The Politics of Secrecy
Whereas nuclear holocaust fiction introduced the idea of the “world” into anti-Communist fiction and strove to establish the unity of this world, spy thrillers split the world into two and claimed that it was always at least two worlds. This split simultaneously accounts for the obstacles that prevent the world of anti-Communism from becoming one unified entity and, at the same time, places the internal division of the world under the law of necessity. Hence the paradoxical proposition that we will examine in more detail in this chapter: in order to become one, the world must be divided.
We could, then, say that the unity of the world depends on a configuration of external and internal limits. The external limit corresponds to the global enmity characteristic of the geopolitical situation. The globe failed to become “one world” in the sense of an ideological unity due to the political opposition of East and West, the Communist world and the free world. The world will be one ideologically, once the enemy is eliminated on a global scale.
But the internal limit of the world introduces a more difficult complication. While it might appear to be a self-evident proposition that an enemy bent on world domination can prevent the free world from achieving its fullness (in the sense of realizing itself eihter as an autonomous totality or as a global order), the claim that the free world must be inherently divided in order to prevail over this enemy is likely to appear as a contradiction. The problem is that if the free world is inherently divided, then freedom is founded on exclusion. The particular exclusion that we are concerned with in this chapter, however, is not the exclusion of different minorities from the ostensibly free domain of democratic politics, but a more comprehensive exclusion which excludes the totality of democratic citizenry from directly participating in anti-Communist politics. This exclusion establishes the necessary limits of democratic politics and establishes a domain where democratic principles no longer necessarily apply.
The product of this more fundamental exclusion is the world of political secrecy. While the interaction of privacy and publicity defines what we could call “the normal world” of everyday experience, secrecy completely separates itself from these fields and institutes its own world. We can speak of this terrain of politics as a “world” in the sense that through its institutionalized mechanisms secrecy creates its own totality with its autonomous laws. One of the major gambits of anti-Communist politics was the establishment of this field as a necessary supplement of democratic politics: in order to secure the framework of democracy, executive power had to retreat into a clandestine zone where nondemocratic acts can be perpetrated in the name of democracy.
As a result, one of the most important tasks of American anti-Communist spy fiction was to legitimize this reduplication of worlds within democracy. The genre could be interpreted as a cultural reaction to one of the most decisive developments of modernity: the parallel historical emergence of absolute surveillance and the simultaneous withdrawal of executive power to the domain of secrecy.1 It participates in a form of “world politics” similar to the one we identified in the case of atomic holocaust fiction. Accordingly, secret agent fiction had to demonstrate a basic fact of anti-Communism: that politics as such is simultaneously global and clandestine.2 The function of spy fiction (as a field of representation) was to reveal the dividing line separating the normal world of democratic publicity from the secret world of espionage and to establish the relationship of these two domains as a necessary supplementarity. Just as in the case of atomic holocaust fiction, where the ideological figure of the catastrophe allowed the establishment of a field of representation within which a system of relations could be revealed to be necessary for the survival of the free world, a privileged figure appears in spy fiction as well: the secret. The necessary premise of the genre is that there is a secret vital to a given order of things, and the threat posed to this or by this secret allows the establishment of a fictional field within which a story can unfold.
The necessary reduplication of worlds is such a prominent feature of the genre that it has long been a central motif of criticism.3 One of the clearest formulations of the two-worlds thesis was provided by John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg, who argue that a “cycle of clandestinity” structures the history of the genre. The cycle consists of three phases. First, “an individual or group conceives a purpose which appears to require actions beyond the bounds of law or morality accepted by other members of their society.”4 Spy fiction always takes us beyond the limits of what is considered to be legitimate political action. In the second phase, however, once the threshold of legitimacy is crossed, a secret group is formed, which immediately leads to the creation of a secret world: “This group constitutes a clandestine world defined by the secrets they share.”5 The important point about this clandestine world is that it “exists side by side with the ordinary world in the mind of the spy. Participants in clandestinity believe that their secret world is more real than the ordinary world and that it is exempt from the rules that govern those who are not part of the clandestine world.”6 This duplicity leads to the characteristically “schizophrenic” structure of the genre, as these characters have to inhabit both worlds simultaneously.7 The final phase of the cycle marks the turning in on itself of the secret world (a conspiracy within a conspiracy) as the “clandestine group begins to feel isolated not only from ordinary society, but from other members of the group.”8 According to Cawelti and Rosenberg, the predicament of this final phase is embodied by the double agent betrayed by his or her own organization.
Let me then reformulate the three stages of Cawelti and Rosenberg’s analysis into the terms of our argument. First, the existence of a secret is acknowledged to be vital to the maintenance of a particular order of things. The metaphysical presupposition of the genre is that the world possesses a secret: one of the objects in this world is no longer a mere object, but an element that establishes the unity of the world. But its dependence on this object questions the autonomy of the world. If the unity of the world depends on a secret, the world can only be successfully constituted as “one” if the secret does not fail to perform its unifying role. In other words, if the secret remains in a relation of heteronomy to the world it maintains, the role of the secret is to make up for the failed unity of the world by supplementing its identity with an unknown yet necessary component. This is why the secret is never fully within the law it helps to establish.
Second, this heteronomy of the secret leads to the constitution of another world. Since the function of the secret is to sustain the normal world, the other world is “more real” than the normal world and exempt from the laws that govern it. The impossible closure of the normal world is supplemented by the supposed authenticity of the clandestine world. Although things might not be working according to plan in our world, those participating in the other world “know” what is really going on, and their authentic knowledge is opposed to the lack of authenticity (and the ignorance) of the normal world. While the manifest world is not one, the “real” other world is supposedly fully constituted as one.
But the final stage of clandestinity marks the reduplication of the logic of secrecy. The secret world that was supposed to provide the consistency of our incomplete world is itself revealed to be incomplete. The logic of secrecy turns against itself and makes it impossible to establish a fully functioning totality. Since the function of the foundational principle of this alternative world (secrecy) is precisely to establish alternative worlds, its effects cannot stop on the level of a first, fully constituted world. As a result of this basic principle, this alternative world will also be at least two. The arithmetic of the reduplication of the worlds cannot be a simple addition of two independent units: a world that is not quite one is supplemented by another incomplete world. We can, thus, see that rather than two fully separated independent worlds existing side by side, we get two incomplete worlds that completely intertwine each other.
We are therefore confronted with the question: How does the secret relate to the field of narration it founds? The very form of this question suggests the answer, since it demonstrates the reduplication of the role of the secret. In the fictional field of these novels, the figure of the secret assumes a double role: it is both one of the formulaic elements that make up the world of the novel and the signifier of the totality of the formula. First, we have to point out that the secret designates a limit of representation: the very term acknowledges the existence of a particular object, yet at the same time announces that it is without public representation. The figure of the secret marks the location where something could appear in the field of representation without actually doing so. In fact, it is a figurative “crease” on the surface of the form that marks the site of a possible yet absent content. There is something in our world that cannot be identified publicly yet holds this whole world together. The withdrawal of this object from the field of representation results in the creation of a site where its mere existence has to be marked. This process of withdrawal, however, establishes a field of representation within which a particular set of relations can now be represented.
Second, the split in the identity of the figure (since it stands for something other than itself) guarantees that it is primarily the figure of the consistency of the narrative. The reason why a particular story comes about in a given form and, so to say, “makes sense,” is that the secret is acknowledged to be of vital importance for the characters. On the level of the narrative, the secret accounts for the very possibility of the story (there is a story to narrate, since there is a secret); on the level of the represented world, it accounts for the possibility of a given social order (the secret must be secured in order to guarantee the stability of our world). The condition of narration has to appear in the field of narration, but it can do so only in this displaced form, as the split identity of one of the elements of the narration. In his analysis of the thriller, Jerry Palmer makes a similar point when he speaks of the “absolute structural necessity” of conspiracy in the following terms: “it is the conspiracy that drives the plot into action. Without it, there would be no reason for the hero to act.”9
So Cawelti and Rosenberg are right to compare the ideological figure of the secret to Alfred Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin,” the secret that is simultaneously vital and “beside the point.” They quote Hitchcock to illustrate this point: “And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it is beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters.”10 The point is not that the MacGuffin is absolutely irrelevant. Rather, while its actual content is insignificant for the audience, it occupies a significant position for the characters. We are speaking of a structural position that could be occupied by virtually any object. This is why Hitchcock insists that we cannot logically deduce its central position from its content. When the secret is withdrawn from the field of representation, and an object is invested with marking its existence in the “picture,” this withdrawal allows the particular configuration of characters and their various relations to be represented. Hitchcock’s comment, ultimately, points toward the same conclusion we reached earlier: the secret has to signify the very condition of narration.
