Mimesis International

MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE n. 1 PLOTS AND PLOTTERS Double Agents and Villains in Spy Fictions Edited by Carmen Concilio MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL Published with the contribution of the University of Turin - Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures. © 2015 – MIMESIS INTERNATIONAL www.mimesisinternational.com e-mail: [email protected] Isbn: 9788869770319 Book series: Literature n. 1 © MIM Edizioni Srl P.I. C.F. 02419370305 TABLE OF CONTENTS Paolo Bertinetti FOREWORD 7 Silvia Albertazzi IAN MCEWAN’S INNOCENT SPIES 9 Paolo Bertinetti SMILEY AND THE DOUBLE AGENT OF TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY: IN THE NOVEL BY LE CARRÉ AND IN THE FILM BY TOMAS ALFREDSON 25 Paola Carmagnani MATA HARI: AN ICON OF MODERNITY 33 Carmen Concilio FIGURES OF DOUBLE-NESS IN THE HUMAN FACTOR BY GRAHAM GREENE 55 Irene De Angelis ‘OUR CAMBRIDGE VILLAINS’: ALAN BENNETT’S DOUBLE AGENTS 69 Paola Della Valle CRIMINAL MINDS: REPRESENTING VILLAINS IN WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM’S ASHENDEN 85 Lucia Folena DARK CORNERS AND DOUBLE BODIES: ESPIONAGE AS TRANSGRESSION IN MEASURE FOR MEASURE 105 Alessio Mattana THE CHINESE SPY. DUPLICITY AND DISSIMULATION IN GOLDSMITH’S CHINESE LETTERS 125 Nadia Priotti DOUBLE AGENTS, MULTIPLE MOTIVES: JOSEPH CONRAD’S SPIES 141 Chiara Simonigh AN ANTI-BOND HERO AND HIS WORDS: TOMAS ALFREDSON’S TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY 161 FOREWORD The enemy is the villain. In the early twentieth century espionage narratives, above all in John Buchan’s novels, the enemy is the man who deliberately pursues evil and he is a foreigner. In Ian Fleming’s novels and in many other spy stories written in the Fifties and the Sixties of the last century the enemy is a foreigner and a communist. It is also true, however, that, at least after Gra- ham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, the identity of the enemy is hard to pinpoint. The uncertainty arises with the figure of the double agent, who operates on two fronts and whose loyalty is never to be trusted. In the tradition of secret-agent stories which was started by Maugham and was confirmed in the novels by Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Len Deighton and John le Carré, double agentry is a central theme. Several different motives can convince a spy to turn double agent: money or ideology, but also, in some cases, fear of being exposed. If an agent feels that he cannot keep his activities completely concealed from the enemy, he may find it convenient to become one of the enemy’s own agents. Above all, if he has been, as le Carré has revealed to his readers, “out in the cold”, alone, for a long period of time. The double agent is a most tragically isolated human being because he must behave as if “every man’s hand is against him”. He cannot share his mind and heart with anybody; he must lie to one and all. He enters into such a state of isolation that this very isolation can only be overcome through self-revelation, flight or death. But it must be acknowledged that the condition of the double agent can be dealt with in two different ways. In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, the story deals with opera- 8 Plots and Plotters tions initiated by the protagonist’s own espionage organization which betrays the protagonist himself; the British Secret Service enforces a complex cover up of a double agent planted in East Germany’s espionage organization. The ‘mole’ is responsible for several murders, a totally negative figure, someone who deliberately pursues evil – but who is on ‘our’ side, ‘our man’. In The Human Factor some of the British Intelligence big bosses try to discover which one of their agents is a ‘mole’, and when they identify him in the insignificant Davis, they organize his ‘accidental’ murder. As it happens Davis is not the ‘mole’. The double agent is Castle, who is indebted to the Russians for having smuggled his black South African wife out of the country. Davis’s death compels Castle to help the enemy one more time, even if he knows that this will mean his own ruin. However, Cas- tle’s moral stature makes the reader empathize with him, that is with someone who works for the enemy. We are brought to realize that espionage occurs in such a dark, fuzzy, confused and confusing area of human relationships that it is often difficult to tell who the enemy really is and even when we do see them as they are, we must admit that sometimes our sympathies go with the ‘mole’, and not with the double-agent hunters. The human factor has the upper hand. Paolo Bertinetti IAN MCEWAN’S INNOCENT SPIES SILVIA ALBERTAZZI (University of Bologna) Writers are like spies, poking