6. Jabberwocky
Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky, whose opening stanza was first published a decade before Alice as a parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry, demonstrates conversely the creation of functional meaning out of denotationally flawed language. It is the linguistic equivalent of a piece of mathematical problem-solving in which a number of parts of the equation are left blank. Using the contextual structure of existing syntax and narrative, it is possible to determine the likely meaning of the poem’s nonsensical words. These are better considered neologisms than nonsense, however; they each signify something, and the puzzle is to triangulate what, in each case, that is likely to be.
Eleven out of the twenty-three words in the opening stanza are nonsensical, but its syntactical structure establishes it as a piece of description lacking information only on the level of vocabulary:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.[1]
It was [adjective], and the [adjective][noun]
Did [verb] and [verb] in the [noun]:
All [adjective] were the [noun],
And the [adjective][noun][verb].
The likelihood of the opening stanza being purely descriptive in character can be determined from reading the remainder of the poem. It isn’t necessary to know the meaning of the initial neologisms to work out what happens in the poem, because they do not describe the series of events that make up its plot. That is the task of the following five stanzas, which contain fewer neologisms and identify the poem within the genre of heroic monster-slaying epic.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.[2]
We know that someone is instructing his son to beware the Jabberwock. We don’t know exactly what the Jabberwock is, but there is enough contextual information – jaws that bite, claws that catch – to determine its status as a monster. We know that the Jubjub bird and Bandersnatch are best avoided. We can determine from this that ‘frumious’ means something bad. The remaining neologisms during the quest to find and slay the Jabberwock consist of a small number of adjectives, so that the syntactical structure necessary to establish the order and nature of events that follows is present; adjectives can mediate the description of objects and events to a degree, but their possible meaning is constrained by the nature of those objects and events themselves. When the son returns, the father’s response in asking whether he has killed the monster and seeking to embrace him, along with the assertion that the father ‘chortles in his joy’, indicates that his remaining exclamations must be joyful. The meanings of ‘frabjous’, ‘callooh’ and ‘callay’ are constrained by the demand of coherence in coexisting with the other pieces of information provided.
The poem repeats the opening descriptive stanza at the end. Many of Carroll’s neologisms can be partially determined either onomatopoeically or by association with homophones: the classically Carrollian tendency of creating combination ‘portmanteau’ words operates on the basis that certain easily identifiable sounds associated with particular words can be put together so that the meanings of the words they derive from are elided. ‘Slithy’, Carroll writes, is ‘compounded of SLIMY and LITHE’. By using words made up of sounds that, within shared linguistic assumptions, connote particular sets of qualities, Carroll can create signifiers that may be technically invalid, or nonsensical, but are not functionally invalid. Similarly, on the narrative level, Carroll can draw on the shared cultural assumptions concerning the literary genre and periods to which the poem alludes to increase the constraints on the possible meaning of his neologisms, so that the field of what they are likely to signify is minimised and their probable meaning easier to determine.
The efficacy of any functional language subsists in its shared assumptions regarding which signifiers signify which thing. So long as those shared assumptions are adhered to, it is possible to remove normative signifiers and replace them with alternatives; this is sometimes called poetic licence, but Carroll takes it a step further by making numerous substitutions in proportion to the poem’s normative language so that the meaning, though capable of being determined to a high degree of probability, requires explicit triangulation. Jabberwocky’s neologisms operate on a basis of signification rather than denotation due to the indeterminate nature of what they represent: we don’t have an established definition of what a Jabberwock is, or a real-life Jabberwock that we can point at when we say the word.
Jabberwocky’s narrative integrity is intact, which facilitates the triangulation of meaning in its nonsense vocabulary. We know what happens and who does what to whom. The rest is detail, and it is determinable detail. Jabberwocky demonstrates that elements of nonsense can be accommodated in a way that facilitates the functional determination of meaning so long as certain constraints are adhered to. The overall narrative structure must order the propositions it contains so that they are mutually coherent. The narrative structure must also remain coherent with external assumptions regarding its likely content and progression; this might be considered a literary-genre analogue of ‘common sense’ in which the plot and style assumptions of heroic battle with a monster are flagged consistently in a way that indicates the likely meaning of the missing elements.
When Carroll initially published Jabberwocky’s first stanza in isolation, he provided a set of definitions for its neologisms. The definitions are largely coherent with their place in the syntax of the poem, and with their place within the narrative: animals such as ‘toves’ do things like ‘gyre’, or scratch, in a ‘wabe’, or damp hillside. Some definitions, however, contain mutually contradictory elements: a ‘TOVE’, Carroll writes, is ‘A species of Badger. They had smooth white hair, long hind legs, and short horns like a stag; lived chiefly on cheese.’[3] A species of badger with smooth white hair seems possible; one that departs from the physiognomy of a badger to the point of long hind legs and short horns like a stag can no longer be taxonomically held as a badger. A ‘BOROGROVE’ is ‘An extinct kind of Parrot. They had no wings, beaks turned up, and made their nests under sundials; lived on veal.’[4] A wingless parrot and an unbadgerlike badger, if those descriptions were contained within the text of the poem rather than its margins, would add to its meaning-making challenges. From the margins, they operate as discrete jokes: the information is incoherent both internally within the various propositions contained within each definition, and incoherent with our understanding of what a badger or a parrot is.
Carroll then provided a brief prose translation; in his note to the translation, he speculates further about the poem:
There were probably sundials on top of the hill, and the ‘borogroves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of ‘raths’, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the ‘toves’ scratching outside. This is an obscure, yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.[5]
The note consists of a number of additional propositions relating to those contained within the narrative:
1. There were probably sundials on top of the hill
2. The ‘borogroves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined
3. The hill was probably full of the nests of ‘raths’, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the ‘toves’ scratching outside.
Of these, the latter two are coherent in relation to the definitions Carroll provides and the propositions regarding the ‘borogroves’ and ‘mome raths’ in the poem. The first is not: there is nothing in the text that can be construed as a sundial. The incoherence of the first proposition in the note set against the otherwise coherent narrative provided in the translated poem operates as a joke. Carroll’s final comment on the ‘deeply affecting’ nature of the poem is, similarly, an incoherent outlier in a sentence that might otherwise be coherent with both the contents of the translated poem and the contextual assumptions of poetic criticism. The poem, held in Carroll’s conceit as a lost fragment of Anglo-Saxon literature, passes as ‘obscure’, a ‘relic’ and ‘ancient’; a description of imaginary animals scratching and screeching on a warm afternoon is lacking in any obvious emotive content and thus incoherent with the claim that it is ‘deeply affecting’. This too is a joke, but the joke can only exist in its clear disjunction against an otherwise functional set of narrative propositions. Both the sundial and the claim for the poem as ‘deeply affecting’ are additionally incoherent with shared ‘common sense’ assumptions around the historical likelihood of sundials existing in the Anglo-Saxon wilderness and the appropriate display of affect in analysing poetry. It is, on the one hand, incoherent to feel emotional about screeching, scratching animals; it is also a truism that some advocates of obscure poetry display eccentric passions considered elsewhere to be inappropriate, or incoherent, with how most people feel about obscure poetry. It is therefore a joke about the content of the poem and more generally about the oddities of affect with which poetry can sometimes be received.
