So I was reading Mr. Mitchell's blog about the different types of football in The Catcher in the Rye and I made a comment about a similar episode in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. As I was thinking about it more, there are a whole lot of similarities between Calvin and Holdin in terms of how they view childhood/adulthood, society as a whole, and even their narrative tone.
Calvin and Hobbes was one of my obsessions growing up. I read and reread every collection of the strips so much that to this day I have most of them memorized.
To start with the obvious, both of them despise school and do not even try to succeed in it. Calvin is constantly the worst student in his class who doesn't do his homework, daydreams during class, and in general acts up. Calvin is always getting bad grades, getting sent to the principles office, and dreading the end of summer and back to school. Holdin has gotten kicked out of multiple schools and is failing his classes at Pencey prep except for English. Both of them are intelligent and witty; their rejection of school is out of principle, not lack of talent.
Connected to their rejection of school is their rejection of society at large. Both are lonely outsiders to society, Holdin has no close friends and Calvin's only friend is his stuffed tiger Hobbes. But this loneliness is largely self-enforced. Holdin views other people as too fake to bother getting to know. Calvin thinks humans are too caught up in the rat race (among their other flaws) and tells Hobbes he wishes "humans were more like animals." Both see themselves as somehow disillusioned from this, like they can see beyond the life everyone else is living (this is especially evident when Calvin and Hobbes are taking rides down the mountain in their wagon and discussing human nature). In both cases, not having grown up is important to this. Holdin hates the "phoniness" that must come with growing up, while Calvin sees adulthood as buying into the rat race.
Perhaps the biggest reason they seem similar is the narrative style they use. We have talked a great deal in class about how Holdin will pause his narration to make a smart-ass comment to us, and how it often has this sort of stand-up-comic dimension to it. A similar thing often happens in the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. The first three panels will show Calvin in some situation or conversation, and then the last panel will be Calvin standing by himself facing the audience and making some funny comment to the readers. Like Holdin, much of the humor in his lines comes from the audience recognizing the situation he is in or is describing, the stand up comic dimension.
Of course, the parallel is not completely accurate. Holdin likes girls and invites a prostitute up to his room at one point, while Calvin is afraid of cooties and is the dictator for life of GROSS (the Get Rid Of Slimy girlS) club. Also, Calvin is eternally stuck at age 6 and he never gets older or has a birthday, moves past second grade, or undergoes significant personal development. I assume Holdin will at some point undergo some type of personal development, otherwise this would not be a coming-of-age novel.
This post is insightful and original on a number of levels--Calvin is a fine representative of the kind of "eternal child" that Holden idealizes, both mischievous and essentially good. I hadn't heard this comparison before, but it makes a lot of sense. When you compare the narrative dynamics of both, I'm reminded that, in previous classes, some readers were inclined to compare David Mitchell's style in _Black Swan Green_ to Calvin and Hobbes. Keep this in mind, and see what you think.
ReplyDeleteYou draw some really interesting parallels between Calvin and Holden, and in doing so you highlight Holden's immaturity. It's worrisome how much this teenager has in common with a little kid, and I hope you're right that he will undergo significant personal development by the end of the novel. What you said about how Calvin and Holden alienate themselves is also an interesting similarity between the two. It's true that Holden has no close friends and that this is a choice, but in some ways, he's very eager for companionship. Throughout the novel, I've been puzzled by his ability to seem so distant from others and yet in other respects, so chatty and willing to converse with complete strangers.
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