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Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) is a nonsense poem about a group of adventurers hunting a legendary beast. It borrows occasionally from Carroll's short poem "Jabberwocky" in Through the Looking Glass, (especially the poem's creatures and portmanteau words), but it is a stand-alone work, first published in 1876 by Macmillan. The illustrations were by Henry Holiday.
Cast of characters
The group is led by a Bellman as explained in Fit the First, third verse, and consists otherwise of a Boots, a maker of Bonnets and Hoods, a Barrister, a Billiard-marker, a Banker, a Butcher who can only kill beavers, a forgetful Baker, a Broker, and a Beaver. Care was also landed with the crew (as indicated in the first stanza). Hope, necessary for the pursuit of the elusive snark, also came along. The Boots is the only character who is not shown in any illustration, and is thus the most mysterious member of the crew (see below). As an alternate theory, some have suggested that the character identified as "Care" below is really the ship's figurehead (as shown in the first illustration), and that "Hope" is actually the Boots. Andrew Lang, who reviewed the book in 1876, suggested that "Hope" might be the Bonnet-maker. But this is clearly incorrect, since a shadowy figure making bonnets can be seen on the ship in the second illustration.
Plot summary
After crossing the sea guided by the Bellman's map of the Ocean — a blank sheet of paper — the hunting party arrive in a strange land. The Baker recalls that his uncle once warned him that, though catching Snarks was all well and good, you must be careful; for, if your Snark is a Boojum, then "you will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again." With this in mind, they split up to hunt. Along the way, the Butcher and Beaver become fast friends, the Barrister falls asleep, and the Banker loses his sanity after being attacked by a frumious Bandersnatch. At the end, the Baker calls out that he has found a snark; but when the others arrive he has mysteriously disappeared.
Structure
The poem has some aspects characteristic of much of Carroll's poetry; it utilizes technically adept meter and rhyme, grammatically correct phrasing, logical chains of events — and largely nonsensical content, frequently employing made-up words such as "Snark". It is by far his longest poem — unlike Alice which is prose with occasional poems within the text, the Snark rhymes from start to end. The poem is divided into eight sections or "fits" (a pun on the archaic word "fitt" meaning a part of a song, and "fit" meaning a convulsion):
- The Landing
- The Bellman's Speech
- The Baker's Tale
- The Hunting
- The Beaver's Lesson
- The Barrister's Dream
- The Banker's Fate
- The Vanishing
Intended audience
It is disputed whether Carroll had a young audience in mind when he wrote the book. The poem has no young protagonists. It is rather dark and does not end happily. In addition to the disappearance of the Baker, the Banker loses his sanity, an event that is described in detail. Similarly, Henry Holiday's illustrations for the original edition are caricatures with disproportionate heads and unpleasant features, very different from Tenniel's illustrations of Alice.
However, Carroll definitely thought the book was suitable for some children. Gertrude Chataway (1866–1951) was the most important child friend in the life of the author, after Alice Liddell. It was Gertrude who inspired The Hunting of the Snark, and the book is dedicated to her. Carroll first became friends with Gertrude in 1875, when she was aged nine, while on holiday at the English seaside. The Snark was published a year later. Upon the printing of the book, Carroll sent eighty signed copies to his favorite child friends. In a typical fashion, he signed them with short poems, many of them masterful acrostics of the child's name.
Origins
In composing the poem Carroll started from its last line. This is how he explained it in 1887: "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."
- In the midst of the word he was trying to say
- In the midst of his laughter and glee
- He had softly and suddenly vanished away
- For the snark was a boojum, you see.
Jabberwocky connection
In the preface to the Snark, Carrol remarks that "... this poem is to some extent connected with the lay of the Jabberwock..." and goes on to explain how to pronounce borogoves and slithy toves (words which do not appear in the text of the Snark). Eight other nonsense words in the Hunting of the Snark first appeared in his poem Jabberwocky. They are: bandersnatch, beamish, frumious, galumphing, jubjub, mimsiest (which appeared as mimsy in Jabberwocky), outgrabe and uffish. In a letter to a friend, Carroll described the domain of the Snark as "an island frequented by the Jubjub and the Bandersnatch — no doubt the very island where the Jabberwock was slain."
