Hunting Snarks

Found at the amazing blog A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL

"Lewis Carroll's Hunting of the Snark is his Nonsense masterpiece, a unique, weirdly epic romp through a world completely devoid of common sense. Yet at the same time, there is a logic governing the story, a dream-logic which cannot be trifled with when illustrating the poem. Respect the Nonsense!

The graphic novel version sampled here is the longest Snark yet published, to my knowledge. This length allowed me to pack in many references and allusions, chiefly Surrealist but also ranging from ancient Rome to British Sci-Fi. The dream-logic of Surrealism fills out the matrix of Carrollian Nonsense better than most isms.

The technique of faux wood-engraving pen and ink work is also an homage to Max Ernst and his collage novels, such as Une Semaine de Bonté. This quintessential Victorian visual technique lends the imagery a sense of false authority which dovetails nicely with the Nonsense of what I call the Carrollian Multiverse, the world of topsy-turvydom.

Surrealism, Nonsense, Philosophy and Culture, these are the major themes of my Snark. But above all, I hope it furnishes a key for younger people, students of the arts in particular, who are searching for alternatives to the abysmal popular culture swamping them. The Snark is Nonsense but it is real Art of the highest caliber and the Carrollian Multiverse is a very frabjous place to make it in!"

Mahendra Singh

For more:

Biblioklept's interview with Mahendra here

New Yorker review here

Salon review here

A hunt within a hunt

Mahendra Singh

Buy the book HERE

Fragment from:

Biblioklept Interviews Mahendra Singh About Fitting Lewis Carroll into a Protosurrealist Straitjacket with Matching Dada Cufflinks


"Nothing has meaning or value unless we decide it does. For years, readers have puzzled over the meaning behind the Snark. It’s another Carrolian Zen koan : the meaning is the meaning. It’s always been staring us in the face, the meaning of the Snark is a verb, it is to search for meaning and when doing so, one automatically generates a meaniningful purpose just as naturally as a spider ejects its web. Inside this silky web is the comfort of whatever logic you feel up to (and that is the secret pleasure of Carrollian Nonsense) and outside the web is just chaos, a Boojum!

In my Snark I’ve mashed up artists including Hieronymous Bosch, Grünewald, Titian, Théodore Géricault, David, Ingres, even George Herriman and also many Surrealists such as Man Ray, Dali, Magritte, etc. There are musicians and authors, the Beatles and Gilbert and Sullivan, Edgar Allan Poe, the Comte de Lautremont, even Victorian parlor games and optical illusions. The idea was to create a web, a labyrinth of allusions in which to hunt the Snark. Some of the references will be familiar but some will not and the reader, if so inclined, can hunt them down on their own. It’s a hunt within a hunt, another Carrollian regression.

The educational aspect is important to me. I really do hope some of the kids who read this will get curious and start off on their own, pillaging a library, ransacking a museum, sneaking into the opera, whatever turns them on. The smart kids are hungry for culture. We must get them thinking, to get them to manufacture and own their own meanings before a mass-marketing goon does it for them.

The actual process of creating the imagery was simple, it’s basically me lying on a sofa, maybe a quick snooze and then free-associating while pondering the text. The cover image is a good example, it’s also the illustration for the whiskered Snarks who scratch and the feathered Snarks who bite. This made me think of Old Scratch, the devil, AKA Lucifer, who was once an angel with feathered wings who also showed a nasty tendency to bite the hand that feeds. I had a vague visual memory of seeing a photo of a surrealist devil; I rummaged through some books until I found it — Denise Bellon’s photo of the Québécois Surrealist, Jean Benoit, at a costume party.

Denise Bellon’s photo of the Québécois Surrealist, 

Jean Benoit, at a costume party.

The slippers are what caught my eye, it made me think of Old Scratch lounging at home in Pandemonium, his day off, not bothering to shave, hence the whiskers that scratch. I made the toes unequal on a lark, it just seemed right to have Satan misshapen but afterwards I came up with a cabalistic explanation which I won’t bore you with for now.

