the way language means through divergence. The portmanteau word creates a new meaning by phonologically exploiting the divergence between two old meanings. It thus provides one of the most economical proofs of Saussure's insight into language. But the portmanteau word is also the third element of a three part progression, from one, furious, to two, fuming, to three, frumious. Like the rule of three it results in a new “truth,” and like the rule of three it is a unique kind of syllogism. In order to get a logical conclusion to the syllogism, it must grow out of a divergence between two prior parallel statements.

This is an important point if one is to see the logic which determines that Carroll's system is a language and not gibberish. In logic, not all pairs of apparent concrete propositions can result in a meaningful conclusion. Two examples, again taken from our poet's own textbook of Symbolic Logic will make the point. The two statements, “No riddles interest me if they can be solved”; and “All these riddles are insoluable,” cannot lead to a conclusion due to the fallacy of like eliminads not asserted to exist. “Some of these shops are not crowded; no crowded shops are comfortable” cannot lead to a conclusion due to the fallacy of unlike eliminads with an entity-premise. These and other possibilities for false syllogisms are generally subsumed under the fallacy of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc.” That is, the invalidity of the conclusion is a result of incorrect premises. And the criterion for determining whether the primary and secondary propositions are valid or not is provided by the rules of logic itself. These rules make up one system. But if one were to create another system, which would state that the original premises were correct according to its rules, then the same conclusion which the system of logic would call invalid would, perceived as a result obtained according to the new rules, be correct. By extrapolation a true syllogism has been created out of what was in another set false.

The point this arcane diversion into eliminads and entity-premises seeks to make is that the system of Carroll's nonsense is just such an extrapolation, it is the transcendence of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc principle into an aesthetic. Carroll's portmanteaux are words and not gibberish because they operate according to the rule which says that all coinages in the poem will grow out of the collapse of two known words into a new one. Carroll can deploy words he invents and still communicate, because he does so according to rules. Whereas an expression of gibberish would be a sound pattern whose meaning could not be gleaned from its use according to rules: an expression of gibberish would be a sound pattern whose meaning could not be gleaned either from the syntactic or morphological principles provided by its use, or which would be deducible according to such principles in a known language system. Nonsense, like gibberish, is a violence practiced on semantics. But since it is systematic, the sense of nonsense can be learned. And that is the value of it: it calls attention to language. Carroll's nonsense keeps us honest; through the process of disorientation and learning which reading him entails, we are made aware again that language is not something we know, but something alive, in process—something to be discovered.

6. The final structure of resistance I'd like to mention is contained in perhaps the most obvious feature of the poem, its rhyme. William K. Wimsatt, in a well-known essay, makes the point that in a poem the rhyme imposes “upon the logical pattern of expressed argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical implication.”²⁰ He goes on to say that “rhyme is commonly recognized as a binder in verse structure. But where there is need for binding there must be some difference or separation between the things to be bound. If they are already close together, it is supererogatory to emphasize this by the maneuver of rhyme. So we may say that the greater the difference in meaning between rhyme words the more marked and the more appropriate will be the binding effect.” This important insight into verse is contained in a piece entitled “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason.” Now, Lewis Carroll wrote a book entitled Rhyme? and Reason? (1883), and I suggest that the distinctive role which rhyme plays in the Snark is best caught by means of a titular portmanteau here. That is, it is precisely that one relation of rhyme to reason which Professor Wimsatt evokes in his title, which is put into question marks not only by Carroll's title of 1883, but which is also put into question in the function rhyme serves in The Hunting of the Snark.

Professor Wimsatt suggests that “the words of a rhyme, with their curious harmony of sound and distinction of sense, are an amalgam of the sensory and the logical, or an arrest and precipitation of the logical in sensory form; they are the icon in which the idea is caught.”²¹ I read this to mean that two words which are disparate in meaning result, when bound by rhyme, in a new meaning which was not contained in either of them alone. In other words, you get a kind of rule of three at work. Like the syllogism, two disparate but related elements originate a third. Thus understood, the rhyme of traditional verse has the effect of meaningful surprise; two rhymes will constitute a syllogism resulting in a new association.²²

But this is not true of nonsense verse. “They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; / They pursued it with forks and hope; / They threatened its life with a railway-share; / They charmed it with smiles and soap.” This stanza begins each of the last four Fits, and may stand as an example for what rhyme does throughout the poem. The rhyme words, “care, railway-share,” and “hope, soap” would be very different from each other in traditional verse, and binding effects of the sort Professor Wimsatt has demonstrated in Pope or Byron would be possible. Because the language of most verse is simply a more efficiently organized means of making sense of the sort that language outside verse provides. Thus, while very different, some kind of meaningful association could be made of them capable of catching an idea.

