Family secrets and social memory in Les aventures de Tintin

Abstract

Remarkably enough, tiny Belgium and the vast United States share the distinction of having produced the two most prolific comic strip schools of the twentieth century. The most famous of the Belgian story lines have to be the Aventures de Tintin et Milou, drawn by Herge over almost half a century and reflecting the crises Europe experienced after 1930, particularly those having to do with racism and anti-Semitism. Herge can, of course, be accused of having shared this particular mindset, but he can also be credited with having had the courage of his convictions: he never tried to appear "politically correct" and always expressed his opinions without worrying about their reception. For instance, he used the character of Capitaine Haddock to portray alcoholism as no other cartoonist had dared to do. At the same time, one can also leave aside a moral reading of the work in favor of a consideration of its internal logic. Indeed, since Herge never traveled, he did not depict situations he had actually witnessed abroad, but rather what was said or shown around him. A quick survey of the iconography of the turn of the century does indeed demonstrate that when it came to racism, he faithfully reproduced the xenophobic mood of his time, especially in Tintin au Congo. Unfortunately for him, as it were, most of these documents have sunk into oblivion, while Les aventures de Tintin have remained. From Le lotus bleu on, however, Herge resolved not to be guided only by what he saw and heard around him, but also to refer to reliable documents, to the point where Levi-Strauss could praise the precision and ethnological accuracy of the places and objects presented in these works. What is not so well known is that Herge had the same kind of large file cabinet in his office as the commander of the citadel in L'affaire Tournesol, and that it was filled with photographs clipped from newspapers. Most of these pictures were taken with the