On Missing Referents, Blank Maps, and Why Carroll Was Telling the Truth Exactly
Children are amazing. They teach you an astonishing amount if you learn to teach well and listen.
This summer, while I have been migrating our courses to a new community platform, my students and I have been sailing in search of a Snark. Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark is one of the funniest poems ever written. Funny the way Flannery O’Connor is funny. Funny the way Fargo and the wood chipper are funny. Fargo is devastating, hilarious, and the cinematography is exceptional. If you’ve been tracking what the story has shown you, Carl meeting the wood chipper is the joke arriving on schedule. If you haven’t, it’s just horror — sudden, from nowhere, exactly the same horror as a Boojum taking the Baker and the Misfit taking Grandma.
Still of Jerry, played by William H Macy, above the parking lot. Fargo, produced and directed by the Coen brothers. 1996
One of my young sailors noticed that our expedition was hunting with forks.
“Forks,” he said. “Why?”
A reasonable observation and a wonderful place to begin.
“What kind of forks are these? Dinner forks? Meat forks? Or maybe a fork in the road?”
I nearly died. Not from a Boojum. From laughter.
Then another sailor asked an even better question.
“Why does this bring anyone hope?” Excellent question.
“Why should hunting with thimbles, railway shares, and forks inspire confidence?” I asked. I have never looked at a drawer full of silverware and thought, “Today feels promising.”
Another member of the crew noticed that the expedition possessed a map; the map was blank.
By this point, I was laughing hard enough that I was becoming an unfit captain.
“What good is a blank map?” someone asked.
“Indeed,” I replied. “What good is a blank map?”
Another sailor chimed in.
“And why are they sailing in circles? Why not just sail from one place to another?”
One of my students, who actually knows something about sailing, observed that the Bellman’s commands would never get a ship anywhere at all. The Bellman gave orders with complete confidence and considerable solemnity. Unfortunately, his navigation appeared to bear only a passing acquaintance with boats, wind, or the sea.
Naturally, the Bellman’s crew adored the map. Who wouldn’t? It was wonderfully easy to read. No troublesome coastlines. No distracting islands. No currents. No reefs. No ports.
No inconvenient reminders that the world has a shape.
Everything a sailor normally uses to find his bearings had been thoughtfully omitted. The result was a map anyone could understand at a glance. Carroll describes it perfectly:
What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?’
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
They are merely conventional signs!’
‘Other maps are such shapes,
with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank —
A perfect and absolute blank!’
– The Crew
My crew announced the map was useless. Who can argue with that? I voted yes.
I asked about wisdom. The crew in the poem had decided the Bellman was wise because he had good posture, moved gracefully, spoke with confidence, and carried himself with great solemnity.
“Does saying something three times make it true?” That one came quickly. Everyone agreed it did not. Then I asked, “What about being solemn? Does that make someone wise?” The Zoom room became much quieter. It was the sound of thought. That was a harder question to answer.
One of the remarkable things about children is that they have not yet learned to confuse appearances with reality, but they also recognize that appearances often point toward reality. Solemnity has the right shape. A thoughtful, serious person is often wise. A calm physician inspires confidence. A patient teacher usually knows something worth learning. The shape is not arbitrary. It points somewhere. The question is whether it always points to wisdom.
Identifying a Snark
We couldn’t decide whether a solemn man was wise, so we set it aside and kept reading. The poem continued to reward us. The Bellman declared the Snark tasted “meager and hollow, but crisp,” which struck my crew as an unusual way to describe flavor. A Snark gets up late, which may tell you something about its sleeping habits but remarkably little about how to recognize one. Some Snarks have feathers and bite. Others have whiskers and scratch. Fortunately, they do no harm. Except for the Boojum. The Bellman assures everyone that they will know a Boojum when they find one. This is perfectly true. They disappear.
Carroll has just given us five unmistakable marks by which genuine Snarks may be known. He has classified them, organized them, and distinguished them carefully. He has all the machinery of a proper naturalist. Then, at the very end, he gives us the one characteristic that actually matters. Unfortunately, it arrives at precisely the same moment as the consequence. Identification and disappearance occur together. The taxonomy is beautifully organized, wonderfully detailed, and perfectly incapable of helping the crew find the thing they have set out to hunt.
