Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Knivesout no more
Sometimes an emerald is just an emerald.
Tom McCarthy's Tintin And The Secret Of Literature is an odd but fascinating little book. He draws on Barthes, Freud, Derrida and various other dead Frenchmen (including Charles Baudelaire) to analyse Tintin's comic-book adventures. In the process, he's insightful at times, informative at other times, utterly preposterous at yet other times and downright ludicrous in at least one instance, but always gripping. His style, a peculiar mix of chatty directness and lit-crit fartiness (bandying about phrases like 'radical erasure') is a definite asset, it's the voice of a fellow who knows he has received entirely too much education of dubious value, and is both proud of it and eager to prove that he is still a regular chap after all, and not an academic robot.
He's obviously done his research. He unearths interesting possibilities in the Tintin books - that Sir Francis Haddock was a ******* son of Louis XIV, the Sun King, that Francis' treasure, plundered from Red Rackham was in turn plundered from the Incas, worshippers of the sun. So, Haddock derives both his bloodline and his wealth from the sun. McCarthy then suggests parallels between these hints in the books and Herge's unknown grandfather, who may have been an aristocrat, making Herge a sort of distaff or not entirely authentic aristocrat himself. He also notes that Herge's father was one of a pair of twins, or doubles. He then traces out themes of duplicity, counterfeits, doubles and twins throughout the Tintin books. What does it all mean. Maybe nothing, maybe everything, if you subscribe to the Freudian perspective that is one of the pillars of McCarthy's approach.
His analysis of Herge's political shift from right to left is fascinating too. Herge described his shift as being from 'ideology to friendship', but by the end of the series friendship seems to wear thin even as differing ideologies continue to deliver little or nothing.
On the other hand, there are times when McCarthy must be having us on. He dedicates an entire chapter to Bianca Castafiore's clitoris, equating that organ with the constantly-lost (and possibly fake) emerald in The Castafiore Emerald. I am certain Freud would have smiled paternally at McCarthy at this point, called him his beamish boy and offered him a cigar. Only it might have been an exploding cigar, and McCarthy would turn out to be Freud's never-acknowledged illegitimate great-grandson by way of a winter-and-spring liaison in England in the psychoanalyst's declining years.
See what I did there? Well, that's the sort of leap McCarthy makes a lot of times in his book, aided by quoatations from Derrida, Baudelaire and Battaile. I think some of it is a conscious performing-monkey act. At times he even suggests that he might be reaching - in that preposterous chapter on Castafiore, he points out that it is easy to re-read Tintin through a filthy lense. However, he hedges and adds that, like any Catholic schoolboy, Herge had a filthy mind. Someone has a filthy mind here, but I'm not sure if it's Herge or McCarthy.
I wish this book had offered a keener analysis of Herge's art, the 'clean line' is a metaphor after all (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and his brilliant and evolving use of the comic medium. He was as much a pioneer as Eisner or Kirby, creating an entirely new visual vocabulary in a then-new medium, and with his exclusively literary approach McCarthy avoids any in-depth discussion of the pictures that go with Herge's words.McCarthy also fails to make as much of Tintin's eternal youth and vaguely androgynous sexlessness as he could have, but perhaps that would have been too obvious for him.
The flow of topics is a bit random, and the book reads more like a collection of essays, loosely connected, than a sustained analysis of its subject matter. However, McCarthy's excesses and failings do not devalue his real insights, and his fascinating presentation of tropes and parallels throughout the Tintin books. You just have to wade through a lot of incredible but amusing intellectual posturing to get there. The book fulfills the most important attribute of any critical piece - it made me go back to the originals and enjoy them afresh, with new perspectives in some places. While McCarthy may be stretching things when he says Tintin is the secret of literature, he does a good job of initiating us into the secrets of what makes the Tintin adventures such enduring entertainment.
Tom McCarthy's Tintin And The Secret Of Literature is an odd but fascinating little book. He draws on Barthes, Freud, Derrida and various other dead Frenchmen (including Charles Baudelaire) to analyse Tintin's comic-book adventures. In the process, he's insightful at times, informative at other times, utterly preposterous at yet other times and downright ludicrous in at least one instance, but always gripping. His style, a peculiar mix of chatty directness and lit-crit fartiness (bandying about phrases like 'radical erasure') is a definite asset, it's the voice of a fellow who knows he has received entirely too much education of dubious value, and is both proud of it and eager to prove that he is still a regular chap after all, and not an academic robot.
He's obviously done his research. He unearths interesting possibilities in the Tintin books - that Sir Francis Haddock was a ******* son of Louis XIV, the Sun King, that Francis' treasure, plundered from Red Rackham was in turn plundered from the Incas, worshippers of the sun. So, Haddock derives both his bloodline and his wealth from the sun. McCarthy then suggests parallels between these hints in the books and Herge's unknown grandfather, who may have been an aristocrat, making Herge a sort of distaff or not entirely authentic aristocrat himself. He also notes that Herge's father was one of a pair of twins, or doubles. He then traces out themes of duplicity, counterfeits, doubles and twins throughout the Tintin books. What does it all mean. Maybe nothing, maybe everything, if you subscribe to the Freudian perspective that is one of the pillars of McCarthy's approach.
His analysis of Herge's political shift from right to left is fascinating too. Herge described his shift as being from 'ideology to friendship', but by the end of the series friendship seems to wear thin even as differing ideologies continue to deliver little or nothing.
On the other hand, there are times when McCarthy must be having us on. He dedicates an entire chapter to Bianca Castafiore's clitoris, equating that organ with the constantly-lost (and possibly fake) emerald in The Castafiore Emerald. I am certain Freud would have smiled paternally at McCarthy at this point, called him his beamish boy and offered him a cigar. Only it might have been an exploding cigar, and McCarthy would turn out to be Freud's never-acknowledged illegitimate great-grandson by way of a winter-and-spring liaison in England in the psychoanalyst's declining years.
See what I did there? Well, that's the sort of leap McCarthy makes a lot of times in his book, aided by quoatations from Derrida, Baudelaire and Battaile. I think some of it is a conscious performing-monkey act. At times he even suggests that he might be reaching - in that preposterous chapter on Castafiore, he points out that it is easy to re-read Tintin through a filthy lense. However, he hedges and adds that, like any Catholic schoolboy, Herge had a filthy mind. Someone has a filthy mind here, but I'm not sure if it's Herge or McCarthy.
I wish this book had offered a keener analysis of Herge's art, the 'clean line' is a metaphor after all (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and his brilliant and evolving use of the comic medium. He was as much a pioneer as Eisner or Kirby, creating an entirely new visual vocabulary in a then-new medium, and with his exclusively literary approach McCarthy avoids any in-depth discussion of the pictures that go with Herge's words.McCarthy also fails to make as much of Tintin's eternal youth and vaguely androgynous sexlessness as he could have, but perhaps that would have been too obvious for him.
The flow of topics is a bit random, and the book reads more like a collection of essays, loosely connected, than a sustained analysis of its subject matter. However, McCarthy's excesses and failings do not devalue his real insights, and his fascinating presentation of tropes and parallels throughout the Tintin books. You just have to wade through a lot of incredible but amusing intellectual posturing to get there. The book fulfills the most important attribute of any critical piece - it made me go back to the originals and enjoy them afresh, with new perspectives in some places. While McCarthy may be stretching things when he says Tintin is the secret of literature, he does a good job of initiating us into the secrets of what makes the Tintin adventures such enduring entertainment.
