Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11

The Wrong Side of Paradise

K. Miller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137443212
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

Transatlantic Literature and Culture After 9/11 asks whether post-9/11 America has chosen the 'wrong side of paradise' by waging war on terror rather than working for global peace. Analyzing transatlantic literature and culture, the book refocuses our view of Ground Zero through the lenses of imperial power and cosmopolitan exchange.

Part I
Empire

1

Paradoxical Polemics

John le Carré’s Responses to 9/11

Phyllis Lassner

John le Carré is on a tear. Although his fiction prior to 9/11 is often peppered with barbs at the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States, his criticism since the terrorist attacks appears to have escalated into rage. His outbursts, however, do not target the perpetrators. Rather, his post-9/11 fiction worries more about America’s responses to and influence on British policies than the event and the losses occasioned by the attack itself or the motivations and responsibilities of the perpetrators. In an essay published originally in The Times of London, he declares, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War” (“The United States” 11). Just as US military and cultural responses to 9/11 have continued well past the attack’s tenth anniversary, so they still haunt the novels of John le Carré. His first fictional response, Absolute Friends (2003), expresses anger, not at the war cries of the terrorists, but at the lies that perpetrated the war in Iraq led by President George W. Bush and supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair. By 2008, when le Carré published A Most Wanted Man, the targets of his wrath expanded to include the ongoing wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, racial profiling, surveillance, and the US policy of extraordinary rendition, which sent suspects abroad to be subjected to draconian interrogation practices.

Although le Carré published several novels in the period between 2003 and 2008, this essay will focus on Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man. I argue that these novels represent a continuum of his earlier concerns but with a significant change in narrative style and voice. Foremost among his concerns is that the Western democracies have justified the erosion of freedoms as the means by which they achieve their domestic and international goals. What has changed since the “War on Terror” and constitutes the focus of my study is le Carré’s new approach to dramatizing how “the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed, where its secret neuroses, paranoias, hatred and fantasies are whispered to the microphones” (“Will Spy Novels?”). Unlike his Cold War fiction, which embeds polemics with various narrative devices, le Carré’s post-9/11 voice can no longer be described as a whisper. Instead, as these later novels demonstrate, the urgency expressed in his critique of British capitulation to US policy demanded a different polemical form, one that the conventional definition and tone could not accommodate. He therefore amends the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) definition of polemic in order to counter the aggressive intervention he wishes to attack. The result is a paradoxical polemical voice that complicates the meaning of polemic by operating in two registers. “[A]rguing against doctrinal positions taken to represent national interest,” both novels dramatize how those positions are justified by paranoid fantasy and defended by violating rules of international law and justice (“Polemic” OED). While the primary targets of le Carré’s polemic are bureaucrats of the American and British Secret Intelligence agencies, he also examines his own position and voice critically. The expression of abrasive anger is both modified and intensified as the protagonists and victims in Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man are equally ensnared by and mocked for their own paranoid fantasies of resistance.

The paradox in le Carré’s post-9/11 novels surfaces in his creation of a parodic narrative voice that makes his political diatribe all the more controversial by mocking it. I turn to Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation that parody

ridicule[s] the straightforward, serious world in all its generic guises [by travestying it through] mimicry [that] rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word – epic or tragic – is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object […]. Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word […]. (Dialogic 52, 55)

Le Carré’s post-9/11 novels rip his polemical voice away from its twin objects – the “expanding, non-democratic decisions of the deep state” of espionage and his own one-sidedness (le Carré, “Interview” October 12, 2010).