In the previous chapter, we defined the fundamental paradox of atomic holocaust fiction by saying that the genre is made possible by the imagination of conditions under which it would be impossible to write fiction. We could, then, speak of a similar complication in the case of the spy thriller as well. On the level of the narrative constitution of the world, we find that the secret appears in the field of narration to mark the very condition of the narrative. In this, it is very similar to the figure of the catastrophe, which fulfilled a similar narrative function. They both sustain a field of representation and appear in it to mark the very limits of what is representable in this field. On the level of the represented world, however, the secret marks the very condition of the constitution of the world. Here the fundamental paradox of spy fiction can be expressed by the formula we already mentioned: in order to be one, the world must be divided.
The question concerning the exact relation and position of the two worlds with regard to each other leads us to a familiar problem, since we find that the clandestine world is neither fully inside nor completely outside the normal world. Jerry Palmer’s analysis of the figure of the hero as a “paradoxical figure” clearly highlights this problem. Palmer argues that, on the one hand, “the hero is typically a man who participates fully in the life of the community”; on the other hand, however, “he can never participate fully in the community.”11 This impossible position, caught between the inside and the outside of the community, however, is not a simple exclusion from the community, but the very definition of another dimension of the community whose relative autonomy has to be established as an actual place. Someone or something must occupy this position, since it is vital to the integrity of the community that he does so. And by occupying this position, the hero puts himself in the position of a sovereign instance: “in each novel he re-founds the state, he prevents society from returning to the wilderness from which it supposedly came.”12 The secret establishes a fictional field in which another figure, the hero, can emerge as the sovereign instance necessary to maintain the symbolic framework of our world in face of a grave crisis.13
Modernism and Secrecy
The historical fact that the “metaphysics of modernism” was based on an internal reduplication of the world has long been recognized.14 The question we need to raise now concerns the different ways modernism and mass culture articulated this metaphysical condition. The conclusions we reached in the previous chapter apply to the figure of the secret as well as to the ideological figure of catastrophe.15 Previously, I argued that the historical experience of modernity was translated into a set of aesthetic standards and that catastrophe provided the ideological consistency of formal fragmentation. But whereas authentic art maintained an indirect (that is, figurative) relation to the historical experience of catastrophe, mass culture literalized this ideological content and, thereby, merely offered the simulacrum of catastrophe. In a similar fashion, we could argue that in modernity the category of the secret came to denote a move beyond representation that was essential both for politics and aesthetics.16
It is in this context that I want to revisit the historical link between political realism and aesthetic anti-realism characteristic of Cold War liberalism. We have to point out that the liberal “imagination of disaster” is also an imagination of conspiracy. Although the exploration of secrecy remains seemingly underdeveloped in Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, conspiracy and revolution do play a central role in Trilling’s reading of Henry James, since Trilling singles out The Princess Casamassima (1886) as the only text by James to be examined in detail. The role of secrecy in The Liberal Imagination, thus, has to be interpreted on two levels: the metaphysical and the ideological (which includes politics as well as aesthetics). Trilling’s project can be clearly inscribed in a larger, typically modern problematic. His goal is to deduce a politics (liberalism as the imagination of disaster) and an aesthetics (moral realism as a form of modernist aesthetics) from a metaphysical condition (the constitutive split between the hidden and the manifest). For Trilling, the metaphysical foundation of Cold War liberalism and anti-Communist modernism is an inherent limit in reality which is best represented by the figure of the “secret.”
As we have already seen, Trilling defined the “American metaphysics” as an inadequate form of realism.17 Although he never uses these terms, his criticism of Parrington and Dreiser suggests that what he finds objectionable in these authors is precisely the elimination of a particular kind of secrecy from their metaphysics. Vulgar materialism and religious pietism (the shortcomings of the early and the late Dreiser in Trilling’s eyes) are equally unacceptable, since the former simply eradicates secrecy, while the latter reduces it to the mysticism of “Something behind It All.”18 In a world like this, aesthetic mediation must be a fully transparent process. The opacity of art can only be a mistake or, even worse, deliberate deception. Therefore, art can have no secrets. It must be fully identical with the proper representation of a simply self-disclosing reality. For Trilling, this kind of vulgar realism is the art of a world without secrets.19
Trilling finds the cure to this flawed American metaphysics in Freud. Speaking of Freud’s “tragic realism,” he explains how psychoanalysis could contribute to a more appropriate conception of reality.20 Claiming that psychoanalysis is the continuation of the Romantic tradition, Trilling speaks here of the “perception which is to be the common characteristic of both Freud and Romanticism, the perception of the hidden element of human nature and of the opposition between the hidden and the visible.”21 In fact, this split appears here as the foundational notion of modernity: “the idea of the hidden thing went forward to become one of the dominant notions of the age. The hidden element takes many forms and it is not necessarily ‘dark’ and ‘bad.’”22
But this is the point where Trilling parts ways with Freud. According to Trilling, although it does not necessarily follow from the logic of psychoanalytic thought, Freud had a reductive view of art in his writings explicitly devoted to aesthetic matters. Simply put, Trilling accepts the therapeutic validity of a stark separation of illusion and reality, but he argues that the metaphysical conclusion of psychoanalysis should be more radical than this therapeutic pragmatism: “Indeed what may be called the essentially Freudian view assumes that the mind, for good as well as bad, helps create its reality by selection and evaluation.”23 But, as Trilling is quick to point out, if reality is not simply given but created, the full pathologization of illusions is misguided, since reality itself is constituted by illusions. He wants to convince us that “the illusions of art are made to serve the purpose of a closer and truer relation with reality.”24 Since for Trilling reality itself is constituted by necessary illusions, realism in art is also only possible as an illusion rather than a mere reflection of reality: art should be the realism of the illusion that organizes reality.
This redefinition of realism becomes a political principle in Trilling’s reading of The Princess Casamassima as the new center of the modernist canon. For Trilling, the negative contemporary reception of the novel is precisely the unmistakable sign of James’s unfailing prescience, his very modernity: he could pinpoint something in the experience of modern politics that came to be fully appreciated only in the aftermath of World War II. This special element is the conspiratorial nature of modern politics and the unavoidable moral ironies of political secrecy.
In his preface to the novel, Henry James provides a compelling version of the two-world thesis we have been examining. The basic argument is that, because of the constitutive unevenness of the social, “exclusion” is an unavoidable part of modern experience and the role of imagination is to fill in the holes produced by these exclusions. More precisely, the specific experience that James wants to examine is a particularly modern contradiction. By turning society into a spectacle, modernity allows universal access to experiences previously denied to the masses. At the same time, however, this new freedom comes with severe restrictions. James located the specificity of the modern experience in the common availability of urban space. In the first sentence of the preface, he bluntly states that the most important source of The Princess Casamassima was “the habit and interest of walking the streets” of London.25 James fashions himself as a modern flâneur and describes his exposure to the metropolis as “a mystic solicitation, the urgent appeal, on the part of everything to be interpreted and, so far as may be, reproduced.”26
Thus, there is an essential similarity between the author and his protagonist: they are both walking the city under the spell of this mystic solicitation and they observe and compulsively interpret the same complex reality. But, James hastens to add, there is “one little difference”: Hyacinth has access to the same urban world (and the same universal spectacle of the pleasures of modern life) as James does, only he is excluded from a full enjoyment of the city since all access to power is denied to him.27 Similarly, James has access to the same world that is haunted by the envious Hyacinth, but while to him the doors of privilege are open, he is ignorant of the underworld that is Hyacinth’s home. This is why at one point James adds: “Truly, of course, there are London mysteries (dense categories of dark arcana) for every spectator, and it’s in a degree an exclusion and a state of weakness to be without experience of the meaner conditions, the lower manners and types, the general sordid struggle, the weight of the burden of labour, the ignorance, the misery and the vice.”28 The fundamental contradiction of modern experience is that it renders visible a wide range of social experiences but, since the social structure is maintained by a set of exclusions, at the same time this spectatorship also necessarily produces “dark arcana.” Conspiratorial fantasies are, therefore, constitutive of modern experience.
