As a kid I read two kinds of books: cheap, paperback science fiction novels with covers festooned with spaceships and robots, and Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin. How I adored Hergé! Best of all were those Tintin adventures that combined my two passions: The Shooting Star (1941-42), Destination Moon/Explorers on the Moon (1950-53) and Flight 714 to Sydney (1966-67).
Child-me pored over on these books and their wonderful ligne claire images. Captain Haddock was, I think, the first fictional character I genuinely loved. To this day I maintain that there is real genius in his characterisation, the way his grumpiness and slapstick reinforce rather than erode his splendid courage and comradeship, and the way his character grows, from the cowardly booze-hound we first meet in The Crab With the Golden Claws into something approaching noble.
Still, to reread Tintin as an adult can be startling. Take The Shooting Star: a meteor is hurtling towards the Earth, growing brighter in the sky night by night, making the world so hot the tarmac melts on the roads. It promises apocalypse, but the meteor misses us, though an island-sized chunk breaks off and falls into the Atlantic. Since this rock contains valuable minerals unknown to our world, Tintin and Haddock mount an expedition to claim it. But a rival expedition also wants the prize.
Writing in Nazi-occupied Belgium in 1941, Hergé makes these rivals nasty Americans managed by a venal financier called Bohlwinkel, a bulb-nosed, pin-eyed caricature Jew. After the war, and mindful of the US market, Hergé revised away the US: in later editions the rivals hail from the fictional country of São Rico, their stars-and-stripes redrawn as an imaginary flag. (Although their ships are still incongruously called the SS Peary and the SS Kentucky Star.) But he left in the disfiguring antisemitism, which speaks, alas, to his postwar priorities.
None of this registered with me as a child, but as an adult I can’t help but be struck by it. Collaborator is a harsh word, but it’s hard to deny its applicability to Hergé. Then again, Tintin explicitly stands for interracial friendship, most prominently with his Chinese best friend, Tchang. (The two share one of Hergé’s best stories, Tintin in Tibet). And The Red Sea Sharks (1958) is filled with horror at the modern-day trafficking of black Africans, even if its representation of those Africans is still mired in the patronising stereotypes of Tintin in the Congo (1931, a book quite properly unavailable in the UK because of its racism). Tintin, this blond Aryan, this upholder of the bourgeois status quo, is also Tintin, gay hero, living openly and happily with Haddock, befriending people regardless of class or race. It’s complicated.
The Shooting Star is simultaneously a piece of Nazi-era propaganda and an ingeniously surreal subversion of that propaganda. It’s a story about a team from German-occupied Europe beating the US to the meteoric prize. (Tintin pips the Yanks to the post by means of a deck-launched German Arado 196 seaplane.) But their prize is a nightmare: the extraterrestrial constitution of the meteor causes mushroom spores to bloom and swell to enormous size. A discarded apple core grows in moments into a gigantic tree dropping apples the size of boulders. A spider as big as a cow appears and chases Tintin across the waste. At the end, the mysterious star slips below the waves, as if it had never been, and Tintin and Snowy are rescued in the nick of time.
Early in the story, when an escaped lunatic attempts to sabotage the expedition ship with dynamite, Tintin talks him down, using a megaphone to pretend to be the voice of God. When I read it as a kid, that seemed daft and funny. Now the whole story strikes me as a complicated riff on madness, on the insanity of the war years, on the arachnid ideology of Nazism, the giganticism of the US and the ultimately void prize for which they were competing. Fevered and brilliant, monstrous and hilarious, the book is a dream-haunting vision of sanity melting into madness, like the tarmac dissolving hot flowing tar at the book’s beginnings. As the shooting star sinks into the blankness of the sea, so everything solid melts into fluidity.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion