From: [popa 0200] at [PO-Box.McGill.CA] Date: Tue, 2 May 1995 11:03:21 -0400 Subject: TINTIN (0/2) - Intro - Short I sent something about this last night but it bounced back :( Following this brief post is the two part Tintin (actually Herge moreso) essay which I presented Saturday at a local conference here in Montreal (which was lousy :( ). If you couldn't care less (and who could blame you?) delete away. I've gotten enough requests for it both personally and publically that this is the most expedient way of doing things. I was going to annotate it, but I got bored doing that after the first half so I stopped :) I'll be happy to clear anything up that I can though. Please bear in mind that this is a rough draft of a much larger paper (particularly it will be expanded in significantly in three areas: 1) the theory (I chop most theory out of spoken papers since it bores people to death), 2) the history (this is a summary more than an analysis), 3) the commentary on the final two books (Breaking Free and the Tuten novel) will be greatly expaded in the final draft. Please also note that this was written to be read and that the language reflects that choice, it's far more conversational than my normal writing (which is terribly obscure ;) ). I think (hope) you can follow this paper even if you haven't read the scholars I'm discussing. Other than that I hope people are able to get something out of this. I'm rewriting the paper this week, so any feedback you can offer will be greatly appreciated (and credited in the final draft). The conference attendees were no help at all and generally asked inane questions (which I won't get into). The paper is (c) Bart Beaty 1995, please don't toss it about syberspace too randomly as it's supposed to be appearing in altered form in some art journal soon. bart ------------------------------ Nowhere in the past several months has the idea of the mobile signifier been brought home to me more strongly than in the looming eight storey mural of Tintin painted onto the side of an office building on rue St Laurent. Why, I wonder, would two images be stripped from a Belgian Cold War allegory detailing the exploration of the moon and placed in the downtown Montreal of the 1990s in order to celebrate the United Nations' Year of the Family? Certainly the figure of Tintin has a great deal of currency in Montreal as a popular hero. In the sixty-five years since his creation Tintin has become an established point of cultural reference - producing meaning even for those unfamiliar with the original texts from which his image is drawn. On a global scale, the popularity of Tintin -- who has sold over 100 million volumes in forty languages -- is rivalled only by his American counterpart - Mickey Mouse - who, it should be noted in passing, also made his initial appearance in 1929. Perhaps what Tintin most clearly evokes in the context of the mural on the Main (1), is the accomplishment of French culture, reaching from Belgium, to Montreal, to the moon. The fact that the painters who created the mural began work in the same week that the Parti Quebecois returned to power then, is probably nothing more than a serendipitous coincidence (2). Yet the question of precisely how the image of Tintin functions in any context is a complicated one; for there is not one set of texts of Tintin' but more accurately a series of sets which contribute to the expanded reproduction and circulation of Tintin and play a key role in the remodelling of the character both culturally and ideologically. By taking into consideration the ways in which the figure of Tintin has been adapted in order to situate changing claims about the roles of Europe, youth and masculinity through his sixty-five year history I will be attempting to suggest that the ideological effects of the Tintin books cannot be resolved abstractly but rather must be regarded as a shifting terrain within an arena of ideological contestation. Pierre-Yves Bourdil has suggested that the death of Tintin's creator, Herge, impacted French culture more significantly than the death of any writer save Andre Malraux (3). Bourdil seeks to claim Tintin as a twentieth-century myth devoid of politics, religion and history. According to Bourdil, in Tintin "we escape from history. The narratives which unfold recount great events but refuse to tie them down with dates or evidence; they remain sufficiently free for our imagination to be inspired by them". This attitude towards Tintin is clearly evidenced in the reporting which circulated in Paris around Herge's death in 1983. Le Monde, for example, stripped Tintin from his historical specificity by inserting an image of Tintin drawn in 1939 into a photograph of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan at an oil summit. The magazine Le Vif used the image of Tintin's rocketship shooting towards the moon to signify Herge's departure from the Earth. Yet no publication removed Tintin from his historical roots so forcefully as did Liberation. In an hommage to the important role which Herge played in developing images of French speaking Europeans, Liberation substituted all of their news photos in their March 6th issue for drawings taken from the 23 published Tintin novels. In Liberation one encounters Tintin standing in for Helmut Kohl, victorious in the German elections; Tintin facing a firing squad accompanying a report of the Pope's visit to Nicaragua; and a panel from the rabidly anti-communist Tintin in the Land of the Soviets used to illustrate the French victory over the Soviet Union in Davis Cup tennis. Of the six pages in the paper devoted to Herge's death there are no articles specifically about the author, instead they are concerned exclusively with his best known creation. Herge himself is relegated to a one column timeline indicating some of the important moments of his life. The editors of Liberation are in clear agreement with Bourdil, the importance is placed not on the creator Herge, nor the stories which he wrote and illustrated for 54 years, rather significance is located solely in the image of Tintin, stripped of history and able to substitute for any of the headlines of the day. If the myth of Tintin is established in the first instance by removing the image of Tintin from its roots in history and narrative, that myth is perpetuated by the careful maintenance of the image of Herge as a creator. Herge's defenders have taken to emphasizing the technical achievements of the Tintin books as one means of downplaying the more problematic history of the author and his associations. Tintin began as a weekly two page strip in 1929 as the driving force of a children's supplement for the Belgian newspaper Le vingtieme siecle. The strip was commissioned by the paper's publisher, Norbert Wallez, a friend of Mussolini, who envisioned Le petite vingtieme as a route towards winning children to the side of Belgian fascism. Tintin continued to be published in Le petite vingtieme until the paper was closed by German troops occupying Belgium in 1940, when Tintin was moved to the sole remaining Belgian newspaper, Le soir, a paper which was under the editorship of occupation forces. Herge completed four Tintin novels during his