This contradiction between visibility and exclusion, however, is simultaneously a political issue and an aesthetic one for James. He defines the social as a field of visibility structured by a set of exclusions, and the role of the imagination is to provide the consistency of the social by filling in the holes produced by these exclusions. Close to the end of the preface, James formulates the defense of his art in the following terms: “the effect I wished most to produce were precisely those of our not knowing, of society’s not knowing, but only guessing and suspecting and trying to ignore, what ‘goes on’ irreconcileably, subversively, beneath the vast smug surface.”29 The lack of knowledge inscribed in the social structure is immediately turned into a set of aesthetic categories. This is why James describes his book in the following terms: “My scheme called for the suggested nearness (to all our apparently ordered life) of some sinister anarchic underworld, heaving its pain, its power and its hate; a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities.”30 The limits of perception are thus immediately tied to a system of social exclusions in such a way that they can provide the foundations of a whole theory of aesthetic representation (the presentation of loose appearances as an “impressionism” of secrecy).
These passages show us that the role of the imagination is simultaneously aesthetic and political. If social exclusion leads to a lack of knowledge, conspiracy theory is a constitutive part of modern experience. The reproduction of this experience in art is a form of modernist aesthetics which makes this secrecy into a formal principle: “a presentation not of sharp particulars, but of loose appearances, vague motions and sounds and symptoms, just perceptible presences and general looming possibilities.”31 This is a poetics of the limits of experience which tries to imagine the way something appears within experience without ever assuming a full presence. Thus, rather than producing an accurate picture of a “sinister anarchic underworld” based on knowledge, this realism is that of the lack of knowledge about the world. James is not giving us a novel of social realism. Quite to the contrary, his aesthetics of not-knowing is a realism of the limits of representation as they are a constitutive part of social existence. In place of a naturalism of base instincts, James offers us a modernism of conspiracies.
Needless to say, Trilling found The Princess Casamassima so appealing because, as James puts it in the preface, its central focus is the “dilemma of the disillusioned and repentant conspirator.”32 At the time Trilling wrote the essays collected in The Liberal Imagination, a whole generation of Americans perceived themselves to be a group of disillusioned revolutionaries, if not exactly repentant conspirators. The three central characters of the novel represent for Trilling the inherent weaknesses of liberalism. Paul Muniment and the Princess account for the reason why the novel “was not understood in its own day”: “But we of today can say that they and their relationship constitute one of the most masterly comments on modern life that has ever been made.”33 These two characters embody the basic ironies of modern politics. Paul Muniment represents the possibility that an honest idealism can coexist “with a secret desire for personal power.”34 The Princess, on the other hand, represents “political awareness that is not aware.”35 As Trilling explains, in her quest for reality, the closer she believes she comes to reality, the farther away she is in actuality. The final irony of liberalism emerges between this corruption of idealism and the false realism of the secret center of things: Hyacinth Robinson falls in love with the beauty of the world that he himself conspires to destroy. Trilling perceives in Hyacinth’s character a crucial predicament of Cold War liberalism: political progressivism cannot be fully justified by aesthetic conservatism.
This is why we have to conclude that the “liberal imagination” is fundamentally conspiratorial. As I argued in Chapter 2, Trilling deduced the necessary aestheticization of anti-Communist politics from the constitutive paradox of liberal democracy. Since liberal democracy attempts to institutionalize freedom by limiting it, there will always be a gap between what Trilling called “the primal imagination of liberalism” and its “present particular manifestations.”36 Imagination here means the imaginary constitution of social reality itself, which is always structured by exclusions. The role of the liberal imagination of disaster is to manifest this gap between primal imagination and particular manifestations. But if no particular manifestation can be identical with the primal imagination, the liberal imagination always has to be suspicious of itself and imagine the dark underworld of its own particular manifestations. In short, to the degree that liberal politics remains irreducible to its present manifestations, its source of authenticity will remain something hidden in principle.
Although the modernist imagination is fundamentally conspiratorial, according to modernist ideologies, mass culture can only offer us the simulacrum of the secret. Edmund Wilson, for example, in a famous article entitled “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1950), dismissed detective fiction in the following terms:
The addict reads not to find anything out but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret. That this secret is nothing at all and does not really account for the incidents does not matter to such a reader. He has learned from his long indulgence how to connive with the author in the swindle: he does not pay any real attention when the disappointing dénouement occurs, he does not think back and check the events, he simply shuts the book and starts another.37
Wilson does show some appreciation for Raymond Chandler, Alfred Hitchcock, and Graham Greene when he writes that in their works it is “not simply a question…of a puzzle which has been put together, but of a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy that is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms.”38 But in order to be a legitimate artistic subject, the problem of the secret has to be elevated to the level of the metaphysical horror of historical existence. As the consumption of mass culture is mere addiction, it is the repetition of the experience that counts, not its authenticity. The real point is not the secret itself, but looking forward to learning it.
When Wilson declares that “this secret is nothing at all,” he effectively purges popular culture of its secrets. The terrain of cultural simulacra is a mere surface without any depth and, therefore, without any authentic secrets. As a matter of fact, the false promise of revelation is the most effective way of avoiding secrets in an infinite repetition of the reading experience. In Wilson’s reading, if the secret “does not really account for the incidents,” we could say that these novels fail to connect their ideological foundation with the field of representation that the first establishes. The reduction of this ideology to a formula corresponds to a formal failure to capture this organizing figure (the secret). This formal failure thus reduces the genre to the status of a mere puzzle, rather than a complex expression of a conspiratorial epochal consciousness.
Trilling’s work, therefore, illustrates in a compelling way that the ideological figure of the secret functions as the foundation of liberal anti-Communism on three distinct levels. First, it is a metaphysical principle which guarantees that reality is irreducible to what merely appears to us. Second, it is also a political principle, since the politics of liberalism is irreducible to its particular manifestations beyond which we always have to posit a more primary form of liberal imagination. Finally, in the case of art we find that it is irreducible to the field of representation, since it must transcend the mere realistic rendering of the world. The function of true art is precisely to represent the internal split in the world between what is representable and what is not. This is why, if mass culture literalizes the ideological content of modernism, its ultimate failure is that it reduces the secret to the field of representation. From the point of view of the aesthetic ideology of modernism, in mass culture the hermeneutical attitude is replaced by a literal rendering of secrets and conspiracy precisely in order to avoid any hermeneutical encounter. The secret appears on the surface of the narrative because the narrative no longer has any secrets. In modernism, however, the secret cannot be reduced to a plot element on the level of the represented world, since it enters the very process of representation. In “authentic art,” the secret is not simply represented but is itself internal to the principle of representation.
Necessary Secrets
In order to establish the basic components of what we could call an aesthetic ideology organizing the world of the modern spy thriller, we have to raise two questions: first, we have to inquire after the principle that establishes the field of visibility specific to this world; then, we need to establish the relationship of this field to art. In spite of the significant differences among individual authors, this double concern with visibility and art is a persistent structuring force of the genre. The most basic assumption at the heart of this problem is that the field of visible experience and the autonomous field of aesthetic experience are both sustained by certain limits. The division of the two worlds (the normal and the clandestine) is established by a theory of representation that includes a reflection on constitutive limits: since there are inherent exclusions, the underworld of secrecy is necessary to maintain the principle of public representations. At the same time, the division of aesthetic production between mass culture and high art is also one of the constantly recurring elements of spy novels. The juxtaposition of these two divisions, then, allows us to raise the question of how particular forms of aesthetic practice are correlated to the constitutive division of the social.
John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)—often referred to as one of the foundational pieces of the modern spy story—offers itself as a perfect example of this double concern with representation. Richard Hannay, “the best-bored man in the United Kingdom,” is an ordinary citizen sucked into the tumultuous world of international politics.39 As it happens, an American agent (Franklin P. Scudder, whom he tried to protect from his German pursuers on a gentlemanly basis) is murdered in Hannay’s apartment. Before his death, Scudder entrusts Hannay with a wildly anti-Semitic tale of a “big subterranean government”: “Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland; besides, the Jew was behind it.”40 As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Scudder (probably trying to be careful) did not tell the truth to Hannay, but the story is convincing enough and contains enough truth to set Hannay on his personal quest to save the Empire. A considerable amount of the story is, then, devoted to Hannay’s attempts to mislead his pursuers as he first flees to Scotland and tries to make his way back to London to reach the capital on a specific day in order to prevent the final catastrophe.