Interpretations
Various theories have tried to elucidate the text or parts thereof.
Lewis Carroll is the Baker
The text has a number of hints that suggest that Carroll intended for the character of the Baker to represent himself Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Snark. The fact that his name is unknown to the other crew members (he forgets it) attests that some riddle is involved. The Baker's character as described in Fit the First matches other descriptions of Carroll of himself (e.g. the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass). Lewis Carrol was 42 when he wrote the poem. The Baker is around the same age, as the phrase "I skip forty years" in Fit the Third: The Baker's Tale discloses. And finally, the Baker had "forty-two boxes, all carefully packed, With his name painted clearly on each" (Fit the First), which he left on the beach, presumably his previous life.Hidden meanings
As already stated, the Hunting of the Snark is unusual among Lewis Carroll's work for its length and its dark nature. This also fits with an attempt to find a hidden personal message within its pages. Many believe that this hidden message should be in the repeating stanza- 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.
But no convincing theory yet explains it. Lewis Carroll once wrote: "Periodically I have received courteous letters from strangers 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!"
The murderer was Boots
Apparently, as the poem states, the Snark was a Boojum. However, the following describes the Baker's last words, when the others see him leaping and cheering on a nearby hilltop:
- "It's a Snark!" was the sound that first came to their ears,
- And seemed almost too good to be true.
- Then followed a torrent of laughter and cheers:
- Then the ominous words "It's a Boo-"
- Then, silence.
The others disagree whether they heard the syllable "-jum" after this. Thus, a rival school of interpretation of the poem suggests that in fact there was no Boojum, but that the Boots betrayed them all and murdered the Baker, and that this was what the latter was trying to say when he died Shaw, Larry. "The Baker Murder Case", Inside and Science Fiction Advertiser, September 1956.. It is worth mentioning that the Boots is the most mysterious of the crew members. He is alluded to very shortly in Fit the First and Fit the Fourth and nowhere else, and is the only one of the crew members which does not appear in any of the original illustrations. It is also reasonable to assume the Boots (shoeshine in contemporary English) would have a particular grudge against the Baker, as he was wearing three pairs of boots one over the other (Fit the first, and this also appears clearly in the illustrations).
The Boojum was only dangerous to the Baker
There are a number of clues for this theory throughout the text. It is never stated explicitly that a Boojum might be dangerous to other crew members. When the Baker's uncle warns him about Boojums he says
- " '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!'
A hint that the Baker might be more vulnerable than the other crew members to Boojums is the repeated use of the word "beamish", an uncommon word which also appears in "Jabberwocky". On hearing this the Bellman is surprised and complains that the Baker should have mentioned this fact before. One would hardly suppose that the Bellman was unaware about an inherent danger in Snarks, or that he expected his crew members to enlighten him on such issues. Thus one must conclude that the Bellman did not know a fact specific to the Baker. Finally, and most revealingly, the Bellman's reply is
- "We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,
- If you never were met with again—
Which clearly implies that the danger to the Baker is greater than to other crew members.
Contrariwise, the Bellman's speech ends with
- "For, although common Snarks do no manner of harm,
- Yet, I feel it my duty to say,
- Some are Boojums—"
So the Bellman was definitely aware that Boojums pose some danger — perhaps the danger to beamish people is simply larger than to others.
A frequent criticism of this theory is that it may not cohere with several other facts implied by this poem and "Jabberwocky". As Lewis Carroll implied (see above), the domain of the Snark might well have been the same place where the Jabberwock met with his end. Yet it is well known that the heroic nephew in "Jabberwocky", who felled the manxome beast, was himself beamish ("Come to my arms, my beamish boy"), and so ventured into the domain of the Snark to hunt the Jabberwock, on the advice of an uncle knowledgeable about that locale and about beamishness. Yet for his uncle to advise him to do so would be wildly inconsistent with the protectiveness evinced by typical uncles toward their beamish nephews in Carroll's poems; knowing this, Carroll would have realized the Jabberwock story could not have taken place on an island known to be populated with Snarks.
