Excerpt
Author's note: The Zombification of the Snark is part of the Underland universe, and is a work of fiction—except for the parts that aren't. Other than this story, Underland comprises two novels (Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, and Alice's Adventures in Underland: The Knight of Shattered Dreams), in which the undead Reverend Charles Dodgson (that is, the author Lewis Carroll) tells the living Alice Pleasance Liddell two stories, at two crucial points in both their lives. The Zombification of the Snark is the last of the series, and depicts the last years of the undead Mr. Dodgson's animate existence, with notes later added by Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, Mr. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (Mr. Dodgon's nephew), and the entirely fictional Johannes McDermott, as if part of the 1929 edition of Mr. Carroll's Collected Verse.
THE ZOMBIFICATION OF THE SNARK
As presented in Collected Verse (1929), with Introduction and Commentary by Alice Pleasance Hargreaves and Johannes L. McDermott, N.P. Plenum & Co., Inc. New York.
"Charred Is Your Stooped Form Now"
by Alice Pleasance argreaves (1898)
Inscribed to a dear Zombie:
in memory of maddened autumn hours
and whispers of stark lunacy
Charred is your stooped form now, ashes in a cask
Heavy were your shackles: yet quick to tell
A tale to sad children, behind a masque of
Riddles, puns as well
Less morals than of math, witticisms rife!
Eager to speak of chess-pieces all at strife!
Such nonsense he loved in death as life.
Dogs, cats, and Bandersnatch: words as his decoys
O'er tea and croquet, through cracked mirrors wild
Down rabbit-holes, through keyholes: fierce underlanded joys
Given gentler form, our rages slept and smiled!
Song of a deadened breast, lively no more
Onward he travels dreamily to shores
Never dreamt by tend'rest heart before!
An Introduction to The Zombification of the Snark
by Johannes McDermott (1929)
The time has come to talk of many things, of bootstraps—and trigs—and parallax—of Babbages—and strings!
The earliest experience of most readers with the zombie or undead mathematician and author the Reverend Charles Dodgson is, of course, with the Alice books: Alice's Adventures in Underland and Through the Looking-Glass.
Mr. Dodgson, in his persona of Lewis Carroll, has delighted generations of children, each of whom first encounters the story as a sort of fairy-tale, a dreamlike exploration of a realm in which the lines between big and small, wonder and terror, and life and death itself are crossed—thoroughly and repeatedly.
To the childlike mind (particularly at seven years and six months!), the Alice tales are a fantasia. If young children think at all about the meaning of the two books, it is as a sort of satire of the confusing world of adults, with its strange rules, incomprehensible references, and disproportionate logic. As they grow older, if the Alice tales capture them still, what they learn is of a different nature: that the strange rules posited with in the book make more sense than those of the adult world above-ground; that the references point toward concepts rather than the satirical or merely surreal; that the logic espoused in Alice is one of mathematics and games, rather than of law and custom.
The Law might have denied the celibate don Mr. Dodgson, who was also long known to be one of the Infected, a home and family of his own; but Alice's Logic gave him all the descendants that one might wish for: a widely dispersed army of intelligent little girls possessed of a Propædeutic Enchiridion which taught them independence of mind by means of nonsense both logical and artificial. In other words, the Alice tales are a sort of illustrated primer meant to rectify the stultifying education offered to young ladies in Victorian times, with each small bit of nonsense serving as an introduction for more complex concepts to be taught at a later time.
The Zombification of the Snark, while beloved by readers of all ages, was never quite meant to be a tale for children. It is nonsense—but a more sort of opaque nonsense, and one missing a child-protagonist.
If you have not encountered The Zombification of the Snark before, I shall attempt to explain it to you now—only wait! there is too much. Instead, I shall sum up:
The action of The Zombification of the Snark centers on the search for something called a "Snark," and the fates of some of the characters who search for it.
There! Now that we have summed it up, it should be easy to—What do you say? That I have not yet provided sufficient information with which to understand what you are about to read, that is, The Zombification of the Snark?
Alas, it may be impossible to do more than to summarize The Zombification of the Snark. It may be impossible even to properly define what a Snark is! I myself, at best, can only provide a description of the approach that I have taken in catching a glimpse of it, now and then, and even then I must state that it was not an approach of my own invention, but one that I adopted after having the privilege of speaking to Mrs. Alice Hargreaves, who once was Alice Liddell, the first of Mr. Dodgson's several child-friends.
She had spoken to him upon the matter of Snarks and Boojums during a visit in July 1897, that is, before his final demise in January 1898, and in the end had gotten from him that which none before or since had quite managed to do: a decided lack of answer as to whether she had correctly guessed the meaning or not!
It is a two-part answer, and I shall leave it to Mrs. Hargreaves to explain it herself, following the original poem.
Following that will be Mr. Dodgson's response, which he wrote as Fit IX—The Zombification, and enfolded in a letter, which, because he wrote it a day or two before his final death, was not sent immediately, but was only discovered with his papers by Mr. Stuart Dodgson Collingwood in putting together material for The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1899).
I shall attempt to make such annotations as might elucidate a few of the amusements (but certainly not all!) that Mr. Dodgson planted for his readers. Mrs. Hargreaves's approach has within it such a peculiar genius, that to read it is almost to understand the delight that Mr. Dodgson had in his child-friends, who—despite the learnedness of his peers—in their innocent wonder and lively mischief, always seemed to know his mind best.
It is with much gratitude that we recognize Mrs. Hargreaves's contribution to the understanding of this poem, for, we suspect, without it, we should have been unable to hazard any sort of clarification for at least another hundred years!
