Part 1: Introduction

Created by Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes completed in 1998 its last run of strips but not before proving that, like most works of humour, the laughter it elicits merely shades an insight into our true characters both as an adult and, more specific to this work, as a child. In his book of correspondence, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advised:

To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child,… And when one day one perceives that their [grownups’] occupations are paltry, why not then continue to look like a child upon it all as upon something unfamiliar, from out of the depth of one’s own world, out of the expanse of one’s own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why want to exchange a child’s wise incomprehension for defensiveness and disdain?… only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. (LYP, 46)

For Rilke, the poet must possess a frame of mind similar to that of a small child, to attain its solitude so that he may see the “truth” of things. The Romantic painter Tommaso Minardi, in his essay, “On the Essential Quality of Italian Painting From Its Renaissance to the Period of Its Perfection”, figured the essential child’s painting would be

of the truest character, because he takes it from truth itself… Since the child’s soul, completely involved in the sentiment of the loving image, would feel only that which is strictly connected with the expression of the image itself, all accessory matter would simply remain unobserved. So there would be nothing superfluous, nothing useless.[1]

The poetic struggle, then, is the recapturing of one’s youth, to view the world as one once did but with the faculties of a mature, adult mind to articulate such views.

Bill Watterson, to a certain extent, has overcome this struggle. The result is the comic strip, with a permeable line all that distinguishes Watterson from Calvin. Watterson is a child and a poet; Calvin is a child with the mindscape of an artist.

Rilke demonstrates in his works an appreciation for the mind of the child. I will cite examples of such works as they exemplify a yearning for the “truth” of things – something that may only be realized through a child’s eyes. Parallels will also be drawn between Calvin’s “life” and Rilke’s life to identify those ingredients which contribute to such an affectionate viewing of childhood and indeed, the world; to identify why the child and the poet are so similar despite ostensible inconsistencies.

Ultimately my aim in writing this paper is to disregard common opinion, to contradict (and, hopefully, eradicate) the stigma that threatens the life force of the comic strip. It is an underappreciated art form, a source of humour and insight. Calvin and Hobbes figures too prominently in the literary world to be dismissed as newspaper filler if not for its razor-fine depiction of childhood, then for its social commentary — a responsibility undertaken by the greatest of poets.

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[1] Joshua C. Taylor, ed, 19^th Century Theories of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987) 178-179, qtd. in Fineberg, p4.

Part 2: Hobbes

Bill Watterson has never illustrated the initial meeting between Calvin and Hobbes. We are to assume they have always been together. Yet this omission lends itself to theories regarding just what exactly Hobbes is. On a very basic level he is an imaginary friend assuming the form of a stuffed tiger. In the past child psychologists have frowned upon those children who create imaginary companions, characterizing them as having “adjustment difficulties…The animals seem to some extent to take the place of unsatisfactory or unacquired human friends. [They] get along badly with children, [are] dictatorial, moody, negative, explosive…”[1] But as Marjorie Taylor asserts in Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them, such archaic findings neglect any consideration of the personality traits of those children who do not have imaginary friends. “This is a crucial piece of missing information,” she writes, “because we are not interested in whether children with imaginary companions have problems, but whether those problems are actually more common among children with imaginary companions than children without imaginary companions.” (Taylor, 35) This discrepancy in the survey shatters any allegation that deems Hobbes a detriment to Calvin’s social and mental well-being.

More recent studies find imaginary friends indicative of a child’s well-developed imagination. The child, in giving his friend distinct personality traits, now recognizes the world from another perspective and has developed “theory of mind” – a major area of developmental research.[2] This theory hinges on the child’s inability to consider someone else’s point of view or that a belief could exist which is false. The test most popularly practised to illustrate this point is the “false belief” task, which, as explained by Marjorie Taylor, has a child being shown, for example, a band-aid box. The child will expect there to be band-aids inside the box. When the box is eventually opened, however, the child discovers there to be crayons inside. Now, when the child is asked what he thought was in the unopened box, he will invariably answer, “crayons”. In fact, the child will figure future subjects of the test will figure crayons to be in the unopened band-aid box. Such are the dynamics of the child’s mind that they can not differentiate between their subjective reality and the reality of someone else. (Taylor, 47)

An experiment performed by Taylor and a colleague, Stephanie Carlson, concluded that those children with imaginary companions performed better on the “false belief” tests, opening their minds to other ways of perception, admitting their error in predicting incorrectly the contents of the band-aid box. In this way, Calvin, because of Hobbes, does not suffer the repercussions usually associated with his ostensibly anti-social behaviour. Taylor surmises this tolerance results from the child constantly executing the imaginary friend’s actions and vocalizing the imaginary friend’s thoughts. (Taylor, 47)

(From The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, p150)

Calvin explains Hobbes’ somnambulistic tendencies to his irritated parents in the middle of the night and insodoing, illustrates his selflessness in retrieving for his imaginary friend a midnight snack. In short, these friends help to develop a child’s notion of subjectivity. Acknowledging Hobbes’ idiosyncrasies will ultimately afford Calvin an understanding of other people.

This understanding will of course require time to develop sufficiently. At present, Calvin can not fathom any reference to Hobbes as a stuffed animal. When Susie finds Hobbes and invites him to tea, the other stuffed animals seem, to Hobbes, to be “slightly comatose” and Susie’s regard for Hobbes and her own stuffed animal, Mr. Bun, is generic. They are, for her, someone (or something) to talk to. Why then, does Calvin attribute such a specific array of humanistic character traits to Hobbes? We can deduce that Hobbes is more than a mere sounding board for Calvin, which is the case for Susie and her stuffed companions. Hobbes vocalizes his opinions, most of which differ from those of Calvin. The latter of course benefits from hearing these differing opinions because they expose him to the broad spectrum of viewpoints in the world. But where do these opinions come from?

They exist in Calvin, presumably. He simply lacks the intellectual or emotional capacity to express them directly himself. Consider the following strip:

(From It’s A Magical World, p20)

Calvin uses Hobbes as a suppositional figure (i.e. acknowledging that his view may not be the only one), or as an “angel’s advocate”. Hobbes represents that subconscious level on which Calvin admits complaining is futile.

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[1] L.B. Ames & J. Learned, “Imaginary companions and related phenomena,” Journal of Genetic Psychology. 1946. 69: 147-167, 162, qtd in Taylor, 35.

