A STEADY PLAY BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY

Hugo Pratt created Corto Maltese in 1967, when he had already reached his maturity as cartoonist and scriptwriter. He managed to make Corto a real contemporary myth to the extent that some readers firmly believe that this adventurous and unflappable sailor, a humanistic and cultured dandy born on 10th July 1887 and disappeared – not died, which is a fundamental undertone – around 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, has truly existed.

TELLING WHAT’S TRUE AS IF IT WERE FALSE AND VICEVERSA

In the false true biography of the sailor with the earring, the comic book “Corto Maltese in Siberia” on which the cartoon film “Corto Maltese” was based can be placed between “The Celts” (1917-1918) and “Fable of Venice” (from 19th to 25th April 1920). As to tales, “Corto Maltese in Siberia” was right from the beginning a comic strip that clearly showed the reason why in his stories Hugo Pratt steady intermingled fact and fiction, which became one of the most characteristic aspects of all his comic strips. Corto Maltese says: “It would be wonderful to live in a tale”. Addressing the creator of them both, too, his interlocutor Gold Mouth replies: “But you steady live in a tale even if you don’t realize it anymore. When an adult enters the world of tales, he can no longer leave it. You didn’t know that?”…

Hugo Pratt’s master for his tales was Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). “Dedicated to Corto Maltese” (Kesselring, 1985), a work paying homage to this cartoonist, starts as follows: “Borges has taught us a very important thing, that is, how to tell lies as if they were true. It is from him that I have learnt how to tell the truth as if it were a lie”. This is an indicative statement for anyone wishing to understand Pratt’s way of going about fiction.

When after 1961 Borges was discovered in Europe, Pratt, who had lived in Argentina during the Fifties, had already read all his works. He loved this author, who had imbued his stories with very complex intellectual mystifications. In this way, J. L. Borges summarised and commented ‘basic’ literary works that had never existed or wrote biographies of great phantom authors who had the same name of his former schoolmates… Borges and Hugo Pratt greatly appreciated those authors who were particularly skilful at intermingling fact and fiction like, for example, Daniel Defoe, who wrote several false true biographies, and Joseph Conrad, who sometimes did not manage to clearly distinguish real and fictional events resulting from his past experience as sea-captain. In his comic strips, Pratt also re-adapted in his personal way some stories by J. L. Borges, as Bernardo Bertolucci also did in his film “La strategia del ragno” (The spider’s stratagem, 1970).

Pratt’s works are certainly based on the enormous experience he gained during his life spent travelling all over the world, which was later put into a new form through his peculiar instinctive stroke. Based on the strong opposition between black and white to obtain expressionist effects, it manages to evoke the atmosphere and places experienced and visited by this Venetian artist steady travelling around the world. Even though Pratt’s scripts always include some elements of their author’s personal life, they are steady supported by Pratt’s great imagination. They basically refer to the adventure genre but are also greatly affected by Pratt’s intellectual curiosity and eclectism that led him to be averse to any hierarchy between different cultural fields. On the other hand, Pratt complained about the fact that his means of expression – the comics – is often excluded from culture. According to this approach, history, literature, cinema, painting and comics in particular greatly contribute to culture and are ‘reviewed’ through several references often treated with distance and irony.