#innocent smith

“The old fairy tale,” writes Chesterton in Orthodoxy, “makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.” But is Wirt really normal, and are Chesterton’s heroes? Well, that depends on what you mean by the word “normal”; Chesterton uses it as another word for “sane.”

(Spoilers for Over the Garden Wall appear below. And for Manalive!, incidentally, though I doubt many people will care.)

When I think of Wirt as heroic figure I often think of this passage from The Man Who Was Thursday: 

Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder star. But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him–the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol–took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed.

At heart, Wirt is a romantic–and I don’t mean because of his Dante-esque devotion to a fair maiden or his tendency to recite drippy poetry of his own invention, although both of these things are facets of the whole. The whole is best expressed in the moment where he puts his de-trimmed Santa hat on his head, lets the Union soldier’s cape from his attic blow in the wind of the nearby electric fan, and, turned toward the mirror, lifts his arms over his head in a superhero pose. “Yes. Yes.”

It’s the thing in him that makes him worthy of our notice, because it seems to blatantly contradict his chief characteristic–the eagerness to blend in which makes him hush his brother up at every turn and walk with his head lowered. This is a kid who’s so terrified of looking like a freak that he’s not only afraid to talk to his crush, but afraid to talk to the harmless multitudes who greet him with a careless smile. At the same time, this is a kid who psychs himself out to woo a lady by putting on a Civil War cape and crowning his head with a vandalized Christmas decoration. (He is not supposed to be a gnome; let’s get that out of the way right now. Behold his nervous reaction when someone suggests it. He’s not supposed to be anyone but himself. His getup is not a disguise, but an enhancement. This is his power suit.)

This divide between the rational and the irrational (but which of these sides of Wirt is irrational, really? The side that wants only to embody an idiosyncratic vision–who “asks to get his head into the heavens,” as Chesterton said of the poet–or the side so exasperatingly timid that he thinks Jason Funderberker is a better man than himself?) is the mark of all of Chesterton’s heroes. It’s certainly visible in Syme, the scion of a clan of “cranks” who has revolted into normalcy as the only alternative to the whims of his elders: “there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.”

But it’s best embodied in Manalive’s Innocent Smith, who by the time we meet him has already undergone the seismic shift which lead him to embrace a wild romanticism as the only form of sanity: he’s Wirt post-Unknown. His own encounter with the Beast, at a time when he was a student–“a very big man trying to make himself small”–takes the form of a chat with an admired professor whose outlook on life is suicidally bleak. On the brink of personal despair, Innocent makes a desperate grab for a glimmer of hope–turning a pistol on the academic, he forces him to confront his stated preference for death and to admit to the meaninglessness of his words. To him, this result is nothing less than an “escape from death”: “[Y]ou spoke with authority, and not as the scribes. Nobody could comfort me if you said there was no comfort. If you really thought there was nothing anywhere, it was because you had been there to see. Don’t you see that I had to prove you didn’t really mean it?—or else drown myself in the canal.” It is this sort of direct confrontation with despair–calling nihilism’s bluff–which provides Wirt with his own escape from drowning. (“No, that’s dumb.”)

According to Chesterton’s school of thought, it is not insanity which Wirt embraces when he dons his strange armor, but sanity. He’s making a desperate grab for the element of his nature which keeps him alive: “Poetry,” as Chesterton said of Cowper, “was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health.” Wirt is successful in the Unknown because the strangeness of the situation permits him to exhibit the parts of himself which he has heretofore confined to his cluttered bedroom: the understanding of architecture which helps him to unravel Endicott’s strange case, the skill with wind instruments which must be exercised immediately if they are to avoid being kicked off the ferry. It turns out he’s a man of varied and considerable talents, or, in other words, “a very big man trying to make himself small.” In Orthodoxy Chesterton draws a distinction between the sane man and the insane man by proposing that the sane man understands his own complexity– “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman”–whereas “the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.” When we first encounter him Wirt believes that sanity means reducing himself to a single, faceless trait: in a comic book written by creator Patrick McHale, he contrasts himself with Greg, the gleefully Chesterton-like eccentric, as follows–“Greg gets into all sorts of trouble all the time. … I want to avoid conflict as best I can. That’s my thing. I just want to stay out of other people’s lives.” It’s a “simple and solid view” of his place in the world which leads Beatrice to retort, “So you just want to float through life without affecting anyone else? Like a ghost… completely unknown and forgotten by anyone who’s ever met you?”

And indeed, Wirt is not allowed to return to life until he has allowed for the expansiveness of his nature and of the world itself, disowning the fatalism (he describes the coming-on of the Beast as “inevitable”) and the unwavering faith in his own inferiority which has characterized him up to the present. This untenable worldview–the one which would have lead to his death–is visible in Manalive’s meek figure of Arthur Inglewood, who states, “Some people are made to get on … and some people are made to stick quiet, like me. … Nothing can ever alter it; it’s in the wheels of the universe … some men are weak and some strong, and the only thing we can do is to know that we are weak.” (He might be comparing himself to Jason Funderberker.) The saner figure of Michael Moon retorts as the wiser Wirt of the ending might: “Let us go and do some of these things we can’t do.” 

(There isn’t a lunatic on the list. Even that guy who goes around threatening to kill everyone. He’s not crazy, he’s just enlightened.)

Nope, Chesterton would never be able to write a quirky guy named Smith who’s into practical socialism… oh wait.