Incongruity in retrospect

We remember something that didn’t seem strange at the time, but does now.

Memory is a complicated thing, as our tutor’s students find out daily.  And as we get older it gets more complicated and unpredictable.  So we cannot say why, a week or so ago, one of our consultants suddenly remembered Snoopy and the Red Baron.  This was a meme, we would probably say now; it consisted of a pet beagle fantasizing about being a First World War flying ace, and trying to shoot down the German pilot, Baron von Richthofen (who famously painted his airplane red, so anyone could find him if they wanted to).  It was found in the comic strip Peanuts in the 1960s.

Consider the layers of incongruity here.  A dog imagines his doghouse to be a Sopwith Camel, and sits upon it, pretending to fly.  He is fighting in a human war that ended almost a half-century before.  We remember strips with him wearing an aviator’s helmet and goggles, and possibly some with bullet holes in the doghouse (Snoopy was often unsuccessful).  There was even a popular song on the subject.  We remember just accepting the idea at the time, but it seems terribly strange as we look at it now.

While the 1960s were definitely years of new and surrealistic ideas, Peanuts was firmly set in the mundane world of postwar suburbia.  It was certainly not part of the Psychedelic movement.  And why WWI? There was a much more recent conflict, with far more variety to choose from when inventing fantasies.  We note also that this strange idea was decades before Calvin and Hobbes, with its dual worlds of imagination and reality.

We fell to thinking about it and we may have some answers.  First, WWII was too recent and real to be the best subject for a dog’s imagination.  The parents of the 1960s had experienced the war, and many had fought in it.  WWI was another generation earlier, the grandparents’ war.  It was far enough away to be safer, but not so far as to be distant history.  And there remained a tinge of the romantic to the first pilots.

As to a dog’s fantasies in the first place, we note that Peanuts had only children as characters.  Adults did not appear, and were rarely referred to.  It took place, then, in a children’s world.  And a child’s world can have very strong and strange elements of imagination.  Incongruities abound.

So we can explain the idea, sort of.  But a beagle flying his doghouse in an ancient war still seems strange when we step back and look at it.