[2] J.W. Astington, The Child’s Discovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), qtd in Taylor, 44.

Part 3: Face(s)

The poet, like Calvin, is constructed of many levels, many more so than the common layperson. These levels indicate personalities which may or may not differ greatly from what we could call the individual’s “prime personality”. The poet learns of differing likes, dislikes, and beliefs from these levels as he explores them through deep introspection. We are a composite of everyone we meet. Shades of their personalities linger in our subconscious long after we encounter them. The poet however, is more sensitive to such idiosyncrasies in personality.

What is a Poet? A man endowed with more lively sensi-bility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul… to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present… (Wordsworth, 453)

Such an ability to absorb qualities of those we encounter results in the universal poet, who alters his narrative voice to widen his readership by making his works more accessible. The poet has what one may consider to be an imaginary friend – the narrator of any piece of literature is not the writer but rather, the writer’s link to another world or, at the very least, a chance to see the same world from a different point of view.

In this sense, writing under different guises serves as therapy for the poet. These other voices allow the writer to attempt more risque subject matter in his works that he would not have been brave enough to attempt otherwise. For Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge functioned as a journal wherein he could purge his neuroses without using his own voice. It complements Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet. Rather than tell the youngster to suppress the neurosis, Rilke encourages him to “have the whole sickness and break out of it”. (Kleinbard, 44) Accordingly Malte resulted from Rilke’s mental and emotional neuroses boiling over onto the page. Rilke and Malte are both 28 at the time of the writing; both live or have lived on the rue Toullier. Presumably Malte is a fictional Rilke, a layer within the author’s psyche, suggesting Malte’s experiences bear many insights into the poet’s often troubled life. (Kleinbard, 26)

Hobbes’ layer within Calvin’s mental world surfaces when, for instance, the family’s supply of tuna suddenly diminishes. Though it is apparent the stuffed tiger did not eat the food, his traits (i.e. his culinary likes and dislikes) dictate Calvin’s actions as an inert stuffed animal looks on. Essentially, as every mental layer is a facet of the poet’s mind, so, too, is Hobbes a facet of Calvin’s mind to the extent that Calvin, the real culprit, will eat what his prime personality regards as disgusting: tuna. Hobbes is a scapegoat for Calvin, though not in any vindictive sense of the word. He harbours Calvin’s gentile, mature nature – a manifestation of those traits that Calvin, being the precocious child he is, would rather not admit to harbouring. Perhaps Calvin will develop an appreciation for tuna later in his life. The aforementioned situation implies that certain levels are prominent at different points in one’s life. Hobbes could be representative of Calvin’s future self. If so, our entire lives’ traits are inherently programmed within us, surfacing sporadically.

Rilke explains, in his autobiographical fiction, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, the many facets of the poetic and the infantile mind:

to think, for instance, that I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are qualities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several…There are thrifty, simple people; they do not change their face, they never even have it cleaned. The question of course arises, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? They store them up. Their children wear them… Other people put their faces on…and wear them out and then little by little the under layer, the no-face, comes through, and they go about with that. (Malte, 15-16)

One’s complexity of character positively correlates with the number of faces the soul possesses. But the question remains: to what are these levels attributed? The simplest answer, though not necessarily the most accurate, is the imagination. Contemporary researchers in child psychology generally regard imaginary friends as an exhibition of an active, healthy mind, merely a stage the child will outgrow and therefore, little cause for parental concern. Nevertheless, Calvin’s parents, and indeed Rilke’s parents, should have embraced their respective child’s imaginative qualities. Instead, Calvin’s parents (never named in the strip) scour psychology texts to discover where they went wrong; why their child is outside performing lobotomies on snowmen and not playing baseball with other children his age. It is, afterall, when he is forced to join a baseball team that Calvin seems at his most desolate. Even Watterson, in hindsight, admits that placing Calvin in a scout troop (or imposing any form of social integration) in the earlier strips stifled the character’s – and the strip’s – development, and worked against Calvin’s personality. (10^th Anniv., 31)

Part 4: Regimentation

Rilke’s parents, whose son exhibited anti-social tendencies and a fondness for the arts, enlisted young Rainer in military school for a time, during which the would-be poet felt stifled and borderline suicidal. Rilke wrote, as noted in Carl Sieber’s book on the poet’s childhood,

it was out of the question to write. Not an hour without the echo of a voice shouting commands, and behind the slight shock another command was waiting. Thus even going to bed became an exercise divided up by orders, every moment another, up to the moment when one had at last slipped under the blankets in dismay. (Wydenbruck, 30)

Calvin’s life takes on a similar tone of strict regimentation.

(From The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, p64)

This lack of intellectual free-will stunts both the poet and the child’s development. A time for solitude and discovery is severely lacking and unsurprisingly both Rilke and Watterson look back on this period in their respective lives with contempt. In a letter written in 1920 to his former teacher at the military school, Major-General Sedlakowitz, Rilke admitted the following:

 

…when I left military college, I stood as one exhausted, physically and spiritually misused, retarded at sixteen, before my life’s enormous tasks, defrauded of the most spontaneous part of my energy and at the same time of that preparation, never again retrievable, which would have built me clean steps for an ascent that, weakened and damaged, I had now to begin before the steepest walls of my future. (Selected Letters, 261)

 

And Watterson: “I’ve never understood people who remember childhood as an idyllic time.” (10^th Anniv., 84) And, “I did pretty well at school, but I don’t remember it with much fondness.” (10^th Anniv., 185)

 

(From Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, p80)

And let us not forget Rosalyn – dreaded babysitter and infamous torturer of children:

 

(From The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, p43)

Rosalyn does not compare congruently to the military school of Rilke’s childhood despite their similarly stern philosophies. Though she is an authority figure, she is still a relative youngster who struggles with homework and the discovery of the opposite sex during those turbulent years of adolescence. She bridges the gap that divides Calvin from his parents, and Rilke from the army. She compares better to Rilke’s family who, although they are close to the young poet, still harbours an undeniable respect for military life.