Carroll’s humour, therefore, operates across various narrative scales: the individual proposition; the narrative part or whole; the relationship between the narrative and the shared assumptions that characterise the meaning and reception of that particular narrative; and the shared assumptions that characterise the meaning and reception of narrative modes more generally. If humour consists of a misfit with sense, the narrative relationship with sense can be explored across those narrative scales too.
7. The Hunting of the Snark
Of Carroll’s four main literary works, The Hunting of the Snark goes furthest in its humorous deployment of illogic at often significant narrative cost. It is also fundamentally flawed at a narrative level: the title, The Hunting of the Snark, implies that a thing called a Snark will be hunted in the course of the narrative. It is clear from the Snark’s outset that the process of hunting is in no way functional and that the Snark may not, in fact, be a Snark. I will therefore use the Snark to illustrate the operation of Carroll’s humour, and where it leads in considering problems of sense.
Carroll subtitles the Snark as ‘An Agony, in Eight Fits’[6]. Both agony and fits are used archaically, agony to describe a struggle – the conflict that narrative epic is concerned with resolving – and fit as a part, or canto, of a poem. These archaic uses introduce the multiple meanings of a pun in each case too: agony as death or pain, fit as seizure.[7] Both of these meanings are coherent with the plot and style of the narrative respectively: it ends with a vanishing somewhat like death, and is characterised by inconsistencies and nonsequiturs that elsewhere could be taken as indications of psychopathology.
The subtitle sets up an expectation for the bathos of the mock-epic genre from the outset: a situation, once set up, will collapse by means of incoherence with its own ambition. In the Snark, we see this across narrative scales, from the level of the validity of an individual proposition to the validity of the aim of the narrative as a whole.
8. Problems of the individual proposition
Of the twelve members of the hunting expedition’s crew, the most notable is the Baker. The Baker is the only crew member to ultimately encounter the Snark, or Boojum, and subsequently ceases to exist.
The Baker is introduced in the form of a logical contradiction:
He came as a Baker: but owned when too late –
And it drove the poor Bellman half-mad –
He could only bake Bridecake – for which, I may state,
No materials were to be had.[8]
This can be unpacked as a series of propositions. If the Baker is a baker; a baker bakes things; the Baker can only bake Bridecake; and there are no ingredients for baking Bridecake, then the Baker cannot bake Bridecake; the Baker cannot bake anything;
and the Baker is not a baker.
The Butcher’s identity is similarly self-contradictory:
He came as a Butcher: but gravely declared,
When the ship had been sailing a week,
He could only kill Beavers. The Bellman looked scared,
And was almost too frightened to speak.
But at length he explained, in a tremulous tone,
There was only one Beaver on board;
And that was a tame one he had of his own,
Whose death would be deeply deplored.[9]
Carroll has set up an identical logical problem. If the Butcher is a butcher; a butcher kills animals; the Butcher only kills beavers; and the only beaver onboard is his beloved pet Beaver, then the Butcher cannot kill his pet Beaver; the Butcher cannot kill any animals; and the Butcher is not a butcher.
In each case, Carroll creates a situation in which the identity of both Baker and Butcher is conferred by the ability to carry out at least some professional tasks, of which each can carry out only one, allowing them to retain their identity. Carroll then adds a piece of circumstantial information that implies that the particular professional task that they are able to do is not possible, and because their identity is their professional identity, and their professional identity is rendered circumstantially impossible by their inability to carry out at least some professional tasks, their identity is self-contradictory.
In addition to the problem of being, paradoxically, both Baker and not-baker, the Baker’s identity is beset by the fact that he has ‘wholly forgotten his name’. The name ‘Baker’ does not denote the Baker, so far as the Baker is concerned. At the same time, the Baker does respond to a number of phrases whose usual signification is non-specific, and therefore opposite in function to a name, as though they denote him:
He would answer to ‘Hi!’ or to any loud cry,
Such as ‘Fry me!’ or ‘Fritter my wig!’
To ‘What-you-may-call-um!’ or ‘What-was-his-name!’
But especially ‘Thing-um-a-jig!’[10]
The phrases ‘What-you-may-call-um!’, ‘What-was-his-name!’ and ‘Thing-um-a-jig!’ exist specifically to denote nonspecificity, to signify the insignificant, or to denote an unknown denotatum: in these respects they too are self-contradictory in failing to carry out the act of denotation we expect them to. But the Baker has not yet run out of alternative naming options, and at first it looks as though more specificity might be provided:
While, for those who preferred a more forcible word,
He had different names from these:
His intimate friends called him ‘Candle-ends’,
And his enemies ‘Toasted-cheese.’[11]
It would be expected that the Baker’s intimate friends and enemies would use names connoting like and dislike, and with some kind of contrasting, oppositional quality when compared. No such thing is offered: instead, there are two apparently random and metrically identical phrases.
Naming is perhaps the most obvious example of how language represents the world, and in the case of the Baker it is entirely dysfunctional. The Baker’s identity cannot be conferred by naming and it cannot be conferred by his professional status. The identity of a character within a narrative can be conferred by the accrual of pieces of information about their particular attributes; the first mention of the Baker is that he is ‘famed’ for the things that he has forgotten, and there follows a detailed list of possessions that the Baker left behind and that therefore cannot be present to help identify him on the ship. Details performing denotational function in describing the Baker are lacking, while the details that are present are characterised either by negation, their own internal contradiction or their inability to contribute to a coherent picture of who the Baker is.
The only exception to this, in providing apparently functional information that does not contradict anything else we are told about the Baker, is that ‘His form is ungainly’, ‘his intellect small’ and ‘his courage is perfect’.[12] But there is so much dysfunctional information that this, and the Baker’s tendency to commune with dangerous animals, cannot be trusted as a representation of reality: the Snark’s protagonist is already set out apophatically as a non-character. In a more conventional narrative, the assertion that ‘He would joke with hyenas’[13] would itself be an obvious joke, operating on the implied pun of a hyena’s laughter and the animal’s lethal reputation, so that the hyena laughs and not-laughs, and the pleasurable interaction of joking is implied as dangerous, and thus not-pleasurable. The joke runs the risk of being lost because it is unmoored to any coherent set of meanings in which the behaviour is revealed as aberrant: everything else about the Baker is stranger still.
If the Baker’s identity is riddled with problems, so is the Snark’s. The crew is informed that there are ‘five unmistakeable marks’ that characterise a ‘warranted genuine Snark’[14]. This implies the possibility of a class of invalid Snarks, but a clear list of attributes should help in determining one from the other.
