I had hesitated for a while about adding another brick in the wall of Tintinology. Hergé’s boy reporter has inspired a lot of smart-alecky postmodern commentary. I don’t necessarily disagree with Tom McCarthy that Tintin contains the secret of literature. But I think Tintin’s immortality and worldwide fame have meant a profusion of takes on a character with basically no psychological depth at all. Tintin barely even has a face. Then again, McCarthy locates Tintin’s brilliance not in his vivid character but in his role as a filter for his surroundings. “A whole era lurches into focus” through Tintin’s analysis and derring-do.
Ah, but what era? For me, Tintin is a distillation of several eras. In his first appearance he lectures to the Congolese about their beneficent Belgian overlords. Tintin bridges his bourgeois homeland with ancient Egypt, the Himalayas, and the medieval border squabbles of eastern European fiefdoms. He tangles with Rastapopoulos, an industrialist Bond villain who typifies the Cold War. The predominant mental environment of Tintin dates from around 1930. Hergé was a right-wing Catholic with a gee-whiz appreciation for 20th century technology. Fascism is not yet comprehended, and Tintin’s deductions have to cut through a lot of superstition and fustiness. This is a world of pipe-smoking, scarves, pistols and telegrams, which eventually comes to embrace telephones, jets, movie studios and hazmat suits.
A Tintin adventure promises a marriage of the domestic and the exotic. Hergé’s famous ligne claire drawing style creates indelible fetishes: the pleasure of uncorking a bottle of Loch Lomond, or the tin of crab that whisks us into the hold of a cargo ship. And the most instantly recognizable object in the whole series is that red-and-white rocket ship.
The whole series is transformed when Calculus lures Haddock and Tintin to the Kingdom of Syldavia and they glimpse that rocket. This object marks a boundary that leaves the old world of streetcars and hypnosis far in the past. At times, the lunar adventure feels like a category error: why is Tintin sleuthing and speculating about footprints after landing on the moon? Why is Captain Haddock talking about carbon dioxide?
Another problem is the coincidence of Calculus’s rocket trip with the world-historical triumph of NASA. It is hard to read this fantasy of space travel (published in 1953) without interpolating one’s impressions of the actual moon landing. Tintin doesn’t have a module that detaches from the rocket. Instead the rocket has rungs that the crew can climb up and down. But the spacesuits do look a little bit like what Buzz Aldrin would wear sixteen years later.
Anyway: the reality of Apollo 11 doesn’t quite damage or invalidate Destination Moon or its sequel, Explorers on the Moon. The book’s vague political intrigue positions lunar exploration back into the muck of Cold War brinkmanship – where it justly belongs. This moon mission is a secret operation, being developed in a mountainous hinterland. A weird boozy bald guy is eavesdropping on a radio and moo-ha-ha-ing about Tintin’s fate.
Tintin knows right away that gangsters in a Citröen are tailing him, because of course Tintin figures this out. The security of the Syldavian space program is laughable, and it falls to the boy reporter to stay a few steps ahead of his local patrons as well as the mysterious bad guys. Long descriptions of nuclear power and tedious attestations of security protocol (ha!) threaten to bog down the adventure, but then Tintin gets to do his thing: he sneaks somewhere undetected and scales a mountain with his loyal dog, Snowy. Still, Destination Moon struggles to overcome its reliance on pratfalls and on the screaming match between Haddock and Calculus, whose moments of lucidity never seem to match up with one another.
In Explorers, there are two separate reveals of stowaways on the moon rocket. This is what I mean by a mental environment of 1930: the rocket may as well be an ocean-crossing steamship, it has that many hiding places. The presentation of the extraterrestrial landscape is masterful, and the depleting-oxygen-while-trapped-in-a-cave is a perfect pulse-pounding mid-book subplot.
It’s true that the swarthy stowaway with the buzzcut seems to have stepped out of a rough-and-tumble bar in a port town in one of Hergé’s fictional nation-states. But something was cleared away in this new, postwar Tintin. The adventures that come after this one are broad and cinematic. The baroque, symbol-drenched narratives of the early books are now big and clear and nuclear-powered.