Literary criticism and counterintelligence

[Monte Davis]

Great post! On the W.A.S.T.E. FB group, Chris Karatnytsky wrote the other
day that she was going to try John le Carre. That reminded me of how much
JlC's books draw on the aftermath of the Cambridge spy ring in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Spy_Ring

Five (or more) of "the best and the brightest" from the heart of England's
old boys' network, recruited in the 1930s, spied for the USSR while active
in WWII and Cold War intelligence and diplomacy, including collaboration
with the US. Unraveling their roles extended from the early 1950s into the
1990s. Le Carre's Smiley novels are set in an intelligence /
counterintelligence service agency trying to determine how it has been
compromised, while its leaders may or may not include as-yet-undiscovered
spies covering their own tracks.

For many readers in the US, those novels also set the terms for
understanding the Angleton/CIA saga. And they hover in the background
whenever Pynchon characters try to figure out whether some event or
sequence is random happenstance, historical contingency /  inevitability,
or conspiracy. Which is most of the time.

On Thu, Feb 4, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de
> wrote:

> I find it interesting that Jesus James Angleton, chief of the CIA
> counterintelligence staff from 54 to 75 and next to Dulles probably the
> most influential member of the CIA (and a key figure of the Cold War), once
> founded a literary magazine in which he published poems by Williams, Pound
> and Cummings, amongst others, and carried on extensive correspondences with
> these poets as well as with T. S. Eliot. He also borrowed Eliot's phrase "a
> wilderness of mirrors" (from "Gerontion") to describe the
> intelligence/counterintelligence business, a usage that has meanwhile
> turned into a commonplace. Furthermore, Wikipedia says that Angleton was
> influenced by William Empson and "was trained in the New Criticism by
> Maynard Mack at Yale".
>
> (For those who are not familar with Angleton, his Wikipedia entry makes
> for a fascinating read.)
>
> On the other hand, Peter Dale Scott, who wrote some of the most important
> books on the CIA and related subjects (aka the American Deep State, the
> title of one of his books), is a poet and a retired professor of literature.
>
> It all has to do with a penchant for reading between the lines and
> searching for hidden meanings, I guess. Something that has of course always
> played an important role in Pynchon's novels and for their readers.
>
> As for New Criticism vs. reader-response theory, I tend to agree with
> Cleanth Brooks as quoted and paraphrased in Wikipedia:
>
> "'If some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather
> than the writer, so have they given less stress to the reader葉o the
> reader's response to the work. Yet no one in his right mind could forget
> the reader. He is essential for "realizing" any poem or novel... Reader
> response is certainly worth studying." However, Brooks tempers his praise
> for the reader-response theory by noting its limitations, pointing out
> that, 'to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the mercy of any
> and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to
> reader psychology and to the history of taste.'"
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism#Criticism
>
> You can go too far either way.
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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