SOURCE: Holquist, Michael. “What is a Boojum? Nonsense and Modernism.” Yale French Studies, no. 43 (1969): 145-64.

In the following essay, Holquist examines The Hunting of the Snark as an experimental work that resists critics' attempts to interpret it as an allegory.

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great advantage in point of health as well as brevity. … An expedient was therefore offered, that since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.

Swift, Gulliver's Travels

What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered?

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Because the...