Читать книгу The Graphic Mythology of Tintin - a Primer - Tim MDiv Mountford - Страница 3

The graphic work of the Belgian artist Georges Remi, better known by his nom de plume Hergé, ranks as one of the richest and most influential in the history of European comic strip art. Regarded as a father figure in the history of bande dessinée (the French term means literally ‘drawn strip’ and is commonly abbreviated to BD), he didn't invent the format per se, but made an immense contribution to its development, maturity and above all its public acceptance. The enormous quantity of work he produced during some six decades of the twentieth century testifies to an artist and storyteller of considerable skill and sensitivity, and demonstrates how the medium of the comic strip has evolved to become a language as capable of literary expression as mere prose.

In truth it is of course one creation that has marked out Hergé for worldwide acclaim: that of the perpetually youthful reporter Tintin. Unknown to many, Hergé’s other work contains the same rich vein of graphic originality, style and wit; from his early adolescent sketches, through the illustrations and graphic motifs that he created for newspapers, magazines, books and advertisements, to the numerous story strips for which he is virtually deified by ranks of European BD artists, we can see in them all a creative talent, honed and perfected at the hands of an industrious and expressive artist. In the French-speaking world Tintin has no equal. His many admirers and imitators may adopt the plastic language of his world (the fluid accuracy of Ia ligne claire – the clear line – and the muted palette which typifies I’école belge – the Belgian school of BD) yet few have equalled Hergé’s impact on global culture.

This book, while focused on Hergé's Les Aventures de Tintin, takes into account Hergé’s oeuvre as a whole, considering some of the influences that motivated it, and how this eventually gave rise to Tintin and the canon of his adventures. Aside from simply reading these tales, I think we can understand them better by looking more closely at their idiosyncrasies, their stylistic innovations, their rhythms, their visual language. Comic strips often have a reputation for being something to amuse young minds before growing up and reading ‘proper’ literature. I think this is mistaken. The apparently straightforwardness of the Tintin adventures is riddled with themes and symbols of a surprisingly profound nature. It is an adventure in itself to learn to discover them.

A sizeable chunk of the original research and writing in this book was undertaken for a thesis written nearly twenty years ago for a degree in graphic design. Since then it has sat unread on an old floppy disk and (I am led to believe) a microfiche held in the archives of the London Institute. Reading Tintin books was a childhood obsession of mine and being able to write about their visual language academically was the happy culmination of years of poring over their pages. Needless to say, when an artist is no longer alive to contribute further to a body of work, reading what someone has written about them two decades ago is unlikely to be any less pertinent than what is written last week. Art endures, and ideas sparked by that art are part of the reason why it does.

Some things have changed in that time. The internet for one has made exchanging ideas easier and more democratic than ever. We no longer need defer to appointed authorities for opinions, or wait on a protracted publication schedule to read their ideas. Nor do we need to visit specialist bookstores to track down hard-to-find foreign tomes, as I did when originally researching this work. (It helped that at the time I arranged one of my student work placements to be in Brussels.) For those who remain fascinated by Hergé and especially his creation Tintin, there are now informative community sites such as tintinologist.org where like minds can meet virtually, regardless of geographical distance. And websites such as the prodigious Amazon not only bring the ability to buy the world’s publications to your web browser, but now offer unpublished authors like me the chance to share ideas with new readers.

Yet for those same lovers of Tintin, there are things that haven’t changed. The visual material that Hergé created in his life is still carefully marketed and controlled by his estate. As the late Harry Thompson intimated back 1991 in his book Tintin: Herge and his Creation, the ability to reproduce Hergé’s work in the context of critical analysis was already being restricted to officially sanctioned works. Thompson’s book wasn't one such, so to find a suitable cover illustration his publisher ingeniously approached the Belgian Post Office who held the copyright on an illustration which Hergé had drawn for a commemorative stamp in 1979, Tintin’s fiftieth anniversary. I have essentially the same problem as Thompson; ebooks are perfectly capable of containing illustrations but only if one has the rights of reproduction. My thesis of twenty years ago – being only three laser-printed copies, privately produced – had nearly thirty carefully chosen visual quotations from Hergé’s work to illustrate the text. Unfortunately doing the same for this version is simply an unfeasible legal negotiation for an independent author. This is frustrating as some of the visuals were from a variety of more obscure sources and old editions. In this new presentation of the text I try instead to describe visuals as adequately as I can.

I am surprised to see that, 20 years on, Numa Sadoul’s insightful interviews with Hergé first published in 1976 by Casterman – the publishers of Tintin albums – remain unavailable as a whole in an English translation. I, like all writers about Hergé, refer to these valuable conversations numerous times and the English renderings given here are my own. It’s perhaps also worth noting here that the interviews as published were meticulously edited and re-edited before being released for public consumption by Hergé who was somewhat wary of being too candid.