association with Le Soir, and had begun work on a fifth, The Seven Crystal Balls, when Belgium was liberated. In the immediate post-war period Herge was arrested four times for collaborating with the occupation forces, and as a result he was denied a work permit and was unable to continue publishing the strip for two and a half years. It was not until high profile members of the Belgian resistance stepped forward in 1946 to request a visa on Herge's behalf that he was permitted to resume work with the newly created Tintin magazine, the magazine which would have exclusive first rights to all of Herge's work until his death in 1983. The subject of Herge's political views is a flashpoint in Tintin scholarship. Herge's critics on the left have labelled him racist, misogynist and an apologist for European colonialism. His defenders, on the other hand, seek to diminish these charges by claiming that Herge was politically naive, and that he was only reflecting the attitudes of Catholic Belgium and the atmosphere in which he had been raised. In his own defence Herge claimed that all of his drawings were intended as good-natured satire, and that race was of no concern to him, he saw himself belonging to neither the right nor the left. Asked if he was interested in politics Herge responded "not even a little, little, little bit". For the most part Herge's biographers have attempted to follow this line of denial and strip the politics from his work. One example of this tendency is provided by Harry Thompson's account of the writing of The Shooting Star in his book Tintin: Herge and His Creation. Written for Le soir in 1941 The Shooting Star details a race to the North Pole between two competing groups. Tintin is allied with a group of scientists culled from the neutral European countries and the Axis powers. The villains of the piece are American, or to be more specific Jewish-American bankers bent on world domination. Thompson, argues that "because he knew little about the USA" it was purely by chance that the lead villain should have the name Blumenstein. In Thompson's words: "By a disastrous accident, Tintin was escorting a German professor and his colleagues to the Arctic to defeat the forces of the international Jewish financial conspiracy". By portraying Herge as a naive pawn of fascist publishers Thompson undercuts the most important function which Foucault (4) attributes to the category of the author: supplying the means of neutralising the contradictions within a set of texts where incompatible elements "can be shown to relate to one another and to cohere around a fundamental and originating source". This tendency to regard author and creation in associative terms, rather than as an indissoluble unity, has been identified by Bennett and Woollacott (5) as a marker of a popular, as opposed to literary, oeuvre. This distinction becomes problematic, however, if we consider the differences in the terms used to discuss Tintin and those used to describe Herge. Scholarship on the Tintin novels is near universal in its belief that Herge's work constitutes a pinnacle of world cartooning. Maurice Horn's Encyclopaedia of World Comics indicates that Herge "spear-headed the post World War II renaissance of European comic art", and this is an important observation. By placing Herge's influence after the second World War Horn suggests the beginning of the move to reclaim Herge as an unproblematic source around which the Tintin books cohere. The key to understanding this shift in the evaluation of Tintin occurs in the reconstruction of the Tintin novels which took place during the war. During the two years in which he was barred from working in Belgium because of his wartime association with Le soir Herge began the long process of converting his early novels for publication in colour. The first ten Tintin novels had been published upon completion of their serialization by Le petite vingtieme. With the closing of that paper in 1940 the book publication rights for Tintin were sold to France's Casterman Publications who suggested that the books be altered from their 100 page black and white format to a smaller 62 page full colour format. In instituting the change to colour Herge was forced to redraw each of the first ten books, resulting in significant alterations. 60 pages were removed from Tintin in the Congo, and Herge altered the page layouts, panel designs, costumes and all other visual elements of the book. At the same time Herge removed as much of the plots and characterisations which had landed him in trouble as was possible. The evil Jewish bankers from The Shooting Star were moved to the fictional land of Sao Rico, the German heroes of The Seven Crystal Balls became Englishmen, Tintin no longer taught the merits of colonialism to the children of the Belgian Congo, he taught them math Just as significantly as the deletion of the racism in the books was the consistent stripmining of history in the colour versions. As the books were altered they were removed from the historical specificities of their production. Historical allusions were dropped in favour of the development of a timeless quality which was intended to be coupled with Tintin's completely static personality and facade, in order to develop a series of books in which the development of characters was impeded, or better yet halted altogether. In this way it was hoped that readers would be able to approach the books from any starting point. If there was no continuity, no history and no development in the books it was believed that there would be no impediments to the participation of the buying audience. It is imperative to understand, therefore, that many of the contemporary accounts of the genius of the Tintin novels, and the recuperation of Herge's own status as an author, are dependent on the reformatting of the books for the Casterman editions, which began in 1944 and lasted until 1955; a period in which Herge's oeuvre was not only stripped of the most blatant examples of racism and defences of colonialism, but also stripped from the context of its own production, a process often made complete by abandoning the original premises of the serialized works. - --------------------------------------------------------- Notes (1) rue St Luarent is the main North/South street in Montreal and divides the city geographically and linguistically. English speakers live to the west, the french to the east. The mural is on the east side. The Main is slang for rue St Laurent. The term is a combination of main Street and the french Le main (ie French form, enlgish pronunciation) (2) This is a joke. I n fact it got big laughs at the conference although I'm sure there are virtually no non-Canadians who get it. It would take forever to try and explain why this is funny. Trust me, it's a riot :) (3) Bourdil'ts essay "Tintin as Myth" appears in Goddin's book _Herge and Titin: Reporters_ which is a really weak book unfortunately. (4) Foucault quotes are from "What is an author" (5) Bennett and Woollacott are Toney Bennett and Janet Woollaccott, authors of the excellent _Bond and Beyond_ about the James Bond phenomenon, a practical and theoretical examination of James Bond. Highly recommended.