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| Tintin's backstory |
| Cullen Murphy / Jan 23, 2012, 00:58 IST |
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Cartoonists are a peculiar breed of artist. For one thing, they’re hesitant about the use of the A-word. Their craft – now that’s better – also comes with great constraints. Because the work appears in newspapers and comic books, it must strike a commercial chord quickly: there isn’t much time for it to “find an audience”.
One thing cartoonists generally haven’t done is take themselves very seriously. That’s a job best left to the professionals. Comics and comic strips have been a major focus of academic research for at least half a century. One of the main targets has been The Adventures of Tintin, the classic series introduced some 80 years ago by Georges Remi, better known as Hergé. More than a hundred specialty books have been published about the Tintin series; entire journals and conferences are devoted to it. So when I saw that a new study of Remi was being published by a man described as “one of the most highly regarded Tintinologists in the world” – and a biographer of Jacques Derrida to boot – I thought I knew what to expect.
Well, Blistering Barnacles!, as Captain Haddock would say. The great merit of Hergé, Son of Tintin, by Benoît Peeters, translated from French by Tina A Kover, is that Georges Remi is allowed to emerge in three dimensions as what he in fact was: not an intellectual, not an activist, not a saint, but an ordinary man of his times. To encounter him is something of a surprise, because so much else about Tintin is extraordinary. Leave aside the new Spielberg blockbuster, which incorporates elements of three Tintin adventures and seems destined to create a durable movie franchise. The 24 books in the series have sold about 350 million copies and been translated into roughly 80 languages.
The Belgium into which Georges Remi was born, in 1907, was not exactly a colossus among nations, but it was a commercial dynamo and a colonial power, enriched by rubber and ivory from the Congo. That sense of possibility, along with the retrograde attitudes bound up with it, formed Remi’s terroir.
Remi created his first Tintin cartoons, in black and white, as a weekly insert for the rightist Roman Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, in 1929. He published them under the name Hergé, which is what the letters RG (Remi’s initials, reversed) sound like in French (AIR-zhay). Tintin proved an immediate hit. Eventually the stories would be collected in books and reproduced in colour.
The characters began to accrue. First the boy reporter Tintin, with his plus fours and unflappable tuft of hair; and his dog, Snowy (Milou in French, the nickname of a former girlfriend of Remi’s). And then the rest of the cast: the mercurial and sozzled but stalwart Captain Haddock, the brilliant Professor Calculus, the archfiend Roberto Rastapopoulos and others. Even as a child, Hergé had been a skilled mimic, and that talent animates his creations. At the same time, the characters are oddly detached: except for Captain Haddock, no one has much of a backstory. Tintin has none at all, and although he is a reporter, we see him write only one article in the course of the entire canon.
Benoît Peeters knew Hergé and interviewed him on several occasions towards the end of his life. (He died in 1983.) Hergé suffered from chronic depression, but his capacity for work was always prodigious. He was a pioneer in merchandising and promotion, though an overture to Walt Disney was rebuffed.
Hergé worked his life and preoccupations into his stories. His father and uncle – twins who dressed identically – inspired the hapless detectives Thomson and Thompson. Tintin was modelled on Hergé’s younger brother, Paul. Strangely, Hergé had no particular fondness for children (and had none of his own). Tintin was his progeny, rarely out of mind.
Some passages in Hergé, Son of Tintin seem directed at the cognoscenti. The excursions into prewar Belgian politics are not for everyone, even Belgians, and passing references to arcane debates among Tintinologists will mystify many. Yet Peeters squarely faces two issues that hang over Hergé’s career: his resort to ethnic and racial stereotypes, mainly in the early stories, and his record of accommodation in German-occupied Belgium.
The issues can’t be avoided. In both word and picture, the depiction of Africans in “Tintin in the Congo” makes your jaw drop. As for accommodation, Hergé published Tintin throughout the war in the collaborationist newspaper Le Soir. Peeters doesn’t excuse any of this (who would?), though he does try to put it in context. He observes that Hergé’s prejudices were those of his time and place, and notes that the cartoonist, as he matured, acquired a more enlightened sensibility. In “The Blue Lotus”, Chinese ideograms on signs in the background say things like “Abolish unfair treaties!” and “Down with imperialism!”. Hergé was not in essence a political man, publishing in Le Soir because collaborationist newspapers were the only ones allowed to exist.
At best, he was naïve. More likely, in Peeters’s telling, he just didn’t care about the most consequential moral conflict of the century. After the liberation, Hergé was spared the fate of others in Belgium whose records were no different from his — the authorities proved “overridingly indulgent”. Hergé was protected by nothing less than Tintin’s popularity.
And that, in the end, is Peeters’s larger point. In many ways Georges Remi vanished into the work of Hergé. “What if I told you that I put my whole life into Tintin?” he asked Peeters shortly before his death. That seems to be exactly what he did. A flawed and not terribly happy man grew a modest talent into something vastly greater than himself. I don’t know what a semiotician would make of that. A layman might call it art.
HERGÉ, SON OF TINTIN
Benoît Peeters. Translated by Tina A Kover
The Johns Hopkins University Press
394 pages; $29.95
©2012 The New York Times News Service
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