The significance of the story for us is that it presents a perfectly dialectical argument about the reduplication of the world. The three steps of the dialectic are constituted by two reversals. First, the observing subject realizes that he is an object of observation. At this stage, the novel establishes an external split between two different perspectives. But this initial stage is followed by an internal split within the subject’s perspective. In the course of the story, we move from the unified perspective of the observing subject to a split between two independent perspectives and, finally, to a split within the original perspective itself. This final reversal teaches us an important lesson about the reduplication of the world: it shows us that the world of secrecy and the world of publicity take place in essentially the same social space, only one has to learn to look at the same scenario differently to perceive both of them.
At one point in the story, Hannay strategically positions himself on the top of a hill so that he can easily spot his enemies. As he surveys the landscape from his “sanctuary,” he concludes: “I was on the central boss of a huge upland country, and could see everything moving for miles.”41 But what Hannay has to learn soon is that rather than being in the privileged position of the observer, he is himself being observed. As he is standing on top of the hill, he all of a sudden hears the engine of an airplane: “Then I realized that my vantage ground might be in reality a trap.”42 The lesson of the episode is clear: it is precisely by positioning himself as the observer that he exposes himself to observation.
At this point already we can highlight the central thesis of the novel: a given field of visibility is always established by a split of perspectives. In order to be able to define it as a field, we need at least two perspectives. On the one hand, we are presented with Hannay’s horizontal view, which exposes the world to him as everything that he can see. But a seemingly unified, isolated perspective will always be deceptive as it cannot construct the whole picture. In Hannay’s case, at least one element is absent from the world as it displays itself to him: Hannay himself. This is why the vertical perspective is introduced: it not only redoubles (and contextualizes) the first perspective but also inscribes the passive state of “being looked at” into the very act of active observation. And what “you” see and what “they” see can never be exactly the same. The field of visibility constitutes itself at the intersection of these two irreconcilable perspectives, but at this point both of the perspectives are imagined to be fully constituted autonomous perspectives.
Hannay’s main problem thus becomes that of trying to hide on a flat surface fully exposed to surveillance from above: “How on earth was I to escape notice in that tablecloth of a place?”43 The answer to this question, however, is not to escape the field, but to become one of its elements: “You must stay in the patch, and let your enemies search it and not find you.”44 Hannay spots the only human being in this field (a roadman) and through perfect imitation becomes this man. He escapes his enemies not by running or by hiding in the ordinary sense, but by exposing himself to full view through mimicry. This same logic is repeated later in the novel, when Hannay recalls a hunting story in which both he and his dog were fully deceived by a rhebok: “that buck simply leaked out of the landscape.”45
The central theory of deception put forth by the novel concerns precisely this “leaking out of the landscape,” as the pure spectacle is punctuated by invisible sites of escape. Hannay quotes his friend, Peter Pienaar:
Peter once discussed with me the question of disguises, and he had a theory which struck me at the time. He said, barring absolute certainties like finger-prints, mere physical traits were very little use for identification if the fugitive really knew his business. He laughed at things like dyed hair and false beards and such childish follies. The only thing that mattered was what Peter called “atmosphere.” If a man could get into perfectly different surroundings from those in which he had been first observed, and—this is the important part—really play up to these surroundings and behave as if he had never been out of them, he would puzzle the cleverest detectives on earth.… A fool tries to look different; a clever man looks the same and is different.46
This is how you move between two worlds: you do not rely on external disguises, you change your own being. The passage suggests a new definition of secrecy: if secrecy is a change in the very being of the object and not a change of appearance of this object, we could also conclude that secrecy should be defined as a specific mode of visibility rather than exclusively as a form of invisibility. In other words, secrecy is not a different location physically separated from the visible world of publicity. As the example shows, it inhabits the very same social space as the normal world. Rather, the task outlined by Peter Pienaar’s theory is to disappear between two perspectives.
But the closing chapter of the novel completely revises this theory. Hannay finally figures out how the German spies are trying to leave the country with the stolen secrets, but when he hurries to their villa with the “thirty-nine steps,” to his utter consternation he finds only a completely “innocent spectacle,” “the happy home of three cheerful Englishmen.”47 In spite of the fact that according to Hannay’s reasoning these three men should be the infernal spies (whom Hannay actually encountered face-to-face before), the spectacle they present are fully at odds with their supposed identity. Once again, Hannay is in the position of the observer and cannot believe his eyes: “The house stood as open as a market-place for anybody to observe.… Everything was as public and above-board as a charity bazaar.”48 In spite of his own theory of deception, however, Hannay fails to grasp the spectacle as a performance: “These men might be acting; but if they were where was their audience?”49 The question betrays a surprising degree of naivety: Hannay misrecognizes the fact that his position of observation is structurally part of the spectacle (in other words, that he is the audience he cannot identify).
The crucial point, however, is that Hannay decides to enter the spectacle: he confronts the three men and accuses them of being spies. But this preposterous proposition appears to be a foolish mistake. Hannay is ready to lose his mind as he is invited to a game of bridge by the three men. Finally a simple little nervous “tick” destroys the whole performance: all of a sudden, one of the men starts tapping on his knees, which leads to “full and absolute recognition” as “the three faces seemed to change before my eyes and reveal their secrets.”50 The moment of revelation depends on the persistence of something real that has the power to interrupt the performance.
The question of literature, as it is discussed in the novel, also involves the problem of visibility. Two scenes are of special interest for us here. First, it is the aneċe of the “literary innkeeper” that introduces the question of literature to the narrative. Hannay at one point seeks refuge at a vacant inn run by a young man who happens to be an aspiring writer. The innkeeper complains that there is no longer any romance left in his profession, as in modern days only vulgar everyday people visit his inn, which does not provide him with the right kind of material. He wants to travel the world and write novels, as Kipling and Conrad did. To which Hannay responds: “D’you think that adventure is found only in the tropics or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you’re rubbing shoulders with it at this moment.”51 The episode tells us something important about the world: “The only thing to distrust is the normal.”52 The function of literature is to bring the exotic colonies home and reveal the normal to be absolutely extraordinary.
The second scene occurs after Hannay finally contacted the proper authorities. Sir Walter, however, dismisses Scudder’s story in the following terms: “He was half crank, half genius, but he was wholly honest.”53 Sir Walter admits that the story contains some truth, but adds that “it reads like some wild melodrama.… The trouble about him was that he was too romantic. He had the artistic temperament, and wanted a story to be better than God meant it to be.”54 But after dismissing Scudder’s tale as a “penny novelette,” the chapter ends with the arrival of an urgent message announcing the assassination of the Greek politician, just as it was foretold in Scudder’s notebook.55 This ironic interruption is left without further comments, so the reader is left with the conclusion that the novel in the end confers some realistic value on Scudder’s melodramatic narrative. As it appears, a certain “artistic temperament” is actually necessary to understand modern politics (to get at the real truth behind mere appearances).
While in the case of the “literary innkeeper” the normal turned out to be the fantastic in disguise, here the fantastic excesses of conspiratorial narratives are revealed to be true. To put it differently: while reality, in its banality, is always going to appear merely normal, and while conspiratorial narratives are always going to appear unrealistically romantic, the self-reflexive message of the novel establishes an equivalence between the two extremes. The apparent aesthetic failure of spy fiction is a political merit to the degree that it stages the fantasy that sustains the world of bourgeois boredom. Although spy fiction is mere mass entertainment, in reality it is the “necessary melodrama” (or aesthetic excess) that reveals the truth about modern politics.
What is it, then, that this novel tells us about the modern spy thriller? It teaches us to consider the juxtaposition of the problems of visibility and art as constitutive of the genre. It shows us that the split of perspectives is internal (since we are not dealing with a “perspectival relativism” which would claim that everybody sees something different, but rather with the supposition that seeing always presupposes a moment that is different from itself), which also means that a field of visibility is always established by this internal reduplication of perspectives. Therefore, the possibility of deceit is structural, since things simply leak out of the landscape, whether we like it or not.
