Tintin Forums

[Moderator note: branched off from this thread]

Thanks everybody for your diverse & most pertinent divers' & ironers' answers.

Balthazar
...if we need to know that the good professor's interests are not only various but also quite different and seperate from each other (calligraphy, rollerblading, headbutting suitcases), then "divers" or "sundry" won't quite do the job, and diverse is the better word.
I hope yamilah gets in touch soon and puts us out of our suspense about what she's actually wanting to say with the phrase. Is this an academic thesis that we're all helping you out with, yamilah, or merely the phrasing of your next question? Happy to help, either way, but I'm curious!

Not much suspense nor academism at that stage, I'm afraid, but just a childish* game. Cantonneau belongs to both expeditions: the arctic one (up to the meteorite), and the Peruvian (one up to the Sun temple).
As mentioned in quite a few posts, Cantonneau's interests are thus:
- stars, i.e. astronomy or a related science (The Shooting Star)
- Indians, i.e. ethnography or a related science (The Seven Crystal Balls)

Such diverse or dissimilar interests should trigger some attention on the part of the non fed-up hard workers, considering these interests can be connected with:
- 'cercle solaire irlandais'* (i.e. Zodiac, found in the original Lotus Bleu)
- the presence of at least one drawn and dated Zodiacal Sign (Cancer or Crab, see Q72)
- the Indian* avatars* seen in every album, except the Black Island, the original title of which (Ile noire*) can operate as a password and lead to the East Indies*, as if Tintin could be kind of a sophisticated tracking game based -among others- on linguistic puns*, as also hinted by 'La Gazza Ladra*' = the stealing magpie (The Emerald), or George* = Varghese = Jorgen, etc.

I would appreciate if the admin could change all my Cantonneau-related erroneous 'asunder' into 'diverse' or 'dissimilar'. Thanks in advance.

* please search for related threads.

yamilah
Cantonneau's interests are thus:
- stars, i.e. astronomy or a related science…

…these interests can be connected with:
- 'cercle solaire irlandais'* (i.e. Zodiac, found in the original Blue Lotus)
- the presence of at least one drawn and dated Zodiacal Sign…

I think most scientific astronomers would be absolutely horified to have their subject connected in any way with the entirely unscientific hocus-pocus of astrology. I once heard the eminent astronomer Patrick Moore walk angrily out of a radio studio live on air when he found the programme he'd been invited onto was being hosted by an astrologer who wanted to "discuss their two related sciences". I'm sure a French academic like Prof Cantonneau would feel the same way!

Your connection of Cantonneau's interest in South American Indian culture with Asian Indian culture is also a bit weak. Indians of the Americas are only called that because Columbus was trying to find a "back route" to the Indies (Asia) and thought he'd landed there when he hit the Caribbean. (At least that was Columbus's story; he may have known more about the existence of the Americas before setting out than he claimed. But that's another debate!)

To suggest that someone studying the Incas would automatically have a special interest in Asian Indian culure simply because both groups of people are refered to as "Indians" - thus allowing a historical misnomer to lump everyone in the world with a brown skin into the same culture - is a bit dodgy!

Or am I misunderstanding the connections you're making, as usual?

yamilah
Cantonneau's interests are thus:
- stars, i.e. astronomy or a related science (The Shooting Star)
- Indians, i.e. ethnography or a related science (The Seven Crystal Balls)

It doesn't mention in the English books that Prof. Cantonneau is interested in astronomy and ethnography. Does it explicitly say this in the French editions?

As I see it he goes on the expeditions to the meteorite and Peru but his field of interest might have been in anything, like geology or extreme ironing for example.

Balthazar
I think most scientific astronomers would be absolutely horified to have their subject connected in any way with the entirely unscientific hocus-pocus of astrology.

I'm afraid there's some overinterpretation here about a science 'related to astronomy': I just meant physics, chemistry, optics, etc, but noways astrology and horoscopes.
The Zodiac is an astronomical concept that consists in a group of constellations made of real stars.

To suggest that someone studying the Incas would automatically have a special interest in Asian Indian culure simply because both groups of people are refered to as "Indians" --- is bit dodgy.

Once again, I think there's some overinterpretation here: I noways meant Cantonneau -a Swiss in the original version, by the way- was personally interested in non-Inca populations, but that Indian* avatars* could be detected in all the books. This fact is enhanced or amplified* by Calculus' pendulum*, that dowses only when there's an 'Indian' presence around.

Harrock n roll
It doesn't mention in the English books that Prof. Cantonneau is interested in astronomy and ethnography. Does it explicitly say this in the French editions?