‘Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,
Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp:
Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,
With a flavour of Will-’o’-the-wisp.[15]
In a conventional narrative, a list of attributes of a thing to be hunted could reasonably entail some adjectives relating specifically to taste before fleshing them out with comparisons. Carroll carries out these operations but uses examples that are taxonomically inappropriate. The Snark’s attributes, taste-wise, are ‘meagre’, ‘hollow’ and ‘crisp’, words ordinarily used to signify number, density and texture. A ‘coat that is rather too tight in the waist’ offers figurative similarity to a kinaesthetic rather than taste-related experience. ‘A flavour of Will-’o’-the-wisp’ makes a taste comparison to a mythical object that is both nonexistent, as a mythical object, and known mythologically to be ineffable. The outcome is that no useful information is made available in identifying the taste of a Snark.
In a conventional set of descriptive markers identifying a thing to be hunted, taste would also be unlikely to come first – visual or sound markers would be necessary to identify the thing before it can be killed and eaten. Instead, though, the unmistakeable marks become more abstract, residing in the Snark’s preference for getting up very late, its poor sense of humour and its fondness for bathing-machines. There is a joke about the Snark’s belief that bathing-machines ‘add to the beauty of scenes – a sentiment open to doubt’,[16] but because the set of propositions describing the Snark either do not have any descriptive function, in the case of its taste, or describe elements of the predominantly mental character of an eccentric human, the failed proposition about the beauty of bathing machines is unmoored against a set of propositions that are themselves either dysfunctional or incoherent. A series of jokes strung together as description results in neither description nor jokes, but nonsense.
The fifth mark ‘is ambition’, but the ensuing details – the first items of detail that might otherwise have been coherent with the act of describing attributes of an object being hunted – are incoherent with the description of ambition. The taxonomical distinction of ‘each particular batch’ of Snarks as either ‘those that have feathers, and bite’ or ‘those that have whiskers, and scratch’[17] could have been descriptively useful, but it comes at the end of a series of nonsensical attributes that collectively undermine the commonsensical context of how ‘unmistakeable marks’ are taxonomically deployed.
However, if ‘common Snarks’ can be taxonomised into sets of ‘those that have feathers, and bite’ and ‘those that have whiskers, and scratch’, there is an additional taxonomical problem, which is that ‘some [Snarks] are Boojums’.[18] This is complicated further by the assertion, via the Baker’s uncle in the subsequent Fit, ‘The Baker’s Tale’, that a Snark might either ‘be a Snark’ which is ‘right’ or, more problematically, ‘be a Boojum’:
He remarked to me then, said that mildest of men,
‘”If your Snark be a Snark, that is right:
Fetch it home by all means – you may serve it with greens,
And it’s handy for striking a light...
‘”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!”’[19]
If some Snarks are Boojums, some Boojums must be Snarks. Perhaps Boojums are a subset of Snarks. But if a Snark identified as a Snark is valid, and a Snark identified as a Boojum is not valid, a Boojum cannot be a Snark, and some Boojums cannot be Snarks, which means some Snarks are not, in fact, Boojums. They are either Boojums or Snarks. And yet the claim ‘some Snarks are Boojums’ is repeated.
Therefore, two contradictory propositions regarding Snarks and Boojums are held simultaneously throughout the text: Some Snarks are Boojums; and No Boojums are Snarks. Perhaps the term ‘Snark’ and the term ‘Boojum’ are both used to refer to the same thing, and the confusion exists in the alternative concepts of that thing rather than which of them correctly refers to the thing itself; however, given that we never resolve what exactly that thing is on the basis of being able to point to one without vanishing into thin air, all we have are the terms and the terms present a problem.
Within Carroll’s own system of logic, the propositions ‘No Boojums are Snarks’ and ‘Some Snarks are Boojums’ pose an additional problem. In his chapter introducing propositions in Symbolic Logic (1876), the title of a subsection is ‘What is implied, in a Proposition of Relations, as to the Reality of its Terms?’ Carroll writes:
A proposition of Relation, beginning with “Some,” is henceforward to be understood as asserting that there are some existing Things, which, being Members of the Subject, are also Members of the Predicate; i.e. that some existing Things are members of both Terms at once. Hence it is to be understood as implying that each Term, taken by itself, is Real.
[Thus, the Proposition “Some rich men are invalids” is to be understood as asserting that some existing Things are “rich invalids.” Hence it implies that each of the two classes, “rich men” and “invalids,” taken by itself, is Real.]
A proposition of Relation, beginning with “No,” is henceforward to be understood as asserting that there are no existing Things which, being Members of the Subject, are also members of the Predicate; i.e. that no existing Things are Members of both Terms at once. But this implies nothing as to the Reality of either Term taken by itself.
[Thus, the Proposition “No mermaids are milliners” is to be understood as asserting that no existing Things are “mermaid-milliners.” But this implies nothing as to the Reality, or the Unreality, of either of the two Classes, “mermaids” and “milliners,” taken by itself. In this case, the Subject is Imaginary, and the Predicate Real.]
‘Real’ and ‘unreal’ imply the existence of number rather than its absence: a real class contains one or more things, and an unreal class is empty. ‘Some Snarks are Boojums’ implies that both Snark and Boojum are real classes, each of which contain some existing things.[20]
‘No Boojums are Snarks’ does not present a problem in itself since Carroll’s rules of existential import are agnostic with regard to the reality or unreality of the ‘No’ proposition. But it also implies that there cannot be existing things in both the classes ‘Snark’ and ‘Boojum’; the proposition ‘Some Snarks are Boojums’ does entail that there are existing things in both classes. While Carroll holds that a ‘No’ statement such as ‘No Snarks are Boojums’ could pertain to imaginary subjects – and we are left in no doubt, given the Snark’s resistance to narrative coherence with common-sense reality, that they are imaginary subjects – his approach to existential import has the effect of eliding the nonexistent, the imaginary and the paradoxical. If there are no members of a set, the things the set contains are unreal or imaginary. If propositions, by means of self-contradiction or the addition of contextual constraints that have the effect of contradicting other propositions, result in paradox or negation, as in the case of the Baker or the Snark, the terms of those propositions are invalid, and cannot exist. The effect of paradox and negation is to undermine the possibility of existential import within Carroll’s system, just as paradoxical objects and relationships within the text undermine the coherence of narrative reality.
Furthermore, there is a joke entailing the elision of rules of logical systems and the truth of their premisses that is itself a sort of pun on the function of existential import: Carroll, elsewhere, states that ‘The validity of a Syllogism is quite independent of the truth of its Premisses’[21] – whether or not it is true, factually, that Snarks exist or not does not pertain to the validity of propositions regarding Snarks. The existential import of a Snark is an issue limited to the existence of one or more things in the mathematical set of Snarks; the existence of the Snark within the narrative reality of the Snark is, however, also in question here: it is a self-referentially fictional world populated with self-evidently imaginary, unreal things, of which the least real, most nonexistent thing is the Snark. Logical determinations can validate the mathematical existence of different classes of things; here, as the determinations are imported into the more holistic narrative reality of fiction, the question of the likely nonexistence of imaginary things hangs over the conceptual divide of hypotheticals, and the process of logical determination itself is revealed as flawed with the addition of narrative propositions containing contradictory information.
