What appeared to be there was only ever an idea. When you home in on a thing and try to pin it down by describing its attributes, and then try to pin down what those are too – Bradley uses the example of a lump of sugar – it all begins to crumble, and must be something other instead. Bradley’s major work, Appearance and Reality (1893), mirrors the point, insofar that there is one, of the Snark. In Mind!, Schiller claimed that the Snark was a satire on the Absolute, whose notorious ineffability drove its seekers to derangement. Schiller delighted in trolling absolute idealists in general and the English idealist philosopher F H Bradley in particular. The realist mission, headed by Russell, was to clean up philosophy’s act with the sound application of mathematics and objective facts, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. Idealism had dominated the academy for the entirety of Carroll’s career, and it was beginning to come under attack. The Absolute was an emblem of metaphysical idealism, the doctrine that truth could exist only within the domain of thought. If it sounded like something you’d struggle to get your head around, that was pretty much the point. It was monistic, consuming all into the One. The Absolute – or the Infinite or Ultimate Reality, among other grand aliases – was the sum of all experience and being, and inconceivable to the human mind. The frontispiece was a ‘Portrait of Its Immanence the Absolute’, which, Schiller noted, was ‘very like the Bellman’s map in the Hunting of the Snark’: completely blank. In 1901, the pragmatist philosopher and provocateur F C S Schiller created a parody Christmas edition of the philosophical journal Mind called Mind!. Carroll anticipated where logic was headed, and the strangest of his creations was more than a game, an experiment conceived, as the English author G K Chesterton once wrote of his work, ‘in order to study that darkest problem of metaphysics’. If an issue over meaning seeks recourse in sense, it seeks recourse in thought too. Sense and nonsense would therefore become landmines in a battle over logic’s ability to untether truth from thought. Realism, the belief in a mind-independent reality, began to assert itself afresh after a long spell in the philosophical wilderness. A logical truth was, like mathematics, true whether or not people changed their minds about it. Building on Frege, logical positivists such as Bertrand Russell sought to deploy logic and mathematics in order to establish unconditional truths. Shortly after Carroll’s death in 1898, a seismic turn took place in both logic and metaphysics. Sense therefore appears to be a mental entity, resistant to fixed definition. The German logician Gottlob Frege in 1892 used sense to describe a proposition’s meaning, as something distinct from what it denoted. We talk about ‘common sense’, or whether something ‘makes sense’, or dismiss things as ‘nonsense’, but we rarely think about what sense itself is, until it goes missing. Language can’t always convey meaning alone – it might need sense, which is the governing context that framed it. How do we know that this sentence is trying to say something serious, or that where we are now is not a dream? It makes us wonder what all of those assumptions are up to, and how they work. In the Snark, as in the Alice books of 18, the commonsense assumptions that usually govern language and meaning are turned upside down. Nonsense such as this might get tiresome to read, but it can make for a useful thought-experiment – particularly about language. So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, Nothingness also characterises the crew’s map: a ‘perfect and absolute blank!’ ‘What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Unfortunately nobody knows what that is either, apart from the fact that anyone who encounters a Boojum will ‘softly and suddenly vanish away’ into nothingness. The only significant piece of information we have about the Snark’s identity is that it might be a Boojum. It doesn’t help that any attempt to describe a Snark turns into a pile-up of increasingly incoherent attributes: it is said to taste ‘meagre and hollow, but crisp: / Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist’. In it, a crew of improbable characters boards a ship to hunt a Snark, which might sound like a plot were it not for the fact that nobody knows what a Snark actually is.
The English writer Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) is an exceptionally difficult read.
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