Interpreting a Cartoon Story

¶ … anxiety and happiness? Let us consider a joke on this topic, before turning to serious theoretical approaches toward the subject. In a "Peanuts" cartoon strip by Charles M. Schultz, the strip's resident know-it-all and amateur psychiatrist, Lucy van Pelt, is observing Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy hopping around in a giddy dance of happiness. "How can you be happy when you don't know what this year has in store for you?" she shouts.

Snoopy looks chastened as Lucy continues, "Don't you worry about all the things that can happen?" Snoopy looks anxious, or sick unto death, as Lucy says: "That's better…live in dread and fear…be sensible." But in the strip's final panel, Snoopy bursts out into joyful laughter ("hehehe") and begins his happy dance again.

I'd like to approach this cartoon strip as a little parable, and evaluate it using two approaches to anxiety: the existential approach given by Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, and the psychoanalytic approach taken by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents. Freud provides a useful starting place, because the Freudian concept of "angst vor etwas" or "fear before something" is precisely what Lucy van Pelt is trying to get Snoopy to feel in this strip.

Freud famously claims that all anxiety is "angst vor etwas" -- in other words, it is not only confrontational (I stand before society / I stand before God and feel fear) but also anticipatory (I feel anxious before the event, my anxiety is an expectation) (Bloom 57). In Chapter VII of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud outlines the mechanism of how he thinks anxiety should operate in civilization. The earliest form is "social anxiety" where people feel fear before the opinion of others, and allow this anxiety to control them (Freud 85).

Freud thinks this is the principle that organizes most of society, but he also believes there is a "higher stage" in which this anxiety and authority is basically internalized -- we respond to an inner sense of fear, the voice of conscience, rather than an external sense of social shame or social punishment for transgression. Part of the joke of the "Peanuts" comic is that, in some sense, it perfectly illustrates the dynamic of Freud's model. Snoopy is happy at the beginning: Lucy doesn't understand why.

So Lucy subjects Snoopy to her opinion of his behavior, and Snoopy complies with "social anxiety" to alter his behavior accordingly -- he replaces his happiness with sorrow and worry. By the third panel, Snoopy seems to have internalized the source of anxiety, to reach the level Freud and Lucy Van Pelt recommend -- he walks away from Lucy, no longer needing social presence to awaken the fear that makes him conform.

Yet in the final panel Snoopy has seemingly realized that his internalized conscience no longer supports the fear: Snoopy is happy again. From Freud's standpoint, this may just be a lesson about the short memories of dogs. But is there another way that we can understand Snoopy's journey here, to pass through anxiety and be surprised by joy? I would suggest that the religious existential philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard provides an even better way of understanding Snoopy here.

Kierkegaard presents his thoughts through the mask of a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio. In some sense this is an old-style church sermon, taking a passage from the Bible and examining it closely. The text is the Genesis story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham -- who waited until his very old age before finally having the son God promised him -- is told by God to offer Isaac as a blood sacrifice atop Mount Moriah.

Abraham takes the knife and binds the boy, and is about to kill the thing he loves most when God stops him. As Johannes / Kierkegaard notes, it almost seems dangerous to try to interpret this story, asking "can one then speak candidly about Abraham without running the risk that an individual in mental confusion might go and do likewise?" (Kierkegaard 23). Yet Kierkegaard's story is one of terror and anxiety -- as the title indicates -- but it is mainly a story about religious faith.

As he says of Abraham, "he left his worldly understanding behind and took faith with him" (Kierkegaard 14). Kierkegaard suggests that the only rational response to the "fear and trembling" of mortal uncertainty and anxiety is to take the leap of faith that Abraham takes -- and in believing and obeying his God, Abraham must face up until the last possible moment the prospect that God's plan for him is indeed horrible.

We might now recollect the cartoon strip, where Lucy tells Snoopy "live in fear and dread…be sensible." Is a state of nonstop anxiety truly the sensible, practical, rational response to existence? Kierkegaard thinks not. He thinks that, instead, religious faith provides meaning and a defense against fear. From Kierkegaard's standpoint, what happens between the third and fourth panels of the cartoon is that Snoopy has clearly taken a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.

Ultimately the difference between Freud and Kierkegaard can be illustrated by one simple thought-experiment of reading the Peanuts cartoon and asking what exactly happens between the penultimate and final panels. For Freud, the answer is the mechanism of repression: as Freud writes in his early case history of Lucy R., "an idea must be intentionally repressed from consciousness and excluded from associative modification" (Freud and Breuer 116). Snoopy's laughter seems to come from internalizing and repressing the anxiety -- his laughter must be hysterical.

But for Kierkegaard, it's clear that the dog found God -- Snoopy has somehow taken a leap of faith, and suddenly the anxiety has meaning within the context of Snoopy's belief in a larger order and meaning that reverses the.