The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.
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The immediate aftermath of the war was harsh for Hergé, even though he could be accused, at worst, of passivity.
He learned his lesson – what political satire there was in his books would henceforth be muted; minorities treated with greater respect. The books would be revised and whitewashed.
Of course, there was little that could be done to arrange Tintin au Congo. The Black’s pidgin was made somewhat more grammatical. And, tellingly, the album was “de-Belgified”. References to Belgium and Tintin’s own ‘Belgianness’ were excised.
This can partly be due to the great winds of de-colonisation that were stirring in the postwar world that Hergé sensed; more likely, with Tintin becoming more and more an international success, Hergé was loath to keep his hero tied down to one nationality. (Tintin au Congo was renamed Tim-tim em Angola by his Portuguese publisher – Angola being, of course, Portugal’s colony – and Tintin dans la Brousse — Tintin in the Bush – by one French publisher.)
Note the difference between the 1931 (top) and 1946 (bottom) versions.
Originally, Tintin was dispensing a geography lesson: “My dear friends, I shall speak to you today about your homeland: Belgium!” In 1946, he’s giving a maths lesson.
We’ve already seen how Hergé whitened the Blacks in his pre-war albums. He was to go further and de-Judaise his Jews. Blumenstein became Bohlwinkel in L’Ile Mystérieuse. And he went even further with Tintin au pays de l’or noir.
This adventure takes place in the Middle East, starting in Palestine. The album was first begun in 1939, when Palestine was under British mandate, then set aside when Belgium was invaded—obviously a bad time to show sympathetic British cops. The story was reworked and published in 1950.
The Stern group and the Irgun were escalating an often violent campaign to drive the British out and establish a Jewish state. In the album, a sub-plot has Tintin mixing it up with the British police and members of the Irgun due to a case of mistaken identity.
The Jews in this book are treated neutrally, even sympathetically.
Captured Irgun militants
However, at the request of his British publisher, Methuen, Hergé excised Palestine and Jews from the book : Palestine becomes the fictional Khemed, Haifa is now Khemkhâh, and the British police are Arabs; the fight for Israel becomes a mere power struggle between different factions. It is noteworthy that Hergé made these changes as late as 1971, showing an ongoing hypersensitivity to any possible accusation of racism, even when unjustified.
He was especially leery of charges that his master villain, Roberto Rastapopoulos, was an anti-Semitic caricature:
« Rastapopoulos, for me,” wrote Hergé, “is more or less Greek, a shady Levantine character, without a country, that is without faith or ethical code. Another detail, he is not Jewish!”
The oily “Levantine” is, of course, another nasty stereotype; and the contempt shown for the cosmopolitan is another reactionary mainstay.
Already, during the war years, Hergé had switched to innocuous escapism for his books. Le secret de la ‘Licorne’/Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge are grand treasure-hunts in the South Seas. The last of the wartime books was also meant to be an escape from the troubled times, involving neutral South America : Les sept Boules de Cristal, a two-part adventure paired with its sequel Le Temple du Soleil.
This is one of the more interesting books from our standpoint. It shows Hergé slowly being weaned from the xenophobia and racism that marred so much of his earlier work; but the process is far from completed.
Basically, it’s a variation on the “curse of Tutankhamen” chestnut, with Peru and Incas taking the place of Egypt and Pharaohs. The scientists who have brought the mummy of the Inca Rascar Capac to Europe are being struck down by a mysterious illness. They are in fact being targeted for punishment for blasphemy by descendants of the Incas living in a secret Andean enclave. When Professor Tournesol is kidnapped, Tintin and Haddock follow his captors to South America, where they are taken prisoner and sentenced to die. Tintin saves the day by the old “eclipse” ruse, terrifying the natives by seeming to blot out the sun. Our friends are released with a warning.
The first thing that strikes one is that the villains here aren’t really villains. They have an authentic grievance against the White man, who comes and despoils their heritage. As one character remarks to Tintin , how would we feel if Egyptian or Peruvian archaeologists came to Europe and opened the tombs of our kings to rob them? Hergé was beginning to empathise with the so-called savage; quite an improvement on the album L’oreille cassée, wherein Amazonian Indians are portrayed as weird and barbarous.
In Peru, Tintin picks up another sidekick of the Chang type, an Indian child named Zorrino. Tintin rescues him from a beating by two White bullies:
Zorrino is brave, loyal and dignified.
Overall, then, we can see that the Indians—the Other – are treated with a measure of respect.
And yet, they remain the Other, an insidious source of dread. The avenging Incas are lured to Europe by the stolen mummy: it’s as much a contamination as a curse. Keep away from the Other, and keep the Other away from us.
Tintin’s ruse would never have worked: the Quechua Incas were superb astronomers. It is insulting to suppose them stupid enough to fall for it.
Finally, the trappings of exoticism remain, alluring, alienating:
Hergé himself was changing. His former reactionary colleagues were no longer there to influence him ; his assistants included such cosmopolitan men as artists E.P.Jacobs or Jacques Martin (who assured Hergé of the reality of the death camps, which he’d seen.)
