'The Snark was a Boojum'

'For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.' This is the end of Lewis Carroll's (1876) poem The Hunting of the Snark. With this statement he started writing his 'agony', as he called it. Carroll himself (quoted by Gardner, 1967) said the phrase imposed itself on him: the words had preceded him without him knowing what they meant, neither at the moment, nor when he wrote the poem as a whole. He accepted interpretations ironically. I expect the one I am offering him will preserve the poetical beauty of its riddle and that, in a certain sense, what is revealed will leave the hidden untouched.

Carroll turned the statement into an evidence of being: 'was …, you see'. For that reason I thought it right to use the last line of the poem as a title.1

'The Snark was a Boojum.' Two subjects are correlated in their existence. Two neologisms signify each other: a pure open significance. In their correlation an interstice was left that called for a development. And Carroll developed it as a 'tragedy'. There is a prophecy and an inexorable fulfilment. The one stating it inscribes another one, as we shall see, in a predetermined and fatal structure that starts by sharing the same name, a forgotten name that never appears.

THE PREFACE

Carroll assures us that it is 'wildly possible' that the author of 'this brief but instructive poem' may be accused of writing 'nonsense'. He could ground his defence on the facts that in the story one can find both strong moral purposes and teachings on Arithmetic and Natural History as well. He is convinced that the accusation will be caused by this line:

Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes ('Fit the Second').