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[edit] Criticisms of Tintin
[edit] Criticisms of the series
The earliest stories in The Adventures of Tintin have been criticised for racist and colonialist leanings, including caricatured portrayals of non-Europeans. Whilst the Hergé Foundation have presented this as naïveté,[1] and scholars of Hergé such as Harry Thompson have claimed "Hergé did what he was told by the Abbé Wallez",[1] Hergé himself felt his background made it impossible to avoid holding certain right-wing views. He stated: "I was fed the prejudices of the bourgeois society that surrounded me."[2]
In Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the Bolsheviks were presented as the villains of the piece, with Hergé drawing on Moscow Unveiled, a work given to him by Wallez and authored by Joseph Douileet. The work is highly critical of the Soviet regime, although Hergé contextualised this by noting that in Belgium, at the time a devout Catholic nation, "Anything Bolshevik was aetheist".[2] Hergé later dismissed the failings of this first story as "a transgression of my youth".[1] By 1999 this presentation was being noted as far more reasonable, The Economist declaring: "In retrospect, however, the land of hunger and tyranny painted by Herge was uncannily accurate". [3]
In Tintin in the Congo, the Africans have been criticised as being presented as naïve and primitive. In the original work, Tintin is shown at a blackboard addressing a class of African children. "Mes chers amis," he says, "je vais vous parler aujourd'hui de votre patrie: La Belgique" ("My dear friends, I am going to talk to you today about your fatherland: Belgium"). Hergé redrew this in 1946 to a lesson in mathematics. Hergé later admitted the flaws in the original story, excusing it by noting: "I portrayed these Africans according to ... this purely paternalistic spirit of the time".[2] The perceived problems with this book were summarised by Sue Buswell in 1988[4] as being "all to do with rubbery lips and heaps of dead animals" although Thompson noted this quote may have been "taken out of context".[1] "Dead animals" refers to the fashion for big game hunting at the time of work's original publication. Drawing on André Maurois' Les Silences du colonel Bramble, Hergé presents Tintin as a big game hunter, bagging 15 antelope as opposed to the one needed for the evening meal. However, concerns over the number of dead animals did lead the Scandinavian publishers of Tintin's adventures to request changes. A page which presented Tintin killing a rhinoceros by drilling a hole in the animal's back and inserting a stick of dynamite was deemed excessive, and Hergé substituted a page which saw the rhino accidentally discharge Tintin's rifle whilst the erstwhile hunter snoozed under a tree.[5]
The adventure which is usually regarded as the first "serious" Tintin adventure is The Blue Lotus. This story, set in China during the then-current Sino-Japanese War, criticised Japanese and Western colonial meddling in China and helped to dispel popular myths about the Chinese people (although it contains flagrant stereotyping of Japanese people, who are portrayed as sinister and cruel). From then on, meticulous research would be one of Hergé's trademarks.[6]
Some of the early albums were altered by Hergé in subsequent editions, usually at the demand of publishers. For example, at the instigation of his American publishers, many of the black characters in Tintin in America were re-coloured to make their race white or ambiguous.[7] The Shooting Star album originally had an American villain with the Jewish surname of Mr. Blumenstein. This proved to be controversial, as the character looked very stereotypically Jewish. He was changed to an American with a less ethnically specific name, Mr. Bohlwinkel, in later editions and subsequently to a South American of a fictional country. Hergé later discovered that 'Bohlwinkel' was also a Jewish name.[8]
Whilst Tintin has been criticised on many occasions for not being much of a reporter, given he is rarely seen filing copy, Harry Thompson advanced a rebuttal in his work Tintin: Hergé & His Creation. Thompson argues that the 1920s had seen a change in the role of reporting, with "adventurer-journalists, who created their own news and reported it from a very personal perspective" very much the vogue of the day. Thompson asserts that Tintin was filing "news back in the shape of a cartoon strip."[1] Tom McCarthy has noted that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is presented as being the copy of a real journalist, with the illustrations purportedly photographs, which he avers "would allow it to invoke notions of documentary rigour".[9] At the end of the serial publication of this first adventure an actor was hired to pretend to be Tintin, arriving back from the Soviet Union by train on the 8 May, 1930.[1]
