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“Molière-style social comedy runs effortlessly into Dumas-style adventure with Conradian boxed narratives which, thanks to the Captain, volleys of Rabelaisian obscenities echo and boom. [...]
A huge symbolic register runs through the books, turning (as we will see) around signs such as the sun, water, the house, even tobacco — a register that, consistent and expanding at the same time, is worthy of a Faulkner or a Brontë. Played out against a backdrop of wars, revolutions and recessions, of technological progress imbued with an almost sacred aspect, not to mention old gods who steadfastly refuse to die, all of this amasses to an oeuvre that, again like that of many of the best writers — Stendahl, George Eliot or Pynchon, for example — forms a lens, or prism, through which a whole era lurches into focus.
All of which raises the question: is it literature? Should we, when we read the Tintin books, treat them with the reverence we would afford to Shakespeare, Dickens, Rabelais and so on? When we ponder and discuss them, should we bring the same critical apparatus to bear as we would when analysing Flaubert, James or Conrad? In the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first, writers of cartoons, hugely indebted to Hergé’s work, have deliberately launched bids for literary status, producing ‘graphic novels’ that are often quite self-consciously highbrow and demanding. The huge irony is that the Tintin books remain both unrivalled in their complexity and depth and so simple, even after more than half a century, that a child can read them with the same involvement as an adult. Adults do read them: there is a wealth of studies, some of which we will encounter over the following pages, assessing Hergé’s work from psychoanalytical, political, thematic and technical angles, just as critics might the work of poets, novelists and playwrights. Does it follow that if the same analytical criteria can be applied to one thing as to another, the two things must innately be the same? Or is this bad logic, fit only for cultural theory seminars and Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-as-Postmodern-Signifier conferences?”
Der Titel des Buches ist selbsterklärend: Tom McCarthy: Tintin and the Secret of Literature. London: Granta Books 2006, new ed. 2007 (Zitat S. 9 f.). Den Bezug zu Krimi-Diskussionen muß ich auch nicht erläutern. Ob ich McCarthy in den Details immer zustimmen möchte, spielt keine Rolle — jedenfalls ist es mir lange nicht passiert, daß ich über der Lektüre eines literaturtheoretischen Buches fast die Bushaltestelle vor meiner Haustür verpaßt hätte. Wer mir nicht traut, der kann ja bei Amazon reinschauen.
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