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Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Tintin et L’Alph Art
This is, as the title page puts it, ‘La Dernière Aventure de Tintin,’ for Hergé died before it advanced beyond a number of pages of pen and pencil sketches. So how much have we got? As all the world knows, Tintin’s book-length adventures take up 60-pages, more or less. The Casterman edition of Tintin et L’Alph Art, handsomely bound in gold boards, gives us: pages 1, 2 and 3 in fairly finished pencil sketches (which would require only tracing in ink and colouring-in to become the actual product); and then pages 4-to-42 in much rougher, more-doodly sketches. These latter, though very un-Hergé (master of the clear line as he was, that gloriously complex-simple graphic balance), are very interesting. Tintin himself, familiar to us all as a simplified circle-head dot-eyed young man is here simplified further to the most rudimentary and hurried of swirls and scratches. After page 42 we are given nine ‘pages retrouvées’: bits and pieces, notes and random drawings that do not fit into the sequential story.
The story, then, is in an unfinished state, without an end, and even lacking the firming-up of certain core details. The ‘pages retrouvées’ suggest a major premise: Haddock, as we remember, was ‘cured’ of his whisky-addiction by Tournesol’s (Professor Calculus to you or me) ‘Stopalcool’ pills in Tintin et Les Picaros. But life without whisky leaves him in ‘trés mèchante humeur, en plein dépression’. The prospect of a selection of his least favourite people visiting all at once (Bianca Castafiore, Emir Ben Kalish Ezab and his monstrous joke-playing son amongst others) provoke a sort of nervous breakdown. He becomes besotted with avant garde artists, replaces all the Old Masters in his stately home with minimalist paintings made up of dots and open space. He wears beatnik clothes, takes to playing the guitar and even loses every strand of head-hair and gets his bald bonce completely covered in dots (it’s not clear from the sketch whether this is some sort of disease or a form of body-art). Satirizing the kooky world of modern art was clearly Hergé’s starting point for this story: sketches lampoon works of art made by throwing custard pies at the canvas; or made out of two dots, a dash and a comma.
The main man in this bizarre world is Ramo Nash, a petit but enormously beardy figure (he looks to me rather like a clothed version of the hairball caveman in Wacky Races). Hergé’s various goes at settling on this name make the buried drug reference clearer:
Hasj
Nhasj
Nach
Nasch
Nasj
Asg
Aje
Asj
Ramo Nasjch
Ramon Hasch
Ramon Hasj
This is all in the random notes. But the 42 pages of the story such as we have them utilize none of this. There’s a single exception to that statement: the agitated state of the Captain’s mind is indicated on the very first page. Haddock dreams that La Castafiore comes into his bedroom and offers him as bottle of Loch Lomond. When he insists that he no longer drinks whisky she screeches at him (‘you don’t want it? Then no pudding for you!’), turns into an enormous monstrous bird and starts pecking at his head.
This weird, screaming-abdab nightmare does indeed suggest a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But the breakdown does not materialise. Instead page two gives us Tintin rushing to the captain’s help (‘Tintin what a terrible nightmare! I dreamt that Nestor was bringing me my breakfast, but it wasn’t Nestor and it wasn’t my breakfast …’). The phone rings: it is the actual Bianca Castafiore inviting herself round to stay. Page 3: the Captain rushes out of his house and goes to town to lose himself in the crowd; but he spots Castafiore and ducks into an art gallery to avoid her. The exhibition is Ramo Nash’s ‘Alph Art’.
The titular Alph-Art consists of actual letters of the alphabet, either sculpted in metre-high lumps of ‘plexiglas’, or painted onto canvases. Haddock buys an H-shaped sculpture (‘H comme Haddock, vous saisissez?’) and brings it home. Nobody knows what to make of it: Nestor, Tintin, Tournesol, Duponds and Duponts (who Anglophones call the Thompson Twins) all ask what the H does. An increasingly irate Captain insists ‘it’s a work of art! It doesn’t do anything!’
From here the story picks up pace, although it proceeds in a rather dislocated manner. Dupond and Dupont are visiting because the Emir Ben Kalish Azib (from Tintin au Pays de L’or Noir) has been threatened with kidnap by an Arab terrorist group (the Emir appears on TV with an offer to buy the Eiffel Tower so as to convert it into an oil derrick). This plot strand remains completely unresolved in the adventure as we have it, and indeed is not mentioned again. At the Alph-Art gallery Haddock meets an art-expert called Fourcart who begs to be introduced to ‘the celebrated reporter Tintin’. But before he can communicate his story he is killed. Tintin investigates, and is almost run-off the road (he’s riding a punky little motor scooter) by a group of assassins driving ‘une puissante Mercedes’. There are further attempts on Tintin’s life, one of which hospitalises him.