I then did a pencil drawing on tissue paper, constantly refining and adding or deleting, this was the slowest part of the entire Snark, the pencils. Afterwards I did the pen and ink drawing atop the tissue, on Denril, a synthetic vellum. This is an old technical illustrator’s work habit, which is how I started out actually, in the 80s.

This business of free associating while simultaneously referring to one’s internal visual memory is only possible if one has spent many years romping though books and museums. You cannot be a serious illustrator if you don’t read and look voraciously, all the time. And above all, don’t look at too much rubbish or you will start drawing rubbish. Art students reading this, take heed! You are what you see.

Recombining Surrealism and other –isms, along with the free associations triggered by Carroll’s Nonsense verse, creates a matrix which allows the reader to move seamlessly back and forth between the worlds of dreams, culture, memory and emotion. Those readers who catch the references will enjoy the historical and even non-verbal logic binding them, the rest is up to you.

You are really bringing the meaning with you, and when confronted by my Snark I hope it triggers a cascade of free associations, a mental phenomenon which is the precursor to dreaming, the royal road of Surrealism and Carrollian Nonsense.

Read more HERE

Denise Bellon’s photo of the Québécois Surrealist, 

Jean Benoit, at a costume party.

The hunting of the Snark by Jean-Marie Reynier

“For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t

Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t: 

Not a chance must be wasted today! 

Lewis Carroll, 
The Hunting of the Snark

Jean - Marie Reynier plays in these illustrations with botanical and anatomical drawings, creating hybrid creatures, monsters and unsuspected mixtures, avoiding easy definitions. They reminded me Svankmajer's illustrations for both Alice books, pictures that reinvent the world imagined by Lewis Carroll and proposes conundrums and paradoxes in gardens of questions that destabilize our certainties.

Jean-Marie Reynier

Jean-Marie Reynier

Jean-Marie Reynier

Jean-Marie Reynier

Jean-Marie Reynier

Buy it HERE

After Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (1872), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is the third masterpiece of the Lewis Carroll’s nonsense trilogy. Even though its not so broadly know, The Hunting of the Snark flies at least so high as the Alice books in matters of creativity, but for many, it presents even bigger and more scaring enigmas. The HOS is a tragic-comic poem over which an unstable, sensitive soul might very well go mad. Certainly it’s not children who ought to read this nonsensical epic, which should be read by

Sages and gray-haired philosophers… in order to study that darkest problem of metaphysics, the borderland between reason and unreason, and the nature of the most erratic of spiritual forces, humor, which certainly dances between the two. That we do find a pleasure in certain long and elaborate stories, in certain complicated and curious forms of diction, which have no intelligible meaning whatever, is not a subject for children to play with; it is a subject for psychologists to go mad over. (1) 

Jean-Marie Reynier

(1) The Library of the Nursery, Lunacy and Letter,1958. 

apud. GARDNER, Martin. The Annotated Snark. Penguin Books, England, 1962.

thanks to Doug Howick (Snark counselor)

The Hunting of the Snark by Gisèle Prassinos

Illustrations by Gisèle Prassinos

All images by Gisèle Prassinos

Contributor: Doug Howick (Snark collector)

‘La Chasse au Snark et Autres Poemes: Fontaine, Paris 1946. Translated by Henri Parisot (« revue et corrigee »). Illustrated by Gisèle Prassinos. The additional poems are Fantasmagorie, Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur, Le Morse et le Charpentier, Assis sur une Barriere and Jabberwocky. White card wrappers, title, etc., in black, intertwining picture of the Snark in green and red. Side and bottom edges uncut.

Translated by Henri Parisot and illustrated with 11 plates by Gisèle Prassinos the French surrealist poet who had been discovered by Andre Berton when she was only fourteen, and later photographed by Man Ray in this scary picture.

