The Broken Ear

The Broken Ear (L'Oreille cassée)
Cover of the English edition
Date	1937 (black and white) 1943 (colour)
Series	The Adventures of Tintin
Publisher	Casterman
Creative team
Creator	Hergé
Original publication
Published in	Le Petit Vingtième
Date of publication	5 December 1935 – 25 February 1937
Language	French
Translation
Publisher	Methuen
Date	1975
Translator	Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper Michael Turner
Chronology
Preceded by	The Blue Lotus (1936)
Followed by	The Black Island (1938)

The Broken Ear (Template:Lang-fr, originally published in English as Tintin and the Broken Ear) is the sixth volume of The Adventures of Tintin, the comics series by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé. Commissioned by the conservative Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle for its children's supplement Le Petit Vingtième, it was serialised weekly from December 1935 to February 1937. The story tells of young Belgian reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy, as he pursues the thieves of a South American fetish identifiable by its broken right ear. In doing so, he ends up in the fictional nation of San Theodoros, where he becomes embroiled in a war and discovers the Arumbaya tribe deep in the forest.

The Broken Ear was a commercial success and was published in book form shortly after its conclusion. Hergé continued The Adventures of Tintin with The Black Island, while the series itself became a defining part of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition. In 1943, The Broken Ear was coloured and reformatted for republication by Casterman. The Broken Ear introduces the recurring character General Alcazar, and was the first to include fictional countries. The story was adapted for both the 1956 Belvision animation, Hergé's Adventures of Tintin, and for the 1991 Ellipse/Nelvana animated series The Adventures of Tintin.

Synopsis

Tintin investigates when a fetish created by the Arumbaya tribe of South America is stolen from Brussels' Museum of Ethnography, only to be returned the following day. Tintin realizes the replacement is a fake, as the real one, unlike the fake, has a small piece of the central part of its right ear missing and he draws a connection to a local sculptor named Jacob Balthazar who recently died: Tintin figures out that he was murdered. Balthazar's parrot—the only witness to the murder—is obtained by two Hispanic men, Alonso Pérez and Ramón Bada, who are also after the fetish, and try to kill Tintin after he begins investigating the crime. From the parrot, Alonso, Ramón and Tintin all discover that Balthazar was murdered by Rodrígo Tortilla, and they follow him aboard a ship bound for South America. There, Alonso and Ramón murder Tortilla, but find he did not have the original fetish. Tintin arranges their arrest when the ship docks at Los Dopicos, capital of San Theodoros.

However, Alonso and Ramón do not remain arrested for long, and in the city they have Tintin framed as a terrorist, arrested, and sentenced to death by firing squad; but he survives when a revolution successfully topples the government, and the new leader, General Alcazar, appoints Tintin his aide-de-camp. Alonso and Ramón capture Tintin, and interrogate him in hopes of finding the original fetish, but he escapes and apprehends them.

Meanwhile, Colonel Diaz, who was demoted to Corporal for questioning General Alcazar's orders to make Tintin a colonel, joins an anarchist group with the intent of murdering both Tintin and General Alcazar. However, his first two assassination attempts only end up backfiring: a bomb Diaz throws into Alcazar's office gets thrown back out by Tintin and hits him into a fountain, and his sombrero is set on fire by the remains of one of Alcazar's cigars (which also ends him up in the fountain). Another bomb Diaz places next to the palace only ends up producing a loud bang, powerful enough to blow a statue's head off its body and onto his own head, but briefly gets Alcazar hospitalized for shock, leaving Tintin, as aide-de-camp, to take over Alcazar's duties for awhile. After his own recovery, Diaz tries to make another assassination attempt using a time bomb, but this too backfires when his watch stops and a power cut stops all of Los Dopicos' clocks, causing Diaz to lose track of time and get killed by his own bomb when it goes off.