My young sailors noticed this immediately. Without ever studying philosophy of science, they began asking one of its oldest questions. What makes a description useful? What belongs in a category? When does a classification help us recognize the thing we are looking for? A description is useful because it helps us find the thing it describes.
At this point, I should probably stop and say something about Lewis Carroll, because it matters.
Charles Dodgson and Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. Under his real name, he spent his career writing about logic, geometry, voting theory, and symbolic reasoning. Under his pen name, he wrote some of the most perfectly constructed nonsense in the English language. That combination is not an accident. It is the reason The Hunting of the Snark works as well as it does.
Carroll insisted the poem was nonsense. Readers have spent nearly a century and a half refusing to believe him. The Snark is death, they say. Or ambition. Or the Victorian examination system. Or the search for God. Or existential dread. Every generation confidently announces that it has finally discovered what the Snark “really” means.
They are hunting with forks.
Carroll was telling the truth. The poem is about nonsense. But nonsense, to a logician, is not randomness. It is not simply saying silly things. It is something much more precise. Nonsense happens when the machinery of meaning continues to run perfectly while the things it is supposed to connect have disappeared. The grammar still works. The logic still works. The categories still work. The authority remains intact. The connection between the sign and the thing it claims to signify has been lost.
Linguists call that connection a referent. A referent is simply the thing a word, a symbol, a map, or a number points to. A map is useful because it points to rivers, roads, mountains, and landmarks. A word is useful because it points beyond itself to something in the world. Mathematics works because its symbols reliably point to relationships that remain true no matter who writes them down. The sign is not the thing. It exists to lead us to the thing.
That is exactly what keeps failing in The Hunting of the Snark.
The Bellman’s map has all the dignity of a proper nautical chart, but it points nowhere. His famous instruction to “steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard” sounds wonderfully nautical until one notices that it issues two incompatible commands at once. “What I tell you three times is true” offers proof that refers only to itself. The statement does not point beyond itself to reality. It simply circles back and declares itself sufficient.
The crew is assembled in exactly the same way. There is a Boots who makes bonnets. A Barrister retained to settle disputes on a voyage with almost nothing to litigate. A Banker hired at enormous expense. A Baker who can bake only wedding cake, for which there are neither ingredients nor customers. A Butcher whose only professional qualification is killing Beavers, only to become the Beaver’s closest companion. Every member of the expedition possesses a recognizable identity. Every title sounds appropriate. Every profession has the right shape. Yet each has been disconnected from the work the voyage requires.
The Baker forgot his name. He forgot his boxes. He forgot his clothes. He delivered his warning in Hebrew and Dutch and German and Greek, then forgot to say it in English, which is the language everyone aboard the ship speaks. He possessed an abundance of what did not matter and lacked the one thing that did. The excess obscured the absence.
And the Snark itself. What if the Snark is not merely a creature to be hunted, but the one thing in the poem that genuinely lies outside the crew’s own system of references? The one thing that is real enough to be found. The entire expedition is organized around finding it, yet every tool they possess has lost its ability to orient them toward reality. The map is blank. The directions are circular. The captain’s authority points only to itself. His plan is to cross the ocean by ringing his bell. The descriptions identify nothing. They are not unable to find the Snark because Snarks are rare or obscure. They cannot find Snarks because you cannot hunt something real with instruments that no longer point beyond themselves. You will sail in circles and call it navigation.
Which makes the Boojum the most terrifying possibility in the poem. If the Snark is that which genuinely exists outside the self, then the Boojum is its perfect counterfeit. It wears the face of the real thing while pointing nowhere but back to itself. You cannot distinguish the two until the moment of contact. And when you finally reach for something that has no reality beyond itself, there is nothing to meet you. Nothing to resist you. Nothing to correct you. Nothing to orient you. You reach for the thing and there is no thing. Only the reflection of the reaching.
Disappearing is what happens when you have navigated by self-referents for so long that there is nothing outside yourself left to locate you.
