tout tintin

My friend Pascal Béguin has been reading Tintin for almost all of his life--which has been well-spent at other pursuits like stonemasonry on two continents, resettling a ruined hamlet on a mountainside, raising a son, rebuilding an old schoolhouse to run it as a bed and breakfast, and supporting his wife Nancy in turning her soap-making hobby into a viable family business. But all the while there has been Tintin, from the early days in prefabricated family barracks in post-war Normandy, where he read his first Tintin at age 7; to the present, when he makes discrete phone calls to find out which Tintins his 7-year-old granddaughter Jeanne hasn’t read yet so he knows what to get her for Christmas and birthdays.

His familiarity with the contents of the 24 published Tintin books is casually encyclopedic. Ask him who said: Gros plein d’soupe! or Dors-tu avec la barbe au-dessus ou en dessous des couvertures? and he’ll tell you, monsieur Balthazar’s parrot in L’Oreille Cassée, and Capitaine Haddock’s treacherous erstwhile lieutenant, Allan, in Coke en Stock. Quiz him on details fine or broad of plot-lines, and after a few moments of cogitation he can specify villains and describe major turns and denouements for any volume you mention. Quote some silly gaffe by team Dupond/Dupont (Pis de panaque!) and he’ll rattle off several more; call him one of Captain Haddock’s famous insults and you’ll find you’ve started a fight in which you can’t possibly have the last word, analphabète diplômé!

His son Sébastien, who’s also a keenly competitive Tintin buff, gave Pascal a 1700-page, 6.2-lb book in which are bound, in reduced size but unabridged form, all the Tintin books, from the embryonic and curiously dull black-and-white lurchings of the 1929-30 Tintin au Pays des Soviets to the messy but marvelously expressive penciled outlines of Tintin et L’Alph-Art, which was unfinished even in draft form when Hergé died in 1983. Pascal loaned me this Tout Tintin at the end of 2009, and in the first month of 2011 I finished reading it. There were long stretches of 2010 when traveling or visitors distracted me from this hardly portable project, but the further I got into the books the more I found that Tintin and his adventures was on my mind wherever I went. Part of this was due to the way Hergé’s lush imagery gets under your skin to the point that it can start coloring the world around you. When I was rowing a boat through the bottom of the Grand Canyon in September and October, for example, I kept imagining how the Canyon walls and sky and river, in all their outsized colors, would look rendered into frames by Hergé. Grand Canyon river running culture, rich as it is in kit and tackle, would have appealed to Hergé, and I could just see Tintin togged out in an old-fashioned lifejacket; Tintin learning to row and perhaps riding a mule down the Bright Angel Trail; Tintin hobnobbing with salty old hermit miners and Indians on the side-creeks whilst Captain Haddock gets sunburned and runs out of beer after the first night of a two-week trip; Tintin thoroughly enjoying his wilderness tourism until he stumbles across the victims of a mysterious Havasupi curse, or perhaps a circle of narcotics traffickers operating in the river corridor...

Whenever left to my own devices in Chasteuil, I made it my inviolable ritual, to start my morning by grinding and boiling a cup of coffee, then sitting down, my chunky little French-English dictionary at hand, and reading 20 pages or so of Tintin.

I must confess that it was very slow going initially, through the first three books which, even after Tintin breaks into color and assumes his iconic physical appearance in volume 2, are pure pap as far as their plots go. The stage-prop bad guys are part of a syndicate led most uncompellingly by Al Capone--Hergé did better when he started inventing his own villains.

And, to touch briefly a subject on which much has been said by more rigorous scholars than me, Tintin au Congo and Tintin en Amerique are, in addition to being boring, embarrassingly racist in their caricatures of Africans and American Indians, even in the cleaned-up versions reproduced in Tout Tintin, published decades after the originals.

I'd read a random handful of the later volumes a few years before, so I knew Hergé would hit his stride soon. And hit his stride he does, in the magnificently drawn, richly peopled and detailed, engagingly sinuous story-line that sprawls across several continents and volumes 4 and 5, Les Cigares du Pharaon and Le Lotus Bleu.