In addition, it also shows that the internal limit of social visibility establishes a particular self-reflexive moment in the spy thriller. This is what Bruce Merry called the “internal embarrassment” of the genre caused by the fact that it is relegated to a secondary status in the standard hierarchy of cultural production and it is “aware” of this status.56 In other words, it is impossible to write a modern spy thriller without the full and conscious assimilation of the “great divide” characteristic of modernist culture. This cultural hierarchy is an explicitly thematized formal principle which is by definition part of the ideological foundations of the whole genre. As a result, the spy thriller often legitimizes itself by renouncing its own generic characteristics. Yet the supreme surprise of the genre is when reality reveals itself to be structured by a mere romance, and the melodramatic imagination is declared to be necessary to understand modern politics.
Bypassing some of the history of the genre, let us now move to three paradigmatic representatives of the Cold War spy thriller: John le Carré, Ian Fleming, and Mickey Spillane. I chose these three authors because they clearly correspond to the threefold cultural hierarchy characteristic of Cold War aesthetic ideology: le Carré (along with Graham Greene) is usually considered to be the most artistic and literary representative of the genre; Fleming’s works are quintessential kitsch; while Spillane is the prototypical author of lowbrow mass culture. What will be of interest to us is the way the positions of these authors in this cultural hierarchy are reflected on the level of the aesthetic ideology that their works propagate.
It is customary to refer to le Carré and Fleming as representatives of two different traditions of the genre: Fleming is usually considered to be a master of the “sensational” thriller, while le Carré is commonly cited as the heir of the “realistic” spy story. Whereas in le Carré we are confronted with an explicitly aesthetic problematic that opposes art to the ambiguous visibility of the social, Fleming formulates an “anti-aesthetic” for the society of spectacle, in which the image annihilates the original.
Le Carré’s “realism” is most often explained as a representation of “moral ambiguity” and not necessarily the accurate representation of the secret service. This moral ambiguity is often depicted as a peculiar characteristic of the Cold War, which often necessitated unethical acts in the name of the defense of freedom. The literary character of le Carré’s writing is already obvious in his first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), in which art occupies a central position. In this text, the division of the world into two separate fields (the normal and the clandestine) clearly corresponds to a division of cultural production into two distinct fields (mass culture and individualistic artistic achievements). But while the political division is rather problematic in le Carré’s fiction, the second cultural division is treated as self-evident. The result of this double division is that le Carré’s ethical critique of Cold War politics is tied to his cultural conservatism. In other words, the aesthetic division establishes the conditions of the critique of the political division.
In the famous opening pages of Call for the Dead, George Smiley is introduced to us as a “breath-takingly ordinary” person.57 This ordinariness is in direct opposition to the common “romantic” view of his chosen profession, the secret service, and frames the whole narrative as it is simultaneously thematized on the first and last pages of the novel. In the closing chapter, entitled “Between Two Worlds,” we find Smiley on an airplane en route to Zurich to meet his estranged wife. The concluding moment of the text is described as “a glimpse of eternity between two worlds.”58 Once again, however, the division of worlds becomes a question of perspective: “Smiley presented an odd figure to his fellow passengers—a little, fat man, rather gloomy, suddenly smiling, ordering a drink. The young, fair-haired man beside him examined him closely out of the corner of his eye. He knew the type well—the tired executive out for a bit of fun. He found it disgusting.”59 From the perspective of his fellow travelers, Smiley appears to be disgustingly ordinary. But the book also established another perspective that the reader can share now. Seen from this angle, the breathtakingly ordinary is revealed to be extraordinary without being external to the ordinary world.
This social phenomenology of normalcy also establishes the impossibility of the full separation of worlds. Close to the opening of the novel, the freshly widowed Mrs. Fennan (who will eventually turn out to be a Communist agent) establishes one of the central concerns of the text when she attacks Smiley with the following words: “It’s an old illness you suffer from…and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it?”60 The failed and impossible separation of the two worlds is the very source of the moral ambiguity that is at the center of the text. The novel, if it is to be realistic, needs to manifest precisely the overlap of the two worlds, the ambiguous zone of indistinction, where they become impossible to separate.61
As a matter of fact, it is more than just a coincidence that before joining the secret service, Smiley was a scholar “devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany.”62 In Smiley’s case, secret service is a continuation of literary criticism by other means. In a telling passage, for example, intelligence work is essentially defined as a particular form of applied literary criticism: “It also provided him with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.”63 In the case of intelligence work, the critical and theoretical conclusions about human behavior are not mere abstractions, since they are directly channeled into the practice of everyday espionage. This seemingly perfect marriage of theory and practice forms the basis of an aestheticized theory of intelligence: the complexity of the world is like that of a work of art. Intelligence work implies the discovery of a narrative structure behind seemingly unconnected and inconsistent set of facts.
But while the internal separation of the world is an impossible but necessary project, the separation of the opposing fields of cultural production is discussed without any ambiguity: “[Smiley] hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favor of the mass.”64 In the rest of the chapter, mass culture is aligned with Communism and art with the individualism of the free world. In a certain sense, while the internal division of the two worlds remains an ambiguous project, the external division of ideological enmity can be formulated in clear terms, to the degree that it corresponds to the division of the aesthetic field into mass culture and high art. Thus, the political function of art is double: on the one hand, it allows us to distinguish ourselves from our external enemies (who are identified with the logic of the masses); on the other hand, it provides a defense against the ambiguity of the internal division of the world as it comes to signify the last stable value in an ambiguous world.
The ideal aesthetic object at the heart of the novel is the so-called “Dresden group,” a tiny statue which is one of Smiley’s prized possessions: “He loved to admire the beauty of those figures, the tiny rococo courtesan in shepherd’s costume, her hands outstretched to one adoring lover, her little face bestowing glances on another. He felt inadequate before that fragile perfection.”65 As a matter of fact, the solution to the mystery is directly tied to this little statue, since it is a moment of “aesthetic experience” that finally brings order to the whole story: “As he stood gazing at the little shepherdess, poised eternally between her two admirers, he realised dispassionately that there was another quite different solution to the case of Samuel Fennan, a solution which matched every detail of circumstance, reconciled the nagging inconsistencies apparent in Fennan’s character.”66 The little shepherdess, “poised eternally between her two admirers,” becomes an allegorical representation of the suspended state between two worlds. The universalization of moral ambiguity leads to the aestheticization of ambiguity.
Needless to say, Ian Fleming was also aware of the ambiguities of secrecy, but he rejects both the rhetoric of moral ambiguity and the aestheticization of intelligence. In Umberto Eco’s words, Fleming’s first novel, Casino Royale (1953), evokes “the salutary recognition of universal ambiguity” only to dismiss it once and for all as an unnecessary annoyance and mere sophistry.67 In the chapter entitled “The Nature of Evil,” we find Bond in a hospital bed in a particularly philosophical mood. As Bond explains to his French colleague, Mathis, he is ready to resign from the secret service because, as you grow older, “The villains and heroes get all mixed up.”68 At the end of the novel, however, when Bond realizes that the woman he was planning to marry was actually a Communist double agent, he accepts Mathis’s moral philosophy: “How soon Mathis had been proved right and how soon his own little sophistries had been exploded in his face.”69 Fleming thus evokes moral ambiguity only to excise it through the formulation of an unequivocal program.
The move toward the unambiguous foundations of ambiguity, however, is tied to the redefinition of the meaning of art, which is no longer the final redemptive value in an unstable universe. Art is actually a sign of a pathological obsession: as such, it becomes the unambiguous sign of evil. It does not save us from the enemy, since it is the enemy who is an “artist.” In Fleming’s second novel, Live and Let Die (1954), for example, the arch-villain Mr. Big (an African-American voodoo priest Communist agent) explicitly aestheticizes his own criminal activities:
Mister Bond, I take pleasure now only in artistry, in the polish and finesse which I can bring to my operations. It has become almost a mania with me to impart an absolute rightness, a high elegance, to the execution of my affairs. Each day, Mister Bond, I try and set myself still higher standards of subtlety and technical polish so that each of my proceedings may be a work of art, bearing my signature as clearly as the creations of, let us say, Benvenuto Cellini. I am content, for the time being to be my only judge, but I sincerely believe, Mister Bond, that the approach to perfection which I am steadily achieving in my operations will ultimately win recognition in the history of our times.70
For Mr. Big, the model of conspiratorial activity is “the self-negation of the anonymous artist.”71 He sees himself “as one of those great Egyptian fresco painters who devoted their lives to producing masterpieces in the tombs of kings, knowing that no living eye would ever see them.”72 This redefinition of conspiracy as an art is therefore based on a constitutive division of human perception (as there are certain things that no living eye can ever see). The question is: What lies beyond these limits?
