Charmed with Smiles and Soap

This post is about snark, or rather, The Snark, the quarry of Lewis Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". It is not about David Denby's book Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, which I will talk about soon. Rather, my reading some of Denby's book (which Miles mentioned in a comment a little ways back, and which seems in general the kind of Hip Zeitgesity Thing I tend to write about a few months late) has inspired me to look into the etymological provenance of Snark, and that place is Carroll's poem. And! It is National Poetry Month! So, count this as the festivities beginning.

What can you do with the poem, "The Hunting of the Snark", by Lewis Carroll? Right now, I am reading it, full over, for the second time, while I watch the Denver Nuggets play the Utah Jazz on mute and listen to Seasons of Love from Rent. Probably inimical for good poetry reading, but whatever, you did not come here for good poetry reading. Where did you go for good poetry reading? Keats, maybe, or Yeats, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Those are all, uh, ok -- it is not unknown for yours truly to interrupt his sister at a movie at the Boston Science Museum to quiz her on the beginning and ending of "The Second Coming" -- but what do we get instead from reading, over and over, this verse:

"They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap."

This is a stanza that shows up at intermittent points, throughout the last half of the Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits. It bespeaks the kind of ominousness that under normal circumstances I only get from reading about Peter Grimes, or Jigsaw. Why does that stanza ominousness-ize? It shows up in each fit as a sort of marker that there are the fits that have come before. The barrister's dream of the pig may be silly, but we remember throughout the fit that we are reading not just of some schlubs, but of them that sought it with thimbles, who sought it with care. This free-floating, glommed on stanza of nonsense functions, throughout every fit in which it appears, as a calling back from self-contained nonsense into...more and other nonsense. But the change in nonsenses is worth repeating; the idea that all of our nonsenses may call out to one another is one that overpowers, is one that tinges everything we read about such nonsense with menace.

Carroll's nonsense differs from most nonsense in that it is noise allied with logic. Pavement, a brilliant group of (almost)contemporary nonsenseurs, love noise: I cannot imagine a way in which "the trial's over, the weapons found" has anything to do with anything else that is possibly going on in Gold Soundz, except that it sounds fucking awesome right there. It is glorious and mild, and unthreatening, to listen to Gold Soundz; and it is something else that we seek from that nonsense bound up in rules that haunts us, in places like Kafka and Carroll, in places like that brilliant repeated stanza from the Hunting of the Snark.

What is the Snark they are hunting? It is unclear. Where are they? It is sublimely unclear; all they have is their map of nowhere but the unremarked sea. For all this lack of clarity, the poem seems pointedly frightening. Is there something strange about being scared by that weird, weird stanza about how they hunted the snark popping up in the middle of otherwise totally locally-logic -bound digressions? The barrister dreams about a pig, yeah, so what? But the barrister dreams about a pig in a fit kicked off with that remorseless repeat: they sought it with thimbles, sought it with care, pursued it with forks and hope, and all of the sudden the nonsense of that dream and that pig kick back into the poem's world that we thought we cared about; and the world we thought that we cared about becomes subject to no less a thing than vanishing, to no less a thing than an encounter with the boojum.

Some good poetry should frighten you, which is to say that, like scary stories and depressing songs, good poetry should lard you with little bits of speech that you want to show to everyone you know. You're getting frissons all the time. Knowing that the germ of this poem was the final line -- "The snark *was* a boojum, you see" --its cupola emphasized as all worst fears are confirmed -- gives a locus to the radical, freewheeling menace of Carroll's poem. Remember last year's National Poetry Month? Our poems were things like Herrick's coy appraisal of what life might offer up to him, or Wordsworth's epic and elegaic invocation of the life that had passed him by. The poems that I picked last year all seemed to be sensible ruminations on things, and I think that both the nonsense and the franticness of the Hunting of the Snark is a good showing of something else that poetry can do. The Hunting of the Snark is, as the titles of its fits suggests, an episodic dawdle, in which each episode has its own internal logic (here I notice something like the occasional habit of the narrator to use internal rhyme, a habit that springs up only intermittently); and insofar as they so echo, they are like so many bits of life, which we always encounter expanding according to inner dictates. But when the primary narrative genius slices and dices its way into the narrative of the Hunting of the Snark, we are suddenly in the realm of Kurtz and of the Ancient Mariner -- the realm not of shunted, but of inexplicably real stakes, because at the end of all of this episodic and dawdling foolishness, the Snark -- that boojum -- is going to do nothing more, and nothing less, than cause you to vanish.