Here we see the blossoming of Hergé’s flair for kooky intrigue--The Pharoah’s cigars? The aesthetics of that title are a big step away from the simplistic comics-page-of-the-paper ethos of the earlier Tintins and into the more vivid roman policier world of detectives, criminals and enigmas. Here we meet the bumblingly officious duo Dupondt, who enter the story as Tintin’s police adversaries and somehow become his staunch but prickly friends, though their usefulness as inspectors and as allies is always dubious at best.

Here we encounter an absent-minded savant who prefigures Professor Tournesol, and other memorable characters who will turn up again and again through Tintin’s subsequent adventures: the florid schmoozer Oliveira da Figueira, who could sell ice to eskimos but has a heart of gold and always proves useful to our hero; the sadistic contrabandier Allan Thompson, who finally gets his comeuppance when he loses his dentures and every scrap of dignity in a volcanic earthquake 18 volumes later; the winsome waif Tchang, who reappears later as Tintin’s summons to Tibet and who serves as the archetype for the other spindle-shanked boys of varying ethnicity who, after being rescued from brutal treatment by Tintin, become his loyal native guides.

We also meet Rastapopoulos, the worldly, sneering arch-villain who will be Tintin’s Professor Moriarty, dodging death and capture to surface again and again as Tintin’s most significant and cunning foe.

And our young reporter himself takes shape to become the smooth-faced manchild he’ll remain for five decades of adventures. He’s unswervingly optimistic about human nature without being exactly naïve; he’s often much more canny about sniffing out a knave or a nefarious plot than most of the adults around him. Trouble seems to have a way of finding him, and a majority of the stories are set in motion by a chance encounter with someone who piques his interest or his sense that something is afoot.

He prevails against his enemies and escapes his demise time and time again through a combination of cleverness (he is a master of trickery and disguise) bravery, agility with his fists and a gun, the loyalty he inspires in would-be helpers by his selfless deeds on their behalf, and by good luck of heroic proportions.

He gets drunk easily when the situation demands he drink, as in L’Oreille Cassée when he’s condemned to death by firing squad in the South American republic of San Theodoros, and the colonel assigned to carry out the execution offers him an aperitif of the local eau de vie. The constant political reversals between the generals Tapioca and Alcazar, one or the other of whom stages a coup every few hours, prevent the orders for execution from ever being carried out, and tipsy Tintin staggers blithely through the mêlée, hiccuping revolutionary slogans.

But when Tintin has the choice, he seldom takes anything stronger than mineral water, never utters an expletive, refuses to kill even the most murderous blackguards when they are at his mercy (a tendency that suits Hergé’s ends, for what serial writer in his right mind would kill off a good villain?), and generally comports himself with such honor and justice that it can be a little maddening sometimes.

His canine companion Milou is more of an id-riddled regular guy. Like his master he’s brave, loyal and resourceful, but he also likes to chase cats and lap up any champagne or whiskey that gets spilled, and he’s easily distracted from the task at hand whenever there’s a bone to be gnawed.

He’s sometimes shown with a devil-dog on one shoulder and an angel-dog on the other, wrestling with himself in a situation that wouldn’t even present a decision to Tintin, just pure, upright necessity and action. But Milou isn’t quite enough of a foil for so anodyne a hero, and I’m betting I’m not the only reader who feels the books really come into their own when Hergé produces a more substantial helpmeet for Tintin in the form of le capitaine Haddock, who comes into the story in volume 9, Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or, as a broken man, shackled by alcoholism and taken advantage of by Allan and his wicked crew. Rehabilitated by Tintin and sworn to temperance (though his concept of restraint would still send most of us squarely under the table), he becomes Tintin’s devoted sidekick.