Then the peculiar New Age guru and hypnotist with the even more peculiar name ‘Endaddine Akass’ enters the story. Tintin and Haddock attend one of his hypnotistical revivalist gatherings. The receptionist at the Alph-Art gallery wears a double E pendant (a mirror-writing ‘E’ and a normal ‘E’ fixed together along their vertical line) that Endaddine has given her. She believes it possesses health-giving properties, but actually it contains a tiny microphone via which Akass’s gang is monitoring how close Tintin is getting to them.
Tintin and Haddock (who is now showing no sign at all of nervous breakdown, and no further desire to get involved in the art world) travel to Naples and stay as guests in Endaddine Akass’s mansion. Poking around at night Tintin discovers various masterpieces: a Modigliani, a Renoir, a Picasso. But the paint on these is still wet: Akass has been exploiting Ramo Nash’s talents as a forger. Akass’s goons direct Tintin at gunpoint into a small dungeon cell: he is informed that the following day he will be murdered by being transformed into a piece of sculpture in the style of ‘César le sculpteur, l’homme des compressions’. He will be (it’s not entirely clear from the sketches, but I think this is right) submerged in polyester liquid and compressed into the form of a metre-sided cube. In effect he will become a work of avant garde art himself. That night Tintin manages to get a message to his dog through a tiny grill in his wall, telling the sapient pooch to take it to the Captain. The sketchy last page is only a third complete. The next day dawns. One of Akass’s goons wakes Tintin up and leads him out, telling him ‘L’heure a sonné de vous transformer en César…’
Nothing more.
I think we can assume safely that Tintin is saved from this dreadful fate; and I’d think it’s a solid bet that the Captain is eventually cured by his chemical antipathy to whisky by his Professorial friend. But otherwise it’s difficult to say how the story might have ended. One of the ‘pages retrouvées’ suggests that Endaddine Akass is Rastapopulous in disguise, but I can’t see how that works: the buffoonish criminal from previous Tintin adventures has none of the magnetic personality and genius demonstrated by Akass. Plus Akass’s nose is not nearly large enough.
The development of plot, in point of fact, is more than a little disappointing. But the conception, the inevitable self-referentiality, of text is very intriguing indeed.
Intertextual self-referentiality has on one level always been a feature of the Tintin books: characters reappear, jokes are reused mercilessly (Tintin et L’Alph Art is no exception: the Moulinsart/Marlinspike Hall phone rings constantly with a wrong number trying to reach the butcher), little footnotes direct the reader to those previous adventures in which salient details were first mentioned. But at the same time, there is a level of self-referentiality that the books scrupulously avoid. In fact, there are several. The layering of reference and character perhaps implies a kind of roman fleuve quality to the books; although by that same token Tintin’s adventures resist the accumulation of inevitable significance they inevitably generate.
I’ll tell you what I mean. In On A Marché Sur La Lune Tintin became the first person to walk on the moon. This is in addition to developing a horn-based method of communication with elephants (and substantive, sophisticated communication too) in Les Cigares du Pharaon, to befriending the Yeti in Tintin au Tibet and close-encountering ETs in Vol 714 Pour Sydney, not to mention averting many catastrophes, unearthing slave rings, opium smugglers, currency counterfeiters and so on. He really must be the single most famous human on his planet. The idea that he could be puttering around rural France on a scooter unrecognised by almost everyone he encounters became insupportable long before this adventure.
Tintin is supposedly a reporter (although we never see him in a newspaper office, or filing copy, or doing any of the tedious writing part of the reporter’s job). But of course he is not really a reporter. In a meaningful way he is not a human actor at all. He is a work of art: he is that circular head, dot-eyes and upsprouting divot of hair. He is, indeed, at the centre point of the whole balance of word and picture, the sharp lines, blocked-in colours, basic shading, the intricate detailing combined with a perfect artistic ease with large blank spaces (large stretches of blue sky, say, or yellow sands) that is so distinctively Hergé. I’m biased because I’ve been reading these stories since I was tiny, but they seem to me not only visually very beautiful but extremely distinctive, instantly recognisable.
