#295: DREADING THE BOOJUM.  Queen Victoria, the story goes, read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and was so delighted with it she let it be known she would love to have a copy of his next book, only to be surprised and confused by receiving a copy of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, a mathematical work Carroll had published under his own name, Charles Dodgson.  The story, alas, is apocryphal—Dodgson himself scuttled it—but it does point up the almost schizoid dichotomies in Dodgson’s life and works.  Aside from Alice Through the Looking Glass, the genuine and brilliant sequel to Wonderland, Carroll only ventured twice again into the realm of nonsense.  There’s Sylvie and Bruno, which fails rather badly: it’s laborious, self-conscious, and spattered with baby talk—a period comic affectation now, thank God, entirely extinct.  

        This leaves us The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits, published in 1876 with those eerie, grotesque illustrations by Henry Holiday, which as a pairing of text and picture stands well next to Carroll’s Alician collaboration with Tenniel.  The Snark is an eighty page poem in anapestic quatrains about a group of people—the Bellman, the Baker, the Butcher, the Broker, and so on, plus, for good measure, a Beaver—who sail in hunt of the Snark, a creature none of them has ever seen.  Well into the journey, a complication is introduced: the Snark might be a Boojum:  “But, oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, / If your Snark be a Boojum! For then / You will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!”  Consternation ensues: “If only you’d spoken before!”  But they continue, and….well, no spoilers.

        This is Carroll at his best combination of drollery and deadpan, but with a big dollop of dread mixed in.  Like those perspective-trick pictures that show you a vase or two profiles, the Snark hovers between being a fizzy giggle and an anxiety attack.  There’s the delightful bounce of the anapestic lines; no one can keep a straight face forever around an anapest. (Try to imagine Macbeth rewritten in limerick form.)  But all the analyses speak of existential angst, human folly, and futile endeavors, and there are those unsettling pictures by Holiday, whose characters have (sorry, David Byrne) tiny little bodies and great big heads, and look like Victorian political caricatures.  It’s perfectly of its period—permeated with anxiety fully as much as the poems of Wordsworth or Arnold—and yet truly a nonpareil.  It’s funny, but.  One critic nailed it, who wrote, “Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark is one of the funniest poems ever written. Funny the way Flannery O'Connor is funny. Funny the way Fargo and the wood chipper are funny.”  It was Carroll’s final successful foray into nonsense: that door at the back of his head which let the mighty and stifling respectability of the time drop out onto the carpet slammed shut and never opened again.  But the echo of those few moments of comic release are still with us, and we can still hear the howl of their laughter. (Repeat: the howl.)

There are innumerable editions and online texts of The Hunting of the Snark; make sure to find one that includes Holiday’s illustrations.  Martin Gardner, the explanatory angel of Carroll’s who did The Annotated Alice, after several revisions came up (Callooh! Callay!) with The Annotated Hunting of the Snark: The Definitive Edition, published by Norton in 2006.  It’s full of great stuff.  The Flannery O’Connor comment was by Sonya Post, on the website learningwellathome.com.