The grip of Catholicism on his was relaxing; in time, he would become an agnostic, fascinated by Buddhism and especially Taoism. He collected modern and contemporary art: Calder, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Frank Stella.
Herge with Andy Warhol, who cited him as an influence
He travelled extensively—finally discovering the foreign parts he’d drawn for decades. Hergé was evolving.
Not that he didn’t slip up. In Coke en Stock (The Red Sea sharks), the Black victims of the slavers are shown to be dignified in their Muslim faith, but fairly stupid as well.
Up till this point, one might suppose that Hergé’s turn away from racism and xenophobia was dictated as much by political fears and commercial considerations. His next album—considered by many (including me) to be his finest work—would prove that his personal evolution was sincere. And, fittingly, it would feature again Chang, the young Chinese who first opened Hergé’s eyes to other cultures.
In Tintin au Tibet, again, there is no villain: the adversary is nature itself, in the forbidding snows of the Himalayas. The Tibetans are depicted with admiration and respect, whether sherpa guides:
or lamas :
or kids:
But the ultimate image of the Other is that of the Monster, such as the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman :
Yet we come to learn that the Yeti is a being of kindness, even love.
Hergé took the side of the Other in Les Bijoux de la Castafiore, wherein a group of Roma (“Gypsies”) are unjustly accused of theft. Haddock protects them and gives them shelter, though Hergé wisely shows them to be skeptical.
And in Hergé’s last album, Tintin et les Picaros, we can feel his indignation at the treatment meted out to the Amazon natives, deliberately kept enslaved by the White man with lashings of free alcohol .
So, yes, the man matured and evolved beyond his prejudices.
Can I say the same for myself?
Next instalment: the Tintin reader on trial.
All Tintin art copyright Moulinsart
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The entire Tintin in Otherland series is here.
Thanks for this. Very interesting series of articles, which I’ve been following from the start. Looking forward to the next installment.
I grew up on Tintin. More than any other “bande dessinée,” these had a profound impact on my imagination as a child. Growing up in the eighties, I inherited the full collection from one of my uncles, and I re-read them over and over again. Although I haven’t looked at those books for the past 10 years at least, I still remember each one of them vividly, so it’s really fascinating to revisit them now. I look at them now not just from a contemporary perspective, as historical artifacts, but also from an adult one, as powerful stories from my childhood that involved a whole set of cultural assumptions and stereotypes I was only vaguely aware of at the time.
I don’t know that I’d entirely agree that he evolved beyond his prejudices exactly; it seems like he continued to struggle with them and against them. In these later books, you end up with Tintin saving or rescuing various sorts of darker skinned people, whether Peruvians or Chinese or Gypsies. There’s a Schindler’s List effect; Europeans of good heart as the saviors of more or less grateful ethnics.
It’s obviously an improvement over Tintin in the Congo or his earlier virulent anti-semitic caricatures — and he deserves credit for addressing it and learning from his critics. But I don’t think he ever entirely managed to shed his preconceptions, and that those preconceptions are present in some form in all of his work. (Which doesn’t make his books worthless or evil, of course.)
Basque: thanks for your comments. I’m intrigued by how your and my experiences of Tintin concord so neatly, thirty years apart.
Noah: No, I’d say Hergé never quite made that last mile. But he tried, he really did, to surpass his prejudices. That’s honorable in itself.
Alex,
Just wanted to let you know that I’ve really enjoyed the series so far, and I’m looking forward to the conclusion. Also, there’s no link to this on the TCJ mainpage!
Gah! I did a link post, then hit save instead of publish! It’s fixed now; thanks Sean!
Sean, thanks for the kind words.The conclusion should be up by next tuesday. It’ll deal with my own history as a Tintin reader, and how Tintin– and French popular culture– may or may not have influenced me.
If I may defend Hergé a bit; from Part 2 of this lively series:
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It’s telling, for instance, that (apart from the Bird brothers in The secret of the Unicorn), every single villain in the 23 albums is a foreigner.
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Um, well isn’t – correct me if I’m wrong – every single one of the adventures in the Tintin books mainly set in foreign countries? What, Tintin’s going to run up against Belgian villains in every land he travels to?
As to Hergé, in Tintin’s travels, rendering the “trappings of exoticism…alluring, alienating…” Does not every travel show focus on exotic architecture, colorfully different native costumes, unusual traditional foods?
Is this not a huge part of their appeal; a taste for which Tintin’s (or fellow globetrotting adventurers like James Bond or Indiana Jones, for that matter) stories likewise catered to?
Travel shows which only show the inhabitants of the country-of-the-week wearing Western clothing, eating at McDonald’s, motoring to work down traffic-choked expressways, shopping at supermarkets, watching TV, may all be very Politically Correct; no showing them as the exotic Other!
But…yawn!