What’s interesting is that no previous Tintin adventure had put ‘art’ itself front-of-stage the way Tintin et L’Alph Art does. The nearest Hergé had come was the inter-relation between the quasi-alphabet of song (sung words) and visual representation (strictly televisual representation) in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore. But that was harnessed in support of a witty anti-story in which, charmingly, nothing happens at all. But in Tintin et L’Alph Art Hergé dramatises the two things out of which Tintin is himself construed: letters and pictures, the alphabet and the cunning reproduction of geometrical shapes.
I’m trying to make more than merely the obvious point here, I hope. Perhaps it goes without saying, but Tintin of all comic characters lacks depth. His head is a circle, not a globe.
His backstory is a mere sketch. His inner passions and desires (beyond a boy-scoutish passion for ‘doing good’ and hiking about in the open air, and a love for his dog) are mysteries to us. This creates imaginative space in which all manner of flavoursome fantasy on the reader can flourish. What was an unimaginable and perfect blank for me when, at the age of 10, I read these books, looks to me now, as I re-read them in my 40s, rather too obvious. I’m talking about:
But what of this? Tintin is unfailingly polite, even egregiously deferential. He, for instance, always addresses Captain Haddock – his oldest and surely best friend – as ‘vous’ (if they were lovers wouldn’t the occasional ‘tu’ slip through?) Perhaps the reason why thinking along those lines – I mean the secretly gay Tintin beloved of some interpreters – seems like a false step to many is not so much that there’s anything improper about applying such interpretative criteria to ‘children’s literature’ as such (although, of course, some may object to it on those grounds); but rather that such analysis seems to depend upon an absent psychological verisimilitude in the text. To imagine Tintin as somebody with a sexual taste for older men would require us to imagine Tintin with an inner life capable of complexity, contradiction, secrecy. That’s not what we have. He is as clear a personality as the lines out of which he is composed.
But this isn’t right. Tintin’s adventures repay endless re-reading (in my experience), and because there is much more there than what meets the eye. This, I think, is at the heart of Hergé’s style; or to put it another way, this is the dialectic that the visual realisation of Tintin’s adventures negotiates, and what makes them so compelling. Herge seems to give us so much information, so much detail, so expertly and evocatively rendered, especially where architecture, technology, machines, landscapes and seascapes are concerned. But in fact he gives us very little information; he conveys almost nothing by way of mood, tone, very little in terms of the visualisation of human atmosphere. It’s a reduction of the real world through a single lens, a 2D clarity that both delights and holds out the interpretive prospect of what is missing.
The two varieties of art with which Ramo Nash are associated are fraudulent in different, but perhaps connected ways. Passing of large-scale plastic letters, or canvases upon which the letters ‘A’ and ‘Z’ have been painted as art is a form of fraud-in-plain-sight: we might say, if people are foolish enough to be taken in then that’s their lookout. But copying Picasso and Modigliani is a hidden fraud. People who buy a Ramo Nash alph-artwork know what they’re getting; but people who buy a Nash imitation Picasso don’t, and that’s the difference. But this difference is perhaps not so pronounced: the balance between what is hidden and what it (apparently) on plain view is precisely the issue with an art like Herge’s. We see the surfaces of things, expertly flattened and rendered; we see lines that are clear. But this very clarity, as the postmodernists might put it, baffles our sight. Here is Tintin; here is Haddock. We see everything about them. Who does Haddock turn-to when he has a nightmare of a siren bird-woman assaulting him in bed? Why, to Tintin, of course. The clarity of the line is the very means of obscuring the, for instance, in-plain-view gayness of the relationship.
The adventure collapses in on itself at precisely the point where it threatens to become completely metatextual. Herge had previously flirted with this sort of jokey self-referentiality: for example, in Pays de L’or Noir Tintin is captured by a hostile Arab sheik who changes his attitude to his prisoner when he realises that he is ‘the famous Tintin!’ (he even displays to Tintin a series of Casterman ‘Aventures de Tintin’ volumes). But this sort of device, played for laughs, had previously only been a peripheral part of Tintin’s textual world. In Tintin et L’Alph Art it is set-up as the main climax: Tintin will be literally turned into art, a process which must of course be fatal to him.
