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Part of
Dimensions of Iconicity
Edited by Angelika Zirker, Matthias Bauer, Olga Fischer and Christina Ljungberg
[Iconicity in Language and Literature 15] 2017
► pp. 209–228

Reading across the gutter

Tintin’s interrupted railway journeys

| University of Zurich

This paper offers a metapoetic analysis of the train journeys in Hergé’s Tintin series as a comment on the reading experience, discussing the process of reading comics in terms of a phenomenology of interruption. Comics are structurally dependent on interruptions: divided into strips and panels that are separated by “gutters”, they disrupt the flow of reading. Implying movement and division, mirroring the direction of reading and referring beyond the individual panels in which they appear only partially, Hergé’s trains and railways lines can be usefully understood as diagrams of the reader’s progression from panel to panel. The many accidents and interruptions that mark the railway journeys in Tintin resonate with the anxieties around speed and transportation that accompanied the railroad from its inception; it is argued that these interruptions are transferred to the reader’s experience of the fragmented space of the comic book itself. This paper thus contends that the series’ unified and controlled vision of a global network is disrupted by the spatial structure of the comic book as experienced in the reading process. This disruption is epitomised by the railroad, and Tintin’s trains are diagrammatically related to the process of reading comics as a process marked by interruptions.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Immersion or interruption? Poulet’s phenomenology of reading
  • 3.Reading comics: Gutters, gaps, interruptions
  • 4. Tintin’s trains: Diagrams of interrupted reading
  • 5.(Detour) communication and transport: Michel Serres
  • 6.Interference: Accidents, derailments, explosions
  • 7.Modernity and global space: The blind spots of Tintin’s world(s)
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 September 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ill.15.12riq
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