Part 5: Nature

Rilke, in his letters, compares the reversal of a child’s developmental tendencies to the turning upside-down of a blooming tree. The tree fulfills its natural inclinations in growing into something beautiful as it surrounds itself with the elemental world. The sun, the air, and the rain all contribute to its realization of the self (i.e. a fully-bloomed tree). When the tree is turned away from these elements, it ceases to grow. (Wydenbruck, 281) Similarly, the child seeks not only the love and support of his humanistic surroundings (i.e. his friends and family) but also, the elements of nature to aid in the development of his own mental ecology. Calvin’s intellectual development is realized in nature. When he is trapped within the walls of the classroom, this intellectual development is compromised. As the comic strip asserts,

(From Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, p58)

The unique quality of the child (i.e., his unique pace, method of learning, and special skills) is homogenized into one “ordinary, boring molecule of water”, a far cry from the once beautiful and unique snowflake it naturally was. The conventional mode of teaching (i.e. in the classroom) is not conducive to Calvin’s mode of learning. Though his teacher, Miss Wormwood, finds it difficult to focus his attention on one particular subject, Calvin’s discovery of a snake in his backyard instigates a trip to the library to learn more about the animal. His desire to learn about the snake overcomes Calvin’s fear of books and what he has come to regard as “education”. When it is moved outside, learning is enjoyed. This “natural” mode of learning sees the child move beyond the limits of the four walls to realize their true potential in a world containing more than math and history textbooks. Afterall, how can school teach the students of the outside world without allowing them to experience it?

For Calvin and Rilke’s imaginations grow in nature. But this is not to say their imaginations are not influenced by other stimuli. Rilke, for instance, is molded by the politics of the real world. Harsh reality becomes for him fodder, which his mind manages and transforms into literary work. Calvin comparatively is molded by the products of the real world. He sits passively before the television as images of violence and amorality flash before his eyes. These images are then translated to Calvin’s work, his snowmen, as his creations are gutted, hanged, and dismembered for the viewing pleasure of the passerby. You cannot consider this shock-value art. Art created solely to disgust is dishonest and therefore, useless. Calvin’s work harbours a sincerity, thus making it valuable. On art, the German painter Caspar David Friedrich wrote in 1830,

the only true source of art is our heart, the language of a pure childlike spirit. A creation, not flowing from these springs, can only be mannerisms. Every true work of art is received in consecrated hours and born in jubilant – to the artist often unknown – inner urges of the heart.[1]

True art reveals the essence of the artist’s subject. The child, to Friedrich, is uncivilized and therefore possesses a more intimate relationship with the secrets in nature. Friedrich Schiller writes,

[Children] are what we were; they are what we should again become. We were nature like them and our culture must, through reason and liberty, lead us back to nature. They are at the same time a rendering of our own lost childhood which remains for eternity our most cherished possession.[2]

The child knows little, if anything, about perspective, colour complements, and other such technical components of painting. This epitomizes, as Ruskin asserts, “the innocence of the eye… a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify.”[3] Painting is lost in convoluted theory and technicality; a child’s eye recovers the truth of the object being painted because his view of the object is not hindered by such needless complications as shadow and light.

Unfortunately the honesty in Calvin’s snow sculptures, instead of illustrating truths in nature, only illustrates how the child’s mind has been molded by television. Calvin watches an exorbitant amount of it despite his father’s urges to do otherwise. Here, Watterson makes a conspicuous criticism of today’s children’s viewing habits and of those programs being viewed. Cartoons which portray animals being shot in one scene yet appearing fully functional in the next trivialize violence as inconsequential,  circumstances that unfold for our amusement. Charles M. Schulz wrote, “Krazy Kat being hit in the head with a brick by Ignatz Mouse is funny. It’s funny because it is not happening to us.” (Schulz, 114) The child laughs accordingly at these cartoon antics, as it is sheltered from the gravity of the situation, thereby maintaining its innocence. Consequently the uncivilized child, while he has the potential to reveal such truths harboured in nature, instead discloses the truths harboured in society. These days, the child is not a child of nature but a child of the media.

Calvin leans toward violence because televisual images have portrayed it as the norm. That Calvin, and I am sure he realizes it, is somewhat abnormal convinces me only too well that his love of violence, his desire to fit in with TV demographics, wear the logos that will show he is accepted at the cost of his individuality, and his sincere self-disappointment when he just cannot bring himself to enjoy organized sport suggest an attempt to atone for his seeming abnormality. The poet, then, treads this line that divides accepted marginality and rejected nonsense.

This line, expectedly, exists in nature where Calvin contemplates in solitude while his classmates play baseball nearby. Authority demands the child “get some fresh air” and “run around outside”; however, are these demands placed on the child a result of the authority’s subconscious desire to have the child learn from nature in solitude or to have the child spend time with others in competition? Rilke, like Calvin, condemns such primal inclinations:

And the playing field, trampled down by the furious playfulness, the impatience, the violence and the vengefulness of all those bewildered boys, was it not the first meadow I knew?… If at that time I had already discovered the happy communion of walking on the grass with bare feet, I would surely have comforted it with the innocence and curiosity of my naked soles. To comfort – yes, it seemed to me that that was the only thing that was needful. (Wydenbruck, 29-30)

This is a passage of two distinct halves. The “playing field” of the first half is associated with “trampled”, “furious”, “impatience”, “vengefulness”, and “bewildered”, a far cry from the lexicon of the second half: “happy”, “bare”, “comfort”, and “innocence”. Such aggressive words should not pertain to children. They are not old enough to develop a hatred necessary for vengefulness; nor are they old enough to bear responsibility and subsequently, develop impatience. Yet these boys do. The military regime has accelerated the maturation process — if not completely overlooked it – forcing children to forfeit their chance of intimacy with nature and prove unattainable the purity described in the passage’s second half.

That a field, in and of itself, must be manually altered by construction to be deemed fit for play contradicts the hedonism and boundlessness of nature and youth. Calvin’s world — the exercising of his imagination and interaction with nature — is, on several occasions, disrupted by these alterations.

(From Something Under The Bed Is Drooling, p36)

The garbage not only physically interferes with Calvin’s play, it also mentally interferes. Now he is concerned with the destination of the trash. He no longer explores the trees and wonders, for instance, why they grow towards the sun, he is instead concerned with the man-made garbage that has poisoned his playground.

(From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, p227)

Here, Man has destroyed nature to build more interiors. The four walls which threatened Calvin’s individuality in school are imposing themselves on the wilderness of Calvin’s natural education. The roses of Rilke’s poetry are being crushed, and without this muse, where is the poetry?