We can, then, say that le Carré and Fleming represent two opposing paradigms of the aestheticization of the internal division of the world. For le Carré, as we have seen, the greatest threat would be an “audience without art”—that is, a spectator who can no longer come to terms with the ambiguity of the world, since without the aesthetic principle, it would be impossible to make sense of this world. For Fleming, on the other hand, the threat to the social order is the exact opposite: an “art without audience.” Instead of the aestheticization of intelligence that characterized Le Carré’s vision, Fleming provides us the paradigmatic case of the opposite tendency: the aestheticization of conspiracy.
Umberto Eco’s classic article on James Bond, however, is also significant because it demonstrates the standard liberal rejection of Fleming’s fiction in its most sophisticated form. What concerns us the most is that Eco detects a strange contradiction in Fleming that takes us right away to the problem of kitsch. As Eco points out, Fleming’s prose pleases “sophisticated readers” who find “aesthetic pleasure” in the discovery that Fleming uses “the purity of the primitive epic” and maliciously translates it into “current terms.”73 This sophisticated reader, however, becomes a “victim” of this strategy “for he is led on to detect stylistic inventions where there is, on the contrary…a clever montage of déjà vu, a dressing up of the familiar.”74
Two of the motives that formed the basis of our analysis can be detected in this reading: on the one hand, kitsch is the deceptive imitation of art without true (modernistic) innovation (“Fleming simulates literature by pretending to write literature”); on the other hand, as a result of this mere imitation, midcult has no secret, since its essence is the repetition of the known (“And, again, the pleasure of reading is not given by the incredible and the unknown but by the obvious and the usual”).75 Eco’s interpretation suggests that the move beyond ambiguity is simultaneously a political and aesthetic program for Fleming. But a different way of presenting the problem would be to argue that what Fleming excises on the level of political content (Communist simulation) returns on the level of the aesthetic constitution of his work according to the logic of kitsch (aesthetic imitation of art). Thus, if according to the basic tenets of Cold War liberalism, the problem with mass culture is that even if its politics is correct, it cannot successfully translate it into an aesthetic principle, we find that that the problem of spy fiction is that it tries to establish the political necessity of secrecy, but as an art it is without secrets.
“Jehovah’s Messenger”: Mickey Spillane and the Democratic Paradox
One of the first things that comes to mind at the mention of Mickey Spillane’s name is the extremely violent nature of his fiction. The vulgarity of this violence is often understood to be especially repulsive as it is the source of “sadistic” pleasures. The eternal middlebrow, Philip Wylie, for example, found this aspect of Spillane’s fiction especially odious and concluded his review of his works (aptly entitled “The Crime of Mickey Spillane”) with the following judgment: “If Spillane’s millions of readers suddenly began acting like Spillane’s detective, Mike Hammer, the Soviets could take us over without dropping a bomb—because the U.S.A. would be in chaos.”76 And if we consider, for example, the following passage, it is understandable that someone of Wylie’s moral commitments would feel uncomfortable with Mike Hammer’s version of anti-Communism: “But some day, maybe, some day I’d stand on the steps of the Kremlin with a gun in my fist and I’d yell for them to come out and if they wouldn’t I’d go in and get them and when I had them lined up against the wall I’d start shooting until all I had left was a row of corpses that bled on the cold floors and in whose thick red blood would be the promise of a peace that would stick for more generations than I’d live to see.”77 Anti-Communism with a vengeance, to say the least.
But Wylie’s conclusion seems to miss a crucial point about Spillane’s fiction: Mike Hammer’s exceptional status. Spillane’s point is not to convince every reader to act as Mike Hammer does. Rather, Spillane wants his readers to accept the fact that Mike Hammer’s position with regard to the law is that of a structurally necessary supplement. Instead of formulating a universal injunction, Spillane claims that “at least one” element must act like Mike Hammer.78 The split of the two worlds in Spillane’s works is caused by this “at least one” which functions as the exception to the rule it helps institute. As a matter of fact, we could even say that Mike Hammer’s violence remains (in an ambiguous fashion) external to the field it helps establish: he is violent so that Spillane’s millions of readers won’t have to act as he does.
In order to explain the meaning of this exception, we have to remember that in Spillane’s fiction, the ideological figure of the secret emerges at the intersection of two generic traditions: the spy story and hard-boiled detective fiction.79 The latter is important for us, since at the same time that British spy fiction established the standard cultural reaction to the decline of empire, the hard-boiled novel emerged as a specifically American tradition. The hard-boiled explicitly thematized the gap between law and justice. To use an expression from John D. Macdonald’s novel, The Executioners (better known as Cape Fear, 1957), the figure of the private detective emerged as “a supplement to the law.”80 In other words, the constitutive gap between law and justice opens up an intermediary field of dubious legal and ethical value. Ideally, the task of the private detective is to uphold justice even if the law inherently fails to do so.
Spillane’s fiction picks up this motive of the “supplement to the law” and derives a particular form of anti-Communist politics from it: Spillane tries to establish a sovereign agency outside the law that nevertheless serves the spirit of the law (beyond the mere letter of the law). But the articulation of this agency is intimately tied to a reflection on the role of enjoyment in politics. We encounter here a democratic paradox in one of its most basic forms: in order to maintain the democratic framework of democracy, certain elements must be excluded from participating in democracy. We could speak of two exclusions here: the sovereign element is simultaneously inside and outside the field it rules over (it withdraws itself from the sphere of democracy to a third domain); but this sovereign instance establishes its rule by excluding others (in a nondemocratic fashion) from participating in democracy. And since the enemy is guilty of a “theft of enjoyment,” this sovereign agency has to make up for this lack of enjoyment by way of its extralegal activities: it has to find enjoyment in breaking the law in the name of the law. (In fact, this enjoyment is no longer a sign of its illegal nature, but the guarantee of its legitimacy.)
The clearest example of this logic is to be found in Spillane’s 1951 novel, One Lonely Night. The story is framed by a direct confrontation with the law, as in the beginning we find Mike Hammer publicly humiliated by a judge for being a murderer. The figure of the judge keeps reappearing in the story which, in the final analysis, is Hammer’s attempt to clarify for himself his relation to the law. The central question that Hammer poses for himself is whether he enjoys killing, and if this enjoyment is pathological. But on the very first pages of the novel, the question of law and enjoyment is contextualized by the problem of war: “[The judge] had to go back five years to a time he knew of only secondhand and tell me how it took a war to show me the power of the gun and the obscene pleasure that was brutality and force, the spicy sweetness of murder sanctified by law.”81 For Mike Hammer, therefore, the militarization of anti-Communist politics aims at a recovery of this “spicy sweetness of murder sanctified by law,” the “obscene pleasure” of obeying the call of duty. The paradoxical project behind this militarization is, thus, to restore the unity of enjoyment and duty.82
But the contradictory foundation of this redefinition of duty is that the logic of obeying and disobeying the law are no longer clearly distinguishable: the new law demands the violation of the law. The starting point of the novel is the opposition between war and law: war is the exceptional situation in which killing is a duty rather than a crime. And this is the primary meaning of the exceptional situation: whereas the law banned certain forms of enjoyments, the exceptional situation is not simply the removal of all such bans (a chaotic situation in which everything is allowed, as Wylie seems to have understood it), but rather the reversal of the logic of the previous ban—what was normally denied is now a duty (and what was normally allowed can now come under a new ban). As official anti-Communist propaganda put a ban on the enjoyment of anti-Communism, Mike Hammer’s character concentrates in itself this forbidden joy as he is the only one legitimately (even if not legally) enjoying anti-Communism. Thus, the militarization of anti-Communism is based on this reversal of the banned into a duty which provides the foundations of the joys of anti-Communism.