While taking over Alcazar's duties, Tintin meets with Mr. Trickler, the head of the General American Oil Company, who wants Alcazar to go to war against neighboring Nuevo Rico over the oil-rich Gran Chapo region (ironically, the head of British-American Petrol, the rival company of General American Oil, wants the General of Nuevo Rico to go to war against San Theodoros for the same reason), but when Tintin opposes this, Mr. Tricker begins plans to get rid of him. Mr. Trickler's right hand man hires mercenary Pablo to kill Tintin, but his assassination attempt is botched when he gets hit by a bunch of bananas cut by a knife thrown by Ramon, as the result of Ramon's own, coincidentally simultaneous, botched attempt on Tintin's life (and in doing so, causing Ramon to be painfully wounded). Tintin, however, spares Pablo after getting his confession. Later, when Alcazar is better, with the help of the head of a weapons company (who, like Mr. Trickler and the head of British-American Petrol, is also corrupt), Mr. Trickler gets Tintin framed as a spy and imprisoned, but with the aid of Pablo, Tintin escapes imprisonment and recapture.

After crossing the border into Nuevo Rico, Tintin gets captured by the border patrol there who think he is part of an attack by San Theodoros, thereby starting the war that he had wanted to prevent, but he escapes and decides to return to his original job of finding the fetish: he enters the forest to find the Arumbayas, in the hope they can explain to him why people would wish to steal the fetish. From a British explorer, Ridgewell, living among the Arumbaya, Tintin learns that during the Walker Expedition that visited the tribe in 1872, a diamond was stolen and figures out it was hidden inside the statue by Lopez, the expedition's interpreter. After another run in with Alonso and Ramon, Tintin makes it to Sanfacion, capital of Nuevo Rico, and catches a ship back to Europe. At the same time, after it is discovered that there is no oil in the Gran Chapo region after all, San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico call a ceasefire and prepare to sign a peace treaty to end the war that was fought over nothing.

Returning to Belgium, Tintin discovers that Balthazar's brother has produced a long line of exact replicas of the fetish, which he had discovered among his deceased brother's belongings, and learns that the original has been purchased by a wealthy American, Mr. Goldbarr; now aboard a ship to the United States. Catching up to the boat, Tintin finds that Alonso and Ramón are aboard, and they struggle for the possession of the fetish. It smashes on the deck, with the diamond falling into the sea. Tintin, Alonso and Ramón struggle, and fall overboard. Tintin is rescued, but Alonso and Ramón drown and are shown en route to Hell. Goldbarr gives Tintin the stolen fetish to return to the museum, where it is bandaged and put back on display.

History

Background and research

Georges Remi—best known under the pen name Hergé—was employed as editor and illustrator of Le Petit Vingtième ("The Little Twentieth"), a children's supplement to Le Vingtième Siècle ("The Twentieth Century"), a staunchly Roman Catholic, conservative Belgian newspaper based in Hergé's native Brussels which was run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez. In 1929, Hergé began The Adventures of Tintin comic strip for Le Petit Vingtième, revolving around the exploits of fictional Belgian reporter Tintin. Wallez ordered Hergé to set his first adventure in the Soviet Union as anti-socialist propaganda for children (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets), to set his second adventure in the Belgian Congo to encourage colonial sentiment (Tintin in the Congo), and to set his third adventure in the United States to use the story as a denunciation of American capitalism (Tintin in America). Wallez was subsequently removed from the paper's editorship following a scandal, although Hergé was convinced to stay on the condition of a salary increase. In preparing The Broken Ear, Hergé developed the new habit of keeping plot notes and ideas in a notebook. He also began making cuttings of photographs and other images from magazines and newspapers, filing them away for future use; he used them as a basis for many of the drawings in The Broken Ear.

