{"id":44260,"date":"2017-02-01T17:01:27","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T17:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/?p=44260"},"modified":"2018-05-11T10:20:48","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T10:20:48","slug":"silent-third-panel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/silent-third-panel\/","title":{"rendered":"Silent Third Panel"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I look (again) at Peanuts<\/i>\u2014the entire 50-year-project, and its astonishing achievement\u2014I\u2019m noticing new things. I\u2019ve learned, for example, about how everyone credits Schulz with inventing not just the classic four-panel gag strip but the crucial innovation of the \u201csilent\u201d third panel, which Garry Trudeau (whose style I appropriate here<\/a>) and Bill Watterson (whom I discuss here<\/a>) and Johnny Hart and so many others have mimicked. (Someone\u2019s got a website just about silent third panels.)<\/p>\n

I seized on the below strip because, this time through, I\u2019ve been noticing the sheer force of the characterizations\u2014for example, I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that Lucy is maybe his greatest creation, in terms of depth and complexity (I think somebody else like Jules Feiffer said the same thing)\u2014and I’m realizing anew that what I\u2019ve always loved about Sally is how unabashedly stupid<\/i> she is. Other characters have moments of slowness or confusion, as manifested (especially) by school problems\u2014Schulz was actually an unusually sharp critic of the now-discredited \u201cnew math\u201d teaching system, and, in general, sympathetic to the difficulty of receiving formalized instruction even for the sharpest amongst us\u2014but Sally goes beyond this: she’s a beautiful expression of that sheer, belligerent opacity that only the truly dull-witted have\u2026the refusal to even consider that they might learn or absorb something; the resignation or even contentment in the face of the certain knowledge that they will go through life fundamentally baffled. This strip (June 6th, 1967) seemed, now, like the best example of this I\u2019ve seen:<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

But as I kept staring at it, I became puzzled and then fascinated\u2014I realized that I’d been missing something, not just about this strip but about the characterizations and the ideas themselves. The more I focus on the “joke,” the more I realize there\u2019s an entire second-level meaning; a \u201cFool on the Hill\u201d zen clarity and brilliance to Linus\u2019 question and, especially, Sally\u2019s answer. I don’t just mean the clich\u00e9 of profundity emerging through the pursuit of seemingly na\u00efve or dumb inquiries (Einstein asking “What would I see if I ran along a beam of light?” which sounds like Rod McKuen but is actually the thread that, when pulled, leads to General Relativity) or Art Linkletter’s treacly “Kids Say the Darndest Things” vaudville (which is, of course, exactly the kind of Family Circus<\/i> horror that Schulz spent fifty years forcibly eradicating). The contemplation Sally engages with in that third panel is not so much Existential as Phenomenological; there are echoes of Husserl in her probing of her own experiential lexicon and the dissatisfaction that results. But her final question goes further back through intellectual history: it’s not just zen, it’s Socratic. Linus’ Nietzschean desire for an Eternal Return, a triumphant rebirth as enlightened superman, is checkmated by the simplicity of her Classical inquiry (as Leon Kass<\/a> remarked in my “Genesis” class at Chicago, “Nietzsche can’t escape the clutches of Aristotle”).<\/p>\n

And where are Linus and Sally standing and why are they there? It’s a blank, Samuel Beckett landscape, complete with hapless, baffled interlocutors pinned eternally in place: Like Vladamir and Estragon, the Peanuts<\/i> cast lives outside of time, never aging, with no beginning and no end\u2014Linus can’t<\/i> start over; his immortality traps him even more than our own (or Schulz’) finite lives. (As Jerry Seinfeld said of Pop-Tarts, “They can’t get stale because they were never fresh.”) The more I think about this strip, the deeper and heavier it gets: an avalanche of meaning in these four minimalist drawings and those 25 words. The towering genius of Charles M. Schulz endures\u2014and the fact that it’s carried forward not in scholarly texts or museums but in newsprint, sweatshirts, beach-towels and mugs makes it all the more impressive and indelible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I look (again) at Peanuts\u2014the entire 50-year-project, and its astonishing achievement\u2014I\u2019m noticing new things. I\u2019ve learned, for example, about how everyone credits Schulz with inventing not just the classic four-panel gag strip but the crucial innovation of the \u201csilent\u201d third panel, which Garry Trudeau (whose style I appropriate here) and Bill Watterson (whom I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44261,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cartoons","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44260"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44260"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44544,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44260\/revisions\/44544"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}