(From The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, p224)

This last strip summons once again the “playing field” conceit. On this occasion, the bulldozers have levelled the ground to better accommodate play. They have eliminated the natural field and in its place, erected something as unnatural as a baseball diamond with its carefully placed plots of dirt, grass, and chalk lines. The game of baseball further imposes itself on the children by requiring them to hit, run, catch, and throw in a certain manner. The baseball field is, in actuality, not a field at all. A field suggests a fresh opening full of possibilities. The baseball field regulates where there shouldn’t be any regulation at all. Children who play baseball are not exploring the sport, they are conforming to it. When everyone conforms to the same structure of methodology, it makes it easier to compare and more importantly, contrast the players. Statistics are tabulated to identify who executes an action correctly. By imposing these rules, we are melting the once-unique “snowflakes” of children into generic molecules of water, each one the same as the other. Granted, we are identifying talent and distinguishing the children accordingly but we are not celebrating every child’s distinctiveness. The weak players are seldom congratulated on being themselves. They are ignored and being so ignored compels them to practise until an exact emulation of another, better-skilled child is achieved. Anonymity is encouraged as children sacrifice a chance to explore other possible avenues of talent – one that is truly their own – to be like someone else. As Rilke counsels in his Letters to a Young Poet,

if there is nothing in common between you and other people, try being close to things, they will not desert you; there are the nights still and the winds that go through the trees and across many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may participate; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad like that and happy – and if you think of your childhood you live among them again, among the solitary children, and the grown-ups are nothing, and their dignity has no value. (LYP, 48)

Is it any wonder Rilke took to the meadows, away from the playing fields? He found comfort in his thoughts of a youth spent in solitude, away from people but among friends:

Friend of hours when no one remains,
when all’s refused to the bitter heart;
comforter whose presence attests
to such caresses floating in the air.

If we refuse to live, if we renounce
what was and what may happen still,
we never think enough of this tenacious friend
who’s next to us, at work on miracles.
 

“The Rose X” (from French Poems)

Rilke emulates the rose because he sees in the flower a beauty all its own. It is pure; it focuses on its own presence and purpose in the field, and indoingso, achieves a harmony not only within itself but with those beings that surround it:

 

Does your endless state make you capable of knowing,
in some melange where everything is fused,
that speechless harmony of nothingness and being
we so ignorantly refuse?

“Poem XXIII” (from French Poems)

 

The rose is a cog within nature, a complex system of inter-being. Everything is governed by “natural” law yet is able to maintain its own individuality and beauty.

 

(From The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, p237)

The rose is the “friend of hours” (line 1), that which remains when all else has fled. It is autonomous without being taciturn. As a “comforter whose presence attests/ to such caresses floating in the air” (lines 3-4), the rose for the poet represents the maternal figure Rilke did not enjoy as a child.

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[1] “Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen”, Sigrid Hinz, ed. (Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1968) 92, qtd in Fineberg, 2.

[2] Friedrich Schiller, “Schillers Werke, Bande 1 (Berlin and Weimer: Aufban-Verlag, Bibliothek Deutscher Klassiker, 1967) 249, qtd in Fineberg, 3.

[3] John Ruskin, “The elements of drawing”, The Works of John Ruskin, eds E.T. Cook, vol XV (London: G. Allen, 1903-12) 27, qtd in Fineberg, 9.

Part 6: Leisure

Wydenbruck, in her book, Rilke: Man and Poet, describes the poet’s mother as “wild and passionate as a young girl, but these innate tendencies were repressed through her marriage and she became restless and superficial. Missing the affluence of her paternal home, she would make pathetic efforts to appear wealthy and distinguished.” (Wydenbruck, 22) Later Wydenbruck mentions Rilke’s complaints in his letters and conversations about his mother being “unreal”. Now, consider this passage from Malte:

 

There was a time when Maman wished I had been a girl, and not this boy that once and for all I was. I had somehow guessed this, and I had hit upon the notion of sometimes knocking… at Maman’s door. I took delight in answering from outside, “Sophie,” …And when I entered then (in a little, girlish house-dress I wore anyway, with sleeves rolled all the way up), I was simply Sophie, Maman’s little Sophie, busy about household duties, whose hair Maman had to braid so that she should not be mistaken for the wicked Malte, if he ever returned. (Malte, 88)

 

Ernst Nordlind, a confidante of the poet, reveals Rilke had spoken of his mother’s prayers to the Blessed Virgin to give her a daughter. (Wydenbruck, 23) When her son was born, she treated him as though he were a girl.

Rilke’s father, similarly pressed upon young Rene a life in the armed forces presumably to compensate for his own inability to survive as a military officer. Josef Rilke disregarded those occupations fueled by creativity, and therefore favoured by his son. Predictably Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing has, on many occasions, denounced any sort of emotional bond between father and son. In a letter to Swedish author Ellen Key in 1903, Rilke wrote, “My whole art has grown up from its first day against opposition: against the laughter and scorn of the non-commissioned officers, against my father, against all about me.”[1]

And in Malte, when the young narrator falls ill and his parents must return prematurely from the Crown Prince’s ball:

 

And my father commanded me to say what was the matter… And he became impatient when I did not reply… He wore the uniform of the Master-of-the-Hunt with its lovely, broad, watered blue ribbon of the Order of the Elephant.

“What nonsense to send for us,” he said, speaking into the room without looking at me. (Malte, 87)

 

These inter-generational dynamics compare to those between Calvin and his parents:

 

(From It’s A Magical World, p56)

In both circumstances, the father imposes his passion (the military and cycling, respectively) upon his son. The child is forced to fill the void in the father’s life created by his own shortcomings. For Josef Rilke, having his son refuse life in the military ends the family tradition and renders him a failure who could not convince his son to live as the Rilke men who have gone before him. Perhaps Josef Rilke is less concerned with what his son has become (i.e. a poet) and more concerned with what his son did not become (i.e. a military officer). In either case, his father’s abandonment afforded the poet the solitude all artists require. Rilke, as Malte, muses:

 

To sit and watch a warm streak of afternoon sun and know many things about girls of bygone days and be a poet. And to think that I too would have become such a poet, had I been allowed to live somewhere, anywhere in the world, in one of those many closed-up country houses about which no one troubles. (Malte, 44)

 

And…

 

I spoke to almost no one, for it was my joy to be alone; only with the dogs I had short conversations now and again: we understood each other admirably. (Malte, 34)

 

With subtlety and humour this conflict of ideals exists in the comic strip, with Calvin and his dad continually at odds with each other. Little is ever really mentioned of Calvin’s parents. To Watterson, they do not have names because “as far as the strip is concerned, they are important only as Calvin’s mom and dad.” (10^th Anniv., 23) They offset those traits of their son through contrast, as the generation gap in the family is strikingly wide.

