Snark watch.(The Annotated Hunting of the Snark)(Book review)

Lewis Carroll The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, edited by Martin Gardner. W. W. Norton, 192 pages, $27.95

Nonsense may well be the most misunderstood of literary genres. Many have mistaken it for mere loony and meandering piffle--fun, but chaotic stuff. Yet, as the novelist and critic Elizabeth Sewell discovered in her insightful study The Field of Nonsense, a well-made nonsense world is strictly regulated. It resembles a game whose moves are ordained: they can't go in just any direction. Guests at the Mad Tea-Party have to keep moving on to the next seat; indeed, the plot of Through the Looking-Glass follows the sequence of a game of chess. Sewell sees nonsense as a logical construct which, unlike poetry, excludes deep emotion. If she is right, the phrase "nonsense poem" seems an oxymoron.

Fond of arbitrary order, nonsense has no truck with lunacy, with which it has sometimes been confounded. Whenever madness intrudes on a Carroll-designed world, this disturbing element must soon be ejected. Alice quits the Mad Tea-Party in disgust, and when, in The Hunting of the Snark, a character known only as the Banker starts chanting words "whose utter inanity proved his insanity" his fellow travelers react in horror and abandon him. True, the limericks of Edward Lear are peopled with mental cases like the Old Man of Whitehaven who danced a quadrille with a raven, but we glimpse each of them for only five lines, and clearly we are to think them pretty silly.

In nonsense, it seems clear, a fussy, orderly mind goes out to play, fully aware that it is kidding. Moreover, reading the Alice books and Carroll's verse, one begins to suspect the author of playfully trying on the mantle of the Almighty. His creations are self-contained, little worlds made cunningly. This may be the very insight James Joyce had when, in Finnegans Wake, he likens Lewis Carroll to the Trinity: "Dodgfather, Dodgson, & Coo." Certainly there's a curious streak of impiety in the Reverend Mr. Dodgson. In the Alice books, parodies poke fun at poems of moral uplift and the hymns of Isaac Watts. "'Tis the voice of the sluggard" becomes "'Tis the voice of the lobster" and Watts's "busy bee" turns into a "little crocodile."

In The Hunting of the Snark, Carroll's verse narrative of 1876, abstract ideas are deflated to the level of objects in everyday use:

 
   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. 

Ever the mathematician, Carroll assumes that numbers are trustworthy things to be clung to like the Old Rugged Cross. Alice, even as she falls down the rabbit-hole, is calculating the radius of the earth. In The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman, leader of the hunt, asserts, "What I tell you three times is true"--which declaration sets off his companion the Butcher on an involved calculation to demonstrate that 2 + 1 = 3.