Presently they set up housekeeping as mansion-mates at Haddock’s ancestral Château de Moulinsart, where they’re joined by the guileless and decorously loony inventor Tryphon Tournesol, whose patent earnings pay for the château when their two-volume quest for Haddock’s ancestral pirate treasure come to naught (Le Secret de la Licorne and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge); and whose quasi-deafness and occasional hissy-fits of offended pride (never call him a zouave or anything else loudly enough that he might actually hear you, as Haddock learns in Objectif Lune) provide for endless gags and diversions. (Tournesol is a perpetual maundegreen machine, always hearing something different than what was said, always giving an answer that bears no resemblance to its question--for example, at one point in Les Picaros Haddock calls him a “sinistre farceur” and Tournesol almost has an aneurism at the idea that his sister (soeur) is being slandered. But that’s the kind of mistake I would make, I thought. The French language, as rich as it is in homonyms and silent endings, is a minefield of misunderstandings for the foreign--or the quasi-deaf--listener. I remember once being under the Tournesolesque impression that my neighbors and I were discussing something from India, d’Inde, when really the conversation concerned a turkey, or dinde.)

Haddock is everything human that Tintin isn’t, and we adore him for it. He’s generous of heart and genuinely wants to do good, but he’s also hotheaded, moody, childishly fond of instant gratification, and generally braver than he is wise.

He’s a functional alcoholic whose relationship with the bottle is one of the more complex forces at work in a world whose moralities are usually as unambiguous as the bright colors in which its panels are blocked. It’s clear from Tintin’s initial interactions with Haddock that the whiskey is a problem almost on the order of demonic possession. He almost kills them both several times in Le Crabe aux Pinces d’Or, first when they’re taking turns at the oars of a wooden lifeboat and Haddock, finding a bottle of rum on board, empties it in two gulps while Tintin sleeps and then, feeling cold, sets fire to the oars and sinks the boat. A few pages later he finds a bottle of whiskey in a biplane they’ve taken over, and in a rampage of drunken glee he dashes Tintin over the head with the bottle and seizes the controls. They survive the resulting crash and wander in the arabian desert until they’re delirious with thirst, and Milou has to intervene to save his master when the captain tries to strangle Tintin, mistaking him for a bottle of champagne whose cork won’t pop. Haddock’s remorse is enough to make him abstain, at great effort, from taking an aperitif with the French lieutenant whose patrol saves them from dying in the desert, but when they leave the outpost to travel overland by camel the captain brings several of the lieutenant’s bottles in his saddlebag. When a band of attacking Berbers shoot two of the bottles in succession, Haddock’s demon possesses him again and he charges the enemy, single-handedly routing them (or so it seems) with an outburst of the ecstatically ludicrous insults that will be his hallmark.

Tintin has to admit to himself that there must be a god for drunkards, and when he reaches Haddock, who has finished by knocking himself in the head with the butt of is own rifle, Tintin cries, “Bravo, capitaine! Magnifique!”

In Le Secret de la Licorne when Haddock goes on the piss one night and tells Tintin the legend of his ancestor the chevalier de Hadoque, the pint-glasses of whiskey he downs in the telling are the central narrative device for pacing the flashbacks: the story moves forward on two tracks as Haddock drinks and exuberently re-enacts the chevalier’s adventures. Haddock waxes sentimental thinking about how the chevalier must have suffered when pirates captured his ship and tied him to the mast. “From the blow he received to the head, naturally,” Tintin says, but the Haddock answers, “No, from thirst!” and wipes away a tear before throwing back another glass. Later when Tintin sternly takes the whiskey away, slapstick duty gets passed on to Milou, who finds the glass on the floor and drinks up with hilarious results. It’s during these scenes that we most clearly see how Hergé’s storytelling needs Haddock’s boozy bluster as much as it needs Tintin’s earnest virtue.

Over the course of the series Haddock, perhaps domesticated by the land life at Moulinsart, seems to take his demons more in hand, but the bottle is always present, as much a part of his character as his beard and pipe. I found it creepy, in a Clockwork Orange sort of way, that in the last complete book of the series, Tintin et les Picaros, Tournesol invents a tablet that, when slipped into Haddock’s glass, makes all whiskey taste poisonous. Later on these tablets are important to the plot in that they revitalize General Alcazar’s soldiers, who’ve been reduced to impotent revelry by parachute-drops of Loch Lomand on the part of General Tapioca, who is a puppet of Tintin’s old enemy, the evil Bordurian police-tzar Sponsz. That’s all fine and dandy, but the idea that Captain Haddock might be ‘cured’ from the drink for life is unsettling, to this reader anyway.