Of Calvin’s dad, this much is known: He is a patent lawyer whose contempt for his job leaves him yearning for the outdoors where he can cycle, camp, and play sports. The technological revolution and the dawn of a consumer-driven society has left him cynical of the man-made world around him, his words dripped in sarcasm. He loves his extra-curricular activities – worlds apart from Josef Rilke’s love: his profession.

 

(From It’s A Magical World, p87)

Leisure affords him a certain level of sanity and a reprieve from the maniacally mundane world of his office. He tries to instill in Calvin his love of bikes, camping, and baseball, not his career choice.

 

(From The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, p226)

The strip illustrates how (literally) threatened Calvin is of his father’s interests. He sees them much like Rainer Maria Rilke does – as a violation of his own personality.

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[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters 1:100 qtd in Kleinbard, 137

 

Part 7: Science

The poet and the child in turn find refuge on the outskirts of society where one can sit and observe, away from stifling parental figures, a theme explored by Michael Ondaatje’s Billy The Kid in his Left-handed Poems:

 

This nightmare by this 7 foot high doorway…
I am on the edge of the cold dark
watching the white landscape in its frame
a world that’s so precise every nail and cobweb
has magnified itself to my presence.

(Ondaatje, 74)

Both Rilke and Calvin seek this perspective from which to evaluate the world. With the external world isolated, the artist, as Rilke advises here, can turn his attentions inward to evaluate the only world truly worth evaluating:

 

Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your own future – only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you. What goes on in your inner most being is worthy of your whole love. (LYP, 46)

 

Emphasizing one’s internal world does not trivialize the importance of the external world. Geography – both natural and human – greatly affects the evolution of the poet. Nevertheless, Rilke clarifies that such variables merely influence the inner being — they do not define it. The poet must focus on the emotions aroused by these external elements and then capture these emotions on the page.

Rilke then divides the young poet’s internal world into two parts, remembering childhood and yearning for the future, for these are the only two elements of the world worthy of consideration. Appropriate that Calvin the child should spend his casual hours dreaming of the past (i.e. dinosaurs) and the future (i.e. outer space). For Calvin, this exploration of time and space illustrates his desire for a more expansive world. As a child, his primary source of transportation is his imagination. To alter his surroundings, he must conjure up new landscapes with his mind. Yet he does not create his own worlds, rather he creates worlds based on how the world was and how it might be. His mental meanderings are rooted in some base of reality. He constructs these worlds of pre-history and distant planets (post-history, if you will) from the knowledge of the subject matter he already possesses.

 

(From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, p105)

 

Calvin cannot blast into the fifth dimension and the world of neverending math equations without first knowing of the four dimensions: length, width, depth, and time. Only after displaying a knowledge of these conventions can Calvin unconventionally blast beyond them. And his knowledge of pre-historic life is shocking, if not for its breadth than for its focus on the savagery of our predecessors.

 

(From The Days Are Just Packed, p24)

Bill Watterson writes of the need for factual accuracy in Calvin’s daydreams:

 

Dinosaurs, I quickly learned, were wilder than anything I’d ever imagined. Tails up, with birdlike agility, these were truly the creatures of nightmares. My drawings began to reflect the new information, and with each strip, I’ve tried to learn more and to depict dinosaurs more accurately. I do this partly for my own amusement, and partly because, for Calvin, dinosaurs are very, very real. (10^th Anniv., 150)

 

Children pretend they are dinosaurs at will; Calvin however gives his pretence plausibility not to the extent that we expect him to one day show up to school as a six-ton reptile but by the way he adheres to the rules inherent in the supposition. His dinosaurs are not the stuff of fantasy; they are the stuff of science and fossils in museums. His make-believe world is more accessible to the reader when it is grounded in reality.

Calvin’s time machine, his wagon, continues this trend. Never does Calvin simply close his eyes and magically whisk himself away to other worlds. Instead he travels through time and space by “conventional” means to reach these destinations. Again, Calvin’s imagination refuses to be whimsical, instead conceding to some semblance of logic. He harnasses his wild imagination so as to make sense of it; the worlds he visits seem more realistic this way.

 

(From The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, p220)

Part 8: Malte

The poet, too, yearns to explore other “worlds”, whether they be physical places along the stretch of time or “emotional” worlds that exist only in the poet’s mind. The boy completely submits himself to these worlds. His passion fuels their being and this, more than anything, is the most admirable trait Calvin, as a creator, possesses.

To contradict natural law would be too easy. Calvin however works best within its boundaries to afford a world that is not too obscure (i.e. too rooted in his imagination) for the strip’s readership. Rilke is the same. His passion draws him to such ubiquities as a rose and the common window:

 

Aren’t you our geometry,
window, very simple shape
circumscribing our enormous
life painlessly?

A lover’s never so beautiful
as when we see her appear
framed by you; because, window,
you make her almost immortal.

“The Window III” (from French Poems)

 

Calvin and Rilke transform elements of the real world with their imagination (i.e. their mental worlds) to create art. For Rilke the rose bears positive inspiration. For Calvin the classroom bears negative inspiration – his hatred for school gives rise to his other worlds.