Paraguayan troops in Alihuatá, 1932, during the Chaco War

Hergé used The Broken Ear to allude to real events that had recently taken place in South America. The fictional countries of San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico were based on the real countries Bolivia and Paraguay, while the Gran Chapo War depicted in the strip was an allusion to the Chaco War (1932–35) that was waged between Bolivian and Paraguayan forces over lucrative oil fields in the Gran Chaco region. The name "Gran Chapo" was a pun on the French grand chapeau, meaning "big hat", while the name Nuevo Rico was a pun on nouveau riche and the name of the Nuevo Rican capital city, Sanfación, was a pun on sans façon, meaning "without manners". Hergé's character Basil Bazarov, of the Vicking Arms Company Ltd (Basil Mazaroff in the 1937 edition), was a thinly veiled allusion to the real-life Greek weapons seller Basil Zaharoff of Vickers Armstrong, who profited from the conflict by supplying arms to both Paraguay and Bolivia. Hergé had learned about the conflict and the western corporations profiting from it through two issues of anti-conformist Belgian magazine La Crapouillot (The Mortar Shell), which covered news stories ignored by the mainstream media. It is also likely that he had read Richard Lewinsohn's 1930 book Zaharoff, l'Européen mystérieux (Zaharoff, the Mysterious European), which had been referenced in La Crapouillot.

Hergé's Arumbaya fetish was based on the design of a genuine Peruvian statue in Brussels' Royal Museums of Art and History; a pre-Columbian Chimu statue, it was made of wood and dated to between 1200 and 1438 CE. Whereas Hergé had access to speakers of Mandarin when creating The Blue Lotus, he had no access to speakers of indigenous Amerindian languages, and as such, the Arumbaya language that he developed was entirely fictitious. He based its structure largely on the Brusselier dialect spoken in the Marolles area of Brussels, mixed with Spanish endings and constructions. In developing the Arumbaya's rivals, the Bibaros, he was influenced by anthropological accounts of head shrinking among the Jibaros tribes; when Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner translated the book into English, they renamed the Bibaros as the Rumbabas, a pun on the rum baba pudding. The explorer Ridgewell, found living among the Arumbayas is based upon the British explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who mysteriously disappeared into the Amazon jungle in 1925. In crafting the story, Hergé was possibly influenced by The Maltese Falcon, as there are similarities in their plots.

Original publication

A scene from The Broken Ear on the cover of Le Petit Vingtième

The Broken Ear was first serialised in Le Petit Vingtième from December 1935 under the title Tintin et Milou chez les Arumbayas (Tintin and Snowy among the Arumbayas). From 7 February 1937, the story was also serialised in the French Catholic newspaper, Cœurs Vaillants. In 1937, it was collected in a single hardcover volume and published by Éditions Casterman under the title L'Oreille cassée (The Broken Ear). For this collected edition, one small change was made; the minor character of Carajo was renamed Caraco, because the word carajo is Spanish slang for penis.

The Broken Ear introduced the character General Alcazar to the series, who went on to become a recurring character who appeared in three further Adventures. As noted by Hergé biographer Harry Thompson, The Broken Ear is the first story in the Tintin series to "start and finish in home surroundings" and the first to deal with the hunt for a specific object. It also marks the last story in which Tintin is seen taking part in journalistic activity and the first time that the Adventures featured Tintin's flat at 26 Labrador Road, in which Chinese mementos from The Blue Lotus are visible. Influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Hergé inserted an illustration of himself into the second frame. He also made reference to contemporary news stories in the book, having a radio announcer discuss the ongoing Second Italo-Ethiopian War at the start of the story; this was removed in the colour edition. At the end of the story, Hergé killed off Ramón and Alonso and depicted them being dragged to Hell by devils; the killing of the story's antagonists was something not repeated in future stories. This upset the editors of Cœurs Vaillants, who asked Hergé to change the scene; annoyed at their request, he later commented, "On the surface it cost me nothing, but that kind of addition was really difficult for me." For their serialisation of the story, he replaced that particular frame with one in which Tintin vouchsafed the souls of Ramón and Alonso for God.