Haddock’s outrageous storms of verbal abuse, whether booze-fueled or not, and his colorful speech in general, account for a significant part of the linguistic joy of the Tintin reading experience.

Sometimes his insults bear a discernibly referential relationship to their intended targets, as when he calls the whiskey-thieving Tibetan Yeti an “espèce de loup-garou (werewolf) à la graisse (fat) de renoncule (buttercup) de mille tonnerres de Brest!” But at their best Haddock’s insults are utter nonsense; sustained and sublime fits of pure, referent-free invective. Moule à gauffres! (waffle irons) Ectoplasmes! Végétariens! Noix de coco! Anthropopithèques! (cannibals) Vampires! Jus de réglisse! (licorice juice) Technocrates! Tchouk-tchouk-nougat! Bachi-bouzouks! Aztèques! Marins d’eau douce! (fresh-water sailors) Hérétiques! Cornemuse! (bagpipes) At the height of his powers Haddock speaks in elaborate compound-insults, untranslatable sums greater than their parts, which the reader can easily assemble at home. If you have cornichons! (pickles), for example, it can become tas de cornichons! or pile of pickles. Cretin des Alpes, or inbred hick, can be elaborated as bougre (guy) d’extrait (extract) de cretin des Alpes. Start with emplâtres, or plasters, and whip up some crême d’emplâtres à la graisse d’herisson (cream of plaster in hedgehog fat).

Given all his predilections, one would expect the warm-blooded old sea-wolf, like Milou, to want to go chase a cat now and then, but the idea of female companionship never seems to cross his mind. In fact the only character in Tintin to show any interest at all in the opposite sex is the otherwise prudish Tournesol, who blushes, stammers, breeds a new strain of white rose, and flies off to San Theodoro for the sake of the dreadnought opera diva Bianca Castafiore. Perhaps the fact that la Castafiore, her stodgy maid Irma, and Alcazar’s shrill, pug-faced wife Peggy are the only adult females with speaking parts explains why the men and boys of this world seem to prefer birds of a feather.

I was startled, in the unfinished Alph-Art, by the introduction of Martine Vandezande, bespectacled receptionist for the art dealer Fourcart. Sure she’s ditzy and brainwashed by a guru, but she’s a well-meaning young lady somewhere near Tintin’s own indeterminate age, with whom he converses for well over a page! Who knows what would have transpired between them if Hergé had finished the book?

In fact, as I read the last few volumes of Tintin I felt that the ground of that world, which had been so delightfully stable for so many adventures, was beginning to shift in unpredictable ways. Sometimes I reacted with nostalgic displeasure. I didn’t like it, for example, when Tintin was suddenly wearing long brown slacks in Les Picaros instead of his iconic knickerbockers. What was he going to do next, grow his hair out? And I could have gone the rest of my life without learning, also in Les Picaros, that Captain Haddock’s first name is Archibald. At least Tintin, when asked his name in the same frame, replies with his usual bland, unselfconscious opacity, “Moi, je m’appelle Tintin,” and we are spared any other revelations.

But in other ways I was excited to see Hergé’s treatment of his characters become more and more nuanced toward the end of the series, and with this a new complexity in his notions of good and evil. His bread-and-butter villains like Rastapopoulos, Allan and Sponsz are still as evil as could possibly be, but otherwise it becomes harder and harder, among newly introduced characters, to really say who is a bad guy of epic proportions and who isn’t just, well, an ordinary dupe who’s made some bad decisions. In Vol 714 pour Sydney the verminous beanpole Dr. Krollspell, originally a flunky of Rastapopoulos, turns coat to help Tintin and his friends, and the rich and eccentric inventor Carreidas, who Rastapopoulos has kidnapped and who Tintin and friends are trying to rescue, reveals himself to be every bit of as nasty a git as Rastapopoulos himself. In fact the two of them, under the influence of Krollspell’s truth serum, engage in such petulant competition for the title of the ultimate génie du Mal that Haddock has to tape their mouths shut so that good guys and bad can think straight to flee the volcanic earthquake that’s engulfing the island. In the end it’s a sort of eerily neutral deus ex machina that decides their fates, in the form of a saucer-full of aliens who’ve made the island their base on earth since time immemorial.

