Rewind: The name is Bond. James Bond
Seventy years later, we remain in Bond-age to the master spy.
By Pramod K Nayar
Hyderabad: In a novel, one man says in an exasperated tone: patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right, but this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
The sentiments expressed could belong to today, although the speech itself is articulated by a man who is willing to lay down his life, or waste that of others, for his country. It is no exaggeration, then, to say that ‘the figure of the spy has always been bound up with nationhood and the idea of what it means to be British’ — the opening sentence of Sam Goodman’s study British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire.
Operating as an undercover operative in various parts of the globe, chasing terrorists and thieves, seducing heiresses and rivals, forever hunter and hunted, the most popular spy in contemporary fiction first appeared, complete with tux, pistol and assorted gadgets, 70 years ago, in 1953, in a novel titled Casino Royale. The spy’s identity is now well known. The name is Bond, James Bond.
Fleming in Bond Time
Ian Fleming’s own life was lived close to the intelligence services, having served in Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division. Later, he would tap into his experiences, including his involvement with Operation Golden Eye that was designed for sabotage operations in post-World War II Europe.
After Casino Royale, the novels first appeared in serial form in newspapers and magazines, later as radio shows and, then of course as films. The no-less-charismatic John F Kennedy declared From Russia with Love as one of his favourite books. Fleming published 12 James Bond novels, and together they sold over 100 million copies, making it the most read spy series in history.
The figure of the spy is bound up with larger questions of national identity, especially British national identity
Played by hugely popular stars from Roger Moore to Daniel Craig, James Bond is a household name. The films were spectacles, with Bond’s Aston Martin racing around cities, exotic locations, the slithering sexuality of the women and the visceral violence. Every aspect of the Bond film franchisee has been studied. Its music alone, from the Bond theme music in Dr No to more contemporary trends, has received critical attention, in the form of Jon Burlingame’s The Music of James Bond.
The Bond Formula
Formula One: Bond’s persona as a cold, ruthless seducer of women, spy, assassin was forged very early in Casino Royale. In the novel, Mathis tells him:
Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles. But don’t let me down and become human yourself. We could lose such a wonderful machine.
This ‘wonderful machine’ becomes set as the Bond image. He is a man bored of peace and the ‘soft’ life. Fleming writes in From Russia with Love:
The Soft Life
The blubbery arms of the soft life had Bond round the neck and they were slowly strangling him. He was a man of war and when, for a long period, there was no war, his spirit went into a decline. In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.
And later Bond thinks: ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored’. The coldness stems in part from the fact that he has to operate as a ruthless killer. There is little room for doubt. And this is the key Fleming formula: Bond is a man of action.
Formula Two: The critic Umberto Eco noted in an early essay that the Bond gallery operates around binary pairs of people (M-Bond, Bond-villain, Bond-woman) and traits: excess/Bond-moderation/M, order/M-improvisation/Bond, beauty/Bond-monstrous/villains. The sleek and suave hero, Bond, is in sharp contrast to the villains who are ugly, unnatural, disfigured (Drax in Moonraker, Jack in Diamonds are Forever or Mr Big in Live and Let Die). There is also the inescapable feature of villainy that the novelist Kingsley Amis drew attention to: the number of foreign villains in Bond.
Sue Matheson in her essay in James Bond and Philosophy inventories the foreign:
Emilio Largo, Darko Kerim, Hugo Drax, and Tiger Tanaka, who are respectively Italian, Turkish, German, and Japanese, aristocrats by nature and breeding, are all illustrations of the popular concept of Nietzsche’s elite barbarian.
And, of course, there is an entire catalogue of Nazis and German villains in Bond.
The history of Bond is the history of technology itself, from surveillance to military devices
Formula Three: Bond is clearly high-society material: fit, well accoutred and poised. Bond is also exceptionally fit. In Thunderball, Fleming writes: he has to ‘make a complete return to his previous exceptionally high state of physical fitness’. When he insists on how the martini has to be fixed (‘shaken not stirred’, in one of the most popular Bond lines), suggests class quality, as the critic Suzie Gibson notes:
The martini connotes the glamour, sophistication, and wealth of the fashionable and privileged. Bond’s partiality for this drink, and indeed his strict instructions concerning its preparation, suggest that he is no slouch when it comes to fashion. He is the epitome of cool.
Formula Four: This has been neatly captured by the critic Umberto Eco:
M gives a task to Bond; The Villain appears to Bond; Bond moves and gives a first check to the Villain or the Villain gives first check to Bond; Woman moves and shows herself to Bond; Bond consumes Woman …; The Villain captures Bond (with or without Woman, or at different moments); The Villain tortures Bond (with or without Woman); Bond conquers the Villain; Bond convalescing enjoys Woman, whom he then loses.
