A Meditation on the Popular

December 8, 2007

Emily and I have been reading the new biography of Charles Schulz by David Michaelis. As we get further along some more direct comments on Schulz and his cartoon strip Peanuts will inevitably make their way into this blog, but for now I want to comment on the value of reading a comic strip like Peanuts.

If most people were asked about why they read a comic strip they might find the question itself funny: one reads a comic strip because it is enjoyable. It is a popular comic strip precisely because so many people have found it enjoyable. But I am interested in the next question: why do so many people find this strip enjoyable.. and what can we say about a culture in which Charlie Brown and company is popular? Or put a different way, how can Peanuts be read anthropologically?

Trying to answer those last questions may strike some as perverse. But anything that appeals to a wide group of people deserves attention. I might personally find some local comic strip as enjoyable as Peanuts, but the fact that millions of other people love the creations of Charles Schulz privileges his work. One might compare Peanuts to the Balinese cockfight described by Clifford Geertz. If the cockfight were popular only among poor laborers, then it would be much harder to build a case that what takes place there is symbolic of key Balinese cultural traits. Geertz's sweeping multi-level interpretation is enabled only because of the popularity of this event. The popularity of a comic strip like Peanuts similarly allows for some ambitious interpretations of its significance.

What makes something popular? if we imagine human culture as being a web of meanings and values.. comprising something like a worldview.. then comic strips, rock bands, and TV shows have the facility to get plugged in to some aspect of that worldview. A work will come to represent some part of this worldview. Anything that is truly popular (as opposed to just widely known) is thus liable to a cultural analysis that attempts to interpret the work and explain its significance within that larger web of meaning.

There are always things worth studying that were never popular. We like to think that we thrive on such works here at Old Roads. Two favorite examples are Pausanias and William Blake. Neither had much of a contemporary audience.. so it cannot be said that either tapped into their zeitgeist. Both were surely interesting writers, but the cultural interpretations that arise from examining such a writer are inherently more limited than those that arise from examining a writer who has achieved great popularity.

So what does an interpreter do with popularity? The important issue will be to establish how a body of work was popular. What are the Peanuts stories that stick out in people's minds? What are the images that they know best? Are there canonical stories that shape most people's perception of these strips? The answer to those questions may be quite different than the answer one would come up with after a thorough reading of the complete Peanuts series. In addition the Geertzian attention to a thick description in which the winks and nods gain a meaningful place within a social context seems like an eminently reasonable way to go about looking at a comic strip.. where winks and twitches (and missed kicks) will be quite common.

update: I noticed on the back of the new Michaelis biography the following blurb:

Charles Schulz's cartoons have a profound depth and resonance that touched the soul of modern America. David Michaelis now explains why. The brilliance of the Peanuts gang is rooted in the life and emotions of its creator... —Walter Isaacson

That is fairly common boilerplate. Schulz "touched the soul of modern America". Well, what does that mean? I would translate the phrase to mean that some element of the Peanuts strip came to be associated with some element of our social identity as Americans. There was some kind of deep congruence at work. That opens up the possibility for what I called above an "ambitious" interpretive agenda.