 

(From The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, p243)

For Rilke the expanses of time present a focus on ancestry and, more importantly, his role in the Rilke lineage. Much of the poet’s work derives from the familial alienation suffered in his youth and for much of his adult life. Severing the Rilke military tradition to focus his efforts on literature was, in the eyes of his father, a denial of his heritage. It could be argued that Josef Rilke resented his son’s ability to set himself free from the confines of the expectations set out by a remarkable family line – something he himself was never able to do. For such a theory to be corroborated, one must prove Josef Rilke despised the army, joining it out of obligation and not desire. The elder Rilke could not provide for his family with the luxury his ancestors enjoyed. Haunted by this sense of inadequacy, the Rilke family, for the approval of high society, dressed in threads which were far beyond their means. (Wydenbruck, 16) In Malte, Rilke’s protagonist suffers the same fate:

 

True, my collar is clean, my linen too, and I could, just as I am, enter any pastry shop I pleased, perhaps on the Grands Boulevards, and could calmly put my hand out to a plate of cakes and take some. No one would find that surprising… for it is still a hand that belongs in respectable circles. But still there are one or two individuals… who are not deceived, who don’t care a hang about my wrists. They look at me and they know. They know that I am really one of themselves, and am only playing a little comedy. (Malte, 41)

 

Again from Malte, art mirrors reality as, in this episode, young Malte watches from afar the doctors perforate his deceased father’s heart:

 

But now the Master-of-the-Hunt was dead, and not he alone. Now the heart had been pierced, our heart, the heart of our race. Now it was all over. This, then, was the shattering of the helm: “Today Brigge and nevermore,” something said within me.

Of my own heart I did not think… It was an individual heart. It was already at its task of beginning from the beginning. (Malte, 139-40)

 

The father’s heart represents true heritage and the natural, God-given luxury which accompanies it. Josef Rilke could not understand that being a Rilke automatically validated his aristocratic status without the need for expensive clothes to maintain the façade of being rich. The “Master-of-the-Hunt” – such majesty emblazoned in the uniform he wore on his deathbed — was obsessed with appearance, maintaining an air of sophistication even after his passing.

In his will, the elder Rilke bequeathed his son the two layers of the Malte/Rilke psyche. There is the outer, visible layer, which is composed of extravagant hunting uniforms and “hands that belong in respectable circles”, and the inner layer: a heart bearing the blood of the past that, in its son, has given rise to a distinctly different future in spite of itself. Amid the “shattering of the helm” is the heart that was “already at its task of beginning from the beginning” – a new family tradition fashioned by Malte.

This rebirth notwithstanding the young artist still struggled with the Rilke his father intended him to be and the Rilke within him, struggling to break free. In this passage from Malte, the protagonist’s discovery of “grandiose” masks in the attic soon reveals the role “masks” play in the Rilke lineage:

 

Hot and angry, I rushed to the mirror and with difficulty watched through the mask the working of my hands. But for this the mirror had just been waiting. Its moment of retaliation had come. While I strove in boundlessly increasing anguish to squeeze somehow out of my disguise, it forced me to lift my eyes and imposed on me an image, no, a reality, a strange, unbelievable and monstrous reality, with which, against my will, I became permeated… I lost all sense, I simply ceased to exist. For one second I had an indescribable, painful, and futile longing for myself, then there was only he: there was nothing but he. (Malte, 94-95)

 

Predictably these masks are found in the seldom disturbed rooms of the estate, where familial relics dwell. Malte confides, “It is all dispersed within me… the narrow, spiral stairs in the obscurity of which one moved as blood does in the veins… all that is still in me and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.” (Malte, 30-31) In this light, the house resembles Malte’s psyche. The narrator, in crossing over the threshold, has entered the past where elaborately embroidered costumes embody the family’s glories and consequently, a condemnation of Malte/Rilke and his chosen profession. Soon the eventual poet will regard these garments of his past as “silly”, “stupid”, and “of such a shabby unreality and hung there so peeled-off and miserable and collapsed so will-lessly when one dragged them out into the light,” (Malte, 92) but this is a far cry from the attitudes of his lineage, who accepted these masks. In fact, young Malte is met with laughter when he pleads for help in removing his mask:

 

There were Sieversen, and the housemaid and the butler: now for a decision. But they did not spring forward to the rescue; their cruelty knew no bounds. They stood there and laughed… I wept, but the mask did not let the tears escape… I was unconscious and lay there like a piece of something among all those wrappings, just like a piece of something. (Malte, 95-96)

 

The colourless phrasing of the last line suggests exasperation as Malte scrambles mutely on the floor. It also suggests a lack of identity. He realizes, upon reflection, that in wearing the mask and costume, he hasn’t any characteristics by which he can be described. He is a “thing” even to himself. Malte has heretofore believed in his family’s credo of appearance over substance, for it is not until he masks his appearance that he must turn inward to gain any sense of self. Masked, he is a “something”, objectified, as the boundaries which separate his mental and physical world break down and he becomes a piece of the wrappings that smother him.

Part 9: Self

Curious that the crying Malte should be discovered not by his family but by servants, who laugh at him. While it is possible some members of the family suffered very little in their own acceptance of the Malte charade of the grandiose, there must be some who, having their dreams of independence shattered by tradition, wept as bitterly as the protagonist does. One such individual is Christine Brahe, whose ominous appearances at dinner while Malte and his father are at Urnekloster (his maternal grandfather’s manor) hint at a life of regret.

Christine Brahe represents Malte’s mother. The mention of her at dinner suspiciously coincides with Malte’s feeling that “a very young girl in white might appear among us at any moment” – a feeling that precedes “there stepped into the darkness of the doorway a slender lady in a light-colored dress, who came slowly toward us.” (Malte, 37). Earlier the Count, perhaps the individual Malte’s father wants to impress the most, is described as such:

 

There were people who called this deaf and masterful old gentleman “Excellency” or “Marshal”, others gave him the title of “General”. And he doubtless possessed all these dignities, but it was so long since he had held offices that such appellations were hardly intelligible any more.” (Malte, 33)

 

Titles without substance, such as Master-of-the-Hunt, mask one’s true self. During dinner, “The Count, at the head of the table, smiled continuously with downdrawn lips, his face seeming larger than usual, as though he wore a mask.” (Malte, 34-35) And later, in the presence of his daughter’s ghost, “Grandfather, whose fingers clutched [Malte’s father’s] arm like a white claw, was smiling his mask-like smile.” (Malte, 37)

These familial masks repel the ghost, a representation of death – the inescapable truth of life. While the Count manages to don his mask with ease thereby maintaining respectability, Malte’s father trembles in the presence of the ghost. “I caught sight of my father, who had jumped up and now, his face pale as death, his hands clenched by his sides, was going toward the lady.” (Malte, 37). It is not until later, when the family is visited once again by the spectre, that the Count’s assertion of his mask empowers Malte’s father to do the same.