In other words, this final Tintin adventure is the place where the textual world of Tintin confronts itself: is forced into a mise-en-abyme against which intertextual playfulness is no protection. Tintin, who is only a work of art (not a person) will be literally, within the textual parameters of his universe, be depersonalised in a literal senseL killed, turned into a work of art, compressed (reduced) into an essential embodiment of himself. This is the point at which the text collapses, confronted with its own impossibilities. Of course Hergé could not finish Tintin et L’Alph Art; it is a work that contains within itself its own impossibility of completion.
Comments
Wow Adam, a postmodern Tintin meets Hancock’s Rebel, what a fantastic spoof; though it isn’t April 1…
Brilliant. But the previous volumes anticipate this more than you indicate. I’m thinking, for instance, of all those depictions of Haddock in Marlinspike, framed standing before the picture of his seafaring ancestor from the 17th century, Sir Francis Haddock, and next to the primitivist bust that island natives carve of Sir Francis when he is marooned. Maybe this helps your claim, insofar as it distinguishes Haddock from the more two dimensional Tintin. After all, Haddock comes into possession of an ancestry and Marlinspike itself, whose secret basement hides a treasure trove of Western art objects. Tintin finds Red Rackham’s treasure, if I recall, within this basement, by pressing a secret button on a globe beneath a statue of St. John the Evangelist. The treasure was buried, not under water or on some tropical island, but in an art object that was in some sense already Haddock’s. Then there is also Tintin and the Broken Ear, which is about the forgery and mass production of primitive sculptures…
Yes: Broken Ear is on the borderline between those early Tintins that are not canonical—because either, like Pays de Soviets because they were never colourised and reworked and look childishly crude, or because like Tintin au Congo (which was reworked) they’re so lamentably racist that they fall outside the pale. Broken Ear is an interesting one: pre-Haddock, and much more clumsily episodic than later ‘classic’ Tintin.
But I’d agree with you (or else, if I’m misrepresenting what you say; in which case I’d put words in your mouth and then agree with you) that in many ways Haddock is the most interesting character; and that his sudden acquisition of not only wealth but a whole family history, plus servant, and attitude is fascinating. It reads as a sort of consummation, a landfill of background detail that exactly fits the character-shaped hole in his prior representation, and gives Haddock a depth that no other character in the series possesses.
Nice post, Adam. Lots of things to chew over.
Btw, Alph-Art is available here: http://www.unknowntintin.cjb.net/
Modified from the original, I should think and also completed and colored. I haven’t managed to get through the whole thing yet though.
One thing I think that your post brings out is that because the works are finely detailed and yet not detailed at all, one can see different things when one reads the books again. When I read them—like you—at 10, I read them as simple adventure stories (which I read extensively then), even if some of the plots and the verbal gags did tend to go over my head.
When I read them again in my late teens, I realized that the books are layered with historical references, which I’d never quite grasped before. “The Blue Lotus” is the most explicitly historical referring quite freely to the Japanese occupation of China. But South America’s perennial military coups come up in “The Broken Ear” , the American entrepreneurial spirit in “Tintin in America”, the Middle East and oil in —most notably—“Land of Black Gold” and so on and on. I think these manage to flesh out the *world* around Tintin a lot more than he ever is. Which I think, may have been sort of a point that Herge wanted to make.
Which leads me nicely to my final point. You finish your piece saying “Of course Herge could not finish Alph-Art”. This immediately brought back for me “Land of Black Gold”, which has always struck me as a book that Herge couldn’t finish. Maybe because he couldn’t meet a deadline. But maybe for some other, deeper reason. The book starts with lots of references to an impending war and Captain Haddock dissapears, apparently called to duty. Investigating the mysterious gasoline explosions, Tintin ends up in the Middle-East, and finally gets rescued, improbably, by Haddock, who mysteriously reappears. Haddock gets interrupted—every single time he starts to explain how he got there—by one of Abdullah’s pranks. And at the end, its never very clear what the impending war was about, and what really is happening.
Perhaps Herge worked himself up into a corner with that one and couldn’t dig himself out of the hole? Or was there a deeper reason, some hidden reference?
What do you think?
ps: By the way, I’ve always thought that the Tintin-Chang friendship was more of a courtship. Much much more than the Tintin-Haddock friendship ever is.
I did not like the latest Tintin that much maybe as a result of the incomplete story. That aside, my favorite tintin has always been the ‘moon’ series as well as ‘captain red rackham’s treasure’. But the best news of all is that steven speildberg is going to make a movie on the ‘boy reoporter’ andhas already cast tintin.