Weekend Reads | What's the Deal With Doodling?

by Kevin Schofield

This weekend's read is an essay in The Paris Review: "Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing," by Polly Dickson.

While doodling has probably existed for as long as there has been pen and paper — and who knows, maybe some of those prehistoric cave paintings were doodles as well — the act was first given its name in the 1936 Frank Capra movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The titular character, Longfellow Deeds, defends himself against his family's attempt to have him declared insane. While certainly a quirky man, Deeds' defense of his own behavior boils down to "everybody's pixilated," meaning we all are haunted (or perhaps taunted) by pixies into "distracted fiddlings." Deeds outs the court's psychotherapist as a fellow doodler, "someone who makes foolish designs on paper while they're thinking," helping to prove his point that harmless erratic behavior is practically universal.

To be sure, many people believe doodling is an actually productive activity: It helps them to think, or it keeps the creative part of the brain busy while the logical part focuses on the task at hand. But beyond the act itself, plenty of ink has been spilled interpreting the doodles themselves and what they might mean. Doodles provided plenty of raw material for Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other noted psychoanalysts (who just happened to be at their peak of influence when Mr. Deeds was released), following the trend of interpreting dreams, ink blots, and other abstract forms of expression, or, as Dickson puts it, "paying attention to the chatterings of the unconscious mind."

We humans seem to want to believe that doodles and the like have intrinsic meaning: They can be interpreted and mined for clues and patterns. Ironically, mental health professionals use the term "pareidolia" to describe a compulsion to interpret random and meaningless markings as if they had higher meaning, which one could perhaps interpret as a gateway to full-blown conspiracy theories. This forces Dickson (and us) to ask where the real madness lies: in doodling, or in insisting that doodles have hidden meaning?

A year after Capra's film was released, Russell Arundel published Everybody's Pixillated, a book of famous persons' doodles combined with analysis of each and a long explanation of why we should pay attention to doodling. But, as Dickson points out, Arundel is either the worst person to try to make that case, or the ideal person, as he himself was quite the eccentric. He founded his own island micronation, the Principality of Outer Baldonia, off the coast of Nova Scotia, and wrote a declaration of independence for it, asserting "fishermen are a race alone" — and enumerating a very peculiar list of their rights.

Dickson also suggests that, much like ink-blot tests, there's something about the very nature of doodles that compels us to the slippery process of trying to find meaning in them, "seeming to solicit interpretation, then skittering away when we get down to the business of studying them." What she doesn't speak to, though, is the flip side of this argument: Why won't we allow ourselves to simply let doodles exist for "the pleasures of mark-making" and "the necessity of testing the pen?" As Freud famously put it, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Then again, as Mr. Deeds put it, "everybody's pixilated": Perhaps the pixies inspire us both to erratic art and to erratic interpretation of that artwork, two sides of the same coin that are forever linked in our unpredictable brains.

Doodle Nation: Notes on Distracted Drawing

Featured image via Mix Tape/Shutterstock.com.