into failures and weaknesses for good stories. Hanif Kureishi When Ian McEwan published a new novel, The Innocent, at the beginning of 1990, after three years of silence, many review- ers were rather perplexed. They expected a story of anomalous passions (like The Comfort of Strangers) or morbid adolescence (like The Cement Garden), or a plot supported by a multi-layered narrative structure (like The Child in Time), while The Innocent seemed to be a traditional, linear spy story, apparently without any postmodern winks to deeper hidden meanings. It did not re- veal, either, any metafictional or auto-referential elements dis- guised as popular fiction tricks. It wasjust a spy story, belonging to a “minor” genre, even though it was written by a major author. This is why, while looking for all the possible interpretations sug- gested by the novel’s title and the subtitle – A Special Relation- ship – we must also take into account the specificity of spy fiction as a genre. Indeed, whilst all possible readings spring from the usual scenario of spy stories, the novel acquires deeper meaning thanks to the author’s explicit or implicit reference to narrative and filmic intertexts. A Special Relationship As stated before, at first sightThe Innocent seems a typical spy story set in Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The plot is 10 Plots and Plotters rather simple: in the ruined city, full of secret agents of all nation- alities, the Americans and the English dig a tunnel to intercept telephone calls in the Russian zone between reciprocal diffidence and incomprehension. This is ‘Operation Gold’, which actually took place in Berlin in 1955, and, as shown in McEwan’s novel, was betrayed by a George Blake (who appears in the book as a minor character). Deriving his information mostly from a volume on the British spy system called Spycatcher, which was the object of wide polemic and severe censorship in the late Eighties, McE- wan describes the “special relationship” between the English and the Americans – as his subtitle suggests: a relationship mainly based on suspicion and resentment. As McEwan’s novel shows, not all the people working at the American General Quarter knew about Operation Gold. Those engaged in the warehouse thought they were involved in the import-export of technologies, while the people at the radar station could not decipher coded messages concerning Operation Gold, since only the few who had access to the tunnel knew what it was for. Moreover, it was not easy for the Americans and the English to establish an even relationship. The latter, who were convinced they were the true heroes of the war, resented the attitude of the Americans, who considered them as losers, since they had just lost a great Empire (and, consequently, all their former power). It is not by chance that the action of The Innocent takes place in 1955, just one year before the Suez crisis and the definitive pas- sage of the hegemony over the Orient from Great Britain to the United States. It is quite easy to detect the influence of such spy story mas- ters like Graham Greene and William Somerset Maugham on the novel, whilst the attention McEwan pays to the bureaucracy of espionage and the platitude of a spy’s everyday life has nothing to do with James Bond’s glamorous universe. On the contrary, the frozen atmosphere of winter in Berlin, together with the obses- sion for – and the ironical uselessness of – betrayal remind one of le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Yet, more than any other spy novel, Lein Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin seems to haunt McEwan’s world: not by chance, since Deighton’s classi- S. Albertazzi - Ian McEwan’s Innocent Spies 11 cal spy story is considered the archetype of all spy fiction set in Berlin in the 50s of last century. The plot of The Innocent pivots around the digging of a tunnel that, just like the Berlin Wall, which was to be built a few years later, is a figure of the folly generated by an excess of rationality. The very title of McEwan’s novel ironically emphasizes the folly of rationality: the protagonist, Leonard Marnham, is innocent only because his betrayal arrives too late, when George Blake has already betrayed Operation Gold. In le Carré’s words, he is “an innocent at large among professional intelligence-gatherers”.1 His innocence derives from that foolish guilelessness which, ac- cording to le Carré, contributes to the creation of a true spy, in a game of chance and betrayal. The Americans, who seem to be up- dated versions of Mark Twain’s “innocents abroad”, show anoth- er kind of ironic innocence. Similar to cartoon supermen, the Old World confuses them, and they try to conquer it with their rock and roll and their baseball.

Load more