However, beyond the formulaic, there is something fantastic about the Bond charisma, abilities, ruthlessness. Judi Dench, who would immortalise M in a series of Bond films, made the comment: ‘[Bond] has to be also a kind of fantasy person, that kind of comic strip quality about it has to be there’.
Bond’s Toys and Machines
A key aspect of the Bond formula is the gadgets and the ‘science’. The Lektor Decoder in From Russia with Love, the jet-pack in Thunderball and the autogyro in You Only Live Twice (not counting the apparatuses in the Bond car, watches, pens, etc), Bond toys are as intriguing as any in sci-fi texts, leading Mark Brake in The Science of James Bond to term the works, ‘spy-fi’, a genre of fiction that fuses spy fiction with science fiction.
Contextualising from the early 20th century the technological fetishism that marks the Bond universe, the historian of technology André Millard maps, in Equipping James Bond: Guns, Gadgets and Technological Enthusiasm, a history of Bond science and gadgetry.
The Bond body is itself a killing machine. Fleming ensured that Bond was skilled in martial arts, such as judo. As early as Live and Let Die, Fleming showcases Bond’s judo prowess:
He bent a little, and with his right hand straight and flat as a board, whipped around and inwards. He felt it thud hard into the target. The Negro screamed shrilly, like a wounded rabbit.
But even a man adept at every gadget fails when he encounters the nuke, as Millard notes about Goldfinger. Millard argues that when the undefeatable Bond needs help defusing the nuke, it indicates Fleming’s anxiety about this apotheosis of technology. But, it can also mean that Fleming is anticipating the kind of threat it poses even to a super-technologised world.
The most popular spy in contemporary fiction first appeared, complete with tux, pistol and assorted gadgets, in 1953, in a novel titled Casino Royale
Bond in Our Time
Clearly the racist, sexist and classist overtones are difficult for contemporary readers of varied degrees of political correctness, heightened self-critical consciousness and woke. And there is no dearth of criticism of the Bond universe. Take, for example, the regressive representations of women. Critics Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott argued that Bond films in particular suggest a ‘putting-back-into-place’ of women by ‘fictitiously rolling back the advances of feminism to restore an imaginarily more secure phallocentric conception of gender relations’, although James Chapman has proposed, not very convincingly, that the representation of women is simultaneously more conservative and progressive in the novels than in the films.
Entire books, such as Lisa Funnell’s For His Eyes Only: The Women of James Bond, have been devoted to the sexism in descriptions such as the notorious one from Thunderball:
Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class. In general, Bond regarded them as a mild hazard and he always gave them plenty of road and was ready for the unpredictable. Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger, and two women nearly as lethal … So two women in the front seat of a car constantly distract each other’s attention from the road ahead and four women are more than doubly dangerous for the driver…
None of the representations of class, gender or race, in works like Fleming’s are unproblematic, of course, from our point of view today. But, we may want to think about the imposition of our cultural values on texts and authors from a wholly different era. Lynn Hunt, author of Inventing Human Rights: A History, argued in 2002 in her capacity as the President the American Historical Association, that
Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forbears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the … historical discipline.
What Hunt is getting at is also that writers like Fleming, or anyone else from the canon for that matter, wrote for their time, employing a language that were acceptable in their time, and not accounting for 21st century’s attitudes. Jeremy Black in The World of James Bond notes that the Bond books and films drew on the then current fears and anxieties — the Cold War, the arms race — as well as Britain’s changing status in the era of America’s rise as a superpower. Black recognises that Fleming was creating characters, both hero and villains, within the demonology of his time: the characters were products of their era. This does not of course condone violence or racism but is a recognition that the representations of these attitudes in literary-cultural texts spoke to that moment, not ours.
Ian Fleming published 12 James Bond novels, and together they sold over 100 million copies, making it the most read spy series in history
Jeremy Wilson, Harvard faculty, speaks of a ‘naïve presentism’ which ‘unreflectively us[es] the terms of the present to interpret the past’. He proposes models like ‘analytical presentism’ (‘using an interpretation of the past to cultivate an interpretation of the present’), ‘theoretical presentism’ (‘using particulars from the past to create abstract schemes and ideas with the potential to elucidate the present and even the future’) and ‘political presentism’ (‘using applied research to draw parallels between the past and present for a call to action in the here and now’).
It remains for us to think through whether our self-congratulatory, self-righteous critical modes should be used to read the dead past and find faults with the authors of/in their time, or see how the past can help emancipate our present. Extending this presentist argument, one could speculate how terrible the readers of 2523 AD would find even our politically correct, all-boxes-ticked literature, academic writing, histories and stories.
James Bond is not Time-Bound. Seventy years later, the name is still Bond. James Bond.
(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and The English Association, UK)
