Chapter 11 ‘The Snark was a Boojum’:* Reading Lewis Carroll (1977)

‘For the Snark was a Boojum, you see. ’Thus concludes Lewis Carroll's poem, The Hunting of the Snark (1876). 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:1 The words had preceded him without his knowing what they meant, either at that moment or 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.

‘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.