Tintin Forums

From the 714: what kind of bird? thread:


I throw it open to anyone to respond to this question: does anyone out there believe, as Yamilah does, that there is an "invisible" tracking game hidden in the Tintin books?
Or are you unconvinced?
If you agree that there is a game afoot, can you give any examples?

I'm not convinced and I've stated the fact clearly. (lol)

Let me use this thread to answer some questions asked in other threads...

Some important points have already been addressed in threads such as 'Herge's multilingualism', or 'first good biography to come'...
Let's sum up the ins and outs of the 'mysterious tracking game', though:

When by the end of his life an artist admits publicly he managed to inlay 'what he had to say' into his life's work, one may reasonably think he isn't just making a display of words, but his message is real, meant to be read one day, and deserves an empathic respect...

If this author -unlike most other artists- describes publicly his early years as terrible & complains about his infancy & if the hushed up presence of his message is finally disclosed by himself after fifty years, one may reasonably infer his message's subject is related to his early years, and he wants his message to be read...

A real message's invisible writing can't be but steganographic, namely masked by some special means such as an invisible ink*, or literary techniques such as the one found in the intimate but nevertheless googlable letter George Sand wrote to Alfred de Musset, around 1833... ( see http://5ko.free.fr/george_sand.html )...

The reading of such a masked message requires a purely empiric method, as mentioned in the beginning:

To rule out an invisible ink, one can try various chemical means, such as lemon juice...
No result? let's then try some physical means, such as heat...

Still no result? then let's try some literary means such as the search for repetitions, for incongruities, or frequency analysises, etc; found nothing but 'meaningless' cross-matchings implying Indians* and East Indies* (a 'childish' rendering of 'Black Island') or 'meaningless' ST faults* present in any Tintin adventure?

Nothing about such findings ever mentioned in any biography, nor in usual Tintin studies? well the '1st good biography'* is still to come, and Herge has been reported to be a multilingual* person, after all...

But how come Herge could have been so, as he confessed 'there were no books at home' and didn't attend much highschool nor university? well some Assimil methods might quite well have been available in Brussels' bookshops, or dictionaries were at his disposal at the parish's or at downtown's libraries, etc, so that he could find a good translation for his message, such as an expression potentially disguisable into various 'names' or drawable objects that could act as 'passwords' or 'avatars' capable of crossing language barriers, 'synonyms' such as Tintin = M-shaped tilted quiff*, Tin+tin = space & time, Tin+tin = duplicated rebus, Tin+tin = bird-like avatars, etc, etc, etc, that show the whole corpus is imbibed by some rebus-like presence...

But how come no archive say anything? Well, Hergé has been said to be very gifted for tongues anyway, and he might have had such an elephant memory that he didn't need to take notes, or he might have burnt them in the end, or there are still some unpublished documents, etc...

But how come such an unworldly young man did know so much about invisible writings? Well it's not so difficult to conceive a multilingual rebus when you know what syllables you want to say, as shown by the example CAT ('chat') + SPADE ('pelle') + 16, that stands for a childish 'Chapelle Sixtine'*; it's certainly much more difficult to find some foreign languages dictionaries, and to draw a work in such a way that the reader can devine it's a rebus, and it's multilingual...

Anyway, such a rebus would still remain invisible if the readers weren't given a correct clue (such as 'a famous building in Rome', or 'a terrible childhood') to devine which province of his wits must be activated, a psychical phenomenon that could be called 'thought transmission', for instance...

Just like the Rosetta stone could help the hieroglyphs' reading via external data that didn't pertain to them, Herge's 'stone' can be as external as 'Chapelle Sixtine' or any proverb able to help solving nothing but its related rebus...
A proverb (or a 'stone') is listed and can be found in some external books...

Thus when some say Tintin is a unique world, I very much doubt it's for sarcastic purposes, or to trigger sarcasms from some sceptical readers: I'm afraid it might just be the plain truth, indeed...

* please search for related topics.

Jock123, until any evidence is presented I will dismiss this notion of a tracking game in Tintin.

I don't know how you can be so patient with somebody who has not once really answered one of your questions. I almost wonder if this whole thing is just a game in itself...