The problem, however, is that the “normal law” is weak and it cannot protect itself from the new enemy. Mike Hammer clearly pinpoints the failure of the law (which, for him, is the inherent failure of democracy) when he demonstrates that the law of democracy cannot distinguish friend from foe. In effect, the problem with the judge is that he cannot tell the difference between Mike Hammer and the Communists, since they are both simply “criminals” in his eyes. He cannot comprehend that in these two cases the violation of the law serves completely different purposes. The literal interpretation of the law fails to live up to the demands of the spirit and opens up little loopholes that the Communist can manipulate to their best advantage: “They use the very thing we build up, our own government and our own laws, to undermine the things we want.”83 Without a violent supplement (which in general terms could be described as “the politics of secrecy”), democracy is constitutively weak and incapable of guaranteeing the survival of the democratic framework of politics.
In the course of the novel, the blueprints of the most deadly American weapons go missing due to a leak in the State Department. So Hammer’s mission is “to make sure this country has a secret that’s safe.”84 But when he finally gets hold of these secrets, they are in themselves meaningless: “They were photos of a maze of symbols, diagrams and meaningless words, but there was something about them that practically cried out their extreme importance.”85 I would argue that with this particular sentence (no matter how incidental it might appear, and no matter how easily the reader might slide over it), the novel reaches one of its crucial climaxes, as it simultaneously demonstrates the ideological function of the figure of the secret (the quintessential MacGuffin) and reveals, with an almost barbaric intensity, the pure emptiness of its foundations.
This meaningless yet inexplicably significant secret appears in the narrative to mark the unrepresentable center of the order of things. The ultimate guarantee of authentic identity can only appear in this text as a mere “maze of symbols” (empty hieroglyphs of mystical knowledge) whose actual content, in the final analysis, is nothing but this mystical form. But this secret remains a secret not because of Mike Hammer’s ignorance, but due to structural reasons. Its function is to mark and isolate a particular site within a text which offers itself in its pure textuality (“meaningless words”), emptied of all other meaning except for a mystical suggestion of significance: its meaning is that it is “meaningful.” The stupidity of the text surfaces in this profound ignorance, which functions as the foundation of knowledge and wisdom. To put it differently, what the sentence demonstrates with the utmost clarity is that the guarantee of meaning is a meaningless sign. But this truth, on the ideological level, is translated into its own opposite: the text suggests that the guarantee of the stability of the world is not a lack of meaning but a particular meaning that is, in fact, so meaningful that it simply transcends the field it establishes.
So what kind of a politics is derived from this structure? In order to answer this question, we have to examine the way “politics” as such is depicted in the novel. We must remember that Mike Hammer is repeatedly described as an apolitical person. At one point, for example, this is how he describes his reaction to newspaper headlines: “More about the trials and the Cold War. Politics. I felt like an ignorant bastard for not knowing what it was all about.”86 This ignorance, however, is not condemned in the text at all, as it is precisely the necessary condition of Hammer’s independence from the social structures that would restrict his potential sphere of action.
But if the foundation of anti-Communism is the politics of depoliticization, the question of the novel is to establish the legitimate limits of politics. It is on this level that the problem of secrecy has to be addressed. For, ultimately, the point of the novel is not to argue for a certain politics of publicity, but to establish forms of necessary secrecy. It is essential that the solution to the problem posed by Communist conspiracy is not a simple revelation of the truth about this conspiracy. Mike Hammer’s solution is much more manipulative: it is a revelation of a partial truth that can influence both domestic and international public opinion in such a way that the truth of anti-Communism can triumph. It is enough that Mike Hammer knows the whole truth; the public only has to know what mobilizes it in the fight against Communism. It appears that the revelation of the whole truth would actually be more harmful than its manipulative distortion.
On the last pages of the novel, when Mike Hammer confronts Oscar Deamer and reveals his true identity as Lee Deamer’s evil twin usurping his identity, he decides to kill him in such a manner that this Communist will actually be the greatest hero of anti-Communism. Hammer organizes things so that it will appear that Deamer was killed by Communists while he was trying to protect the secrets of his country (rather than steal them). This maneuver serves two purposes. On the one hand, it will incite good Americans to an unprecedented Red Hunt. On the other hand, it will send a confusing message to the Kremlin: “they’ll have to revise their whole opinion of what kind of people are over here. They’ll think it was a tough government that uncovered the thing secretly.”87 The Russians will think that the American government is not afraid to act in undemocratic fashion when it comes to fighting Communism.
According to the novel, however, anti-Communist anti-politics is full of enjoyment. The most explicit formulation of the problem of enjoyment occurs as Hammer is getting ready for a final massacre of Communist agents with a tommy gun in his hand. He once again revokes the figure of the judge: “The judge had been right. There had been too many of those dusks and dawns; there had been pleasure in all that killing, an obscene pleasure that froze your face in a grin even when you were charged with fear.… I enjoyed that killing, every bit of it.”88 And the same argument is repeated in different forms several times throughout the novel. For example, after Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda saves him by shooting a Communist agent, he tries to sooth her conscience with the following words: “There is no shame or sin in killing a killer. David did it when he knocked off Goliath. Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands. There is no shame to killing an evil thing. As long as you have to live with that fact you might as well enjoy it.”89 What should be striking is that the enjoyment of the violation of the law in the name of a higher duty is inscribed in a Biblical language.
Of course, one of the major concerns of the novel is to distinguish this form of enjoyment from the evil enjoyment of Communist conspiracy. The most memorable scene that depicts this type of evil enjoyment is the final torture scene in an abandoned paint factory, in which Hammer’s secretary and fiancé, Velda, is being tortured by three Communist agents. As Hammer is about to make his entry into this impromptu torture chamber, he describes the scene in the following terms: “For an eternal moment I had to look at them all, every one. General Osilov in a business suit leaning on his cane almost casually, an unholy leer lighting his face. My boy of the subway slobbering all over his chin, puking a little without noticing it, his hands pressed against his belly while his face was a study in obscene fascination.”90
The problem of enjoyment leads us to the conclusion that in Spillane “the supplement to the law” is placed on theological foundations. This is the point where Spillane’s anti-politics most clearly aligns itself with the anti-Communist political-theology of his times: since anti-Communism had to define the legitimate limits of politics, the American solution was to designate the necessary limit of politics as religion. Although this theology is not an explicitly formulated religious doctrine in Spillane, it is nevertheless clearly a structuring force of his fiction. The reason why it is easy to misrecognize this religious mission is that it manifests itself only on the level of the sacralization of violence. The moral criticism directed against Spillane’s vulgar sadism and the opposing tendency to recover a religious content in his works are equally mistaken unless we perceive the essential identity of these seemingly contradictory themes: the religious content of Spillane’s work is this excessive violence, this repulsive sadism. To put it differently, in Spillane’s fiction, rather than being a mere failure, the heteronomy of the law is recoded as a theological principle. The politics of depoliticization is, therefore, not a mere apolitical posturing, but rather the conflict of two laws: while one of them is worldly and fallible (hence heteronomous), the other comes to us from another world and is infallible (and autonomous). The theological principle establishes the necessary limits of politics and justifies a kind of violence and enjoyment the worldly law denies. Thus the political enjoyment banned by the worldly law becomes the apolitical (theological) duty demanded by the higher law.
This is why Charles J. Rolo’s 1952 article, “Simenon and Spillane: Metaphysics of Murder for the Millions,” a true classic of Spillane criticism, stands out among the contemporary reactions to Spillane’s fiction.91 Unlike Wylie, for example, Rollo moves beyond the clichéd renunciations of sadism in Spillane’s fiction to uncover the hidden religious content of this violence. In effect, Rollo shows that rather than a mere case of sadistic identifications, Spillane’s success could be explained by “an altogether different, primitively moralistic set of cravings” which take us to the “metaphysical” foundations of Spillane’s fiction.92 As Rollo argues, in Mike Hammer’s world, the inherent failure of law (as the police are incapable of guaranteeing justice) necessitates the realization of a higher law: “Hammer is Jehovah’s messenger.”93 The move to the theological dimension, then, makes up for the inherent impossibility of a consistent application of the law. Mike Hammer’s sadism is not a form of vulgar immorality; it is a theological form of violence that founds a higher form of morality.