Second version, 1943

In the 1940s and 1950s, when Hergé's popularity had increased, he and his team at Studios Hergé redrew and coloured many of the original black-and-white Tintin adventures using the ligne claire ("clear line") drawing style he had developed so that they visually fitted in with the new Tintin stories being created. The Broken Ear was the first of these early Adventures to undergo the reformatting and colouration, and this second edition was published as a 62-page volume by Casterman in 1943. Unlike some of the earlier adventures, The Broken Ear was not redrawn, save for a few minor revisions. To reduce the length of the book, various sections were excised, including a dream sequence that appeared in the original. As the colouration process was new to the series, the use of colour in The Broken Ear is more basic than in later volumes; as the book progresses, it is evident that Hergé lost interest and rushed the task, for instance, resorting to using block colour backgrounds without any detail.

Later publications and legacy

Casterman republished the original black-and-white version in 1979 in a French-language collected volume with Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus, the second part of the Archives Hergé collection. In 1986, Casterman published a facsimile version of the original.

Hergé returned to creating fictional nations as allusions to real countries in subsequent Adventures, such as Syldavia and Borduria (based largely on Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany) in King Ottokar's Sceptre and Sondonesia (based on Indonesia) in Flight 714 to Sydney. He also re-used other elements pioneered in The Broken Ear in his later Adventures: a parrot in The Castafiore Emerald, a ravine crash in The Calculus Affair, a fireball and vivid dream in The Seven Crystal Balls, and a firing squad in Tintin and the Picaros. Tintin returned to San Theodores in Tintin and the Picaros, in which the characters Pablo and Ridgewell also made a reappearance.

In 1979, the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels held an exhibition marking fifty years of The Adventures of Tintin. As part of this, they included artefacts that featured in the series, with the broken-eared Peruvian statue that inspired Hergé's Arumbaya fetish as the centre piece of the show; however, they feared that it might be stolen, so a replica was exhibited rather than the genuine article. Imitating the events of The Broken Ear, a thief broke in and stole the statue. A letter was then sent to Le Soir in which an individual alleging to be the thief stated that the item would be returned if Hergé returned to the scene of the crime at a certain time with a copy of the book under his right arm. Hergé did so, but carried the book under his left arm; the thief never appeared, and the replica fetish was never recovered.

Critical analysis

The Chimú statuette from the Cinquantenaire Museum which was copied into the adventure by Hergé.

Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier described The Broken Ear as "a Blue Lotus-lite", noting that it shared many elements with the previous Adventure, although they also considered it to be "more reminiscent of the earlier, more caricatured books" like Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America with the inclusion of comical natives and absurdist elements like "comical bombs". They nevertheless thought that it exhibited a "marked improvement" in Hergé's use of plotting, noting that the story was clearly structured, praising the "very effective, dramatic story, with plenty of twists". Overall, they awarded The Broken Ear two stars out of five. Harry Thompson felt that The Broken Ear had a "slightly lacklustre quality" to it, and was "disappointing" due to the fact that the "various elements don't gel well together." He believed that the artistic quality and the use of research deteriorated as the Adventure progressed, although it had "the most complex plot yet, by a long way". Philippe Goddin asserted that in the story, Tintin develops from a "classic reporter to an investigative journalist."

Michael Farr described The Broken Ear as a "moral condemnation of capitalism, imperialism and war", although felt that it was "not as perfectly constructed" as The Blue Lotus, being "less detailed and realistic". He thought that the image in which Ramón and Alonso drown in the sea and are dragged to Hell by demons was "truly medieval" and represented the "most fanciful image" in the entire series. He also opined that Hergé's depiction of South American militaries was "full of humour" and that the detail was "generally very accurate". Biographer Benoît Peeters thought that The Broken Ear was a return to "pure adventure" from the "quasi-documentary realism" of The Blue Lotus, and that in this Adventure, politics remains "in the second line", and that instead Hergé let "the narrative rip and succeeds marvellously." Elsewhere, he praised the work as having a "formidable dynamism" and an "unequaled vitality", containing a "revolution" in narrative structure. He thought that it served as a "perfect metaphor" for the theories of German philosopher Walter Benjamin published in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), which Hergé had not read. Literary critic Tom McCarthy thought that Balthazar was an example of the interesting minor characters that imbue the Adventures, commenting that his "down-at-heel garret speaks volumes of loneliness and semi-realised artistry." He also opined that the diamond within the fetish was the clitoris of the Arumbaya, describing it as "their pleasure, wrapped up in a fetish". He also thought that there was a homosexual subtext between Ramón and Alonso, believing that the scene in which a bullet was fired into Ramón's buttocks was symbolic of anal sex.

