are read and loved throughout the world. I still hope some of the ideas from the ‘ivory towers’ can reach that wider popular audience.
In my opinion, Thompson’s book still remains some of the best writing about Hergé and Tintin in English and is now available in electronic format. If you have bought this ebook, you really should download his too. Yet, much as I respect and admire this text, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘Post Mortem’ Thompson dismissed an aspect of the study of Hergé’s work which I found, indeed still find enlightening. Passing judgment on some of the critical writing published by the officially approved channels, he derided what he called ‘pseudo-academic nonsense’ written about Hergé. In particular he quoted a passage of highfalutin gallic interpretation from the book Hergé and Tintin, Reporters by Philippe Goddin. (Goddin at that time was the general secretary of La Fondation Hergé, originally established by Fanny Remi, Georges’ widow, to control the licensing rights to Hergé’s work.) In fact, the passage was not by Goddin but from an essay featured in that book by French philosopher and writer Pierre-Yves Bourdil. Although I can see the point Thompson wished to make – he thought that Hergé himself would have not been persuaded or impressed by such analysis – ironically it was reading this essay which gave me the inspiration for my thesis. Bourdil’s writing aligned in my mind with the ideas of the (also French) writer and intellectual Roland Barthes, whose theories on the innate layers of understanding involved in visual language had intrigued me as a burgeoning graphic designer.
I didn’t realise it at the time but I was intuiting the existence of a well-worn path through the field of BD. Now twenty years after writing my thesis, I discovered that, as far back in the other direction from my dissertation, in 1970 Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle had also written a university thesis about bande dessinée (later published in 1972) which examined the work of Hergé, E.P. Jacobs and Jacques Martin using semiotics, the concept advanced by Barthes for deconstructing meaning in visual elements. (Since then Fresnault-Deruelle has become one of the leading semiologists, a university professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris and author of dozens of books about visual language in BD. The greater part of analytical writing about BD in French is firmly rooted in the semiotic model.)
On balance I think Thompson was mistaken about Hergé's view of himself and his work. Sadoul's interviews for instance reveal his openness to psychoanalysis; he had undertaken therapy with a Jungian analyst when his troubled psychological state had affected his creative work, indeed in a letter he wrote to Benoît Peeters cited in his book Lire Tintin, he claimed to have read most of Jung’s writings. (Smolderen and Sterckx note how assiduously he documented his dreams.) Hergé was intrigued by paranormal ideas even if he remained agnostic about the grander metaphysical questions – the various allusions to the Unknown in Tintin stories reflect Hergé's open-mindedness towards esoteric matters. He was more pragmatic Belgian than intellectual French, which was the overriding tendency of many Tintinologists. Thompson also seemed to overlay his own no-nonsense sensibility onto Hergé, and conflated the artist's right to an opinion about his work with the right of his critics to think differently. Hergé deemed introspective reflection as an inhibitor during the creative process, but he did not appear to deny the place of critical analysis. He told Sadoul: 'Whether I'm conscious of it or not, I express myself in what I write and draw; without wanting it or knowing it, I put into it what I think, what I feel and who I am. I'm working too much to have time to analyse myself. And fundamentally that's a good thing: don't think too much, don't be always focused on oneself. Primarily to do, afterwards to look!' He wrote in correspondence to Peeters that it should be possible to do an analysis (in the psychoanalytical sense) of his albums. ‘If I’ve used symbols in my stories then it’s spontaneous and thus totally unconscious.’
It is clear from Sadoul's interviews and biographical works based on his private writings that Hergé created out of a deep existential need, a psychological urge to express his true self. The very fact that he wanted, indeed at one point even tried to become an abstract fine artist proves him to be someone engaged with their creativity at a deeply intuitive level. Thompson’s apparent censure for those psychoanalysing Tintin texts also rings slightly hollow since, in his second chapter he ably describes various members of Remi’s family as subconscious precursors for the cartoon characters of his later career; his brother Paul as an active round face boy with a quiff, his father and uncle (twins) wearing bowler hats and carrying canes, his aunt’s agonising singing, and – most Freudian of all – his adolescent ‘ample-breasted’ girlfriend called Milou. (For any readers who need hints, these are respectively Tintin, the two detectives known as the Dupond(t)s in French or the Thom(p)sons in English, and the opera diva Bianca Castafiore. Milou is the original French name for Tintin’s loyal canine companion, Snowy.)
All artists draw from a reservoir of conscious and subconscious currents and Hergé's stories of a young adventurer and his companions were full of subtexts, presenting visual signifiers of the author's inner world. Some writers were content to document and bring to public awareness the more conscious influences Hergé used in creating his books; Frederic Soumois’ Dossier Tintin is a good example and an excellent catalogue of some of Hergé's sources. Others wanted to put Hergé on the therapist's couch by scouring his art for subliminal clues; the greatest example of which are the analyses of Serge Tisseron which interpreted Hergé's texts as a cypher telling the story of his father and uncle's illegitimacy and possible relationship to the Belgian royal family. Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature, one of the few English books of Tintinology of the last decade, explains and enlarges upon Tisseron’s works very eloquently.
It seems to me there are, as ever, different adult responses to works regarded as childish: those who simply discount the stories as kids’ stuff; those like Thompson who admire Hergé’s work but are loathe to apply literary critical methods to it; and those like McCarthy who are happy to dissect every word and image, often forensically, in order ultimately to enjoy it and admire it all the more. As Jean-Marie Apostolidès alluded in his book Les Métamorphoses de Tintin (first published in French in 1984, and subtitled ‘Tintin for Adults’ in its English translation of 2009) Tintinology allows complex readings of seemingly innocent tales. Isn’t that so of all literary criticism, uncovering an author’s hidden thoughts, or even finding in the text connections which the creator never consciously conceived?
But besides psychoanalysis, theoretical concepts derived from Structuralism had a great influence on many of these writers. Structuralism had become a dominant hermeneutic among French intellectuals in the second half of the twentieth century. Flowing out of linguistics – and the French have a profound identification with their langue maternelle – it became a model for deconstructing and interpreting culture and its expressions. Likewise in my text, I was particularly concerned with Barthes' idea of a mythology: his conceptual use of the word was tied to the vocabulary and meaning of visual language. At the back of my mind the more traditional use of mythology still came into view: likening Tintin's canon of books to the Bible for instance, or seeing Tintin as an archetypal young hero embarked on his own peculiar odysseys. Although I read some Joseph Campbell at the time – and anyone serious about considering mythology in relation to Jung’s ideas ought to read Campbell – I thought that Barthes' semiotic use of the term, with its appropriation of visual imagery, had cultural application to the merchandising industry which was blossoming at the time – and which has now grown to be a formidable enterprise. The expanded text of this publication retains that, but also draws on wider ideas about mythology in culture, especially in the Epilogue with an eye towards the Hollywood franchise which is set to adapt several of the albums into an ongoing narrative.
My dissertation was based on the French works of Hergé published by Casterman, essentially to keep closest to the author’s original texts. (Moreover, some of the stories or specific versions of them simply didn’t exist at that time in English translation.) In this publication, I have retained the French names of characters, places and book titles but have included their English counterparts where necessary. Occasionally I have made reference to the excellent English translations originally for Methuen by Michael Turner and Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, who worked closely with Hergé, uniquely so among
