Doctrines that shape "Calvin and Hobbes"

Keep looking for books -- serious and funny -- to discuss with the kiddos in your life

Whenever our grandchildren visit our home there’s a ritual that takes place during the first hour or so. This has happened since the oldest started reading and, no doubt, will continue with the youngest.

The rite involves curling up with books, of course, and one giant boxed-set of heavy hardbacks is always in play — “The Complete Calvin and Hobbes” by Bill Watterson. They have a paperback set at home, of course, in the ever-growing library created by their parents and grandparents. And, during long road trips, they pack boxes of their own books. After one journey, their father found about 100 books (“chapter books” and lots of toddler classics) in the minivan.

Digging into the Calvin and Hobbes hardbacks is different, a small-t “tradition” in our extended family. Why? Of course, they love the strong-willed (to say the least) Calvin and the understated wit and wisdom of Hobbes, the stuffed tiger who comes alive during their “imaginary” adventures.

Our grandkids learn that there is more going on in these books, as they age and discuss their Watterson favorites with the old folks. Sooner or later, in their classical school readings, they will discover (but this will not be predestination) the symbolism in the strip’s title and the grown-up themes woven into the images and wisecracks.

We are talking about some obvious symbolism, but here is a bit of background information care of a Comic Book Resources essay entitled “Why Bill Watterson Named his Characters Calvin and Hobbes.” The overture is rather long, but — hey — we’re talking about John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes:

Since its publication, Calvin and Hobbes has been singled out for its philosophical preoccupations. The ethics and values of the strip have resulted in a slew of academic analyses. At a base level, this is apparent through the names that Watterson chose for his protagonists. Calvin derives from the theocratic reformer Jean Calvin, while Hobbes takes his moniker from the empiricist philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The inherent dichotomy between these two dialecticians was explored through Calvin and Hobbes’ interactions with one another during the comic strip’s run, presenting disparate worldviews. However, Calvin and Hobbes is special in that Watterson never allowed this potentially pretentious narrative conceit to undermine the comic’s charming characters and humor. …

While playing with Hobbes, Calvin expresses an inclination towards notions of fate and predetermination, to which Hobbes exclaims, “What a scary idea!” Appearing early in Calvin and Hobbes’ run, this moment was one of the first to intimate philosophical disharmony between the title characters. Coupled with the implications of Calvin’s avenues of play, the character ultimately aligns himself with Calvinist thought.

And on the other side of these doctrinal debates:

Hobbes often appears more world-weary than Calvin and typically possesses a far dimmer view of human nature. When asked if he believes in the Devil, Hobbes replies, “I’m not sure man needs the help.” On the meaning of life, Hobbes states, ‘We are here to devour each other.” Nonetheless, despite his apparent cynicism, Hobbes never descends into nihilism. He has a clearly defined moral compass and belief in natural law.

This correlates with his namesake, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’ most famous work is 1651’s Leviathan, in which he lays bare the conviction that humankind’s natural state is “the war of all against all.” … Hobbes is full of joyously independent attitudes and ideas, a state at odds with the secular authoritarianism that Thomas Hobbes prescribed to.

Thus, “In the naming of his protagonists, Watterson provided a philosophical subtext to Calvin and Hobbes for readers wishing to look for it. By choosing two historical thinkers with diametric belief systems — predetermination versus human agency — the cartoonist opened interesting dramatic avenues that allowed him to dissect the human condition.”

As a mass-communications professor (involuntarily retired), I will note that this classic comic strip ran from November 18, 1985, to December 31, 1995, and, thus, predated our current debates about the Internet, social media and all of those omnipresent glowing digital screens. However, Calvin’s tendency to stare at a television set offered an open door, for my students, into the work of writers such as Marie Winn (“The Plug-In Drug”) and George Gilder (“Life After Television”).

The Big Idea, in today’s meditation, is that it’s never too early to start talking to your children about the stories in their lives. If children grow up with their parents reading to them (as should be the norm), they rapidly get used to asking questions and then talking to grownups about why and how stories do what they do.