Gisele Prassinos reading her poetry to Andre Breton and other male artists from the surrealist movement.

Photograph by Man Ray.

"Gisèle Prassinos (Born 1920) is a French writer associated with the surrealist movement.
She was born in Istanbul, Turkey and emigrated to France with her family at the age of two, where they lived initially in Nanterre. Her brother Mario Prassinos is an artist and illustrator.

Her writing was discovered by André Breton in 1934, when she was just fourteen, and published in the French surrealist magazine Minotaure and the Belgian periodical Documents 34. Her first book, La Sauterelle arthritique (The Arthritic Grasshopper) was published in 1935 with a preface by Paul Éluard and a photograph by Man Ray. Marianne van Hirtum observed that the surrealists of the time recognised these early writings as a "veritable illustration of automatic language par excellence".

Source Wikipedia

ABOUT THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK

A tale by Gisèles Prassinos

the young persecuted girl

"A young girl who was in bed was afraid lest a butterfly she saw that morning came to wake her. Before going to bed, she put on a necklace of fresh chervil and little dull glass ladybirds, striped with yellow wax cloth. She was very proud of it and thought the butterfly wouldn't dare touch here when it saw that she was not alone.

But it came anyway: on the windowpane you could see the reflection of a ball of lead, topped with two long horns of bronzed celluloid. Then the pane moved and you could not see anything. So the young girl went to sleep.

When she awakened (because one of her curls had come unrolled) the pane was back in its original place. This time she saw a little hollowed-out cube of glass, full of water, in which a number of balls of string soaked in gasoline were swimming. She wanted to get up in order to destroy this horrible vision, but the window closed violently in her face without making any noise.

Laughing uproariously, she went back to bed. She was happy because she thought the butterfly had been crushed between the two panels of the window. She pulled the bedcover over her with the soul of a pigeon to protect her.

After an hour, she awoke again because the pigeon's soul had fled. She followed it to the window but there she stopped because the wind was raising up her hair. She looked at the pane and saw a sickly little leek whose outer leaves were ragged and full of desiccated tips. Amazed, she slid on to the marble floor and closed her eyes.

She did not open them until three days later."

The Hunting of the Snark by Ralph Steadman

After Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there (1872), The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is the third masterpiece of the Lewis Carroll’s nonsense trilogy. Even though its not so broadly know, The Hunting of the Snark flies at least so high as the Alice books in matters of creativity, but for many, it presents even bigger and more scaring enigmas. The HOS is a tragic-comic poem over which an unstable, sensitive soul might very well go mad. Certainly it’s not children who ought to read this nonsensical epic, which should be read by

Sages and gray-haired philosophers… in order to study that darkest problem of metaphysics, the borderland between reason and unreason, and the nature of the most erratic of spiritual forces, humor, which certainly dances between the two. That we do find a pleasure in certain long and elaborate stories, in certain complicated and curious forms of diction, which have no intelligible meaning whatever, is not a subject for children to play with; it is a subject for psychologists to go mad over. (1)

Ralph Steadman

According to Edward Guiliano, although lacking an Alice, The HOS is in many ways similar to the Alice books. It, too, is first a humorous and entertaining fantasy, and it, too, is laced with philosophical depth, social satire, linguistic playfulness, mathematical and logic paradoxes, and a layer of subtle humour. As in the Alices, there is a tension in the Snark between the comic tone and the underlying anxieties. And while Victorian readers would have dismissed the thought that the Snark, or the Alices, were composed of inner layers dark with seriousness, critics today find dreams, death, probing into the nature of being, reminders of the inescapability of time, and a mythic quest motif figuring in all three works.

Ralph Steadman

The HOS as the Alice’s books is a history of an Adventure. It tells the travel of one eccentric crew – a Boots, a Barrister, a Broker, a Billiard Maker, a Banker, a Beaver, a Baker, a Bonnet-maker and a Butcher – that sail together in a strange ship commanded by one curious Bellman. The reason of their trip is to find and capture one mythical creature: the Snark.

