His smooth and ageless face has nothing to do with it: the character of Tintin continues, 40 years after the death of its creator, Hergé, to make ink flow and criticize.
In 2019, two of the albums featuring the famous reporter were destroyed in the wake of the book burning that raged in the libraries of the Providence Catholic School Board, in Ontario. These were the albums Tintin in America And The Temple of the Sunwhich conveyed, it was argued, erroneous and pejorative information about the First Nations.
For several years, the album Tintin in the Congo, written at the time of Belgian colonialism, attracts virulent criticism for the portrait he paints of the Congolese. The album has been withdrawn from several UK bookstores and will not be translated to South Africa. Already, during his lifetime, Hergé had removed a box from the album where Tintin made racist remarks of shameful colonialism…
Not to mention the book Céline, Hergé and the Haddock Affair by Émile Brami, who argued in the early 2000s that several of Captain Haddock’s swear words were taken from an anti-Semitic manifesto by Céline. Also, once again, Hergé had removed from the album The mysterious star a cell in which a Jew rejoices in the end of the world because it will save him from paying a debt. The mysterious star was originally published in The Stolen Eveninga collaborationist daily published in Belgium under the German occupation.
Despite all this — and recognizing it — Renaud Nattiez, an early admirer of Tintin (he leafed through it before he could read), reiterates in his latest book, Should we burn Tintin?his admiration for Hergé and his work.
In this book, which follows several others that the author has devoted to Tintin, Renaud Nattiez lists the arguments that fuel the discourse of “tintinophobes” or, more broadly, of those who are indifferent to the adventures of the reporter of the last century.
Tintin, he asks, is he overwhelmed? Politically incorrect? Is he a reactionary colonialist and racist? Is he misogynistic? Antiecologist? Too moral or, more simply, completely devoid of humor? In each of the chapters of his new book, Renaud Nattiez dissects each of these criticisms, without rejecting them.
“If a certain number of remarks deemed too dated have been redacted from the original version published in volume 1 of the Archives Hergé, the positive judgment of the fox terrier on the action of the White Fathers is maintained in the current version: “What aces, these missionaries!” he notes.
This is without mentioning the weak female presence in Tintin, which even swears when compared to that of other literatures of the same period. “We don’t see female doctors or surgeons in Tintin. And if we look at the contemporary literature of Hergé, it seems to me more objective towards women, who had a social role at that time, ”says Renaud Nattiez in an interview.
But the great absence of Tintin is the family, he notes. So much so that at the time, the Catholic newspaper Valiant Hearts had protested to the publisher of Tintin, who then forced Hergé to design the comic strip Jo, Zette and Jockowhich depicts a family and a monkey (and which Hergé got tired of after five albums).
Tintin, a too smooth hero?
Depressed, Hergé had, it seems, an ambiguous relationship with Tintin: he himself found him “too perfect”. It is undoubtedly also the opinion of its readers, who rather choose Snowy or Captain Haddock in the polls as their favorite character.
“Hergé had consultations with a psychoanalyst from the school of Jung, adds Renaud Nattiez. At the time, in the late 1950s, he advised Hergé to rest and eliminate what he called the demon of purity, the obsessive pursuit of purity. He had said to him: “Above all, abandon this project of Tintin in Tibet”, an album crossed by whiteness in the mountains. Hergé did not obey him. He continued Tintin in Tibet and he said it did him good. »
The fact remains that Tintin’s quest is to make Good triumph over Evil, he admits, to the point that his detractors often criticize him for not being very funny. Hergé also made the same reproach to his main character. Renaud Nattiez evokes a letter that Hergé wrote himself to Tintin. “He writes to her: ‘I will never be like you, you annoy me, you are too perfect.’ But he also says “Tintin, it’s me”, as Flaubert would have said “Madame Bovary, it’s me”. But Hergé said “Haddock, it’s me” too, like the Dupondts and Professor Tournesol. It’s normal, they are his creatures. »
These Hergean creatures, Renaud Nattiez wishes to save them all from the great fire of oblivion, including their innumerable faults. And the sale of Tintin albums around the world, which persists even if no new album has appeared since the death of its creator, would tend to prove him right.