Whether in a rul panel or in an alien environment.

Whether in a rul panel or in an alien environment, a comic strip character isn't solely a fixed image, it's a fixed image that acts predictably. A Pez dispenser, no matter in what way much it looks like Popeye is solely a piece of plastic (Popeye is cantankerous, Popeye is sentimental), and Dick Tracy with Warren Beatty's polished profile is Warren Beatty, no matter to what degree deadly his aim with a tommy fire-arm Blondie, the monogamous housewife, fellating the plumber in a Tijuana bible, was clearly an impostor; in this way was Little Orphan Annie, the arch-Hooverite, pirouetting around the Oval Office singing "Tomorrow" to FDR And likewise too is the Tintin at large in Frederic Tuten's drawn out strange, and eerily hermetic "romance." Although physically recognizable as the forever teenaged journalist (his hair is fair with a stubborn cowlick, and he travels with a white terrier and a rummy sea captain), scarcely anything about his behavior jibes with the famous creation of Belgian cartoonist George Remi (Herge).

When we first befitting him in the novel, he's moping (Tintin--mopping?) around the cavernous halls of Marlinspike, his seaside estate. It's been a glutted year since his last adventure, and he's "tired of reading, tired of in extent strolls, tired of tranquil evenings before the fire." A verbal expression finally arrives in a cream-colored case We're never told the identity of the correspondent, still the Brussels postmark suggests that it's from Herge himself, dispatching Tintin, without explanation, to a little tavern in Machu Picchu, close by dint of the Inca ruins.

Expecting to find there a certain grand adventure involving the usual assortment of bent staffs he finds, instead, a contingent of querulous--and to readers of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, thoroughly familiar--European expatriates. The same companions who one time endlessly argued politics and philosophy at a sanatorium in the Swiss alps are at it again. Unlike Tintin, however, these characters are returned scrupulously true to Mann's originals: Herr Naptha is still a totalitarian Jesuit, Signor Settembrini still a democratic humanist, Herr Peeperkorn still a loquacious bore, and Clavdia Chauchat still a beautiful egotist ("To be with any les than the exceptional is a form of extinction") and a faithless lover

As Tintin (filling in for Hans Castorp, Mann's protagonist) patiently tread in the steps ofs the group's heady (to him; prolix to me) discussions about human passion, discord, decadence, and violence, his former career as a freewheeling adventurer and righter of unfits seems altogether and all too unexpectedly pointless: "How little I understood the workings of the community I had wished to minister to how less I knew of the human heart, the least known of all, my own" With the shooting of his cognitive life, not to mention his vocabulary and melodramatic syntax, proceeds an awareness of his sexuality: "Each hour I discover a change," says Tintin, "a deepening of my voice, an increase in height. Yesterday, I'm embarrassed to speak in such a manner plainly, I woke in bed to find my penis stiff and tall, rising up like a stick and I rotated it against the woven fabric sheet. How good it felt at the cause and the top."

Eventually, Tintin is seduc (Tintin--seduced?) on Madame Chauchat, who doesn't be seen to mind at all that he wears boxer shorts. His talk of matrimony, however, is entirely unacceptable. "You were delightful when innocent," she declares him before going off with another lover "but you've grown too solemn" And she's not kidding--Tintin (though Mr Tuten would probably not agree) has, by means of now, turned into a devout bore, criticizing his "stunted, skimpy life," making in extent lists of environmental crimes worthy of rigid punishment, and recycling literary platitudes: "What vicious and what wrongdoer are there left to stalk when now I know I would ne to stalk the tracks of each living human, for all are guilty, plane as they sleep, guilty of mischief done or in addition to be done? The human cavern breeds monsters."

Constituted of dialogues, and aphorisms ("One bottle of Coca-Cola contains more spiritual microbes than all the boatloads of Marx and Engels") and a protracted postcoital dream (in which Tintin sheds his last vestiges of heroism and seats down to a long unhappy cuckold's life), the plotles uninflected narrative humming noises on and on, like a tedious prelection in a hot classroom. And yet--the entire enterprise, this invention, is with equal reason bizarre in its plunderings (why Tintin? on what account Mann?), and so unapologetically itself that on a level as it exhausts your goodwill and patience, it in some way fascinates.

...

Home