The dispute between Rastapopoulos and Carreidas is a parody of stage villainy that puts them on an utterly different plane from such flat prototypes as Al Capone and Bobby Smiles in Tintin en Amerique, and Vol 714 is directly preceded by two back-to-back Tintin episodes with no villain whatsoever.

In the sumptuously drawn Tintin au Tibet, our hero travels to Nepal with the reluctant captain in tow when he learns that Tchang has gone down in a plane crash from which there are believed to be no survivors. In this meditation on friendship and loyalty Tintin’s only adversaries are self-doubt and the magnificent indifference of the Himalayas, and the prismatic logic of dreams and omens holds sway over the story. Even l’abominable homme des neiges, who seems be assuming the role of villain for part of the story, turns out to be a lonely, misunderstood hominid with a Justin Bieber hairdo, and he holds Tchang captive and harries the rescue party out of genuine attachment to the boy.

The following volume, Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, is a comedy of manners in which the irrepressible Castafiore invites herself and her retinue to Moulinsart, much to the horror of Captain Haddock, who finds himself wheelchair-bound and romantically linked to the buxom boor in the tabloid press, whose reporters are drawn to Moulinsart by her arrival and the subsequent disappearance of her prize emerald. Hergé mischievously keeps twisting the narrative to keep us thinking it’s a jewel-heist whodunnit, but each time we think we know who, the dunnit evaporates before our eyes, and after all the hoopla Tintin finds the missing emerald in a magpie’s nest. So much for the notion of villainy as a reliable pole by which to navigate this world.

And as for received notions of goodness--well, those turn out to be up for grabs as well, in ways that wouldn’t have been possible in the beginning of the series. The endless cycle of coups and counter-coups between Alcazar and Tapioca is a source of irony from their introduction in L’Oreille Cassée, but gradually the squinting, lantern-jawed General Alcazar comes out as Tintin’s preferred side in the situation. Tintin and Tournesol help him overcome Tapioca by means of the above-mentioned anti-alcohol tablets, but in the process Tintin is cunningly betrayed by his old sworn ally and protector the former assassin Pablo, whose life Tintin once spared. Pablo appears again to make good on the old oath, but in reality he sells Tintin to the highest bidder. This reversal is shocking because it defies the deep-seated moral code whereby goodness on Tintin’s part begats goodness in all but the stoniest of hearts. The improvement in Pablo’s character once wrought by Tintin’s influence may have been real at the time, but it wasn’t an irreversible transformation. Goodness isn’t immutable, and Tintin’s failure to consider this possibility is used against him. In the final frames of Les Picaros the image of the jumbo jet carrying Tintin and friends back to their cozy life at Moulinsart, after they’ve saved the day, implicates Tintin himself in the fact that the poor wretches in the San Theodoran favela below are shown to be absolutely no better off under Alcazar than they were under Tapioca--a significant chink in Tintin’s customary facade of post-colonial optimism.

Mille millions de mille sabords--I said post-colonial. That means it’s time to shut up and remember that comic books are fundamentally fun to read. The only post- seriously at issue here is life post-Tintin. I miss my morning dose, though I’ve been branching out into denser French prose with other optimistic protagonists even more naïve than Tintin, I think--Jean de Florette and Candide. Pascal’s advice on Tintin withdrawal, as written from faraway in California: “...la seule solution c’est de relire ceux que tu veux. Et relire, et relire jusqu’a l’age de 77 ans.”

In other words, reread and reread them again until you’re 77 years old, though I doubt he intends in the least to stop reading Tintin when he reaches that age.

And the Tintin-obsessed young son of a friend in the States also had some advice for me... try Astérix and Obélix!