Abecedarian:
Another piece, in The New Review
I saw this yesterday, and can't say I found it any more enlightening than the review in
The Washington Post.
It seems to me fruitless to make such a strong distinction between Hergé the man being bland, and Tintin being active, as if they are completely separate entities. To say that Hergé did nothing in his life, while Tintin did lots is ridiculous when all of the latter derives from the former.
Perhaps it is the fault of the reviewer, but I fail to see how there can be "a moral divide" between the author and his creation, as the article says, when surely Tintin is the means by which Hergé expresses the sentiments that he wished to articulate?
Why should it matter that Hergé travelled little, but Tintin travelled a lot?
For a lot of the time it was the constant production of Tintin's adventures which chained Hergé to his desk, so
when was he supposed to travel?
Secondly, he managed to be so persuasive in his depiction of foreign parts that perhaps he didn't
need to travel to appreciate them.
I also wonder at the assertion:
"This sense of being outside of time, which Hergé worked so hard to create".
It seems to me to be a completely bogus claim, especially when woven into the notion that the redrawing of the early books was to
"revise the Tintin adventures into a single, seamless tale." He didn't do any such thing.
The albums are quite firmly fixed in the "present day" of the time at which they came out -
America is clearly set in the Thirties, while
Picaros is in the Seventies.
The very revisions about which the writer talks appears to be referring actually
increased anachronisms, they didn't smooth things out:
Black Island may have been updated, but into a Sixties world, not a timeless one, and it
still sits
before "later" stories like
Unicorn and
Rackham, which take place in the nineteen-forties.
luinivierge2010:
Still, any Tintin enthusiast should, as a matter of duty, gather up as many of these items as possible.
I'm interested in this as a point - why?
I can see the point if they do contain images of material unavailable elsewhere, but if it is just to read pop-psychological treatise on the motivations of the characters, or to deconstruct the narrative, I can usually leave them.
I've always thought of these as being largely like those little "Pixi" figures, or "collectable" lithographs of panels from the albums - just another merchandising stream which has little of Hergé in them, so not essential purchases, and certainly not a duty (why encourage them?).