SLSL Intro "John Kennedy's Role Model"

[Dave Monroe]

"John Kennedy's role model James Bond was about to
make his name by kicking third-world people around,
another extension of the boy's adventure tales a lot
of us grew up reading." (SL, "Intro," p. 11)


>From Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1965) ...

"With Mr Fleming, we move beyond the situation in
which you only had to scratch a foreigner to find a
villain, but you still don't need to scratch a villain
to find a foreigner." (p. 86)


>From Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and
Neyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Ne
York: Methuen, 1987), Ch. 2, "The Moments of Bond,"
pp. 22-43 ...

"... Bond also functioned, in this period, as a site
for the elaboration--or, more accurately
re-elaboration--of a mythic conception of nationhood. 
Again, it is no accident that Bond's fame began to
spread, to any significant degree, in 1957.  In the
aftermath of the national umiliation of the Suez
fiasco, Bond constituted a figure around which,
imaginarily, the real trials and vicissitudes of
history could be halted and put into reverse.  As,
above all, a pre-eminently English hero,
single-handedly saving the Western World from
threatening catastrophe, Bond embodied the imaginary
possibility taht england might once be placed at the
centre of world affairs during a period when its
world-power status was visibly and rapidly declining. 
An imaginary outlet for a historically blocked
jingoism, Bond thus furnished a point of cultural
reference in relation to which a chauvenism well and
truly on its uppers could be reconstituted and
symbolically refurbished.  At the same time, of
course, Bond's appeal consisted partly in the way in
which the organization of the novels enabled questions
of nation to be transposed on to those of sexuality."
(pp. 28-9)


And from Jeremy Black, The Politics of James Bond:
>From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen (Westport, CT:
Prager, 2001), Ch. 1, "Cold War Stories," pp. 3-47 ...

"Bond was not a free spirit or an independent force. 
Instead, he was a British agent and Fleming's was very
much an account of Britain.  That it was idealized did
not detract from his presentation of Britain at a
particular moment.  This was late-imperial Britain, as
the decades of defense took their cumulative toll, and
the tide of empire waned under the pressure of a
hostile world.  Yet this pressure was resisted....
   "Postwar Britain was still a major imperial power,
and she sought to act like one in the late 1940s and
1950s in Africa, Malaya and the Middle East.  The
limited decolonization of the late 1940s ... was part
of a strategy designed to ensure the maintenance of
Britain's position as a great power....  Britain
became a nuclear power in 1952.
   "This is the background to Fleming's novels, the
first of which appeared in 1953.  It is interesting
that none are set in parts of the British empire
recently grantyed independence; or, indeed, in the
'Dominions' that had earlier gained independence .... 
 Instead, it was a still-active empire that Bond was
called upon to defend ....   This, however, was an
empire and a world that were at risk, and this may be
a reason why the novels were so popular.  In the
1950s, indeed, a series of crises--the Abadan crisis
of 1951, the Suez crisis of 1956, and the overthrow of
the pro-British Iraqi government in 1958--revealed th
limitations of British strength and encouraged a new
attitude toward empire taht was to lead to rapid
decolonization.
   "Bond is a figure designed to resist the threat to
empire.  Possibly increasing problems and rising
decadence, across the world and even at home, is the
sole setting in which Bond and the global villains can
truly operate....  Indeed, Bond can be seen, at least
initially, as a central figure in the paranoid culture
of the Cold War.  The novels and early films charted a
period whne Britain was making adjustments to her
world
status in uneasy alliance with the United States
agianst Communism, and, increasingly, offering skill,
brains and professionalism, instead of mere might....
the plots encouraged a sense of Britain as being in
great dangerm and the foreign character of the
villains underline dthis point." (pp. 3-4)


And cf., e.g., V. (1963) ...

Suez Canal
79; In 1956, Egyptian president Nasser seized the Suez
Canal, which was under British-French control.
Anglo-French forces intervened, but differences of
opinion in Britain, the United States and elsewhere,
combined with veiled Russian threats, caused the
British and French to back down; 186; 428; "We [the
U.S.] voted in the Security Council with Russia and
against England and France on this Suez business."
431, 448

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/v/alpha/s.html

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