Tintin and the Other

Until last week, we were unaware of the existence of Tintin in the Congo, first published in 1931, but are now keen to read it. A trawl of London bookshops failed to turn up a copy, for a simple reason: a statement from the Commission for Racial Equality, calling the book “racist claptrap” which should be removed from bookshops, has made Tintin in the Congo into a bestseller.

The statement on the CRE website starts by seeming to be on the side of free speech: “Highstreet shops, and indeed any shops, ought to think very carefully about whether they ought to be selling and displaying it”. There follows a history lesson – “it was written a long time ago, but this certainly does not make it acceptable” – before the sage counsellor turns dictatorial, and the grammar goes wobbly: “It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell and display Tintin in the Congo”. The book is “potentially highly offensive” and therefore “the only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying ‘old fashioned, racist claptrap’”.

Disappointed at not laying hands on a copy of Tintin in the Congo, we settled for Tintin in America instead. Here, the boy reporter goes to “Redskin City”, where he encounters bare-torsoed men with tomahawks and feathers in their hair, exclaiming “How!” and “Death to the Paleface” – an instance of two-sided racist claptrap, perhaps. Tintin’s Scottish adventure, The Black Island, shows a land populated by worthies in kilts and tam o’shanters, drinking whisky by the barrel and saying, “Aye, laddie” and “nivver” for “never”. Unarmed Native Americans and sober Scots probably don’t recognize themselves in these images, but might enjoy the tales nonetheless. Michael Farr, author of Tintin: The complete companion, reveals that, “Of all the adventures, Tintin in the Congo is today the one most likely to be encountered in Africa”.

The CRE has not demanded the removal of Tintin in America from bookshops, which suggests that a special case is made against “negative images” of black people. We have often wondered why this should be so, and also wonder why it is not stated more often that the most negative images of black people today derive from the antics of rap singers, exhibiting the trappings of misogyny, violence and gross materialism. In the words of the CRE, “It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable” to sell and display their outpourings.
 
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Literary Life in the 21st Century, an occasional series. It is well known that the English are unmatched in their sense of fun. A while back, we treated you to a list of humour titles from Michael O’Mara Books, which had us all splitting our sides: You Are What You Shite, A Shite History of Nearly Everything, Shite’s Miscellany, Eats, Shites and Leaves, to name only the top titles.

The July 13 issue of the Bookseller, organ of the book trade, lines up “the best humour titles from the publishers’ lists” for the coming season. According to the journal’s reporter, Caroline Sanderson, “There is a run (sorry!) of books about poo. That’s poo, as opposed to shite, which is very last year”. In confirmation of Ms Sanderson’s perception, there is The Book of Poo: A spotter’s guide (Ebury, £7.99); in contradiction of it, Does Anything Eat Shit? (Summersdale, £7.99). In the science line, there is Do Ants Have Arseholes and Ants Have Sex in Your Beer; for students of history, a book of British surnames, Potty, Fartwell and Knob. If it’s just an honest laugh you’re after, try Ricky Tomlinson’s Cheers . . . My Arse, an “arsey collection of famous hell-raisers”. 
 
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Christopher Foyle, chairman of Foyle’s the bookseller, reads “six newspapers a day”, together with “the Economist, the Spectator and specialist periodicals on my various other interests”, which include “archaeology, ancient civilizations, the origin of races, travel and topography, aviation, genealogy and parapsychology”. Out of his hobby has emerged Foyle’s Philavery, being “an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words” (Chambers, £9.99).

The philavery is arranged alphabetically, and the first entry is abacinate, “to blind someone by putting red hot metal before their eyes”, a word more uncommon than pleasing. It would give us pleasure to use in conversation abactinal, “located on the side or end of the body opposite to where the mouth is found”, but the definition leaves us unsure what it means. However, it will be pleasing, on the day that we meet “someone who studies mites and ticks”, to say, “You are an acarologist”. More pleasing still, moving on to the letter C, will be the opportunity to refer to the callipygian profile – “buttocks that are beautifully proportioned” – of the person walking in front of us. We should take care not to confuse this compliment with another, dasypygal, “having hairy buttocks”.

Many of Mr Foyle’s uncommon words are given without derivation or evidence that anyone ever used them – deblaterate, to prattle; limicolous, living in mud; risse, a brawl – but it is pleasing when he backs himself up. For example, dangleation: dallying with girls, comes from a letter written by Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, during the early reign of George II: “Hampton Court is very different from the place you knew . . . . Frizelation, flirtation and dangelation are now no more”. It is pleasing to learn that the word juke, for “a dodge or feint” by a football player, common in Scotland but in desuetude in England, derives from “Middle English jowken, to bend in a supple way”, and that the verb prink, to smarten up, is related to “German prank and Dutch pronk”. We are more uncommon than we were a moment ago for knowing that xenoglossia is “the spontaneous use of a foreign language that the user has not heard before”. Foyle’s Philavery will make of you a xenoglot.
 
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A reader from Brooklyn offers a submission to Metafiction II, in which writers or other artists make reference to themselves in their own work. The suggestion is a good one – the major general in The Pirates of Penzance who could “whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore” – but the up-to-date will be aware that Metafiction II was closed three weeks ago.

There is always ground to explore, however, and we can offer a new challenge. In Metafiction I, we looked for novels in which a character was reading or writing a novel of the same name as that in which he or she appeared (eg, The Tremor of Forgery). Metafiction II is described above. For Metafiction III, we seek works of fiction which feature a character or characters from someone else’s fiction – preferably in a walk-on part. Prequels (Wide Sargasso Sea), sequels (Mrs de Winter), different-perspective narratives (The Wind Done Gone), don’t count.