"Brown Study"

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Sunday 20 February 2000

IT NEVER produced a belly laugh, the good characters almost always were defeated and dejected, and the artwork was stylised and minimalistic often to the point of being dreary. And yet, the Peanuts comic strip, which ended last week with the passing of its creator Charles Schulz, was so well regarded that its termination has been an occasion for genuine sadness around the world. Although from a literal perspective a quintessential piece of Americana, with some of its regular themes built around such things as baseball and American football, Peanuts was a global phenomenon.

La Repubblica in Rome splashed Schulz's death as its main page-one story and devoted a two-page spread inside to the artist. Obituaries of Schulz in the major newspapers in Britain, the United States and Australia have been extensive and glowing. The reason for this is simple: Schulz was an artist in the true sense of the word. Through the 50 years in which he drew and wrote the strip, he told us much about ourselves and the human condition. The world of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopyand the others was self-contained and, to a great extent, self-obsessed. Outsiders, in the form of parents and teachers, did exist but always outside the frame. What counted to the characters in Peanuts were the basics - getting along, striving, avoiding embarrassment, dealing with embarrassment, yearning. To Schroeder, it was art, in the form of Ludwig Van Beethoven, that mattered. To Snoopy, imagination was all. The simple fact that he was a beagle proved no hindrance to his aspirations. With nothing but a kennel and a few props, he was a World War I flying ace, a brilliant dancer and a best-selling novelist. All of this took place in the dog's own private world; no one intruded on his various imaginary existences because imagination and self-knowledge were the things that Schulz made sacrosanct in his art. Often, that self-knowledge was painful. Charlie Brown's constant yearning for the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl developed into a powerful motif for unrequited desire in a consumerist, postwar society. Part of him surely knew that it could never be. But another part always knew that he would always keep wanting. And standing on the pitcher's mound during a baseball game, Charlie Brown knew he was terrible. Humiliated by his repeated failures he might have been, but he never gave up.

The little universe that Schulz created in his comic strip reflected all the uncertainties and anxieties inherent in the newly-created nuclear age. Every time one of the characters thought they had knowledge of something, further analysis would reveal a different, more confusing truth. When Lucy tells her brother Linus that the small, distant shape on the ground is a butterfly that regularly migrates from Brazil, only to discover upon closer inspection that it is a potato chip, Linus asks: "How could a potato chip have migrated from Brazil?" How indeed? What was real and what was fantasy? These were children, after all. But they were children in only the strictest sense. Peanuts was the ultimate manifestation of the Freudian notion that all of our most important and defining characteristics are determined so early in life that even in childhood we are all templates of our adult selves. Schulz played with the concept so brilliantly that he even managed to invert the establishment of child psychology by making Lucy, the most assertive and hysterical member of the Peanuts gang, a part-time psychiatrist who ran a little lemonade stand-style booth where she listened to Charlie Brown's woes - for a fee. Invariably, in the manner of some adult psyche-tending, she managed to make her client feel worse by the end of the consultation.