As can be seen in Les 7 boules de cristal (p.1-A3), and as quoted in ...Amanda MacDonald's article about Tintin's ...'humanesque' characters, the Sanders-Hardmuth expedition is quite explicitly 'ethnographique' !
see http://www.othervoices.org/1.2/amacdonald/tintin1.jpg

Concerning the meteorite expedition, Cantonneau would have been certainly more useful as a geologist than as an ironer, considering the mention of calystene (a new metal) and the absence of any ironing in The Shooting Star...
I'll still check in the book.

Edited 16 nov 2006: The expedition to the Etoile mysterieuse is scientific (p.13-D3) and directed by Calys (p.14-A1), called 'Monsieur le Directeur de l'Observatoire (p.4) or 'Monsieur l'astronome' by Tintin (7 times, p.4 to 16).
From this it can be infered the expedition is implicitly 'astronomical'.


*please search for related threads.

NB: I suggest this discussion about Prof. Cantonneau be splitted from the 'plain English renderings' and become a new thread, as it's getting quite off topic now! Thanks.

[Moderator note: Sorted!]

Re yamilah's last note, yes the subject of Prof Cantonneau may well be a little off topic from the subject of 'plain English renderings' .
But the article by Amanda MacDonald that yamilah refers to (the full text of which can be found at http://www.othervoices.org/1.2/amacdonald/herge.html ) is as far from a rendering of plain English as you could possibly get! Check it out and you'll see what I mean.

There's a danger that when people read impenetrable prose such as this article, they believe that the author must be super-intelligent and that they themselves must be unintelligent for not being able to understand a word of it. The opposite is true, of course! The incomprehensible sentences are a pseudo-intellectual smokescreen to mask the fact that the most of the ideas behind the long words are banal garbage.

Compared to this article, yamilah, your own writing style looks a model of clarity! Please don't use Amanda MacDonald's prose as an example of how to write about Tintin (or about anything else!)

Balthazar
The incomprehensible sentences are a pseudo-intellectual smokescreen to mask the fact that the most of the ideas behind the long words are banal garbage.

I think this article should be considered as a 'sympathetic' amplification* that can be simplified a lot by 'frequency analysis': Herge's text-image connection is evoked 140 times in various ways, and the key question is implicitly 'What comes first? Text or image?'

For weird and subjective reasons, the author decides that 'the image line preceeds the word line', whereas Herge clearly wrote about his technique: "text and drawing are born simultaneously, each implementing and explaining the other" (quoted in her p.1), an assertion which can evoke some dubbed writing similar to the one employed in rebuses, whereby a text actually preceeds and triggers images in the mind of the draughtsman, whose drawings can later transmit thought, via a reverse process.

In Crystal Balls not all of the members of the Sanders-Hardiman expedition were ethnographers. Clarkson was a photographer and Midge a zoologist. Prof Cantonneau’s particular field is never revealed but he probably was something like a geologist as it would account for his interest in the meteorite in The Shooting Star and his trip to the Andes. Yep, I’m sticking with geologist until someone comes up with a better idea.

yamilah
Once again, I think there's some overinterpretation here
You can say that again!

Balthazar
the article by Amanda MacDonald that yamilah refers to (...) is as far from a rendering of plain English as you could possibly get!

This piece of extreme Tintinology popped up on the forum some time ago (see this thread, if you can bear it). It’s a painful memory and one I’d like us to avoid, if only to stay on the topic of Prof Cantonneau.

By refering to it as a 'childish game' you're implying that it is both simple and obvious, when the reality is that neither is true.

Yamilah, I think you should just give all this *bull* a rest.

yamilah
Such diverse or dissimilar interests should trigger some attention on the part of the non fed-up hard workers

There still is no evidence that your postulations have any following outside of those who attempt to extract some sort of meaning such as those reading this thread. I think you are once again dismissing effort by people who may disagree with you as being less worthy or substantial than those who agree with you (which would appear to be a finite group of the order one at this time…).

I’m with Harrock on this one - I’d put Cantonneau down as a geologist, which would make him a valuable addition to both expeditions he appears in.

Harrock n roll
This piece of extreme Tintinology popped up on the forum some time ago (see this thread, if you can bear it). It's a painful memory and one I'd like us to avoid…

Sorry for bringing back the nightmare, Harrock n roll! I just found the piece because yamilah just referred to it and gave a link; I hadn't realised this was old, old ground from before my time as a forum member and that everything I was saying about Amanda MacDonald's article had already been said so eloquently by so many members!

Harrock n roll
…if only to stay on the topic of Prof Cantonneau.
Quite right. (Though when I responded to yamilah's reference to the article we hadn't yet been split off to this seperate Cantonneau thread from the "plain Engish" thead.)
An idea: Maybe we just need a single, permanently running thread which is the sole place for yamilah to expound all her theories and the place for the rest of us to go and respond to them when we feel like letting off steam - a bit like that special bureau where you go to have an argument in that Monty Python sketch.

Anyway, I'll get back to Prof Cantonneau in any future postings I make to this thread, I promise!