I'm far from convinced as well, and to be honest, Yamilah, I often find it hard to understand what you're driving at. What exactly is the great secret that Herge, according to you, wove into the plotting and artwork of the books? Is there a Kit Williams' Masquerade style solid gold Snowy buried somewhere in Belgium, to be found if these supposed clues can be deciphered? If they can all be pieced together, will they reveal that Tintin is the keeper of the Holy Bloodline or something?

There's no doubt that Herge used symbolism from time to time, but it was usually totally obvious; for example the Nazi allusions of Sceptre, or the occasional bizarre dream sequences (which probably signify nothing more sinister than he was a frustrated surrealist ;) ) The only truly symbolic storyline was Tibet, where Tintin's very personal quest and travails mirrored those which Herge was going through at the time.

Yamilah, if you can, please try to give us a straightforward explanation of your theories, instead of cryptic non-answers like your post above. Otherwise, with the best will in the World, it's hard to disagree with the notion that you are indeed playing some sort of game with us...

yamilah
When by the end of his life an artist admits publicly he managed to inlay 'what he had to say' into his life's work, one may reasonably think he isn't just making a display of words, but his message is real, meant to be read one day, and deserves an empathic respect...
That is such a major assumption, that I hardly know how to begin!
Why should it be anything other than a statement of the completely obvious?
There is nothing in that statement which is saying anything about hiding what he had to say, encoding a message or playing games with the readers.
He doesn't even say he has a message.
He might mean that he has said everything because of the Sadoul book; he might be saying that he has done everything in the BD format that he could - he has taken his work as far as he can; he might mean that he has simply achieved a body of work of which he is proud.
I am sure he wasn't the first artist to say this, and surely won't be the last.

If this author - unlike most other artists - describes publicly his early years as terrible and complains about his infancy and if the hushed up presence of his message is finally disclosed by himself after fifty years, one may reasonably infer his message's subject is related to his early years, and he wants his message to be read...

There's no logic to your interpretation of this either.
Hergé actually describes his early life as mediocre - as heard in the Tintin et Moi documentary - not good, not bad, just unremarkable.

He makes it clear that he wasn't a prodigy, or a particularly good student, and that he was a bit naïve about people and beliefs, which allowed him to be lead by people like Abbé Wallez.
Where does he say anything about a terrible infancy - other than that he didn't like his auntie's singinging (which may have been as bad as Castafiore, but is scarcely child-abuse...)?

He and Paul may have had their fraternal differences - all perfectly normal for siblings - but even allowing for Hergé teasing him about his militarism, they remained cordial enough that Hergé could ask him about equestrianism, and Paul did some diagrams of horse and rider at the gallop - so I don't think again that there was anything scarring there.

You then bolt on to that that because you think he had a message it must be about his early life - that just doesn't follow, as you fail to establish that he had a hidden message.

In re: the George Sands letter, I'm glad you brought that up, as it has everything which your theory doesn't: it is clear that given the key, anyone can see the message - how it is encoded, and how to decode it. Your repetiton/ anomoly/ co-relation theory is random, subjective, and not open to any third party being able to identify the message through the use of a key.

well some Assimil methods might quite well have been available in Brussels' bookshops, or dictionaries were at his disposal at the parish's or at downtown's libraries, etc
That's true, but you are bringing in an "unknown" to support an "indefinite", which scarcely makes for a good argument in favour of your theory. Use Occam's Razor, and the edifice falls...

'passwords' or 'avatars' capable of crossing language barriers, 'synonyms' such as Tintin = M-shaped tilted quiff*, Tin+tin = space & time, Tin+tin = duplicated rebus, Tin+tin = bird-like avatars, etc, etc, etc, that show the whole corpus is imbibed by some rebus-like presence...
Tintin is synonomous with his quiff because the other name he has is Kuifje/ Quiffy (or even, as Harrock'n'roll discovered, translated into an early Anglicised "Tufty"). It is wholly subjective to say that his quiff looks like an M - it has never looked like any "M" I've seen...

I seriously doubt the whole "hidden message" thing, since there is no concrete proof presented, just guesses.

-Gustav

Personally I think it is something yamilah is unable to articulate properly in English, therby giving it an extra 'mystique' due to the unusual syntax and vocabulary he uses, and actually it is just looking for pattern where ther are none (which is a normal human response, however in yamilah's case it seems to have gone a bit haywire). I know because I always look for patterns in the numbers that come out on roullette (and consequently lose lots of money...)