Discombobulated

In the lovely Tintin comic books my dad used to read to me when I was a little boy, everything is always in its rightful place. All the people and all the objects are self-contained; they are clearly set apart from everything else in the world by an unambiguous descriptive line. The colors are beautiful, vibrant, and flat. The compositions are always perfectly legible: the succession of images skillfully crafted to breathe and lead the reader to a sharp, precise, untroubled understanding of the story’s space and the action meant to be unfolding. There are no shadows here to obscure the pictures’ trim, orderly clarity. Tintin goes around the world on adventures that his bravery and righteousness allow him to face with little self-doubt. He seems a sort of sexless child but nevertheless possesses the freedom of movement and autonomy of a very capable adult. A proxy, a blank vessel for the young reader to identify with, he is a dream of freedom, of agency, of exploration, of curiosity, of excitement; he embodies the thrill of facing new, wide open spaces with confidence and optimism. And these territories, as far-flung and unfamiliar as they might be, remain ultimately welcoming because their formidable span is reassuringly held by the candid lines and by the forthright color fields. Tintin runs, jumps, climbs; he finds secret passages inside the pyramids; he crosses deserts and jungles; he rockets to the moon; he scours the oceans and scouts the continents; he walks, he shoots, he swims, he decides, he believes: he is totally active, and his motivations are wholesome and uncomplicated. He lives in a world much like our own, but one where reassuring boundaries (graphic, narrative, conventional…) exist to explicitly define situations and clear up their meaning. Though the characters can at times experience fear, and find themselves in real jeopardy - they are free from the murky, formless corrosion of anxiety. And while evil may manifest itself in the personalized, circumscribed form of ruthless, selfish, unpleasant, or insane individual villains, Tintin never doubts the overall goodness of humankind - because he takes it for granted that the bad people doing bad things must always, in the end, be thwarted.

    They’re a bit tattered, but I still have all the old, brightly coloured volumes. And, from time to time, I enjoy letting myself be drawn again by their tidy, precise charm into a restorative mood of trustful composure. It occurs to me that when Hergé first started publishing these travel-themed children’s stories in the 1930s, the Great Depression was already taking its toll and the Second World War loomed ominously; the Soviet Union was a beacon of hope for some and a terrible threat to others; the Spanish Civil War was being fought; colonisation had confronted the West with the great variety of human arrangements, and, in some quarters, given rise to the uncomfortable, creeping suspicion that “the white man’s burden” might be a rather flimsy pretext for naked exploitation. There is no question that the world was already a mess; and yet I note with a kind of melancholy longing that the Tintin stories could still, unselfconsciously and authentically, with great artistic vigour, express a naive, buoyant, winsome self-confidence - an open hopefulness that seems inaccessible to us in our own rather odd, discombobulating, age of helpless disquiet. Most of us can’t really believe in a promised land anymore, or in salvation (of either the supernatural or even the technological kind); we no longer look to a reassuring, benevolent father-figure in the sky, or take comfort in His promise of an agreeable afterlife for the righteous; nor do we seem to be able to give ourselves up anymore to some grand, appealing collective vision - one that, together,  we could work to bring about: a future of mutual respect, of security, of justice for all... Instead we multiply escapist gestures in everyday life; we hypnotise ourselves by staring at screens and indefinitely postpone the imaginative, structuring, adult engagement with each other and with the broader world that would be necessary to make sense of our lives. As the world burns, we all look for comfort where we can, and sentimental nostalgia is fashionable. Since we can’t seem to imagine a future for ourselves that wouldn’t take the form of a series of grim catastrophes, of, sooner or later, scarcely conceivable mayhem, we take refuge in soothing fantasies of the bygone. We constantly rework a half real and half made-up past, concocting a kind of dream continuum where we can exist, despite the gloomy reality of the present, and the dire threats of the future... Like everyone else, I’m constantly seeking palliative distractions. On occasion, this involves contemplating mild, artful, hopeful pictures from another age, and longing for the security and comfortable certainties of my childhood.