If a Boojum is not a Snark, it must be another class of thing. The only information provided about the attributes of that class is that anyone who encounters it will ‘softly and suddenly vanish away’. Its attributes are defined only in its relationship to the process of observation, which it renders, paradoxically, impossible.
9. Problems of internal narrative incongruity
The relationships between elements of a functional narrative such as characters are generally coherent with one another, so that the role of each character as actor in the narrative’s events supports the description of the event and the descriptions of the roles of other actors that contribute to the event. There might be some elements of contradiction in a conventional narrative – a nemesis to be overcome, or a professional odd couple – but those contradictions are generally introduced so that the narrative can set out that the apparent contradiction serves either as an obstacle to be overcome within the events of the plot or is gradually reappraised as a set of complementary differences rather than a contradiction per se. Comedy is the only genre in which this is unlikely to happen: the golden rule of situational comedy is that an attempt to overcome a key point of contradiction must fail in each event, but this maintained contradiction usually exists against a coherence in the stability and predictability of attributes and actions of characters within its events.
The Snark’s subject – the Snark – is paradoxical and indefinite in character. It may well not exist. The Snark’s protagonist – the Baker – is paradoxical and indefinite in character. The Baker does at least exist at the beginning of the poem, but his incoherence with regard to his own identity as Baker and capacity to respond to identification is problematic. From this unstable starting point, we can add the various characters of the crew. They are not mutually contradictory in the conventionally comical odd-couple sense. Instead, they are entirely incoherent in their relationships to one another and their function in the narrative, which is to undertake a voyage to hunt a Snark. Their only common attribute is that each of their names begin with B, which is never explained and serves no functional narrative purpose.
The crew was complete: it included a Boots –
A maker of Bonnets and Hoods –
A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes –
And a Broker, to value their goods.
A Billiard-marker, whose skill was immense,
Might perhaps have won more than his share –
But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.[22]
None of the professions listed are useful for navigational or hunting purposes. The extent of the coherence is that the Barrister, Broker and Banker are listed as having the expected functions of barristers, brokers and bankers. The subsequent introduction of the Baker and Beaver, as discussed previously, undermine this pattern of functional identity.
The Bellman, a town crier whose professional function is to carry out acts of signification in the public domain, is the leader of the expedition. His actions are incoherent with his role as competent captain from the outset: the Snark opens as he ‘landed his crew with care’ by pulling them out of the sea by their hair.
The Bellman’s Speech, the title of the second Fit of the Snark, indicates that the Bellman is about to do something for which he is professionally functional. Carroll sets up this expectation in the first stanza in a rare example of descriptive propositions that are entirely coherent both with each other and contextual common-sensical assumptions of the attributes of a captain:
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]
This moment of coherence exists so that it can be immediately undermined with the introduction of the Bellman’s map:
He had brought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.
‘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!’
‘Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank’
(So the crew would protest) ‘that he’s brought us the best –
A perfect and absolute blank!’[24]
An illustration of the perfectly blank map accompanies the crew’s denunciation of ‘conventional signs’; the Bellman’s map is a skit about signification. It may be true that the markings of a map are conventional signs, but they operate within a system of signification in which the use of those signs is a shared, coherent practice, and in which each sign denotes something in the territory to be mapped. Here, both the shared practice is disputed as useful, and the map that maps no territory at all – that fails to denote anything in the external world – is the best sort of map.
Signification is supposed to be the Bellman’s job. A functional performance of signification is what underpins the validity of the Bellman’s identity as bellman. This process also fails. The Bellman is, at least, capable of ringing a bell, which is his ‘only one notion for crossing the ocean’.[25] The noise of the bell is empty signification, devoid of any contextual meaning, and so are the Bellman’s instructions as captain: ‘Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!’[26]
‘Steer to starboard’ is a meaningful directional instruction, but it is constrained by an additional instruction containing a nonsensical direction, ‘larboard’, which invalidates the first instruction. The bowsprit, at the front end of the boat, gets ‘mixed up’ with the rudder, at the back. This situation is defined by the term ‘snarked’, which has no meaning other than to describe the bowsprit’s confusion with the rudder, so that a word empty of meaning is defined by a situation empty of direction.[27] The voyage is unconstrained by direction, just as it is unconstrained by the ‘conventional signs’ that would indicate dimension and direction on a functional map with a relationship to its territory.
If a successfully navigated voyage is one event necessary in hunting a Snark, another is the preparation for the hunt itself. In the Fit of the Snark dedicated to this, ‘The Hunting’, the crew are provided with instructions:
‘To seek it with thimbles, to seek it with care;
To pursue it with forks and hope;
To threaten its life with a railway-share;
To charm it with smiles and soap![28]
Of these, one – ‘to seek it with care’ – is coherent with practices commonly held to be useful in hunting. The verbs to ‘seek’, ‘pursue’, ‘threaten’ and ‘charm’ are all conceivably functional, but their function is undermined by the items suggested to be deployed in carrying them out. The items are incoherent both with each other and with hunting. Accordingly, the crew’s response in preparing for the hunt is similarly incoherent.
Then the Banker endorsed a blank cheque (which he crossed),
And changed his loose silver for notes.
The Baker with care combed his whiskers and hair,
And shook the dust out of his coats.
The Boots and the Broker were sharpening a spade –
Each working the grindstone in turn;
But the Beaver went on making lace, and displayed
No interest in the concern:
Though the Barrister tried to appeal to its pride,
And vainly proceeded to cite
A number of cases, in which making laces
Had been proved an infringement of right.
The maker of Bonnets ferociously planned
A novel arrangement of bows:
While the Billiard-marker with quivering hand
Was chalking the tip of his nose. [29]
No activity listed is useful as preparation for a hunt. Some characters behave coherently with their professional identity: the Banker behaves like a banker, the Barrister like a barrister, the Bonnet-maker like a bonnet-maker and the Billiard-marker like a billiard-marker. However, the mutually incoherent set of characters and the attributes they possess results in an incoherent set of actions. In the case of the Barrister, behaving like a barrister throws additional digression and contradiction into the mix; later on, we will see that the Barrister provides a larger narrative digression from the Snark-hunt. The inappropriateness of any given preparation would, in isolation, operate as a joke; the incoherence created by all preparations being inappropriate muddies the status of any one of them as a joke.
In fifth Fit, ‘The Beaver’s Lesson’, the Butcher, who has already been established as incompetent within the limited demands of his own professional identity, appeals to mathematics and the natural sciences to validate his claim for the presence of the Jubjub bird to the Beaver.
