TINTIN AND THE SECRET OF LITERATURE
by Tom McCarthy
Granta, £14.99; 211pp

I SAW MY FIRST TINTIN book (properly an album, I think) in 1958. I was 11, and a copy of Objectif Lune was slammed down hard on to each of our school desks by Mr Griffin, our French teacher. For all his corrugated haired, 1950s pomposity, Mr Griffin at least had the inspiration to use Tintin as a teaching aid.

For my 11-year-old self it was love at first sight, a coup de foudre; and it was not only the French language that began to entrance me, but also the drawings. I had never seen a comic book quite like it. There was something hypnotic about the immaculate, deadpan neatness of the pages and of the drawings themselves — not a line too many, such seeming inexpressiveness, such European restraint compared to the American superhero comics with their wild angles and whizzing lines.

The Tintin drawings had clean, flat, vibrant colours, and the characters’ feet always seemed parallel to the bottom of the picture plane. Sometimes, whole spreads were in nocturnal greys and blues with sudden bright eruptions of yellow or red from car headlamps, or gunfire. The backgrounds had such solidity and detail, the vehicles and buildings, the effects of light, weather and sea were so simply and so tellingly rendered; how had he done that, we asked ourselves poring over the pages again and again.

“He” of course was Hergé, or to give him his real name, as opposed to his reversed and coded initialised one, Georges Remi (R / G = Herge). In Tintin and the Secret of Literature Tom McCarthy argues for the possibility that the Tintin oeuvre represents a body of real and expressive literature, in its own way as full of rounded and memorable characters as Balzac’s Comédie Humaine.

The author offers an exceptional, and very up-close, reading of Hergé’s texts, characters and plots, finding that they conceal a veritable palimpsest of coded messages and signifiers, of layers and densities, of crosscurrents, hidden meanings, and sublimated desires. Here is a fascinating, and sometimes disturbing work of deconstruction.

Although the book deals with a popular character from junior literature, it is not a junior read. Mr Griffin would certainly not have banged this book down happily on to our school desks. One section is entitled “Castafiore’s Clit”, referring to the intimate anatomy of the opera singer Mme Castafiore, whose voice can, as McCarthy puts it, “blow away all other discourse”.

He asks questions of the exact nature of her famous emerald. “Viewed with the sexual sub-filter on”, he claims that the answer “will not be long in coming”: “She sits on it, It is hard to find, and easy to lose again among the moundy grass, tucked away in its nest, or under folds of cushion. It was given to her for pleasure and encourages her to give men more pleasure. It is a clitoris, duh.”

He views various instances and appurtenances of Captain Haddock’s behaviour and attributes with the same filter on, seeing Haddock’s broken pipe as an “emasculation”, and his upright reddened finger as an obvious erection signifier.

Throughout the book, McCarthy cross-references from title to title among the published (and unpublished) Tintin albums, finding fascinating parallel themes and echoes from Hergé’s own biography, and making perceptive leaps and links from Hergé’s “real” world to his stories.

He also cites an 1830 novella, Sarassine by Balzac, identified by Roland Barthes as an “exemplary literary text”, that is used to shadow the structures and exchanges, the convolutions of Hergé’s plots. Blistering blue barnacles, this is an intellectual book! Tom McCarthy is the general secretary of a group of conceptual pranksters, artists and writers called the Necronauts (necronauts.org). His first novel, Remainder, was published in 2004. Coded messages loom big in Mr McCarthy’s world. He often cites the use of the poetic fragments and messages transmitted in Cocteau’s film Orphée; that were in turn based on the coded signals used by the French Resistance in the Second World War.

He reads the Tintin plots as a series of codes — which can lead to bewildering complications at times as the texts are analysed in the shadow of Sarrasine — and theory is refracted through theory until all sight of the original seems lost. I am not entirely sure that the whole book is not an elaborately coded “art stunt”.

His analytic method, however, did make me return to the books with a fresh eye and ear — McCarthy constantly points out how the English approximations and simplifications of translation lose some of the buried symmetries and mysteries (in Tintin many things are buried, and crypts are a recurring motif).

If nothing else this book restores to Hergé the primacy of story — of his written texts as opposed to his visual brilliance, which is hardly explored with the same depth. Tintin aficionados may feel they have to put up with all the Barthes, codes and Freudian subtext, but they may find the marvellous originals refracted and refreshed in the process.

Ian Beck is a children’s author and illustrator. His latest book, Tom Truehart, is published by OUP

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