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