 

And then Christine Brahe passed by, slowly, like a sick person… the old man’s great mask thrust forward with its grey smile. He raised his wine-glass to my father. And then I saw how my father, just as Christine Brahe passed behind his chair, reached for his glass and lifted it, like something very heavy, a handsbreadth above the table. (Malte, 40)

 

Malte’s father has overcome the “truth” of the ghost. He has inherited the mask of the family, lifting a glass with his father-in-law in triumph. He “forced himself, passionate as he was… to endure this adventure calmly and without questioning… I witnessed, without understanding, how he finally mastered himself.” (Malte, 39) To master one’s self is to manipulate those layers which comprise you – the ability to appear dignified despite the despondency within.

The Major, Malte’s uncle and another guest at the dinner table, reacts differently to the ghost:

 

…his brown, spotted visage turned from one to another, his mouth hung open and his tongue writhed behind his decayed teeth; then all at once this face was gone, and his grey head lay on the table, and his arms lay over it and under it as if in pieces and from somewhere a withered, speckled hand emerged and trembled. (Malte, 39-40)

 

The passage, foreshadowing the fate that awaits Malte’s father, reveals what lies beyond the pretense. The major’s visage turns, then his face is gone. This last mask disintegrates as the ghost reminds him of a life spent without any real definition to call his own.

Another guest at dinner is young Erik Brahe, who later informs Malte that he and Christine Brahe have been searching for her portrait in the manor’s attic. The portrait is not hung upon the walls of the manor with those of the rest of the family because, as Erik tells Malte, “Her portrait isn’t there…She is not in there.” (Malte, 102) The portraits on the walls only capture masks. Christine did not wilfully hold the mask up before her face and so, any true portrait of her is inconceivable. Erik instead gives her a looking-glass, as only it can display one’s true self.

Erik’s riddle, “Either one is in there and in that case one is not here: or one is here, and cannot be in there.” (Malte, 103) is better understood when juxtaposed with the incident in which Malte is playing dress-up. Fancy turns to horror as the mirror, “imposed on me an image, no, a reality, a strange, unbelievable and monstrous reality, with which, against my will, I became permeated: for now the mirror was the stronger, and I was the mirror…I lost all sense, I simply ceased to exist.” (Malte, 95) The subject ceases to control the object (i.e. the reflection) as the mirror reveals Malte’s future self, the mask still fastened securely to his face. In this way, the mirror shows Malte how grotesque it is to live a lie like his ancestors and impresses upon him the importance of finding one’s true self.

It would seem Malte stumbles to the mirror in an attempt to connect psyche to physique. In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience”, Jacques Lacan characterizes the period of child development between six and eighteen months of age as “the mirror stage: a drama… which manufactures for the subject… the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity.” (Kleinbard, 32) Though Malte is too old to fall into this period of development, the experience extends from this development of the subject’s connection between his mental and physical beings. The child’s physical growth at such an early stage and in such an acute period of time renders its co-ordination temporarily disabled, its motions awkward, and consequently makes its aforementioned connection difficult to realize. Once the child understands that the image in the mirror is himself, the child moves one step further to defining his “self”.

Part 10: Hand

Lacan’s theories help explain the “hands” in Malte. At dinner a hand protrudes from within the Major’s body as the ghost of Christine Brahe wanders through the room. As well, Malte experiences corporeal fragmentation when stooping under a desk to retrieve a dropped crayon:

 

Above all I recognized my own outspread hand moving down there all alone… examining the ground. I watched it…almost with curiosity; it seemed as if it knew things I had never taught it, groping down there so independently, with movements I had never noticed in it before. (Malte, 84)

 

Malte sees his hand as a separate entity unto itself, as though he were looking in a mirror. The subject (Malte) is offered a chance to gaze upon himself: to see how others view him. However differentiation between the concrete world and the mental world – and the boy’s physical body that dwells between them – has broken down and Malte is left trembling in fear: “I felt that one of the hands belonged to me, and that it was committing itself to something irreparable.” (Malte, 84) This commitment is an act of maturity – a step towards a well-defined, well-adjusted Malte. He fears the hand’s independence because it is different and signifies, in Malte’s mind, a premature abandonment of childhood. In other words, the hand is not of another nature or being but rather, of an older, more mature Malte: a virtual stranger to the youngster he must inevitably encounter again. “If there were words for this occurrence, I was too little to find them. And suddenly fear seized me that nevertheless they might suddenly be there, beyond my years, these words, and it seemed to me more terrible than anything else that I should then have to say them. To live through once again the reality down there, differently, conjugated, from the beginning;” (Malte, 85)

Calvin experiences a similar incident when he discovers something under his bed is drooling.

 

(From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, p155)

The monsters exist on that subconscious level as yet unexplored by Calvin. They are as mysterious to him as the hand is to Rilke and because of this lack of familiarity, both Calvin and Rilke cower from their respective apparitions. Given time, Calvin will mature into an adult and fear no more those sounds that once protruded from beneath his bed. Similarly, Rilke will grow up and familiarize himself with the hand that represents his older self.

The Major’s experience requires a description of the man. This much is written:

 

My uncle… was an old man, on whose hard, burned countenance there were some black spots…morose and malcontent as he was, he had retired from the army… and now made alchemistic experiments in some region of the manor house unknown to me; was also, as I heard the servants say, in communication with a prison whence once or twice a year corpses were sent him with which he shut himself in night and day, and which he cut up and prepared in some mysterious fashion so that they withstood putrefaction. (Malte, 32)

 

The hand that emerges from within the vacuity of the Major’s body at the dinner table manifests his lack of self-definition. This is the hand he had hoped to see earlier in his life, and which the Major attempts to replace with those severed hands of the corpses. His inability to see himself objectively and understand his true destiny drew him to a life of bitterness in the army. Ultimately the Major lacked the independence and imagination necessary to see his hand such as Malte did and live his own life (presumably one which veers away from the family tradition of life in the military). In trying to withstand putrefaction, the Major seeks to “preserve” his time and body and maintain the integrity of that last mask, which disintegrates at the sight of the ghost.

So the hand symbolizes that ambiguity that dwells between Malte’s external and internal worlds. Though it is a part of Malte’s being, his hand possesses a life of its own and is regarded by Malte as an object.

