Surplus Matter

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they’ve been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false “metal”); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock’s reward for being “true to himself”. Thus Hollywood’s idiotic “message” is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It’s like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.

Tom McCarthy demolishes Steven Spielberg’s Tintin.

C’s intellectual preoccupations can be fascinating, but they don’t always sit well together. The links it draws between radio, codes, and secrets suggest a new theory of literary modernism, calling to mind a literature that is party autonomic and partly scavenged, carried along subterranean avenues and fugitive broadcasts. His insistence on the omnipresence of hidden patterns enables McCarthy’s best prose, a kind of concentrated physical description which combines amoral detachment with the ecstatic possibilities of pure geometry.

Jacob Mikanowski on C in The Millions.

Hergé war als Künstler ein Genie, das ein ganz eigenes Genre begründet hat. Auch wenn wir heute noch nicht wissen, in welche Schublade wir ihn stecken sollen: Comiczeichner, Comicerzähler, auf jeden Fall ist er der Shakespeare dieser neuen Form. In der Geschichte von Tim in Tibet steckt zum Beispiel die endlos weiße Leere, in die Hergé in seinen Albträumen fiel, aus denen er schreiend erwachte. Wegen dieser Träume suchte er einen Psychoanalytiker auf und er zeigte seine Angst verschlüsselt als Schnee.

An in-depth interview with Tom McCarthy focusing on his Tintin book in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.

Tom McCarthy is mentioned by Nicholas Lezard in his Guardian article on Tintin.

Proust has a similar command of setting, and so does Anthony Powell, but literature demands that their characters grow old. Tintin is exempt from that demand. This is one way in which he, and a host of comic-book characters, are not literature: Even narrative time has no grip on them. This fact isn’t especially mysterious, but it is striking. And it occurs to me that this may, in a way, be the secret of Tintin and the Secret of Literature, although I don’t mean to undercut McCarthy’s scintillating book by saying so: Losing yourself in Tintin is a good way to imagine that you will never grow old.

Paul La Farge reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in Bookforum.

There’s a secret written into the book’s very title. McCarthy is telling us less about, say, what literature is than what it isn’t. We come to a novel expecting it to tell us everything that it can, to be replete. McCarthy lifts the rug to show us that the more a story tells us, the more it hides. Channeling Barthes, McCarthy characterizes Tintin — whose exploits so often involve misread missives, misunderstood map coordinates, misconstruction of another character’s language — as standing “guardian . . . at the heart of a noise.”

Eric Banks reviews Tintin and the Secret of Literature in the Los Angeles Times.

I hold out little hope for Spielberg’s film. I suspect it will be sanitised and anodyne, devoid of the complexities that make Tintin so compelling. Hergé complained in his last years that his creation was killing him. The final sequence in the incomplete Tintin and Alph-Art shows, in what I’ve always seen as a cryptic cry of desperation on its author’s part, the hero being led off to have plaster poured on him and thus be turned into an artwork called “Reporter” — condemned, that is, to die inside his own simulacrum. This is dark stuff, Dorian Gray territory. If I had my way, the film would be directed by David Lynch.

Tom McCarthy on the political trajectory of the Tintin cartoons and Spielberg’s forthcoming movie.