‘ ‘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.’[30]
The Butcher appeals to the nonexistent intellectual authority of the Bellman to confirm his assertion that he has just asserted something. He then claims that he has asserted something twice, and that the third assertion proves the claim. But by reflexively stating that he has ‘uttered the sentiment’ about the Jubjub bird and appealing to the Bellman’s authority to support that claim, it is unclear what the Butcher is seeking to prove: is it the proposition about the sound of the Jubjub bird, or the proposition about the proposition about the sound of the Jubjub bird? If it is the latter, which seems reflexively possible, asserting the claim for the proof is, the Butcher argues, the proof itself. The distinction between the proposition the proof seeks to prove and the proof becomes lost.
The Butcher’s knotted logic is lost to the Beaver, who cannot count to three, leading the Butcher to instruct the Beaver in a mathematical proof that 2 + 1 = 3.
‘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.’[31]
This too is circular: whichever starting number is used will be the end result, as Gardner expresses algebraically in The Annotated Snark.[32]
The Butcher’s appeal to the Natural History of Jubjub birds is little more successful. He begins by describing its temperament, the only type of attribute coherent with his claim to knowledge of the bird’s natural history. As the description of its ‘temper’ continues, however, it departs taxonomically from attributes of the temperament of animals into a set of claims suited to the temperament of highly eccentric, and thus aberrant, humans, and then departs taxonomically from attributes of temperament itself, instead describing it in human social terms: it is ‘desperate’; ‘lives in perpetual passion’; ‘its taste in costume is highly absurd’; ‘it is ages ahead of the fashion’. The Butcher describes the Jubjub bird in a further set of human behaviours – ‘it knows any friend it has met once before’; ‘it never will look at a bribe’; ‘in charity meetings it stands at the door and collects though it does not subscribe’ – none of which are coherent with descriptions of a bird, or with visual or sound cues that one might look for in identifying one. They are complex mental and behavioural traits that cannot be seen or heard, but only identified within a complex systemic analysis of behavioural signification. Given the failure of very basic attempts at signification in the narrative so far, this does not look promising. The Butcher describes the Jubjub’s flavour, which, like the Snark’s, cannot be used in identification prior to killing and eating the bird, for which it must first be identified. No specific markers of flavour are offered: it is ‘more exquisite by far’ than other flavours, but the comparison of value is useless without information on how to identify the bird, and the flavour of the bird, either using appropriate taxonomical attributes or appropriate comparisons to taxonomically similar creatures or flavours. The Butcher then describes the process of treating the Jubjub in order to preserve it:
‘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.’[33]
It is not possible to boil anything in sawdust, which is a solid rather than a liquid, so the instruction is self-contradictory. Glue is not salt, so nothing can be salted in glue. The contradictions are expanded with the incoherent addition of locusts, which are not useful for condensing anything. One useful piece of identifying information – its symmetrical shape – sneaks in, but at this point it too is assumed to be meaningless, since no other proposition relating to the natural history of the Jubjub bird holds, and the assumption must therefore be that nothing in the natural history of the Jubjub bird holds. The lesson, and the appeals to science in identifying a creature to be hunted, have failed.
Each narrative Fit operates as a larger and more complex multi-propositional joke in which no functional events relating to its title happen. ‘The Hunting’, for example, as a unit of narrative, could operate as a joke in which no functional hunting takes place; this too, however, succumbs to a similar problem one level up in the narrative hierarchy, which is that it sits alongside a set of other units of narrative, each of whose narrative fails to carry out the function indicated in its title properly, with the notable exceptions of ‘The Baker’s Tale’, which does at least contain a tale told by the Baker, and ‘The Vanishing’ at the end. ‘The Landing’ is carried out ineptly by hauling men ashore by their hair, and with important possessions left behind; ‘The Bellman’s Speech’ is empty of signification; ‘The Hunting’ fails to meaningfully prepare for any hunting; ‘The Beaver’s Lesson’ contains no functional content; and ‘The Barrister’s Dream’ and ‘The Banker’s Fate’ are digressions, ‘The Barrister’s Dream’ detracting from the overall narrative relating to the Snark-hunt. No individual section is an isolated narrative failure.
‘The Barrister’s Dream’ sees the Snark taking the mantle of barrister to defend a pig ‘on the charge of deserting its sty’ in court. Much as ‘The Beaver’s Lesson’ demonstrates a series of procedural failures in logic, mathematics and science, ‘The Barrister’s Dream’ demonstrates failed legal process. A barrister’s task is to construct an argument in his client’s favour that is logically coherent with reference to agreed external facts. The fact that the pig’s sty is deserted is – rarely for the Snark – incontrovertible. The Snark’s initial strategy is to speak extensively without signification:
The Witnesses proved, without error or flaw,
That the sty was deserted when found:
And the Judge kept explaining the state of the law
In a soft under-current of sound.
The indictment had never been clearly expressed,
And it seemed that the Snark had begun,
And had spoken three hours, before any one guessed,
What the pig was supposed to have done.[34]
The Jury exists in a state of mutual incoherence within itself, and with the legal process it is required to follow:
The Jury had each formed a different view
(Long before each indictment was read),
And they all spoke at once, so that none of them knew,
One word that the others had said.[35]
The Snark then queries the statute cited by the Judge as ‘fudge’, or nonsense, and introduces its own legal argument with no relationship to the charge of desertion before arguing that the pig is not guilty of two additional charges of Treason and Insolvency that have not been previously mentioned, and are thus incoherent with the assertion of Desertion that the court case seeks to prove:
‘In the matter of Treason the pig would appear
To have aided, though scarcely abetted:
While the charge of Insolvency fails, it is clear,
If you grant the plea “never indebted”.
‘The fact of Desertion I will not dispute:
But its guilt, as I trust, is removed
(So far as related to the costs of this suit)
By the Alibi which has been proved. [36]
The Snark’s argument against the charge of Insolvency, ‘never indebted’, is a position taken by a defendant rather than a legal argument, and confounds the legal process: the defendant has a position, or plea; the barrister constructs a legal and logical argument that is coherent with that position and the established evidence; the judge determines whether the barrister’s argument is admissible as a legal or logical proof. The Snark might be expected to query the ‘fact of Desertion’, but it does not. Instead, it appeals to an alibi – a proposition supporting the pig’s innocence – which it claims ‘had been proved’, but no alibi has been mentioned. The proposition that the pig is not guilty of desertion therefore rests solely on its appeal to a supporting proposition that does not exist.
The Judge then confounds the process further by handing over the task of summing-up to the Snark, who is now in a position to determine the proof of his own argument, introducing a similar problem of self-reference to the Butcher’s proof of his own statement in the form of that statement, aside from the incongruity with correct legal practice. The incoherent Jury hands its task to the Snark too; the Snark, tasked with arguing against its client’s guilt, finds the pig guilty. The Snark sentences the pig to ‘Transportation to life’ and ‘then to be fined forty pound’[37] – the pig, whose crime is to be absent from its sty, is sentenced to a more distant absence still, and one that no longer existed as a punishment in English law at the time of writing, so that transportation is a nonexistent punishment, and thus both punishment and not-punishment.[38] The existence of the fine is undermined by a similar contextual problem: Carroll highlights the inverted logic of fining the pig after it has left, so that it cannot be fined, by italicising then. The pig itself is then revealed by the jailer to be ‘dead for some years’, and thus not to exist. ‘The Barrister’s Dream’ is an account of a court case in which each actor and event that contributes to the overall process is either nonexistent or logically flawed; as such, its status as a court case is itself questionable.
