ABSTRACT
Early structuralist writers adhered to the notion that what we often take to be important is merely superficial and that in so doing we ignore the more significant (both figuratively and literally deeper) structure. Writers whose work informed early structuralist writing included Claude Lévi-Strauss (one of whose key works is the structuralist analysis of South American Indian myths) and Vladimir Propp (who analysed story structure and characters in Russian folk tales). All structuralist work is informed by a sense in which it didn’t matter on what you turned the microscope because what would be discovered underneath the surface were the same fundamental structures. And it didn’t matter whether what was structurally analysed was a classic myth drawn from antiquity or a story ripped from the pages of a contemporary comic. In that spirit we now offer an extract from a detailed analytical piece by Umberto Eco analysing the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. Eco begins his structuralist analysis of the Bond novels by identifying sets of oppositions which underlay the whole series of books.
The novels of Fleming seem to be built on a series of oppositions which allow a limited number of permutations and interactions. These dichotomies constitute invariant features around which minor couples rotate as free variants. I have singled out fourteen couples, four of which are opposing characters, the others being opposing values, variously personified by the four basic characters:
Bond – M;
Bond – Villain;
Villain – Woman;
Woman – Bond;
Free World – Soviet Union;
Great Britain – Non-Anglo-Saxon Countries;
Duty – Sacrifice;
Cupidity – Ideals;
Love – Death;
Chance – Planning;
Luxury – Discomfort;
Excess – Moderation;
Perversion – Innocence;
Loyalty – Disloyalty.
These pairs do not represent ‘vague’ elements but ‘simple’ ones that are immediate and universal, and, if we consider the range of each pair, we see that the variants allowed in fact include all the narrative devices of Fleming.
Bond–M is a dominated–dominant relationship which characterizes from the beginning the limits and possibilities of the character of Bond and which sets events moving. Psychological and psychoanalytical interpretations of Bond’s attitude towards M have been discussed in particular by Kingsley Amis. The fact is that, even in terms of pure fictional functions, M represents to Bond the one who has a global view of the events, hence his superiority over the ‘hero’ who depends on him and who sets out on his various missions in conditions of inferiority to the omniscient chief. Frequently, his chief sends Bond into adventures the upshot of which he had discounted from the start. Bond is thus often the victim of a trick – and it does not matter whether things happen to him beyond the calculations of M. The tutelage under which M holds Bond – obliged against his will to visit a doctor, to undergo a nature cure (Thunderball), to change his gun (Dr. No) – makes so much the more insidious and imperious his chief’s authority. We can, therefore, see that M represents certain values such as Duty, Country, and Method (as an element of programming contrasting with Bond’s own inclination to rely on improvisation). If Bond is the hero, hence in possession of exceptional qualities, M represents Measure, accepted as a national virtue. But Bond is not so exceptional as a hasty reading of the books (or the spectacular interpretation which films give of the books) might make one think. Fleming always affirmed that he had thought of Bond as an absolutely ordinary person, and it is in contrast with M that the real stature of 007 emerges, endowed with physical attributes, with courage and fast reflexes, but possessing neither these nor other qualities in excess. It is, rather, as certain moral force, an obstinate fidelity to the job – at the command of M, always present as a warning – that allows him to overcome superhuman ordeals without exercising any superhuman faculty.
The Bond–M relationship presupposes a psychological ambivalence, a reciprocal love–hate. At the beginning of The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond, emerging from a lengthy amnesia and having been conditioned by the Soviets, tries a kind of ritual parricide by shooting at M with a cyanide pistol; the gesture chosen loosens a longstanding series of narrative tensions which are aggravated every time M and Bond find themselves face to face.
