La Comédie Humaine

"Hergé was not a huge literary man. He liked books but he didn’t spend his time reading. Cinema and art were more his things. But he did love Balzac. He read a book in the fifties which was an academic analysis of the use of characters in Balzac’s novels, and how recurring characters gave a structure to the sequence of Balzac’s books which was part of its appeal. This made a deep impression on Hergé because he realised he had already started doing this when he introduced Tintin’s arch-villain – Moriarty. Sorry, Rastapopoulos! Freudian slip. Rastapopoulos is the Moriarty to Tintin’s Holmes. This is another literary allusion because Hergé also knew his Sherlock Holmes and his Conan Doyle. It was another important literary source for him. Rastapopoulos, Tintin’s nemesis, is introduced in Cigars of the Pharaoh . This was in 1933-34, but Hergé didn’t know then that Rastapopoulos would be there throughout the series – and very possibly at Tintin’s end in the unfinished Tintin and Alph – Art . But there he is. Then we have Bianca Castafiore, and Chang Chong Chen, and Thomson and Thompson, and of course Captain Haddock and Cuthbert Calculus. So there is this wonderful cast of recurring characters, and some of the characters introduced early on in Tintin pop up unexpectedly later. Hergé developed this in the fifties, after rereading a lot of Balzac’s novels which he had enjoyed as a younger man. He realised that what Balzac did was highly applicable to his own art. La Comédie Humaine was a huge literary influence, and has not a main cast but a cast of secondary characters. But only there, and after Flight 714 Hergé was unsure of whether he was right to have done that. Otherwise Rastapopoulos is fearful, a very unpleasant man and downright sinister. He should send a shiver down your spine. When Hergé was dying and he did the last drawing of Tintin, in Tintin and Alph-Art , about to be cast as a statue by Rastapopoulos as if so he could be exhibited in a museum – that is a really horrific, frightening moment. No, I don’t think the secondary characters are all comic. Of course they are very amusing but they are more than just that. Balzac was a prolific writer – much more so than Hergé – and the model is particularly the use of characters, but also the building up of tension. But Balzac’s stories were spun out over thousands of words whereas Hergé’s adventures were limited to the final format – the 62 pages agreed with his publisher at the end of the war. One of the things that struck me as I got sucked into Tintin is that you start off thinking that it’s great art, and you finish thinking that it’s very good literature. Hergé I view as a literary figure more than an artist. It has become clearer and clearer to me that his actual narratives are so strong and so well-constructed. An important point is that Hergé did it all himself. He was very fussy and a perfectionist with total control over his creation, which is why he didn’t want anyone to continue it after his death. This interview was published in 2011."