In addition to this, it offers no information that can be used in hunting a Snark. It tells nothing of the process or preparation of hunting or navigation. A unitary section of narrative such as the Snark’s Fits or a novel’s chapters should consist of a series of propositions that set out a convincing, coherent account of a unitary event. The propositions that make up the account of that event should support the narrative propositions that follow in the account of that event, and that follow in later sections of narrative. A unitary section of narrative should be coherent with the assertions of events in the sections before and after it, and should contain information that is necessary to the assertion of subsequent events. We would expect a conventional narrative to be both chronologically and teleologically coherent in this respect; it is possible to jump about in time so long as teleological coherence is maintained in the provision of items of information that in turn feed coherence of those that follow, while a chronologically coherent narrative is generally teleologically coherent by virtue of its events unfolding in this order. Here, there is nothing indicating breach of ordinary chronology, but the teleological order that should follow from it is not there. In ‘The Barrister’s Dream’, the court case exists in the most skeletal procedural form of a court case: a charge is made, a defence argued, a jury consulted, a judge tasked with summing up, a verdict and punishment announced. As such, its narrative structure is just about coherent. But each of these individual events is fatally flawed, and the logic behind the existence of the case revealed to be flawed, so that while the structure of its events as they relate to each other is coherent, the events themselves are not. There is also nothing teleologically necessary about any event or item of descriptive information: the events are not referred to subsequently, let alone used to support or explain subsequent events, and there is no propositional information, about, for example, the attributes of the Snark, that is coherent with – let alone supportive of – later events in its hunting.
The final section of the Snark, ‘The Vanishing’, is the closest the Snark gets to a functional narrative episode. The other members of the crew observe the Baker, in a state of excitement after apprehending a Snark.
‘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,[39]
The name ‘Thingumbob’ is coherent with the names used to denote the Baker previously. The Baker is behaving in ways coherent with finding a Snark – shouting, waving his hands, wagging his head. Earlier, the Baker was resistant to both naming and his identity as a baker. He is finally functionally identifiable, but the insertion of a paradox – ‘their Baker – their hero unnamed’ both states the Baker’s name and states that he is unnamed. ‘Unnamed’ relates to ‘hero’ too, and has the additional meaning that the Baker possesses hero status that is, as yet, unnamed or unofficial. It is therefore both a straightforward paradox, asserting a name and not-name, and a pun in which it asserts one meaning in the context of problems with the Baker’s identity and another in the context of his status and announcement as a hero, providing a straightforward propositional self-contradiction and an additional contradiction of contextual meaning. This could operate as a joke against the otherwise functional narrative, but the advent of meaningful action after a long spell of narrative incoherence distracts from it. The Baker has found the Snark, the Snark is, in fact, a Boojum, and the Baker is sublimated into nothingness, vanishing softly and suddenly away exactly as predicted.
Erect and sublime, for one moment of time.
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.
‘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. Some fancied they heard in the air
A weary and wandering sigh
That sounded like ‘– jum!’ but the others declare
It was only a breeze that went by.
They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
Where the Baker had met with the Snark.
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. [40]
The Baker identifies the Snark, or what he thinks is the Snark, with certainty in the immediacy of his first experience of it. The attributes of the Snark that were previously listed, however, do not lend themselves to immediate identification, if they lend themselves to functional identification at all. The nature of the identification cannot be taxonomical. The systems of taxonomy and linguistic description have been demonstrated as dysfunctional. The Baker, furthermore, is dysfunctional: he is a character without identity, named and unnamed, a baker who cannot bake. His relationship with the ordinary processes of naming and identity is to respond to phrases that denote nothing in particular, and are thus paradoxically empty of denotatation, or whose field of signification is so wide as to be meaningless when applied to identity, and to fail to respond to his own name. For the most part, the Baker exists outside of the constraints of language, which makes him functionally incompetent.
However, the constraints of language, and in particular the logical underpinnings of language, have constructed a paradox out of the Snark-Boojum relationship. It is held to be the case that some Snarks are Boojums, and therefore that some Boojums must be Snarks, and it is also held to be the case that a Snark is edible and essentially harmless while a Boojum is something else entirely and will make you softly and suddently vanish away, which means that a Boojum cannot be a Snark.
The Baker names the object or event that he experiences – it is unclear which, since no material evidence is present and the scene is described apophatically as a Vanishing characterised by his disappearance, and the disappearance of any attribute or thing that might assist in the process of positive identification of him or the Snark – first as Snark and then, partially, as Boojum. The naming of Boojum is left indeterminate, in keeping with the paradoxical and indeterminate status of the Boojum.
Perhaps the Baker’s existence outside of ordinary logical frameworks facilitates his appraisal of the Snark, because it too exists outside of ordinary logical frameworks, so that logical frameworks result in paradox when they are applied to it. A paradox is a denotational problem: a false proposition implies all propositions or no propositions. The Baker, himself a paradox who identifies with sounds empty of signification apart from the sound itself, such as ‘Hi!’, and non-specific denotations such as ‘Thingumbob’, and possesses no identity specific enough to be an identity, sublimates into the all or the nothing of the Boojum at the end. The cost of resolving the paradox of the Baker is that he must disappear, although he does not die in any straightforwardly material way, so perhaps his vanishing is instead a sublimation into a state beyond the logical and linguistic categories that he previously troubled. The rapturous sublimation in the text – ‘erect and sublime’ – implies this as a possibility.
The identity of what the Baker appraises is confirmed in the poem’s last line as a Boojum. It is uncertain that a Snark was successfully hunted, since the question of whether or not a Snark is the same thing as a Boojum remains unresolved. The Boojum may have been appraised, but it is unclear whether or not appraising something is the same as hunting it, because hunting entails not only finding something but, at the very least, taxonomically identifying it to a high degree of certainty, and that certainty is lacking in the case of the Snark.
The cost of resolving the paradox of the Snark’s relationship with the Boojum, if it has been resolved, is that the Snark/Boojum, along with the observer and his capacity to describe the relationship ceases to exist – at least in any way that can be expressed in the system of linguistic and narrative signification that The Hunting of the Snark consists of. The two paradoxes sublimate away into all or nothing. Perhaps the Boojum is the all or nothing, and the Snark the signifier used vainly to denote it.
