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Hunting the Meaning of 'the Snark'

© Christian R. Bonawandt

There will always be those critics who argue the meaninglessness of some or all pieces of literature. These critics are no more absent from the area of nonsense than from any other genre. In an article about humor in literature, titled “Literary Humor: Ha versus Blah,” Avery Pennarun claims that Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” is “an excellent example of a poem written completely for the sake of nothing in particular” (Pennarun 1). His belief is that “The Hunting of the Snark” is not just nonsense, but gibberish, and the only thing that saves it is the childish humor and absurd situations (1).

Not every critic has such a narrow point of view, however. Michael Holquist, in his article titled “What is a Boojum?: Nonsense and Modernism” argues the purity of purpose of “The Hunting of the Snark.” In other words, he says it “best dramatizes the attempt of an author to insure through the structure of his work that the work be perceived only as what it was, and not some other thing” (Holquist 102). “The Hunting of the Snark,” according to Holquist, is Carroll’s “most nonsensical nonsense” (102). Its structure resists critical analysis.

This is the problem that Pennarun has with “The Hunting of the Snark.” He says, “any attempt to glean some kind of literary value from the piece fails miserably” (1). Pennarun compares Carroll’s work to Catch-22, which uses absurd situations like a candy coating to help the reader swallow the harsh theme (2). He claims that “Any individual line, stanza or fit can be assigned some kind of significance if enough effort is taken, but when considered with the rest of the poem, no overall theme seems to evolve” (2-3). But this is almost exactly Carroll’s purpose. The difference between what Pennarun sees (or doesn’t see) and what Carroll intended, according to Holquist, is that there is a logic that, though it isn’t immediately interpretable within the context of literature and language as we know it, it does exist in the context of Carroll’s made-up world of the Snark.

The best analogy, one that Holquist uses, is the passage from Through the Looking Glass in which Humpty Dumpty speaks of the meaning of words (105). It is this model which Carroll uses throughout the entire poem. He has given every word a new meaning. It is as if he has invented his own language. “Thus the elements of the system can be perceived rationally, and therefore meaningfully, within it. Gibberish, on the other hand, is unsystematic” (105).

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