Also untranslated into English are numerous biographical writings about Remi; Thierry Smolderen and Pierre Sterckx's 1988 biography of Hergé for Casterman – which Thompson consulted for his pioneering English biography, as did I for my thesis in 1992 – being a good example out of many. It has apparently taken the arrival of a major Hollywood adaptation to coerce anglophone publishers to see the potential revenue in English texts about Hergé. Besides the movie tie-in books, I've noticed fresh 2011 editions of at least three biographical works about Hergé in English. I wait to see what Raphael Taylor’s new biography for Icon Books (unpublished at the time of writing) will bring that Pierre Assouline’s didn’t already supply, since Assouline was given unfettered access to Hergé’s archives and private papers. Assouline’s 1996 French work, in its Oxford University 2009 translation, also gets a reprint this year. Renowned French BD author and Tintin specialist Benoît Peeters’ book Hergé, Son of Tintin from 2002 has a new English translation from an impressive American academic publisher (John Hopkins University Press) in time for the stateside release of the film. Until this marketing-inspired tidal wave, there have really only been a handful of notable works of so-called Tintinology published in English. It’s interesting to see anglophone university publishers catching on to works that have been staples in French academia for some time. Many excellent books about the world of Tintin remain the province of francophones, which is a shame given that Tintin stories are read and loved throughout the world. I still hope some of the ideas from the ‘ivory towers’ can reach that wider popular audience.

In my opinion, Thompson’s book still remains some of the best writing about Hergé and Tintin in English and is now available in electronic format. If you have bought this ebook, you really should download his too. Yet, much as I respect and admire this text, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘Post Mortem’ Thompson dismissed an aspect of the study of Hergé’s work which I found, indeed still find enlightening. Passing judgment on some of the critical writing published by the officially approved channels, he derided what he called ‘pseudo-academic nonsense’ written about Hergé. In particular he quoted a passage of highfalutin gallic interpretation from the book Hergé and Tintin, Reporters by Philippe Goddin. (Goddin at that time was the general secretary of La Fondation Hergé, originally established by Fanny Remi, Georges’ widow, to control the licensing rights to Hergé’s work.) In fact, the passage was not by Goddin but from an essay featured in that book by French philosopher and writer Pierre-Yves Bourdil. Although I can see the point Thompson wished to make – he thought that Hergé himself would have not been persuaded or impressed by such analysis – ironically it was reading this essay which gave me the inspiration for my thesis. Bourdil’s writing aligned in my mind with the ideas of the (also French) writer and intellectual Roland Barthes, whose theories on the innate layers of understanding involved in visual language had intrigued me as a burgeoning graphic designer.

I didn’t realise it at the time but I was intuiting the existence of a well-worn path through the field of BD. Now twenty years after writing my thesis, I discovered that, as far back in the other direction from my dissertation, in 1970 Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle had also written a university thesis about bande dessinée (later published in 1972) which examined the work of Hergé, E.P. Jacobs and Jacques Martin using semiotics, the concept advanced by Barthes for deconstructing meaning in visual elements. (Since then Fresnault-Deruelle has become one of the leading semiologists, a university professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris and author of dozens of books about visual language in BD. The greater part of analytical writing about BD in French is firmly rooted in the semiotic model.)

On balance I think Thompson was mistaken about Hergé's view of himself and his work. Sadoul's interviews for instance reveal his openness to psychoanalysis; he had undertaken therapy with a Jungian analyst when his troubled psychological state had affected his creative work, indeed in a letter he wrote to Benoît Peeters cited in his book Lire Tintin, he claimed to have read most of Jung’s writings. (Smolderen and Sterckx note how assiduously he documented his dreams.) Hergé was intrigued by paranormal ideas even if he remained agnostic about the grander metaphysical questions – the various allusions to the Unknown in Tintin stories reflect Hergé's open-mindedness towards esoteric matters. He was more pragmatic Belgian than intellectual French, which was the overriding tendency of many Tintinologists. Thompson also seemed to overlay his own no-nonsense sensibility onto Hergé, and conflated the artist's right to an opinion about his work with the right of his critics to think differently. Hergé deemed introspective reflection as an inhibitor during the creative process, but he did not appear to deny the place of critical analysis. He told Sadoul: 'Whether I'm conscious of it or not, I express myself in what I write and draw; without wanting it or knowing it, I put into it what I think, what I feel and who I am. I'm working too much to have time to analyse myself. And fundamentally that's a good thing: don't think too much, don't be always focused on oneself. Primarily to do, afterwards to look!' He wrote in correspondence to Peeters that it should be possible to do an analysis (in the psychoanalytical sense) of his albums. ‘If I’ve used symbols in my stories then it’s spontaneous and thus totally unconscious.’

It is clear from Sadoul's interviews and biographical works based on his private writings that Hergé created out of a deep existential need, a psychological urge to express his true self. The very fact that he wanted, indeed at one point even tried to become an abstract fine artist proves him to be someone engaged with their creativity at a deeply intuitive level. Thompson’s apparent censure for those psychoanalysing Tintin texts also rings slightly hollow since, in his second chapter he ably describes various members of Remi’s family as subconscious precursors for the cartoon characters of his later career; his brother Paul as an active round face boy with a quiff, his father and uncle (twins) wearing bowler hats and carrying canes, his aunt’s agonising singing, and – most Freudian of all – his adolescent ‘ample-breasted’ girlfriend called Milou. (For any readers who need hints, these are respectively Tintin, the two detectives known as the Dupond(t)s in French or the Thom(p)sons in English, and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore. Milou is the original French name for Tintin’s loyal canine companion, Snowy.)