But “care,” “railway share,” “hope” and “soap” in this quatrain have as their ambiance not the semantic field of the English language, but the field of Carroll's nonsense. In traditional verse “rhyme words … can scarcely appear in a context without showing some difference of meaning.”²³ But if the whole context of a poem is without meaning, its separate parts will also lack it. There can be no differences in meaning between words because they are all equally meaningless in this context. So the reader who attempts to relate rhyme to meaning in Carroll's poem will be frustrated. The syllogism of rhyme, which in other verse has a new meaning as its conclusion, ends, in Carroll's verse, where it began. Instead of aiding meaning, it is another strategy to defeat it. Language in nonsense is thus a seamless garment, a pure cover, absolute surface.

But if The Hunting of the Snark is an absolute metaphor, if it means only itself, why read it? There are several answers, but the one I have chosen to give here is that it may help us to understand other, more complex attempts to do the same thing in modern literature. It is easy to laugh at the various casuistries by which readers have sought to make an allegory, something else, out of the Snark. But the same sort of thing is being done every day to Kafka or Nabokov. Possibly the example of Lewis Carroll may suggest how far we must go, how much we must forget, how much we must learn in order to see fiction as fiction.

For the moral of the Snark is that it has no moral. It is a fiction, a thing which does not seek to be “real” or “true.” The nineteenth-century was a great age of system building and myth makers. We are the heirs of Marx and Freud, and many other prophets as well, all of whom seek to explain everything, to make sense out of everything in terms of one system or another. In the homogenized world which resulted, it could be seen that art was nothing more than another—and not necessarily privileged—way for economic or psychological forces to express themselves. As Robbe-Grillet says, “Cultural fringes (bits of psychology, ethics, metaphysics, etc.) are all the time being attached to things and making them seem less strange, more comprehensible, more reassuring.”²⁴

Aware of this danger, authors have fought back, experimenting with new ways to insure the inviolability of their own systems, to invite abrasion, insist on strangeness, create fictions. Lewis Carroll is in some small degree a forerunner of this saving effort. To see his nonsense as a logic is thus far from being an exercise in bloodless formalism. That logic insures the fictionality of his art, and as human beings we need fictions. As is so often the case, Nietzsche said it best: “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”

After having stressed at such length that everything in the Snark means what it means according to its own system, it is no doubt unnecessary, but in conclusion I would like to answer the question with which we began. What is a Boojum? A Boojum is a Boojum.

Notes

1. Cited in R. L. Green, Lewis Carroll (New York, 1962), p. 25.

2. Logic and the Humor of Lewis Carroll (Leeds, 1951).

3. Sewell, p. 25.

4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary (Northwestern U. Press, 1964) pp. 39-40.

5. For raising the problems of the relationship between nonsense and the absurd, and for the computer example, I am grateful to my friend Jan Kott.

6. Merleau-Ponty, Ibid, p. 46.

7. J. R. Beloff, “Perpection and Extrapolation,” Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, XXXII (May 1957), 44.

8. See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton U. Press, 1960), pp. 63-92.

9. Greenacre, op. cit.

10. Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935).

11. Ibid., p. 294.

12. The White Knight (Edinburgh, 1952).

13. Taylor, op. cit.

14. Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark (New York, 1962), p. 25.

15. Ibid., p. 19.

16. The Enchafèd Flood (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 63.

17. Letter cited in Roger Lanclyn Green, Lewis Carroll (New York, 1962), p. 52.

18. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969, p. 59; see also pp. 268-78.

19. Artaud Anthology, ed. Jack Hirschman (San Francisco, 1965), p. 37.

20. The Verbal Icon (New York, 3rd Noonday edition, 1962), p. 153.

21. Op. cit., p. 165.

22. For a detailed study of sound/sense patterns in verse see: A. Kibedi Varga, Les Constantes du poème (The Hague, 1963), pp. 39-42, 91-121.

23. Wimsatt, p. 156.

24. “A Path for the Future of the Novel,” in Maurice Nadeau, The French Novel Since the War, tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1967), p. 185.