ABSTRACT
The growing autonomy of security and intelligence agencies came to be recognised through their evidently emergent influence in global political life. The curiously entangled relationship between literature, security and intelligence is, then, not surprisingly replete with twists and turns of plot and an odd array of dual-facing characters. This chapter examines the twentieth-century backgrounds to state-organised, security-focused and intelligence-inclined uses of literature. Analysing the landscape of lies and dissembling that have cut vast swathes through the land of letters, it outlines a complex entanglement of the arts and the Academy through the byways of espionage and intrigue, the beginnings of a literary cartography of security and intelligence. Without the bourgeois landholding system and its customs, without the subtle suggestions of the estate and of the salon, Non-October art sees no meaning in life, withers, becomes moribund, and is reduced to nothing.