How does Malte now avoid the life of his ancestors? Again the answer lies in a hand:

 

And how came that little grey woman to stand that time for a whole quarter of an hour by my side before a shop-window, showing me an old, long pencil, that came pushing infinitely slowly out of her miserable, clenched hands?… I guessed she was indicating to me that I should go somewhere or do something. (Malte, 42)

 

The woman proffers a solitary pencil: the writer’s tool. With it Malte will “go somewhere or do something”, with the pencil he will create worlds on the page; it is through these words written that he will have a voice and the ability to communicate with others and with this ability he will secure for himself a personality – a true sense of Malte — distinct from all others who have gone before him.

Part 11: Alter-egos

Calvin’s layers, meanwhile, are represented by the characters he creates. Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man,  and Tracer Bullet are levels within the boy’s psyche, allowing Calvin other avenues in which to develop his blossoming prime personality. It is not surprising that they should all reek of bravery and don handsome costumes, for Calvin the eight-year-old is anything but brave and his plain demeanour leaves him ignored at school.

(From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, p50)

Though Calvin cowers from his enemies (i.e. Moe and Miss Wormwood), the valiant Spaceman Spiff undergoes any challenge – be it physical or intellectual – and, ultimately, emerges with his wits still about him. As a result, Calvin, his alter ego, never needs to be afraid of the bully’s punches or the teacher’s questions.

(From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, p23)

Rilke practises similar methods to escape the life he periodically resents. Forced to endure a similar upbringing at military school, he wrote to novelist, Ludwig Ganghofer, “I began to take pleasure in enduring the blows of mischievous school-fellows or rough superiors and to revel in a false martyrdom.” (Wydenbruck, 26-27). Martyrdom led to escapism; the product of which is his literature:

Breathing, you invisible poem!
World-space constantly in pure
Interchange with our own being. Counterpoise,
wherein I rhythmically happen

solitary wave,
whose gradual sea I am;…

how many of these places in space have already been
within me. Many a wind
is like a son to me.

Orpheus II:1 ll.1-6, 9-11

The poem is to Rilke what Spiff is to Calvin. Both are reflections of their respective creator; both supply respite when life proves unbearable. For Rilke his poetry is organic, symbiotically existing with him. They share the air and the sea and the wind. These elements of nature, through Rilke’s imagination, become this poem. And, as nature breathes, so, too, does Rilke’s work. Rilke gives life to nature through his poetry and nature affords Rilke solitude for thoughtful self-reflection.

Calvin illustrates his thought processes with his wagon as it careens through the forest. “Calvin’s woods is important to the strip,” says Watterson, “because it’s the place where Calvin and Hobbes can get away from everyone and be themselves. The solitude of the woods brings out Calvin’s small but redeeming, contemplative side.” (10^th Anniv., 104)

(From The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes, p156)

The child and his tiger catapult themselves into nature, the trees and rocks forming the landscape of both their physical and intellectual excursions, while Hobbes acts as a sounding board for Calvin’s meditations. These strips reveal, as Watterson admits, Calvin’s redeeming, contemplative side – his ability to carefully consider the world around him. It’s as close as Calvin gets to maturing. Despite his seeming contempt for camping outdoors and his love of television, the two are linked.

(From It’s A Magical World, p132)

(From It’s A Magical World, p148)

Calvin takes the ideals presented to him in these programs then retreats to the woods to reflect upon their implications, not unlike the poet. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth writes,

the principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life… to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature.
(Works, 446-47)

The poet now has free range in what he writes. The page is truly blank. It beckons the poet to create new worlds. The oppression of the family name is lifted when Rainer writes. For Calvin, his worlds and the people who inhabit them are a testament to this carte-blanche effect that the child and the poet share. Calvin can create majestic landscapes from his bedroom window and “zap” his parents into aliens because, essentially, he has never been told these transformations were impossible. Even if he were explained the improbability of extraterrestrial life, as a child, Calvin has little use for facts because his “world” does not need to abide by these laws. As Piaget asserts, the child possesses a “primitive consciousness”, in which the subjective and objective worlds are one and the same. As Calvin matures, these entities will split and he will learn to acknowledge a reality beyond his own but for the time being, such a concept is beyond his realm of understanding or concern.[1]

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[1] J. Piaget. “Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood.” (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), qtd in Sugarman, 10.

Part 12: Calvinball

Calvin’s creations are in accordance with his own morals. Piaget calls this “autonomous” morality. Through his studies, Piaget identified those children who believe that the rules of a game are not immutable and can be altered if it pleases all participants. Such collaborations usually led to a consistent adherence to the newly-appointed regulations, as opposed to “heteronomous” morality, whereby children unquestioningly obeyed the game’s rules, though were ultimately inclined to waver in their application.[1]

In Cavinball, Calvin and Hobbes have created a game paradoxical in nature. There is only one rule that must be adhered to at all times: there are no rules. They are conceived by the players as the game unfolds. The rules are therefore as personable as the players themselves. All rules – no matter how silly – must be adhered to.

(From The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes, p229)

The “sport” requires no regulation playing field, thereby completely submerging its players in nature, intertwining the earth and the child. The theme echoes Rilke’s lines

Earth, having holiday, lucky earth, play
now with the children. We want to catch you,
happy earth, The happiest will succeed

Orpheus I, poem 21

The poem continues, identifying nature as a pedagogue to the child student who learns of happiness and gains knowledge in this, a seeming holiday for the pastoral world.

Above all is the honour with which the players conduct themselves despite their disdain for organized sport. This honour system compares well to free verse in poetry. The poet is granted liberties with his form. But it is not enough to break a rhyme pattern or eschew stanzaic organization for its own sake. Such a break in form must agree with a break in content. So Calvinball parallels poetry insofar as its creators obey the limitations of their freedom.

Calvin has been revealed; Rilke has been revealed. Their lives have been disclosed and examined. Similarities have been drawn and explicated but in the end we are no closer to an understanding of such minds than we were pages ago. Nevertheless this paper has revealed the opportunity for commonalities in ostensibly disparate things: the poet and the child, the comic strip and the poem. For both Calvin and Rilke, there is an unimaginable amount of faces and this paper has yet to shatter even the surface layer. Notwithstanding, it encourages the peeling off of those layers which suffocate our true selves to prove that we can never be defined by our outer shell.

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[1] Ibid., Sugarman, 64.