And, isn’t expecting Western-style garb, architecture, food, “lifestyle,” in all its cheapjack mass-produced homogeneous dreariness, to be the “default setting” of human civilization, itself a pretty noxious failing? A narrow-minded attitude, like that of the Ugly American tourist of stereotype, vexed that everyone everywhere doesn’t speak English?
Isn’t the fascination and appreciation with what is different in foreign cultures a far more positive than negative phenomenon?
A more precise criticism – which can be extended to Hergé’s books – is found in Thomas Pynchon’s finding fault with tourism because it encourages a shallow experience of other countries; a quick look at strange clothing, buildings, customs and foods, without going into a deeper understanding of the meaning and purpose behind all that.
The trope of “European goes to foreign country, fights exotic bad guys, sets things right” is the point of the series, certainly. It’s also pretty obviously colonialist. Saying, “but…if it weren’t colonialist it would be dull!” doesn’t really change the fact that it’s colonialist. Porn in which women weren’t always preposterously willing would defeat the point of porn, but pointing that out doesn’t necessarily make porn tropes less sexist.
The point isn’t that one expects Western-style garb and lifestyle. It’s that other cultures are treated in exoticized and offensive ways. You don’t have to show Peru as being the same as Belgium in order to not show Peruvians as engaged in an apparently national conspiracy centered around a long dead culture. There are ways to suggest cultural difference without implying that South Americans don’t understand eclipses.
As for Indiana Jones and James Bond…the second Indiana Jones movie was very controversial because of its treatment of its racist portrayal of India and Hinduism (a portrayal which Lucas and Spielberg have both since regretted). Ian Fleming also portrayed numerous other cultures in quite unpleasant ways (and never had an “oh my god, I’m a racist” moment like Herge did.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…The point isn’t that one expects Western-style garb and lifestyle. It’s that other cultures are treated in exoticized and offensive ways. You don’t have to show Peru as being the same as Belgium in order to not show Peruvians as engaged in an apparently national conspiracy centered around a long dead culture. There are ways to suggest cultural difference without implying that South Americans don’t understand eclipses. …
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By fortuitous coincidence, I’d borrowed a few Tintin books from the library, “Prisoners of the Sun” among them; scans from the latter following.
Rather than showing Peru as wholly an “exocitized” land, Hergé depicts it as a mix of the colorfully foreign and recognizably Western-style “civilization.” The book begins with the scene below:
http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/1117/sungather1.jpg
Aside from the foliage and Spanish-style architecture outside the Police HQ windows, hardly quaintly exotic; we also get glimpses of the entrance and interior of a lavish European-style hotel; the hardly-primitive cargo-unloading cranes of a port; a train crossing a trestle spanning a mountain abyss…why, they even have phone booths!
So, all of Peru is hardly shown as uniformly exotic or backwards.
And, what is this about an “apparently national conspiracy”? That there are agents of this lost culture peppered about doesn’t mean that, say, the police and everyone else were in on it.
Hergé pokes fun at the ignoramus attitudes of Westerners in a foreign culture in a couple of places. Here, Capt. Haddock becomes vexed that everyone everywhere doesn’t speak English:
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/9524/sun18.jpg
Haddock condescendingly treats a Llama – and the concern of its owner – and gets his comeuppance:
http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/2130/sungather2.jpg
Did Hergé say that “South Americans don’t understand eclipses”? Hardly; this was but a small, mostly-isolated Peruvian subculture. Moreover, look who else was clueless about the phenomenon:
http://img718.imageshack.us/img718/9271/sungather3.jpg
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Alex Buchet said:
Tintin’s ruse would never have worked: the Quechua Incas were superb astronomers. It is insulting to suppose them stupid enough to fall for it.
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True! Although, it’s a depressingly common fact that when ancient civilizations go into decline, vast quantities of their former knowledge – medicinal, mathematical, metallurgical, architectural – is lost. (As we Westerners know from the Dark Ages.) So, it’s hardly wholly unlikely that the “hidden culture” central to “Prisoners of the Sun” might have lost this piece of knowledge.
“So, it’s hardly wholly unlikely that the “hidden culture” central to “Prisoners of the Sun” might have lost this piece of knowledge.”
They’re not shown as having declined in any other way. This is special pleading on a grand scale, Mike.
“That there are agents of this lost culture peppered about doesn’t mean that, say, the police and everyone else were in on it.”
It’s presented as fairly broad-based; no one will respond to Tintin’s inquiries because they all know, at least to some extent, about the Incas. Even the random little boy Tintin saves is able to guide them.
I’d agree, Peru isn’t shown as wholly exoticized; as Alex says, Herge made an effort to learn from his past errors and treat other cultures with some modicum of dignity. As Alex also says, however, he didn’t entirely succeed (though the effort is still praiseworthy.)
I grew up in Sri Lanka, read the whole Tintin series as a child. Your posts were quite interesting. Thanks!
“Not that he didn’t slip up. In Coke en Stock (The Red Sea sharks), the Black victims of the slavers are shown to be dignified in their Muslim faith, but fairly stupid as well”.
This sentence needs expanding and examples, otherwise your point is weakened.
Disagree.