The Baker knew enough to be afraid. His uncle had warned him. He knew there was a difference between a Snark and a Boojum. He carried the warning across six languages and forgot the only one that could have helped him. The referent was present. The connection was not.
Navigation with Blank Maps:
The Education Problem
Blank maps are shockingly common. We hand them to children every day. I know. I once was a Bellman myself. A few years ago, I was in a homeschooling group, and a mom sincerely asked, “How do I explain to my child that three-quarters of an apple divided by three-quarters of an apple is one whole apple?”
Her question told me several things. She either did not understand what division is, she did not understand the difference between number and kind, or both. She had performed the procedure correctly. The answer was right. She began with three-quarters-of-an-apple as the kind, and somewhere in the middle she changed the kind to one whole apple, and hadn’t felt it move. She was holding one of something, and that something was no longer what she thought it was. The machinery kept running after the referent had shifted.
When she couldn’t explain how the answer worked, she asked: “How do I explain this to my child?”
Every parent in the room knew how to divide fractions. The procedure was familiar. The answers came out correctly. What no one could explain was what the procedure was doing or why it worked. I understood immediately what the problem was. I had felt this same thing as a kid. Math seemed like some strange magic, a bit like voodoo. How do you divide a part of an apple into pieces and get a whole apple?
When we count, we always count number and kind. We ask, “How many of what?” Three apples and four oranges are not seven until we decide to count fruit. Our place-value system preserves the same pattern. One hundred thirty-four is one of the hundreds kind, three of the tens kind, and four of the ones kind. Number never appears by itself. It always belongs to something.
This is why isolated math facts create so many confident but disoriented students. A child may know that seven times eight is fifty-six and still have no idea what multiplication asks, what kind of thing fifty-six names, or how that fact connects to every other fact in mathematics. The answer is correct. The web is missing. It is a blank map.
Some children eventually construct the web for themselves. They discover the relationships despite the instruction. They find the referents on their own. Others do not. That difference is often mistaken for intelligence. I suspect it is something else. One child eventually notices that the map does not match the territory and begins looking for landmarks. The other trusts the map, which is the perfectly reasonable thing to do when it has been handed to him with great solemnity. Some children shout the emperor has no clothes. And they are right.
The Misfit, The Boojum and The Wood Chipper
Missing clothes are shockingly common. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, Grandma’s manners stopped referring to actual love decades before the Misfit arrived. The Baker’s warning stopped referring to actual danger somewhere in its sixth translation. Carl’s confidence and hubris stopped referring to actual competence long before the wood chipper did what wood chippers do. The Bellman’s map stopped referring to any coastline the moment “no conventional signs” got cheered as a virtue. The fraction mom’s answer stopped referring to the actual kind of thing she was counting. Every case is the same failure in a different costume: the sign kept running, doing its job smoothly, entirely uncoupled from the thing.
That is the point. Whether you see these things as comedy, not the slapstick funny, but the incongruity funny, is whether you can pick out the incongruity. If you can, then you know, the patterns always come knocking.
Flannery O’Connor said that for readers who are almost blind, you draw large and startling figures. That is what the wood chipper is doing. That is what the Misfit is doing. That is what the Boojum is doing. The referent is large and hard to ignore. It’s knocking.
The Structure of Nonsense
Carroll said the poem was about nonsense. He was right. He was being precise. The poem is nonsense. Every element is a demonstration of the referential machine running without the load. And it is simultaneously about nonsense, in the same way that a photograph of fire is about fire. The form and the content are the same thing.
Only a logician would think to do that. To make a self-demonstrating argument. To write the thing and write about the thing in the same gesture.
Which means the poem is the one thing in itself that is not a self-referent. It points accurately at something real. It points at the structure of nonsense itself, from the inside, with complete precision.
Carroll made a map that actually works. He just made it of the territory everyone else was pretending wasn’t there.
That is why it is so funny.
And that is why my young sailors, reading it for the first time, keep finding things. They are not sure what they have found yet. But they know they have found something. They can feel the gap between the form and the missing referent, even if they don’t have words for it yet.
They noticed the forks. They noticed the map. They noticed the solemnity.
They are better equipped for this hunt than the Bellman’s crew.
They are sailing with something other than hope.