Ralph Steadman

The HOS is a poem with 141 stanzas with 4 verses each, divided in eight chapter or “fits”: The Landing, The Bellman’s Speech, The Baker’s Tale, The Hunting, The Beaver’s Lesson, The Barrister Dream, The Banker’s Fate and The Vanishing. It “describes with infinite humour the impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature”.

Ralph Steadman

Ralph Steadman was one of the most important contemporary artists who have illustrated the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark. His illustrations are deeply influenced by the tradition of Carroll’s illustrators, but at the same time, are very original and modern. Steadman’s illustrations have an adult and critical appeal, which is unusual and remarkable in the story of book illustrations. The drawings show a strong coherence and style, associate with one perfect technique. In the last years Steadman have been recognized as one of the most original and authentic English contemporary illustrators. He had a career of almost forty years of “satiric drawings, visions and phantasms.” He is even considered as representing the “happy and morbid reality happened in a mill of a modern Bruegel.”(Novel Observateur) “His scratches are corrosive, poisoning, despaired.” (Le Martin)

Ralph Steadman

The humor and the system of references of the Snark and the Alice books appear in Steadman’s illustrations with irony and perspicacity. The drawings have one strong satirical mood, presenting one complex system of references, which links the text and both historical contexts: the Victorian and the contemporary one. As almost any other illustrator has done before, Steadman concentrates his attention to certain complex questions in Carroll’s works, that scares the reader’s imaginary. “My drawings are an expression of what can be read in between the lines.” Steadman doesn’t try just to please the reader, but to emphasize the cruelty, the humor, the satire and the nonsensical aspects of the text. The representation of the characters of the crew that hunts the Snark is peculiar, as well as the nonsensical mood of the situations. The understanding of his images is not immediate, but much on the contrary, is subtle and complex as Carroll’s texts.

Read the hole HOS poem HERE

Know more about the book in
 JUST THE PLACE FOR A SNARK by Mahendra Singh.

(1) The Library of the Nursery, Lunacy and Letter,1958. apud. GARDNER, Martin. The Annotated Snark. Penguin Books, England, 1962.

Ralph Steadman

The mini Snark

Sent by Doug Howick (Snark counselor)

“The Hunting of the Snark: Barbara J. Raheb, Tarzana, California 1981. One unsigned illustration shows the ship at sea, with an angelic figure above, blowing a trumpet. Edition limited to 300 copies, of which this is Copy Number 13. Signed by the publisher. Blue paperboards, lettered and decorated in gilt. Miniature edition. Pp. 59. 2.2 x 1.5 cm. “

The ship by Doug Howick

“For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t

 Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:

 Not a chance must be wasted to-day!

 

 

The Hunting of The Snark by Lewis Carroll

 

 

Doug Howick

The blank map

The Hunting of the Snark and the blank map

A caça ao Turpente e o mapa em branco

 

He had bought a large map representing the sea, 

Without the least vestige of land: 

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be 

 A map they could all understand. 

 

'Other maps are such shapes, 

 with their islands and capes! 

But we've got our brave captain to thank' 

 (So the crew would protest) 

'that he's bought us the best — 

A perfect and absolute blank!' 

 

Fit the Second : The Bellman's Speech

Blank Maps

 

 

Henry Holiday

Mahendra Singh

Michael Sporn

Quentin Blake

Ralph Steadman

Max Ernst (1950)

Frank Hinder (1989)

Harold Jones (1975)

Helen Oxenbury (1970)

Jonathan Dixon (1992)

Kelly Oechsli (1966)

Michael Capozzola (2005)

Barry Smith

Know more about the Snark
Just a place for a Snark

Illustrations found at 
Michael Sporn Splog 

From The Carte Blanche Atlas