Kenneth C. Davis is, thus, right to suggest that “Spillane’s Jehovah could be seen as the active principle in his books.”94 But it is not exactly right to call it the “sublime contradiction” of his fiction that religion and violence coincide in this vulgar manner.95 As long as we consider this duality a “contradiction,” we are deprived of an essential insight. The compulsive attempts to separate religion from violence in Spillane’s reception shows that liberal anti-Communism’s investment in art and religion was founded upon the disavowal of the violence that established its political and cultural domains. In other words, the suspicion emerges that the separation of culture into high art and mass culture, and the concomitant division of politics into democratic and antidemocratic forces, were themselves the results of violent acts. Religion is not just the source of the truth of anti-Communism, but also the source of the violence that establishes its legitimate field. In Spillane’s fiction, this violent foundation is put on display with a disturbing simplicity and exaggerated force.
This is why Malcolm Cowley’s attacks on Spillane are so revealing, since in Cowley’s work the institutionalization of modernism coincides with the deliberate exclusion of mass culture as paranoid, sadistic, and masochistic.96 This leads us to believe that the institutionalization of modernism during the fifties had to proceed through a denial of the violent content of modernism (primarily, by displacing it to its other, mass culture). New York Times critic Hillis Mills’s critique of Spillane’s fiction is telling as it condenses this ideological complication in one single phase: “violence for violence’s sake.”97 We find here an ironic formula, a parody of an avant-garde battle cry, to explain what is wrong with Spillane: art is replaced by violence. Whereas modernism is capable of making art for art’s sake, mongrelized mass culture has nothing else to offer in place of art but violence. The assumption is, therefore, that art is the exact opposite of violence (without dialectical mediation). Modernism is opposed to mass culture the way art is opposed to violence.
We can, thus, articulate an obvious difference between Lionel Trilling and Mickey Spillane. What is common to both is that they try to derive a form of anti-Communist politics from a democratic paradox, but they assign fundamentally different roles to violence. As we have seen, for Trilling, the constitutive paradox of liberal democracy is that the primal imagination of liberalism will never coincide with its particular manifestations, since liberalism tries to establish freedom by instituting limits on this freedom. Therefore, it is always at risk of turning into an illiberal form of violence against this freedom. The role of “the imagination of catastrophe” is to test the limits of these particular manifestations by reactivating the original imaginary constitution of the field of the social. But Spillane argues the exact opposite. Since every particular manifestation of democracy is constitutively incomplete, it has to be supplemented by a sovereign agency whose actions are not limited to democratic procedures. For Trilling, the defense against the totalitarian threat inherent in democracy is manifesting the constitutive gap of liberal democracy through a repetition of the original act of imagination. For Spillane, on the other hand, the defense against the anti-democratic enemy consists of filling in the constitutive gap of democracy through a repetition of the original act of violence that instituted the regime of democracy. One represents the liberal dream of an absolutely nonviolent politics of perpetual self-critique; the other the sacralization of nondemocratic violence as the only viable means of security. Appearances to the contrary, however, these two options are not simple opposites, but two aspects of the same foundational moment. The separation of these two moments as mutually exclusive options was made possible by an “aesthetic ideology” that introduced a “great divide” within the social production of culture.
Thus, Mills’s formula (“violence for violence’s sake”) misses the important point that the truly perverted nature of Hammer’s violence is not that it is violence for its own sake but that it is violence for the sake of the Other. The perversion at the heart of this violence is that it is in the service of God. In other words, Hammer’s violence is not perverted because it is excessive (and moves beyond the legitimate limits accepted by the guardians of liberal democracy), or because it is the source of enjoyment and self-serving. The democratic paradox is that the “due process of law” that characterizes democracy can only be guaranteed if the possibility of nondemocratic violence is kept alive. But this violence has to be distinguished from mere crime or the sadistic enjoyment of the antidemocratic enemy, so it is only justifiable if it is in the service of God.98
After a decade-long break following Kiss Me, Deadly (1952), Spillane revived his Mike Hammer series in 1962 with the publication of The Girl Hunters. This novel opens with the resurrection of Hammer, who, tortured by guilt, went on a seven-year binge after Velda mysteriously disappeared during a routine job. While the intensity of the later text is not comparable to the fury of One Lonely Night, it is clear that The Girl Hunters is a continuation of the same project. There is, however, a significant difference: Mike Hammer’s relation to the law has undergone a decisive change.
One of the central characters of the novel is Art Rickerby, a federal agent seeking personal revenge for the murder of his friend and fellow agent, Richie Cole. Rickerby represents the logic of vengeance that Hammer used ever since I, the Jury. But this time, Rickerby puts a little twist on the original formula when he tries to explain to Hammer why he wants to catch the assassin alive:
A quick kill would be too good.… But the law—this supposedly just, merciful provision—this is the most cruel of them all. It lets you rot in a death cell for months and deteriorate slowly until you’re only an accumulation of living cells with the consciousness of knowing you are about to die…Too many people think the sudden kill is the perfect answer for revenge. Ah, no my friend. It’s the waiting. It’s the knowing beforehand that even the merciful provisions of a public trial will only result in what you already know.… True violence isn’t in the deed itself. It’s the contemplation and enjoyment of the deed.99
After the final showdown with the Communist assassin code named “the Dragon,” Hammer’s conclusions reflect the correctness of Rickerby’s philosophy: “I thought [Rickerby] was nuts, but he could be right. Yeah, he sure could be right. Still, there had to be some indication that people were left who treat those Commie slobs like they liked to treat people.”100 This “indication” is that, rather than killing the Dragon, Hammer nails his hands to the floor so that he can be properly exposed to the true violence of the law. At the end of The Girl Hunters, therefore, we find that Hammer moves away from the vigilante logic of the earlier novels in the direction of a more properly law-abiding solution. His compromise between the two extremes (vigilantism and due process of law) is this “indication,” this little extralegal bonus, which institutes a sign (in the form of a wound) that nevertheless marks the theological foundation of everyday democracy. Although the law is now “strong” enough to protect itself (since in this later novel it is redefined as an autonomous entity to the degree that it internalizes its own opposite, lawless violence and cruelty), democracy must be marked by the wounds of sacred violence. Mike Hammer’s function is now to be the brutal scribe of these holy signs and literally carve them into the sinful bodies of the enemies of democracy: although the law internalizes supreme violence, it is still dependent on this minimal exteriorization in a sacred text, the holy writing of sovereign violence.
So the most important thing about Rickerby’s philosophy is not that it tries to correct Hammer’s kill-lust by ensuring a proper trial for a criminal. Quite to the contrary, the law is legitimized here only to the degree that it is the cruelest weapon of punishment. In a certain sense, the logic of vigilantism is internalized: the law is just to the degree that in essence it is vigilante. It regains its dignity only if behind the “supposedly just, merciful” façade we perceive a maximum of possible cruelty. But in that case, ensuring the due process of law is not simply just and merciful, but the most “perverted” form of justice as it provides the highest amount of vengeful enjoyment. While in the earlier Hammer novels the heteronomy of the law was exteriorized in the form of a higher law that justified holy pleasures, in the later novels we witness the interiorization of the guarantee of justice through the inherent cruelty of the law. From now on, the law is only just if it is manifestly cruel.
The shift of perspective between One Lonely Night and The Girl Hunters can be described in the following three steps. In the earlier novels, we start with the contradiction of the law and its outside (crime). But the problem is that Mike Hammer’s relation to the law does not fit this scheme. He is not simply in violation of the law; he is fulfilling the spirit of the law. Therefore, in a second step, the opening contradiction between the law and its outside (law and lawlessness) had to be redefined as the contradiction of two laws: the weak law of democracy and the strong law of sacred violence. Finally, in the later novels, this contradiction between two laws is redefined as a contradiction internal to the law. Therefore, it is really no contradiction at all, since what might have first appeared to be the opposite of the law (supreme cruelty) is actually its true essence. This internalization of its own opposite, however, almost fully restores the autonomy of the law. But this restoration is not complete, because there is a minimal remainder of heteronomy: a message must be sent. Therefore, Mike Hammer’s mission is no longer to maintain the democratic framework through sacred violence, since now the law itself is capable of administrating this violence. From now on, Mike Hammer’s role is to institute the signs of nondemocratic violence. Although the law is supreme, some people might not know that it is so. Thus, the proper process of democratic justice must be constantly marked by the wounds of sovereign violence.101