An alternative option for resolving the paradox of the Snark’s relationship with the Boojum is to abandon denotation as the locus of meaning in narrative propositions. Denotation offers little to provide meaning in the Snark. It offers little in validating identity in the Snark. The eccentric methods proposed for the purpose of identifying Snarks indicate that validating something as the same as something else, or possessing the same attributes as something else, does not operate on the basis of a perfect match: in the Snark it is so abstract as to be functionally useless, but it also points to a broader abstraction regarding the nature of identity. Sameness and difference are the most basic elements of pattern recognition: when we recognise a pattern, we recognise the sameness of that pattern with the pattern of something else. Even if we rest the various shortcomings of the five unmistakeable marks of the Snarks as identifiable attributes and assume that there are certain attributes that we can take to identify a Snark, such as its slowness in taking a jest, the pattern of slowness in taking a jest in one creature is not going to be perfectly identical in the pattern of slowness in another. Even if we observe two humans raised within the same language and culture identified as slow in understanding and responding to a joke, there will be at least incremental differences in the timing of their sighing like a thing that is deeply depressed, and differences in the gravity of their demeanour in response to a pun. But the existence of the pattern of that combination of traits is sufficient to establish ‘Snark’ as identity; if we were to use a more obvious attribute of a subtype of Snark – the ones that have feathers and bite – the existence of the pattern of the combination of feathers and biting is sufficient to establish the identity of the ‘feathers and bites’ subtype of Snark, even though ‘feathers and bites’ entails a diversity of presentation when applied to more conventional creatures from goose to velociraptor, which we would not otherwise hold as the same. The benchmark for identity, therefore, is set at the presence of sameness of a pattern of attributes, and if those conditions are met, identity is validated.
This reliance on the abstraction of patterns of attributes is connotative rather than denotative: it operates on the basis of sufficient similarity to forge association. Many of the Snark’s unmistakeable marks rely on the connotative application of language to the detriment of denotative possibility. The ‘meagre and hollow, but crisp’ taste is the exaggeratedly figurative connotative language of the wine critic grasping for novelty of expression. The conventional sensory domains of taste are sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness and umami; ‘meagre’, ‘hollow’ and ‘crisp’ are abstractions relying on higher-order connotative associations that depend on an array of supporting information regarding the figurative application of words describing availability, density and texture to taste. ‘Crisp’ might connote ‘uncomplicated combination of flavour lacking excessive sweetness’, but its reliance on the pattern of uncomplication in combination of flavour does not allow for denotative application when describing food, even if ‘not-sweet’ might do. Sense-data is not sufficient to validate crispness without the additional supporting information that provides context for its connotations.
If the Snark cannot be identified denotationally, and depends instead on a complicated set of connotations for validation, perhaps the degree of indeterminacy allowed by connotative description means that the assertions ‘some Snarks are Boojums’ and ‘no Boojums are Snarks’ are not, in fact, contradictory, but arise more indirectly in the latter case from connotations of normative language use. Then, the statement ‘if your Snark be a Snark’ could be interpreted as meaning ‘if your Snark is the desirable subtype of Snark’ and ‘if your Snark be a Boojum’ could be interpreted as meaning ‘if your Snark is the undesirable subtype of Snark’. Some Snarks would then be Boojums, and at least some Boojums would be Snarks. Relaxing assumptions of where linguistic meaning is generated away from denotation and the logical binaries of true or false and taking it instead to arise from connotation can mitigate the apparent contradiction of the Snark/Boojum. The problem of incoherence between the Snark’s attributes remains, and the problem of methodological incoherence in identifying those attributes against our prior understanding of how to identify a creature to be hunted remains, and the relationship between Snark and Boojum remains unclear to the point of incoherence.
10. Narrative incoherence with the principles of narrative
The system of linguistic and narrative denotation, if that is the basis of its operation, has been rendered so flawed throughout the Snark that the normative assumptions that the role of language is to denote a clearly demarcated thing in the world, and that the role of narrative is to denote clearly demarcated events in its world, become less certain.
The process of certain identification has failed: there is no solid evidence, and the issue of whether the Boojum is a Snark or not is unresolved. The narrative does not fully meet the description made in its title; it often barely meets it at all. In addition to being somewhat incoherent with its title, the narrative is incoherent within itself. The only coherent section of narrative storytelling is at the end, when the Baker vanishes, perhaps because the apophatic nature of both vanishing and Boojum are difficult enough to express without adding elements of incoherence. The closest the narrative gets to functionally expressing its reality, therefore, is the moment where it expresses an event at the very edges of expressible reality. Words, in this case, are revealed as being less useful in expressing detail of the world than their absence. If they are succeeding in representing their narrative reality, the process by which it happens is not denotational.
If we consider what a successful representation of narrative reality might look like, we might describe it most simply as ‘realistic’, by which we mean that it is a good likeness of reality, by which we mean that the characters and objects and events described accurately reflect characters and objects and events in reality. If I were to describe the route to my house, the layout of the house and the things that it contains, and the appearance, behaviour and demeanour of my children, it would be possible to inspect the real-life situation and determine the accuracy of the description. It is, however, unlikely that this sort of nonfiction account would be described as ‘realistic’, because we do not tend to use ‘realistic’ to describe descriptions of reality. A successful depiction of how to reach the house might instead be validated as ‘accurate’, and a successful description of the children might also be validated as ‘accurate’ once they had been observed. If they had not yet been observed, a description of the children might be validated as something like ‘vivid’. We would not describe a successful set of instructions for reaching the house as ‘vivid’; if they had not yet been validated in the process of finding the house they might be ‘detailed’.
‘Vivid’ begins to approach the function of ‘realistic’ here: it validates a bringing-to-life in the imagination of the reader, and it applies to situations like describing the behaviour and character of people or places which resist straightforward denotational validation. A vivid description of my children might entail enough items of information that the reader feels they have a functional set of principles to determine what sort of people they are and how they are likely to present and behave. But the reader has not been provided with an exhaustive set of items of information covering every possible detail of appearance, mood or behavioural eventuality; if what information they do have is coherent with their own prior information on how children look and behave, they will be able to flesh out the list of provided attributes by extrapolating on the basis of that prior information. Even if they do meet the children, the detail of the children’s behaviour and appearance in that moment is unlikely to precisely match the description given: I may have described them arguing over a game of Go, the younger child shrieking with smears of chocolate on her face, and upon inspection they may be fighting over a game of football, the younger child howling and muddy. Validating the accuracy of the description is likely to entail a degree of recourse to prior information about the degree to which principles can be inferred from items of description, and whether the observed information is coherent with those principles and the narrative information provided. It could be validated on the principle that the children were described as arguing, and come across as combative, and that the younger child is noisy and messy in a manner coherent with the narrative description, even if the detail of the noise and mess is different. The coherence of information arising in three domains of narrative description, prior information about children and their behaviour, and observation determines the validity of the narrative. Without observation, the coherence of narrative information and the reader’s prior information about children determines the validity of the narrative.