All artists draw from a reservoir of conscious and subconscious currents and Hergé's stories of a young adventurer and his companions were full of subtexts, presenting visual signifiers of the author's inner world. Some writers were content to document and bring to public awareness the more conscious influences Hergé used in creating his books; Frederic Soumois’ Dossier Tintin is a good example and an excellent catalogue of some of Hergé's sources. Others wanted to put Hergé on the therapist's couch by scouring his art for subliminal clues; the greatest example of which are the analyses of Serge Tisseron which interpreted Hergé's texts as a cypher telling the story of his father and uncle's illegitimacy and possible relationship to the Belgian royal family. Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature, one of the few English books of Tintinology of the last decade, explains and enlarges upon Tisseron’s works very eloquently.

It seems to me there are, as ever, different adult responses to works regarded as childish: those who simply discount the stories as kids’ stuff; those like Thompson who admire Hergé’s work but are loathe to apply literary critical methods to it; and those like McCarthy who are happy to dissect every word and image, often forensically, in order ultimately to enjoy it and admire it all the more. As Jean-Marie Apostolidès alluded in his book Les Métamorphoses de Tintin (first published in French in 1984, and subtitled ‘Tintin for Adults’ in its English translation of 2009) Tintinology allows complex readings of seemingly innocent tales. Isn’t that so of all literary criticism, uncovering an author’s hidden thoughts, or even finding in the text connections which the creator never consciously conceived?

But besides psychoanalysis, theoretical concepts derived from Structuralism had a great influence on many of these writers. Structuralism had become a dominant hermeneutic among French intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. Flowing out of linguistics – and the French have a profound identification with their langue maternelle – it became a model for deconstructing and interpreting culture and its expressions. Likewise in my text, I was particularly concerned with Barthes' idea of a mythology: his conceptual use of the word was tied to the vocabulary and meaning of visual language. At the back of my mind the more traditional use of mythology still came into view: likening Tintin's canon of books to the Bible for instance, or seeing Tintin as an archetypal young hero embarked on his own peculiar odysseys. Although I read some Joseph Campbell at the time – and anyone serious about considering mythology in relation to Jung’s ideas ought to read Campbell – I thought that Barthes' semiotic use of the term, with its appropriation of visual imagery, had cultural application to the merchandising industry which was blossoming at the time – and which has now grown to be a formidable enterprise. The expanded text of this publication retains that, but also draws on wider ideas about mythology in culture, especially in the Epilogue with an eye towards the Hollywood franchise which is set to adapt several of the albums into an ongoing narrative.

My dissertation was based on the French works of Hergé published by Casterman, essentially to keep closest to the author’s original texts. (Moreover, some of the stories or specific versions of them simply didn’t exist at that time in English translation.) In this publication, I have retained the French names of characters, places and book titles but have included their English counterparts where necessary. Occasionally I have made reference to the excellent English translations originally for Methuen by Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, who worked closely with Hergé, uniquely so among Tintin’s many foreign editions. Quotations from various French works have been used throughout but I present them here as English translations for the benefit of a non-academic readership. As with Sadoul’s text, these translations are my own unless noted otherwise. Also, with both non-academic and electronic presentation in mind, I have avoided footnotes here, even though my thesis was rather pretentiously littered with them!

Any dates given in the main text usually refer to when a particular story was first begun. The colour Tintin albums with which most readers are familiar, were printed some time after these dates, usually once the stories were completed in the various periodicals in which they first featured. Please consult the Bibliography for the date of their first publication in colour albums by Casterman. I use the following conventions surrounding the ambiguous title Tintin: where it is rendered in normal text it refers to the character himself or as a generic descriptive term (the Tintin universe, a Tintin album etc.); where it is rendered in italics it refers to the magazine which was the home of Tintin’s adventures from 1946.

I recognise it is risky to revisit one's college thesis and publish it decades later, though I should add this is more than that text. To be precise, I have rewritten many passages and added much new material in several places, especially referencing work published since then. Like Hergé’s interviews with Sadoul, in some places I have reworked the text so much, none of the original survives! Since my thesis was written for examiners who I assumed knew nothing about the subject, I have retained that tone in the text and branded this book a primer suitable for introducing new readers to the wider field of Tintin studies. Of course 2011 sees the arrival of a whole new interpretation of Tintin, and with it no doubt an enlarged fanbase. I won’t deny that I am publishing this in order to hopefully pass on some of my meagre insights to those who are only discovering Tintin – and hopefully the larger edifice of European bande dessinée of which Herge’s contribution was something of a foundation stone – as a result.

I will save further comments on the new movie franchise until the Epilogue. The journey that culminates today in a three-dimensional computerised technicolour blockbuster began around eighty years earlier in black and white doodles by a Belgian boy scout from a rather grey world, so that is where we should begin.