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Tom McCarthy, Tintin and the Secret of Literature (London: Granta, 2006). 211 pp. ISBN: 978-1-86207-831-9 (hb, £14.99)
Tom McCarthy's Tintin and the Secret of Literature is likely to be devoured by Tintinologists the world over who are rabid for any new work related to the dauntless (and ageless) journalist/adventurer with the signature quiff and indelible plus-fours. Readers anticipating a work imbued with the archival richness of Michael Farr's Tintin: The Complete Companion4 or the biographical insights of Harry Thompson's criminally out-of-print Tintin: Hergé and his Creation,5 however, might be more than a little surprised with what they find themselves ingesting. This is not to say that Tintin and the Secret of Literature is unpalatable fare. McCarthy is uninterested in sharing the retrospective air that pervades these other well-known books; instead, he seeks to explain the continued relevance and popularity of the Tintin series by fixing it - to the hilt - in literary theory and philosophical discourse. The likes of Derrida, Barthes, de Man, and Sartre inform McCarthy's interactions with Tintin, resulting in readings that are always entertaining, and frequently startling. McCarthy straps on his 'literary goggles' (4) early in his study and asks readers to share a modified perception of Tintin: what might happen, McCarthy wonders, if Tintin were treated and studied as literature? If 'we bring the same critical apparatus to bear as we would when analysing Flaubert, James or Conrad' (10), how might our understanding of Tintin be enhanced? The short answer, which the remainder of the book seeks to flesh out, is that 'wrapped up in a simple medium for children is a mastery of plot and symbol, theme and sub-text far superior to that displayed by most "real" novelists' (32). To his credit, McCarthy realises that his starting point involves a healthy dose of question-begging, and he admits that: 'To confuse comics with literature would be a mistake' (32). While this admission seemingly subverts McCarthy's efforts, he embraces the marginal position of comics within literary studies, claiming it as the source of his book's interpretive strength: it is because Hergé's canon 'occupies a space below the radar of literature proper' (32) that it can potentially interact with theories of literature from unexpected directions.
The book's first chapter, 'R/G', sets the...