Fiction further besets a denotational approach to validating narrative reality. A fictional narrative cannot, by virtue of its status as fiction, denote identifiable things in the external world, so that avenue is closed in determining its success. If a fictional narrative denotes things in the imaginary world conceived in the mind of its author, only the author can point to the degree of accuracy between the things his mind conceived and the representation he provided of them. The rest of us are limited to determining the degree to which the narrative representation of those things makes sense to us, given our own prior understanding of similar sorts of things.
Narratives that we hold as ‘realistic’ or ‘vivid’ are not assessed as such on a denotational basis, but on the basis of their coherence with prior information that we hold. Narrative description, even outside of fiction, provides a limited set of items of information to be extrapolated into a world held by its reader, and its success is determined by the success of that extrapolation: too little information, or jarring information at odds with itself or the prior information upon which the fleshing out relies, will make the process harder.
A common literary truism is that a good narrative smooths over indications of the artifice of its construction. It provokes the question of what the artifice is here: is it the unreal, imaginary status of the narrative reality being passed off temporarily as ‘real’ in the reader’s mind? Or is it the methodology of how something passing as reality can be coded and conveyed in language?
The former problem of artifice implies it as a problem specific to fiction: the unreal world must somehow feel real enough to trick its audience into forgetting its unrealness. But as we have seen, the lines between fiction and non-fiction are often blurred in practice when we consider the degree to which additional information is imported in each case to create a meaningful narrative reality. The problem of methodological artifice lies in how narrative propositions are ordered to create elements such as ‘plot’ and ‘characterisation’ – respectively creating structural coherence with our prior understanding of the teleological relationships between events, and of the patterns of behaviour and the relationship between behaviour and events. It also lies, on a more basic level, in the use of language: the version of reality provided is shaped by language, and if the language itself becomes the locus of attention, the language-mediated status of the narrative cannot be forgotten.
When narrative works at representing its reality, it represents a world that complements the patterns of our own observation of the world, and in doing so suspends the awareness of its informational status. A coherent narrative impression of reality is fed by the judicious provision of items of information ordered in a way that allows for its construction. When those items of information are there in a functional order, we incorporate them into narrative reality without much reflexive thought about the process, just as we might incorporate an anecdote told by a friend. The process of construction demands attention when it becomes difficult to maintain, or does not make sense.
In the Snark, examples of the artifice of language and narrative are held aloft. There are the nonsense words and neologisms – ‘Snark’, ‘larboard’ – and the apparently random alliteration of the crew, all of whose names begin with B. The basic role of language in assigning names to things such as Bakers is thrown into question. The Baker is the only character who approaches characterisation, although this happens apophatically, thus drawing attention to itself. The relationships of events between the sections of narrative are tenuous and incoherent. The relationships of events with the headline narrative event – The Hunting of the Snark – are tenuous.
To what degree can the title The Hunting of the Snark be said to accurately represent the hunting of a Snark? The process of hunting is dysfunctional: the individual events that entail preparation, navigation and hunting are incoherent with an outcome that would result in a successful hunt. The teleological relationship of individual sections of narrative is dysfunctional. The Hunting of the Snark, as a title, creates an expectation for its reader that could be summed up as the proposition ‘the narrative contains an event in which there is a hunting of a Snark’. In order to remain coherent with the proposition ‘the narrative contains an event in which there is a hunting of a Snark’, the narrative must contain propositions which can be identified with that event.
These propositions, as we have seen, can constitute smaller events which in turn constitute the event in which there is a hunting of a Snark. Each of these events should have its own telos: the event of navigation that constitutes a voyage that constitutes a hunting expedition, for example, should determine the appropriate direction in which to move, and move in that direction. The event should fulfil its own telos in order to meet the reader’s prior assumptions about its purpose, and the successful fulfilment of its own telos should fit into a coherent overall teleological order in which, once the teleological conditions of one step of the epic hunting saga is fulfilled, the next condition can unfold and be met, and so on. If individual events are teleological failures, or events lack a causal relationship with one another, there is a cost to the overall narrative telos.
Intrinsic to the meaning of words like ‘speech’, ‘lesson’ and ‘hunting’ is a sense of an endpoint. If I give a speech devoid of functional information for its recipients, is it still a speech? If I put some children in a classroom and provide them with a number of items of information that they are unable to process in a functional way, is that still a lesson? If, in preparing to go hunting, I do my hair and makeup and select some attractive teaspoons from the kitchen, is that still preparation to go hunting? In each case, I could argue that my intention met the purpose implied in each word: I am merely lousy at public speaking and teaching, and unduly concerned with the aesthetics of my personal appearance and that of my hunting implements at a regrettable cost to functionality. But without that information, an observer could be forgiven for concluding that each event failed at its purpose. If the dictionary definition of ‘speech’ is ‘The expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds’[41] and I fail to express anything functional to my audience, I have not met the definition. If the dictionary definition of ‘lesson’ is ‘A period of learning or teaching’[42] and no learning takes place, I could seek recourse in ‘teaching’ as an alternative, but the dictionary definition of ‘teach’ is ‘Impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) as to how to do something’[43], and I have failed to do that too. Acts or events that fail to meet the endpoint associated with their meaning are to some degree empty of that meaning. Where that endpoint fails, there may also be a functional cost to other events: if the Bellman cannot identify location with the markings of a map, can he identify the marks of a Snark? The expectation of coherent order both of events in time and the relationship of functional necessities of each event at a particular point in time should be met in a coherent narrative reality, but that coherence is often lacking. In the Alice books, the narrative is framed in each case as a dream, which is more coherent with the teleological incoherence of events: we do not expect the same structure of cause and effect. The Snark does not have this excuse, but maintains the same oneiric disregard for order.
[1][1] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, in Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice, p. 191
[2] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, in Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice, pp. 191-9
[3] Lewis Carroll, Misch-Masch, in Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice, pp. 191-2
[4] Lewis Carroll, Misch-Masch, in Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice, pp. 191-2
[5] Lewis Carroll, Misch-Masch, in Gardner (ed.), The Annotated Alice, p. 192
[6] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 43
[7] Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 43
[8] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 52
[9] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 52
[10] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 50
[11] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 50
[12] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 51
[13] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 51
[14] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 59
[15] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 59
[16] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 60
[17] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 60
[18] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 60
[19] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 64
[20] Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic I (4th ed.), in Bartley, Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, p.76
[21] Lewis Carroll, ‘Preface’, Euclid and His Modern Rivals, in Bartley, Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, p.134
[22] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 47
[23] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 55
[24] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 55-6
[25] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 56
[26] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 56
[27] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 57
[28] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 68
[29] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 70
[30] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 76
[31] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, pp. 78-80
[32] Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 80
[33] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 81
[34] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 84
[35] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 85
[36] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 86
[37] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 88
[38] Martin Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 88
[39] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, p. 93
[40] Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in (ed.) Gardner, The Annotated Snark, pp. 93-4
[41] https://www.lexico.com/definition/speech
About the Jabberwock: https://snrk.de/the-jabberwock/
Could the Jubjub be some kind of clock? https://snrk.de/page_jub-jub-jub-jub-jub-jub-jub-jub-jub/