Peanuts

I have recently started Charles Schulz's biography written by David Michaelis titled 'Schulz and Peanuts' and obviously, being the smart-ass that I am who just has to have an opinion on everything under the sun, I have one here too. People have often said to me that they do not read autobiographies because they are too pompous. I have read a few and I must say that autobiographies are rarely pompous. If anything, they are too demeaning of themselves. It's the biographies that I find dishonest because they are the ones which are more often than not colored by a partisan adoration.

Moving forward the book, I must say, is not exceptional. From what I have read, it doesn't quite measure up to the linguistic standards I have come to enjoy and appreciate lately but it's a bit like 'Peanuts' itself. What the book lacks in language, it more than makes up in the story it narrates. Schulz's life so uncannily mirrors the world he created, it almost brings a tear to my eyes thinking that a life of such hopelessness and dejection as Charlie Brown's is not entirely fiction. 'Peanuts' is not about ephemeral jokes and vanishing gags. It's not about the punchline in the final panel that we have come to expect from conventional comic strips. 'Peanuts' is dark. Extremely dark. It's about an innocent child's need to fit in and his failures at being able to do so. It's about his unrequited love and his brutal heartbreaks. It's about his constant search for success and his relentless defeats and it's about his almost boneheaded refusal to accept them. It's about his insecurities in a world infested with seemingly self-assured brats and insensitive brutes and cold sweethearts. For a comic strip it shows a pretty dark world indeed. And then it tries to laugh it all away at the expense of the protagonist, Charlie Brown. And we do smile don't we ? But for me at least it's a smile of quiet resignation at being made to realize, quite beautifully, the helpless cruelty of our world.

Peanuts in other words is a bit like the works of that brilliant Russian raconteur, Chekov. People do not like him because his endings are so ridiculously mundane in conventional wisdom. But how brilliant his stories themselves and how poignant their emotions ? It is customary for language to lose it's bite when it is translated from one form to another. We can see it in the crudeness with which we call Kafka's Samsa a 'vermin', a word that still provokes dissent in the camp of German language purists. But the fact that Chekov retains much of his punch even after translation just goes on to show that his stories are so much deeper. In the same way, my appreciation for 'Peanuts' is neither for the language nor for the twists, for it has virtually none of either. It's an appreciation for a bittersweet story that has been well told with frankness and honesty and subtlety. To me, those two dots between parentheses that are Charlie Brown's eyes convey more insecurity than the best actors ever can with a million words at their disposal. To me, 'Peanuts' represents an exceptional example of the kind of creative instinct that has so alarmingly disappeared in popular consciousness. Honest, intelligent art.