Was Hergé, the creator of Tintin, an artist? My answer is a resounding yes, but here I would like to concentrate only on his towering masterpiece Tintin in Tibet which seems to me to take a significant step towards transcending even the boundaries of art.
Incredible is it may sound, there may be those who have not read this marvellous graphic novel or no longer remember what it was about. Let me, therefore, briefly recount the story. Tintin and the Captain are on holiday in Switzerland where, one evening, Tintin dreams of his friend Chang whom he met in China years earlier. Buried up to his waist in snow, Chang is imploring Tintin to help him. The next morning a letter arrives from the young Chinese to say he is on his way to Europe, but, immediately afterwards, it turns out that the plane the letter says he will be taking has crashed in the Himalayas and there are no survivors. Still under the spell of his dream, Tintin refuses to believe Chang is dead, and, despite all his efforts, the Captain fails to persuade him otherwise. Together they travel to Nepal and track down Tharkey, the Sherpa guide, who took the rescue teams up to the crashed aircraft. Tharkey at first refuses to make the hazardous journey again, saying winter is coming and even if, by some miracle, Chang survived the accident, he will already have fallen prey to the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman that roams the mountains. Ultimately, however, he is persuaded, and they hire a group of porters and begin their ascent of the Himalayas. After evidence that the Yeti is in the vicinity causes the porters to flee in terror, Tintin, the Captain and Tharkey press on by themselves and, passing through many a danger, reach the crashed plane. Spotting a scarf on one of the peaks surrounding the wreck, Tintin realises that Chang was there after the accident; but it is too dangerous for them to stay any more in the mountains. They set out to return and are virtually at death’s door when they reach a Buddhist monastery. One of the monks then goes into a trance and says Chang is in a cave on Yak’s Horn Mountain, so they have to embark on a second journey. It turns out that Chang is indeed in the cave mentioned by the monk, as the Yeti saved him after the crash and lovingly nursed him back to strength through a long fever. When Tintin and the Captain manage to take Chang away with them, the Yeti’s howl of pain echoes amongst the peaks.
When I first read Tintin in Tibet as a child, I found it less interesting than Tintin’s other adventures and didn’t like it very much. But, as if to prove that this work of Hergé’s is really aimed at an adult readership, the older I grew, the more interested I became in it. By the time I had reached my adolescence I was fascinated by the theme of friendship and loyalty in the story. I couldn’t get the speech made by the Grand Abbot of the Monastery after Chang’s rescue out of my mind: “How happy for you that you inspired such friendship in these strangers that they came all the way here for you; and strangers, how happy for you that you could feel such friendship in your hearts.”
In later years, I saw, with some degree of fear, that a motif which should have no place in a children’s book, death, was no less prominent in the book than friendship (“He is dead, I am telling you! Why don’t you believe me?”; “I can’t go, Sahib, death waits in those mountains. I can’t endanger three lives, your life, the young sahib’s life and my own”).
Friends to whom I tried to explain these matters, were of the view that I was reading too much into “an average work of popular culture” But then I found out from a book that Tintin in Tibet was the one of his works Hergé valued most highly. Moreover, this work was apparently the fruit of a period of crisis. After years of marriage, Hergé had embarked on an affair with another woman. What lurked behind his book about loyalty was betrayal. Tortured by guilt, he longed for the past, wanting to return to the innocent days he had spent with Chang, the Chinese student whom he had met years earlier when drawing Tintin’s adventure set in China, The Blue Lotus, and whose name he had given to his hero’s friend. At nights, meanwhile, he had dreams dominated by the colour white, the symbol of purity, but felt no peace but only pain.
I am of course not suggesting that everything was born of a “typical” midlife crisis, and those white dreams were transmuted into the snows of Tibet, Hergé’s lost youth into the fictional Chang whom Tintin is determined to find, and Madame Hergé, “the gaoler” of that youth, into the Yeti. A work of art can never be reduced to such simple origins, and, as I said, Tintin in Tibet has a dimension that goes beyond even art.
To find this book striking we don’t need to know Hergé’s story. It is sufficient that we should have our own dreams of betrayal, and betray not necessarily our spouses but our daily lives by finding them humdrum and meaningless and wishing for “something else”. Dreams that beckon us afar; our past and our hopes lost under the snows; mountains where death is on the prowl; the giant, dumb creature that looked after us in our sickness and, now that we have found the strength to leave, weeps in pain; and those porters walking, always walking under the weight of their burdens: our lives slowly stealing away… These strike me as the ingredients of a great myth.
Borges says literature begins and ends as myth. But it is obvious that there are more works of literature than there are myths. What, anyway, is a myth? It seems to me that in a work of literature the author is in control of the fiction he is creating. He knows, if only at an instinctive level, where he wants to go, and steers his tale in that direction. In myth, on the other hand, the fiction dominates, and, in a sense, eliminates, the author. The latter, having stopped being himself and turned into “everyman” (a transformation at the source of the true “anonymity” of myths) wanders, like one wandering through the fantastic architecture of a dream, amongst the simplest, the most fundamental, the most abiding elements not only of his own life but of human life in general, and takes us, too, on this breathtaking journey. This is the line Hergé is on the brink of crossing. In all twentieth-century literature, I can think of only one work that comes as close to myth as Tintin in Tibet. No, it isn’t Finnegans Wake, where Joyce strives to become “everyman”. I won’t reveal its name for now; if the occasion demands it, one day I may tell its story, too.