Writing in Libération, the philosopher Michel Serres opined that The Broken Ear was "a treatise on fetishism". Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University believed that The Broken Ear established a "tintinian" anthropology that would remain throughout the rest of the series. As part of this, Apostolidès argued, Hergé distances himself from western values and looks at his own society as an outsider, accomplishing what Roger Caillois called "sociological revolution". He felt that the comic was "more contrived" and "more superficial" than the previous Adventures, and that here Tintin loses his position as "the sole point of identification" for the reader, with the other characters becoming more identifiable. Opining that there was a constant theme of twos throughout the story (i.e. the real and the fake fetish, Alonso and Ramón), he thought that the character of Ridgewell was "a kind of Tintin, grown old among the natives, solitary and ill humored", noting that Ridgewell's position among the Arumbayas was akin to Tintin's position among the Ba Baorom in Congo. Apostolidès also argued that in the comic, Alcazar was a religious figure, who attained a "sacred" quality through the spilling of blood in his revolt against General Tapioca's government. As part of this, he argued that the threats of assassination would make him a martyr, or a "holy king."

Adaptations

The Broken Ear is one of The Adventures of Tintin that were adapted for the first series of the animated Hergé's Adventures of Tintin by the Belgian studio Belvision in 1957, directed by Ray Goossens and written by Michel Greg. The Broken Ear was divided up into six 5-minute black-and-white episodes that diverted from Hergé's original plot in a variety of ways.

It was also adapted into a 1991 episode of The Adventures of Tintin television series by French studio Ellipse and Canadian animation company Nelvana. Directed by Stéphane Bernasconi, Thierry Wermuth voiced the character of Tintin. The episode deviates significantly from the original story line. The passage containing Tintin's drunkenness has been ignored entirely, keeping the character consistent with how it is seen in the rest of series - upright, conscientious and of commendable moral standards. Besides, the political narratives, almost ubiquitously present in the latter part of the original album, have also been largely overlooked. Tintin's conflict with the military was also replaced with one with Alonso Pérez and Ramón Bada.

References

Bibliography

• Apostolidès, Jean-Marie (2010) [2006]. The Metamorphoses of Tintin, or Tintin for Adults. Jocelyn Hoy (translator). Stanford: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-6031-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Assouline, Pierre (2009) [1996]. Hergé, the Man Who Created Tintin. Charles Ruas (translator). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-539759-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Farr, Michael (2001). Tintin: The Complete Companion. London: John Murray. ISBN 978-0-7195-5522-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Goddin, Philippe (2008). The Art of Hergé, Inventor of Tintin: Volume I, 1907–1937. Michael Farr (translator). San Francisco: Last Gasp. ISBN 978-0-86719-706-8. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hergé (1975) [1943]. The Broken Ear. Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner (translators). London: Egmont. ISBN 978-0-416-83450-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Lofficier, Jean-Marc; Lofficier, Randy (2002). The Pocket Essential Tintin. Harpenden, Hertfordshire: Pocket Essentials. ISBN 978-1-904048-17-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• McCarthy, Tom (2006). Tintin and the Secret of Literature. London: Granta. ISBN 978-1-86207-831-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Peeters, Benoît (1989). Tintin and the World of Hergé. London: Methuen Children's Books. ISBN 978-0-416-14882-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Peeters, Benoît (2012) [2002]. Hergé: Son of Tintin. Tina A. Kover (translator). Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-1-4214-0454-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pleban, Dafna (7 November 2006). "Investigating the Clear Line Style". Comicfoundry. Retrieved 4 August 2013. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Thompson, Harry (1991). Tintin: Hergé and his Creation. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-52393-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• The Broken Ear at the Official Tintin Website
• The Broken Ear at Tintinologist.org