Tintin And The Secret Of Literature by McCarthy Tom

Author:McCarthy, Tom [McCarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781847086068
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

5

ADONIS AND HIS COUNTERFEIT

i

Let’s start where we left off: the artist Sarrasine makes a sculpture, a copy of la Zambinella. While doing this, he is unable to see the mark of castration on her body. He is killed. Replace ‘Sarrasine’ with ‘Balthazar’ and you have got the core plot of The Broken Ear: the artist Balthazar makes a sculpture, a copy of an Arumbaya fetish. While doing this, he fails to notice the mark on its body, a chip in its ear (its genitals are covered by a kind of nappy). Balthazar is killed. What happens next?

Well, Sarrasine’s sculpture is copied into marble by the Cardinal’s (his killer’s) men, and deposited in a museum. The de Lanty family, whose mother is la Zambinella’s niece, have the artist Vien copy it as a painting: it becomes the Adonis which started the whole story off by sparking Mme de Rochefide’s curiosity. Another painter, Girodet, then uses Vien’s Adonis as the source for his own work depicting Endymion and the moon. Copies, copies, copies: what became of the original we do not find out.

Would the same find-and-replace exercise work here? Almost – but Hergé’s plot is cleverer. After killing Balthazar, his murderer Tortilla places the copy he has commissioned from the sculptor back in the museum he robbed in the first place, passing it off as the original. But, unbeknown to him, Balthazar has made two copies, and passed one of them off to Tortilla as the original. Effectively, Tortilla plays the role of both the Cardinal (killing, having a copy made) and of Sarrasine, taking for an original what was in fact a fake. He, too, will be killed. And so, too, as we have seen, will his killers, who, like him, hope to make a fortune from what lies concealed in the fetish. Balthazar’s brother, a commercial sculptor, finds the real original in his trunk after his death and, unaware of its provenance, has hundreds of copies of it made in his artisan-studios, selling these to secure, if not a fortune, then at least a moderate source of income.

Had Hergé read Sarrasine when he wrote The Broken Ear? Possibly. By The Red Sea Sharks the answer must be ‘probably’. It is hard not to see in the stupendous ball on board the Scheherazade a reflection of the de Lantys’ party, where ‘milling about, whirling around, flitting here and there, were the most beautiful women in Paris, the richest, the noblest, dazzling, stately, resplendent with diamonds, flowers in their hair, on their bosoms, on their heads, strewn over dresses or in garlands at their feet’, while a now-aged la Zambinella, who has the air of ‘a kind of Faust’, slinks among them ghoul-like. It is even harder not to hear in the gossip of the fancy-dressed guests of di Gorgonzola (who moves among them dressed as Faust’s alter ego Mephistopheles) an echo of the de Lantys’ revellers’ chatter. ‘Naturally, malicious tongues spread rumours that he has a shady past,’ a monocled nobleman of Hergé’s mutters to a pharaoh.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.