Tintin in America

I blogged recently about the death of Raymond Leblanc, the Belgian publisher who brought us Hergé's "Tintin." And last summer, I blogged about the good news that "Tintin Au Congo" was going to be published in the US for the first time by Little, Brown. I suggested that parents use this very entertaining, but offensive book as a teaching tool about racism -- like my (antiracist) father did with me.

Here's more good Tintin news: "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" (Soft Skull/Counterpoint), a chatty yet scholarly introduction to the world-famous comic, has just been published in the US. There have been a handful of other books in English about Hergé and his most famous creation, the globetrotting reporter/adventurer Tintin, but the "shockingly talented" (Gawker) British novelist and public intellectual Tom McCarthy has taken Tintinology to a new level. "Secret" brings the sharpest tools of literary theory to a comic strip which got its humble start as a serial in the children's supplement of a Belgian newspaper in 1929, and finds his efforts amply rewarded.

But don't take my word for it. The book was excerpted in The Guardian when it was published in England in 2006. Here's a sample:

Should we, when we read the Tintin books, treat them with the reverence we would afford to Shakespeare, Dickens, Rabelais and so on? Should we bring the same critical apparatus to bear as when analyzing Flaubert, James or Conrad? In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st, writers of cartoons, hugely indebted to Hergé's work, have deliberately launched bids for literary status, producing "graphic novels" that are often quite self-consciously highbrow and demanding. The huge irony is that the Tintin books remain both unrivaled in their complexity and depth and so simple, even after more than half a century, that a child can read them with the same involvement as an adult.

Adults do read them: there is a wealth of studies assessing Hergé's work from psychoanalytical, political, thematic and technical angles, just as critics might assess the work of poets, novelists and playwrights. Does it follow that if the same analytical criteria can be applied to one thing as to another, the two things must innately be the same? Or is this bad logic, fit only for cultural theory seminars and Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-as-Postmodern-Signifier conferences? As soon as we ask if Tintin should be treated as literature, we raise another question: what is literature? What makes a piece of writing "literary" rather than journalistic, propagandistic, scientific or so on?

The Tintin books announce themselves on their front covers as "Adventures". This, plus their action-packed nature, might suggest that they are dominated by what Roland Barthes calls the "proairetic code" -- that is, the code of action. But, in fact, another code is equally, if not more, dominant: the code Barthes calls the "hermeneutic". What does the hermeneutic do? It is made up, Barthes tells us, of all the aspects of a text that "constitute an enigma and lead to its solution."

McCarthy practices the best kind of hermeneutics -- moving nimbly from surface to depth, form to content. Though he's a talented literary theorist, he's equally interested in the social and political context of the Tintin books. Earlier this month, after the death of Leblanc, The Guardian asked Mccarthy to explain how Tintin lost his Boy Scout image. Excerpt:

When Germany invaded Hergé and Leblanc's native Belgium in May 1940, most newspapers closed down immediately. Some, however, continued publishing in "stolen" form, as mouthpieces for the occupier. It was in one of these, Le Soir, that Hergé started publishing his work that same October. This decision led, after the liberation, to his arrest and the removal of his civil status, including his right to work -- until the unimpeachable Leblanc's intervention one year later.

To say that the adventures' origins lie on the right would be an understatement. The editor of the newspaper whose children's section first hosted them, Le Vingtième Siècle, kept a photograph of Mussolini on his desk. Tintin's first missions, to the Soviet Union and Belgian Congo, see him beating up evil commies and cajoling lazy, backward Africans into doing their duty and building their colonial masters' railways.

But no sooner has this right-wing strain got going than a left-wing one pops up to counteract it. The third adventure, "Tintin in America," mounts scathing assaults on capitalist production (meat-packing plants that grind cats, dogs and even people in their machinery) and American racism: in the original version, a bank-clerk tells the police who show up after a heist that the townsfolk "immediately lynched seven negroes, but the culprit got away". In the next-but-one story, "The Blue Lotus," we see Tintin snap the cane with which an American oil magnate is beating a Chinese rickshaw driver in Shanghai, telling the bully: "Your conduct is disgraceful, Sir!" By the final (complete) adventure, "Tintin and the Picaros," the hero is sporting a CND sign on his moped helmet and plotting a revolution in South America.

For me, what's ultimately telling is the way Hergé undermines all politics. In Russia, Tintin sneaks behind what seems to be a factory in the healthy throes of full production to discover two-dimensional stage-fronts and a man hammering a sheet of metal to produce sound effects; he also unearths the gramophone with which the regime scares its people by transmitting ghost noises. But then he avails himself of the very tricks that he himself exposes: in Africa, he bamboozles a technologically illiterate tribe into believing he has magic powers by playing a record and projecting cinematic images to them. Even as the narrative advocates colonial power, it also suggests that the whole thing's a big scam.

Great stuff! I'll let Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, who acquired the US rights to "Secret," have the last word. Nash was interviewed about "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" by the blog The Elegant Variation. Excerpt:

TEV: What about Tom's book made you decide to acquire it?

RN: One of the things that drives me as a publisher is my curiosity about the world. I publish in order to discover. Tom, from the first page, engendered in me a desire to discover what he had to say about Tintin. To me, this is a world-in-a-grain-of-sand book. Like the Salt book, or that book about the history of barbed wire, or God: A Biography. Also: The utter commitment. Tom commits to the premise of the book like a paratrooper off a helicopter.