Charting the polemical changes in his post-9/11 fiction begins by contrasting the later writing with le Carré’s representation of the morally compromised secret world in his first spy novel, Call for the Dead (1961). The very nature of a war fought in total secrecy, underground, and invisibly lent itself to le Carré’s themes of dubious loyalties, treacherous methods, and mystifying circumlocutions of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). The bureaucratic structure of the SIS or, as le Carré would mock it, “the Circus,” burns out those agents who remain devoted to their missions even as they are betrayed by their superiors. The embattled consciousness that highlights these deceits, double and triple crosses, and disguised motivations belongs to George Smiley, the anti-heroic British agent. Smiley could never resolve the contradictions between the ideal of protecting ordinary people and the human sacrifices deemed necessary to afford such protection. It is this lack of moral resolution that has defined le Carré’s reputation as a serious writer within a genre rarely taken seriously until recently.¹

Although the United States emerged as the dominant world power as World War II was being fought, the ironically labeled “Cousins” play an ancillary role in le Carré’s novels until the post-9/11 war on terror begins. In his Cold War novels, from Call for the Dead through Smiley’s People (1980), the antagonist is communism, in its East German and/or Soviet manifestation. As le Carré has asserted, “I do believe, reluctantly, that we must combat communism. Very decisively” (qtd. in Gross 33). Despite this seemingly straightforward statement, le Carré’s Cold War polemical fiction defies polarizing moral certainties, such as targeting the superhuman villains who wage planetary war in the James Bond thrillers. Instead, the novels of this period dramatically critique the multilayered deceptions that drive the machinations of both British and communist secret worlds and thus draw attention to their problematic similarities and consequences. Le Carré notes that these secret worlds comprise a great metaphor that addresses conflicts of loyalty, to oneself and to the state (le Carré, “Interview” October 12, 2010). The confrontational voice that dissects these conflicts does not, however, belong to le Carré’s understated, owlish George Smiley; it is instead a cri de coeur by an agent of action, Alec Leamas. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), Leamas’s bitter sarcasm lacerates the ironies of the “foul, foul operation” that “paid off” by sacrificing the innocent to protect an East German Stasi agent-assassin, “a vicious swine,” an anti-Semite and former Nazi, who now betrays his nation by serving as a double agent for the British (212–13). These are the practices that lead to le Carré’s anger “about doing things in defence of our society which may very well produce a society which is not worth defending” (Vaughan 340). Jost Hindersmann argues that le Carré’s concerns in his Cold War fiction address Britain’s “failure to adapt to […] the loss of world-power status,” a condition in which “British society drifts without orientation” and its “establishment […] withdraws to closed institutions where they lose contact with reality and give in to the illusion that nothing has changed” (29).

Call for the Dead confronts the illusion that through the work of its “espiocracy,” Britain once again fights the good fight against a clearly identified evil force (le Carré, A Most Wanted Man 44).² As the novel unfolds, however, this iconic high ground begins to disintegrate under the pressure of self-defense, that is, protection not of ordinary people but of the structure of power that governs the SIS. With a technique that also applies to Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man, le Carré represents SIS power as a bureaucrat without a backstory, justifying deceit with weary clichés. The later novels parody bureaucratic rationalizations by representing them as robotically delivered sound bites. By contrast, the faces of Cold War enemies in Call for the Dead are lined with backstories that historically and psychologically have victimized even the most calculating assassins like Dieter Frey, the East German master spy. At the end of this novel, protagonist and antagonist are caught in a moral and emotional maelstrom. In an outburst of empathetic fury that fuses Smiley and Dieter Frey in “the nausea of guilt,” the British agent beats the East German spymaster until the latter falls and disappears into the murky waters of the Thames (le Carré, Call for the Dead 145).³ The overdetermined moment resolves the espionage plot while questioning the methods needed to do so and their impact on how we define villainy and victory. With sympathetic overtones, Frey’s crippled body denotes his brutalization during World War II at the hands of the Nazis, but it also represents the destructive communist ideology to which he turned as an antidote to fascism.