This is, dare I say, crucial to the future of our culture. Please see this earlier Rational Sheep post: “Stop reading? Then democracy will fade.”

Most children love comics and, thus, I will now argue that bookish strips like “Calvin and Hobbes” (and “Peanuts”) should remain important in the lives of new generations of children, long after these images have become part of the ink-on-paper past.

With that in mind, let me recommend this essay at The Dispatch — “How Imaginary Is ‘Calvin and Hobbes’?” — written by Daniel Sipes, an intern there. The overture:

I sometimes think that the rarest category in fiction are books that can be enjoyed equally by children and adults. Books in this category not only have to speak to something ageless in human experience — they also have to speak to that something in a way that can be universally understood and appreciated.

I’ve only encountered a handful of these books in my life. The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and David Copperfield all come to mind, but you’d be hard-pressed to find many kids reading Tolkien these days, let alone Dickens. That leaves one book — or rather comic strip — that seems to me to be the quintessential example of the genre: Calvin and Hobbes.

Sipes said he first encountered “Calvin and Hobbes” in a “stack of books in the waiting room of a child psychologist’s office. (In many ways a strange choice—a little like having a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook in a police station.)”

Sipes was an 8-year-old at the time and, to make a long story short, he felt like he was staring in a mirror.

Calvin wasn’t a normal kid who quickly “got fixed.” He was “often petty, vindictive, and downright mean — you got the sense the author sympathized with him and his desire to act out.” Calvin’s vivid imagination turned the “real” world around him into “alien landscapes, prehistoric jungles, 1950s noir films, Cubist paintings, anything at all to escape a world that asks him to sit still and pay attention.”

Then there is this crucial question: Is Hobbes real, as in a “real” tiger? Watterson consistently resisted claims that Hobbes was “imaginary.” The cartoonist told one interviewer: “The strip doesn’t assert [that Hobbes is imaginary]. … That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes, in the way that Calvin does.”

Is this topic too complex for conversations with a curious kid? Sipes argues:

… Watterson seems less to be denying that Hobbes exists only for Calvin and more to be challenging the hierarchy that the terms “real” and “imaginary” imply. In other words, why do we assume that Calvin’s private world is any less real than the world adults keep trying to force him into?

Thus, Watterson passed up mountains of hard, cold, cash when corporations came calling offering to license his characters so they could mass-produce products for toy-story shelves.

The artist had an idealistic, quite philosophical, reason for his refusal: Hobbes was more than a doll or a toy, even though that was part of his identity in the comics. He argued that producing and selling a “real-life Hobbes doll would indelibly upset this balance. It would, Watterson said, ‘deprive the strip of an element of its magic.’”

What’s the deeper message? Near the end of this short essay, Sipes offers this:

Whenever a grown-up arrives and Hobbes turns into a limp, expressionless doll, you feel a twinge of sadness. Holding a doll, Calvin is a tragic figure: isolated, lonely, unwilling to enter the real world. But then the grown-up leaves. Hobbes becomes his witty, energetic, alive self again, and Calvin doesn’t seem so tragic anymore. Not with a friend by his side.

It’s that tension between imagination and reality — to use the words in a way Watterson would not approve of, since after all imagination is as much a part of reality as anything else — that makes Calvin and Hobbes ageless. Children and adults alike understand the pressure to make one’s inner world conform to the grand public world we all share. To turn our own inner Hobbes into a doll.

This probably isn’t a conversation to have with an 8-year-old, unless he or she has asked if there is a way to click a mouse on Amazon and order a stuffed-animal version of Hobbes to hug at bedtime.

Nevertheless, this is a topic that will still be relevant during high school, at least for sharp teens who have grasped C.S. Lewis’ idea that it takes a certain degree of maturity to keep reading books that were allegedly written for children, alone.

Remember the dedication for “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” that Lewis addressed to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield?

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

Yes, invest in a hardback copy of “The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.” You may need more than one set, since it’s a good thing if they wear out.

Do it now. Before you get too old to read these amazingly complex classics with children of all ages.