Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World (New York, NY, William Morrow and Company, 1993).
The novel may come across at first as another too-cute postmodern experiment. It has all the earmarks of its genre: high and low culture mixed together, a pastiche of literary styles, a framing device drawn from pop culture that is used to explore highbrow themes (similar to Robert Coover's fabulist technique in a book like, say, A Political Fable)—all interlarded with a sense of irony.
In a world that has been taken over by postmodernism, much of this seems less interesting now than it did in the '70s-'90s. After all, we are all postmodernists now. Default educated opinion is culturally omnivorous, and no longer finds it shocking to juxtapose a children's cartoon with characters from Thomas Mann. We all unthinkingly engage in the same kind of bricolage each day.
But if you get past the "experimental" quality of it all—which, as I say, no longer seems so experimental to today's readers—the book is strangely haunting and poignant. Its major theme is the loss of innocence. And this is, it must be said, one that comes naturally to postmodern fabulism. Pop culture is always naïve. And the central device of the postmodern genre is to juxtapose pop and "serious" culture.
It is no coincidence that John Barth was already exploring the theme of innocence disabused, even before he discovered the techniques of postmodernism. His relatively straightforward (though irony-laced) historical novel, The Sot-Weed Factor, is essentially a Candide. To carry this same theme into fabulism is a logical next step. One sets archetypes of childhood against a cynical adult backdrop.
This is perhaps the core of all postmodern literature. It is rooted in parody and pastiche. And, as the U.S. Supreme Court once put it: all parody is in some sense "a comment on the naïveté of the original." This is where that famous (perhaps notorious) "irony" of the genre comes from. The Cat in the Hat runs for president. Or, Tintin sits down to discourse with characters from The Magic Mountain.
Tuten's theme of "innocence lost" therefore follows naturally from the techniques of postmodern fabulist fiction. But the book also reveals some of his more idiosyncratic obsessions. There are the sudden intrusions of unattributed literary quotations in place of Tuten's own narration, for instance (I haven't tracked down the sources for all of them, but one is from a now-largely-forgotten Fenimore Cooper novel).
This same device is one Tuten used much more extensively in The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (a book that shares the present novel's postmodern and "pop art" sensibility—the novel as pop art—one Warhol, the other Lichtenstein). The lesser-known works in the oeuvre of Fenimore Cooper were also a major source for Tuten there—lending to him an interest in the Venetian republic, for instance.
The cautionary aspect of Venice's decline into tyranny is a theme that interested more than one nineteenth century American writer (Twain writes of it in The Innocents Abroad, for instance). It seemed to Fenimore Cooper as well to represent one potential danger to which the American republic might succumb. Tuten references this aspect of its history in both Mao and here, in the Tintin book.
There is even a stray reference or two to hydropower that evokes a passage from The Adventures of Mao. Tuten is therefore working through his familiar themes. But they are explored in greater depth here, and to greater emotional effect. Despite being a pastiche of Hergé and Mann and Cooper and god knows what all else, this is nonetheless the sort of book that can make one tear up with a strange loneliness.
I gather from the Goodreads page that the novel has its detractors. I'm sure many people pick up a copy expecting it to be a Tintin book—a straightforward continuation of his adventures—and are disappointed to find out it is avant-garde literature. I, however, was unhampered in my enjoyment of it by previous intimacy with or affection for the works of Hergé. So I was free to read it for what it is.
Since the book deserves many more print runs, I offer—per usual—my services as copyeditor, free of charge:
p. 78 "dip into principle." Sic—in the context of finance, should be "principal."
p. 154 "Fitche" Sic—should be Fichte.
p. 167 "powerless of the wretched" Sic—should be "powerlessness"
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