Sympathy and antipathy merge as the narrator eulogizes: “He was gone; offered like a human sacrifice to the London fog and the foul black river lying beneath it” (CD 141). Frey is not the only sacrifice here. Read retrospectively, the expression of le Carré’s rage against the United States in his post-9/11 work finds common lexical ground in this earliest novel. Smiley goes “mad” while beating the assassin “blindly,” shouting “Swine, swine!” as he recalls Frey’s draconian methods (140–1). The gritty details of fog and foulness now characterize the dissolution of Smiley’s “rationalistic” ideals and by extension envelope the rationalized moral efficacy of British intelligence and the nation itself (145). Like the America that wages a war on terror in his post-9/11 novels, the Circus in his earlier fiction will resort to methods that travesty its lofty goals of protecting the innocent against oppressive ideologies and practices. But instead of linking travesty to parody, le Carré’s imagery in Call for the Dead expresses despair. That the deceitful and tortuous methods of British intelligence mirror those of the communists inspires le Carré’s moral sorrow: “Western hypocrisy […] took us too far into the Communist camp, and too near to the communist evaluation of the individual’s place in society” (“To Russia” 5). A decade after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet empire, with the launch of the war on terror and Britain’s capitulation to American policy, the double and triple crosses that victimize le Carré’s protagonists in Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man become the material of paradoxical polemics, which both mock and mourn the desperately defensive illusion that Britain has a moral imperative and influential position on the world stage. The nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe now suffers from chronic nostalgia for an illusory just history. As le Carré has said, these later novels express a “clearer confusion, perhaps – a more articulate pessimism” (“Cloak, Dagger” 9).

If moral precariousness was the measure of le Carré’s ongoing success, the darkly dystopian visions and conclusions of Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man struck some critics as guilty of substituting moral cant. According to an incensed American reviewer, Absolute Friends expresses le Carré’s “clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message […] meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order” (Kakutani, “Adding”). Some critics in the UK have viewed le Carré’s rhetorical offensive as “a monotonous expression of anger imperfectly interrogated,” concerned that he had succumbed to “politicized ranting” (Poole). Reviewing A Most Wanted Man in the context of le Carré’s career, novelist Alan Furst begins with admiration for its “moral anger […] written from a particularly seductive point of view […] with a ruthless, penetrative intellect and razor wit.” And though he faults le Carré’s interim turn from “evil in the name of good” to “just obscene greed,” he finds A Most Wanted Man the author’s “strongest, most powerful novel […] for representing the sheer desperation of those whose job it is to prevent another 9/11, another Madrid commuter train, another London Tube attack [with] a slow-burning fire in every line.” Complementing this pointed contemporary allusion, British reviewer Robert McCrum compares le Carré’s “unbridled rage” to that of Hamlet, raging against the rottenness in the state, or even Lear, producing “a devastating and phantasmagoric finale expressive of our times.” McCrum’s bridging of le Carré’s and Shakespeare’s expressions of outrage identifies a longstanding tradition of British polemical theater and fiction that takes the form of dystopia. In addition to critique, dystopias dramatize concerns of the day as dire consequences that express political warnings, in “phantasmagoric” images and voices.

Among le Carré’s more immediate polemical predecessors are those women writers of the 1930s and 1940s who created dystopias that combine angry narrative voices, gritty realism, and nightmarish visions to warn of fascist takeovers in Britain and Hitler’s designs for world conquest. Such writers as Phyllis Bottome, Naomi Mitchison, Storm Jameson, Katharine Burdekin, and Rebecca West used their fiction, journalism, and travel writing to protest the passive aggression of British isolationism and appeasement.⁴ Le Carré’s post-9/11 novels castigate a latter-day version of appeasement: Britain’s passive acceptance of and collaboration with American foreign policy. Like his polemical predecessors, le Carré expresses his anger through a method resembling Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, in which “[a]uthorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships” (Dialogic 263). In Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man, narrators and characters engage in multivocal political arguments between characters’ spoken and unspoken thoughts. In all cases, these arguments overlap, intersect, and interrupt each other to represent, express, and analyze Britain’s tenuous role in the escalating geopolitical tensions of the day.⁵

Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man also represent a dramatic shift in polemical fiction as it joins forces with parody. Parodic and satiric spy thrillers are of course conventional fare, as Manohla Dargis attests in her review of the 2008 film Get Smart. The use of parody to convey the serious concerns of spy fiction is more surprising. As Mikhail Bakhtin observes, the “presence of parody is in general very difficult to identify […] in literary prose […] without knowing the background of alien discourse against which it is projected […]. In world literature there are probably many works whose parodic nature has not even been suspected” (Dialogic 374). The “alien discourse against which” le Carré’s post-9/11 novels are “projected” is the rhetoric that justifies the war on terror. Le Carré’s use of parody to polemicize dramatizes America’s tragic fall into “historical madness” and Britain’s tragicomic efforts “to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship” (“The United States” 17). Defying his reputation for exploring deeply nuanced and unresolved moral and political tensions in the secret world, le Carré in these later novels takes the risk of proclaiming “that half a century after the death of Empire, the dismally ill-managed country […] is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its fiefdom” (Absolute Friends 301–2).⁶

And yet, as David Monaghan argues, while le Carré’s fiction represents a searing criticism of contemporary British policy and leadership, he is “a romantic, almost a sentimentalist, possessed of a deep love for his country, and his novels belong, in some important ways, to this patriotic tradition” (569). Coupled with “self-parody,” this romantic view informs the polemical dialogues and multivalent representations not only of Britain, but also of Germany, the primary setting of Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man (AF 4). The effect of this combination of national settings, which in form and substance resemble Bakhtin’s “hybrid construction,” is that it avoids an essentializing critical position in which one nation is pitted against the other as villain and victim (Dialogic 304). Andrew Pepper identifies in A Most Wanted Man a “bipolar Cold War logic whereby the international is characterized as a sphere of influence between sovereign states,” but he also argues that in the novel, “this model is quickly revealed to be inadequate” (418). A Most Wanted Man and Absolute Friends are thus vocally “double-accented, double-styled,” and their meanings, like double agents, must be negotiated by readers who are invited to assume the role of intelligence operatives (Dialogic 304).

Although these novels take place a decade after the end of the Cold War, their settings in Germany provide the narrative armature that connects them to le Carré’s Cold War fiction and its persistent resonances with World War II, the Holocaust, and le Carré’s romantic sense that “[n]othing I have ever written in my life has been free of the German influences of my youth” (“Smiley’s Secret”). After studying eighteenth-century German literature in Bern and at Oxford, he taught German at Eton for two years and then “gravitated to the British Foreign Service where, from inside its walls, I wrote my first novel – about Germany, of course, and the unreconciled heritage of its recent past.” Germany in these post-9/11 novels is haunted by 12 years of the Third Reich and over 40 years of the Cold War. Both eras resonate in the settings of Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man, which chart, as le Carré tells us, how “Germany changed, so I tried to catch its history in the making.” That changing history is incorporated in his belief that “Germany is an ever-growing part of our European destiny just as our so-called special relationship with America dwindles into myth” (“Smiley’s Secret”).

The Hamburg of A Most Wanted Man is inextricably bound to America in having been the “unwitting host to three of the 9/11 hijackers, not to mention their fellow cell members and plotters; or that Mohammed Atta, who steered the first plane into the Twin Towers, had worshiped his wrathful god in a humble Hamburg mosque” (MWM 3). The sarcastic voice here is “double-accented” as it also designates Hamburg as a site of human suffering. Focusing on a railway station, all too reminiscent of Nazi deportations and persecution, the narrator observes “every variety of lost soul – German vagrants, Asians, Arabs, African[s], and Turk[s…]. Few had work, and a sprinkling had no business standing on German soil at all, but were at best tolerat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Wrong Side of Paradise: American Exceptionalism and the Special Relationship After 9/11
• Part I Empire
• Part II Cosmopolis
• Part III City
• Bibliography
• Index