Three well-known replies suggest the following: (1) Perhaps the nephew in "Jabberwocky" was not beamish until after vanquishing the Jabberwock. Indeed, perhaps "beamish" means "Jabberwock-slaying". Then, the nephew was in no danger until he was ready to leave the island: an acceptable risk. (Note that this interpretation allows the nephew to be the Baker himself.) (2) The Snark did not move in until the Jabberwock was killed. (Perhaps Jabberwocks and Snarks are natural enemies.) (3) Perhaps, in killing the Jabberwock, the nephew character in "Jabberwocky" (if one is to consider him the same man as the Baker) made himself incredibly more susceptible to Boojums than the other crew members; i.e., "beamish". Hence the exclamatory and rather violent reaction of the Bellman; perhaps he had vaguely heard of the one who killed the Jabberwock, and was surprised and alarmed that he had, as one of his crew, such a famous person who was so vulnerable to Boojums.
This is simply a theory; nothing in the poem specifically states that the Baker is in danger because he is, so-called, beamish. This theory and its sub-theories allows for the possibility that Boojums are especially dangerous for more mundane reasons (perhaps they are more fierce than other Snarks), so that the Bellman could have been far more aware of the danger that Boojums pose without specifically referring to the Baker.
The illustrations
A related debate is to what extent Holiday's illustrations should be considered when analyzing the poem. Opponents claim that they deviate from the text in a number of places (for example, the Baker is supposed to have whiskers and hair, Fit the Fourth, but in the illustrations he is bald) and hence should be discounted. Others claim they were prepared with great cooperation from Carroll, and that the correspondence of letters can tell us his opinion of each. Thus it would seem that Lewis Carroll did not intend care and hope from the repeating stanza to stand for two women, but was quite pleased with the interpretation after the fact Gardner, Martin: The Annotated Snark. Contrariwise, Carroll suppressed an illustration of the Boojum itself, since he wanted the monster to remain undescribed (none of its features described in Fit the third is physical).
Impact on science
The word "snark" has since been used in graph theory, as has "boojum". "Snark" was also used, some say with chilling aptness, as the name of the SM-62 Snark nuclear cruise missile. The term "boojum" has also been used in physics to describe a phenomenon originally found in superfluid helium-3, and also in liquid crystals, and for the boojum tree.
Impact on literature
Michael Ende translated the poem into German, and wrote the opera based on it. The opera was first performed in the Prinzregenten theater in Munich on January 16, 1988.
The characters of Snark have appeared in other works. For example, the Bellman and The Hunting of the Snark are referenced in Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots, his third Thursday Next book. In this novel the Term boojum refers to the annihilation of a character from the Book World.
China Mieville's The Scar features a ship called the Castor (Latin for beaver), crewed by characters whose names reference the characters of Snark: for example Tinntinnabulum, meaning a tinkling or bells, as in the Bellman).
Douglas Adams divided the radio series of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy into "fits", after a suggestion by Geoffrey Perkins, inspired by the Hunting of the Snark.
Jack London's boat was named Snark, and he described his voyage across the Pacific Ocean in the book titled The Cruise of the Snark (1913).
Characters in The Lyre of Orpheus, by Robertson Davies, often refer to the poem, and wonder whether the end of their quest to put on an opera will reveal a Snark or a Boojum.
In Vonda McIntyre's novelization of The Wrath of Khan, she reveals that the use of protomatter in the Genesis Device was made possible due to the discovery of sub-elementary particles, which were named by whimsical scientists as "snarks" and "boojums".
In Marvel Comics, "Snark" is a nickname given to a reptilian alien race whose proper name, Zn'rx, is considered unpronounceable by certain other sentient species. The nickname was bestowed by Aelfyre Whitemane, member of an equine alien race known as Kymellians; Whitemane had been assigned to study Earth and in doing so became fascinated with human literature, the works of Lewis Carroll in particular, and used "Snark" for its supposed phonetic similarity to "Zn'rx".
In the "Uplift" series of books by David Brin, the human and dolphin heroes are travelling aboard the Streaker, a Snarkhunter class exploration ship. Other references to the Hunting of the Snark may be found elsewhere in these books.
Notes
Media
External links
- The Hunting of the Snark An Agony in Eight Fits With nine llustrations by Henry Holiday
- Gutenberg's full text of the poem
- Full text with original illustrations
"The Hunting of the Snark"