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It
has always been more amusing to see knowledge put to flippant
use than to see it doing what it was intended to do: enlighten.
We
do not remember 19th-century mathematician Charles Dodgson for
his theories of logic, but we remember his pseudonym Lewis Carroll
for using those theories irreverently in his Alice books. We do
not remember the members of Monty Python for what they learnt
as undergraduates, but we remember them for how they demolished
that learning in two minutes in their Philosopher's Song. Peter
Blegvad follows in this tradition, and epitomises it. His Book
of Leviathan, which contains a selection of his long-running comic
strips for the Independent on Sunday, contains hardly any of the
Thomas Hobbes its title might connote. What it does contain is
much of the collected philosophical and logical wisdom of Western
civilisation, mutated and destroyed through a rapid succession
of puns and streams of consciousness.
Blegvad's
desire, judging by the Book of Leviathan, is to return to the
formative years of early childhood. Blegvad's Leviathan is a featureless
toddler, often accompanied by a wise cat called Cat and an inanimate
rabbit called Bunny. Occasionally, we see little Levi through
the eyes of his parents and elder sister, and the differences
between their respective perceptions of the world become hilariously
apparent.
Blegvad's
choice of protagonist for his epistemological demolition job is
shrewd. After all, a child encounters many metaphysical conundrums
in their formative years. These conundrums are described memorably
by the German poet Peter Handke, whose conception of the childhood
experience seems very close to that of Blegvad. As Handke says
in one of his poems, recited in Wim Wenders's film Der Himmel
über Berlin:
"When
the child was a child, it was time for questions such as:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here and not there?
Where did time begin and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun nothing but a dream?
Isn't what I see, hear and smell just the vision of the world
before the world?
Does evil really exist and are there people who are really evil?
How can it be that I, who is me, wasn't there before I was?
And that one day I, who is me, shall no longer be what I am now?"
When
the child reaches adulthood, he may return to these conundrums
in a number of ways. Formally, through studying a related discipline.
Casually, through popular or obscurantist science. Cathartically,
through art that allows one to re-experience one's innocence.
Blegvad's trick in the Book of Leviathan is to magically reverse
these processes, so that the formal knowledge built up from paradoxes
and conundrums regresses and meets the child halfway.
A
sample of the authors casually quoted in the Book of Leviathan,
in no particular order, runs: JR Lowell, E Cobham Brewer, Laurence
Sterne, Flann O'Brien, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Stéphane Mallarmé,
Sigmund Freud, GK Chesterton, Lewis Hyde, Emily Dickinson, Christopher
Marlowe, Eliphas Levi, St Augustine, William Alexander, Arthur
Street, Thomas Hobbes, Hamlin Garland. Oh, and the Bible. Does
this eclectic and often obscure list of references mean that Blegvad
is pretentious? Fortunately not - if he comes across as being
anything, it's disarmingly good humoured. Where others writing
from a child's-eye view would let loftiness or cynicism seep through,
Blegvad delights in his protagonist, and shows again and again
that no pun is too obvious or too low for him. The best illustrations
of this are the occasions when Blegvad illustrates a well-known
phrase absolutely literally. 'Nature abhors a vacuum' is illustrated
by animals fleeing a forest with a vacuum cleaner in its depths.
'So it has come to this' is illustrated by the word IT taking
an epic journey through mountains and ravines to join the word
THIS.
Just
because Blegvad delights in his protagonist, this is not to say
that he mollycoddles Levi. On the contrary, Blegvad can be as
cruel to his two-dimensional creation as the best surrealist -
having little Levi rip off successive layers of his own face,
for instance, to find out what lies beneath it (predictably, nothing).
These abstract horrors contrast strangely with the more gentle
depictions of Levi unable to communicate his profound thoughts
to the adult world, his complicated ruminations always sounding
to parents and peers like the solitary word 'dep.' Perhaps most
disturbing are sequences in which Blegvad bridges the extremes
of cruelty and gentleness. There can be no better example of this
than the first eight strips in the book. In this sequence, Levi,
convinced that his parents are dead, wanders a dreamscape in search
of them. His companion Cat has become a ghostly, menacing tutor.
After meeting the undead spirits of his parents, Cat forces Levi
to go through an agonising ritual in order to revive them. Just
as the reader is becoming absorbed by this horrifying and surreal
fable, we leap into the 'real' world, where Levi's parents inspect
his cot after having gone out for the evening and left him with
the babysitter.
At
the heart of the Book of Leviathan is the modernist obsession
with the blank page, the dead signifier. Levi's blank face is
the most obvious example of this, but a strip celebrating the
history of the blank page in literature from Laurence Sterne to
James Kelman, or strips in which Levi attempts in vain to escape
his two-dimensional existence, demonstrate the extent of Blegvad's
obsession. Other strips, in which Levi's messy floor is seen to
constitute a complicated mathematical equation, or detailed instructions
are given for making a crumpled paper missile, mock the structures
of human knowledge and assume that they are empty. Jacques Derrida
probably thinks that heaven is a world in which all of our academics
and thinkers are Peter Blegvads. Actually, such a world would
be an intellectual Dark Ages. But as long as he's writing comic
strips, we're safe. Unless we all die of laughter, that is.
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