The Untaxonomised Remainder: Daoist Epistemology and Orientalist Containment in Hergé’s Tintin in Tibet

Abstract

Hergé suffering from documented psychological crisis and the production of Tintin in Tibet converges into the dive toward reading and manifesting Taoism. An album that is built on pillars of an unverifiable dream, a vindicated mystical vision, and a creature, the Yeti. This paper reads these narrative devices against primary Daoist sources, the Daode jing in D. C. Lau’s translation and the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi in Burton Watson’s translation. Building upon Saidian account od imaginative geography and on postcolonial children’s theory, the paper argues that the album enacts a genuine, biographically grounded suspension of Western rational and taxonomic authority. Tintin in Tibet suspends continuously and systematically contains epistemological humility and converts into physical conquest, a rescued character’s testimony is deferred until it costs him nothing, and the Yeti’s irreducibility is finally redescribed as a pending taxonomy rather than a permanent excess. The paper concludes that Tintin in Tibet represents neither an authentic vehicle of Daoist thought nor a generic instance of Western Tibetan fantasy, but a more specific and instructive case whose real philosophical reaching was authentic, and containment of that reaching was equally real, the two facts coexisting rather than cancelling.