Cultural

George Grella

James Bond: Culture Hero

George Grella (b. 1938), a member of the faculty at the University of Rochester, is the author of Murders and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel and of essays that appear in such journals as Life, the New Republic, and the Kansas City Star. The essay that follows (published in 1964) is a delightful exercise in ironic scholarship.


Ian Fleming’s James Bond is the most famous spy since Mata Hari. The indomitable secret agent reaches every level of literacy: Presidents to popcorn chewers. Not only has the author become a kind of subliterary lion in Time, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Review, which have devoted interviews and articles to his work, but his opinion was solicited on a major network show about the U-2 affair, the producers seeming to consider Mr. Fleming something like the Walter Lippmann of espionage.
Yet there is no puzzle to solve, no criminal to discover, no brilliant method to reveal. Fleming has no view of a corrupt society in the manner of a Cain, a Hammett, or a Chandler; his style and outlook are facile and pedestrian. Unlike Mickey Spillane, he doesn’t write pornographic thrillers. Unlike Graham Greene, he offers no metaphysical or psychological insight, no significant comment on the nature of good and evil. Eric Ambler, a genuine craftsman, gives us plausible incidents, people stumbling into affairs which are complex, ambiguous, and believable. Newer writers, such as John Le Carré in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or Len Deighton in the largely unrecognized Ipcress File, portray the life of a professional spy as unglamorous, poverty-ridden, and full of odd danger—one never knows when his own organization may betray him, or how far a competing unit of his own government will go, or if he must kill someone on his side, or even what side he is on.
To put it plainly, James Bond, despite his lean good looks, his taste in food, wine, and women, his high standing in the British Secret Service, his license to kill, is stupid. He disobeys orders and blunders into situations he should have anticipated chapters in advance. He is almost always known to the enemy as soon as he arrives, undercover, on the scene of action. He usually flounders around long enough for his adversaries to disrupt his elaborate plans and capture him.
His only genius lies in an infinite capacity for taking pain. He has suffered (and survived) bombing, shooting, stabbing, poisoning, and automobile attack. He has managed to (barely) escape castration by carpet-beater; bisection by buzzsaw, rocket blast; shark, barracuda, and octopus attack; a near-fatal increase in height on a health farm stretching apparatus; and a dose of poison from the sex glands of a rare Eastern fish. Such bizarre punishment is oddly requited: Bond has enjoyed the charms of the expensive Tiffany Case; the Bahamian nature girl, Honeychile Rider; the mystic Solitaire; and the ineffable Pussy Galore.
No secret agent could behave with such incompetence and still achieve such high renown, such titillating rewards. Fleming’s characters are grotesques, the much-publicized sex is chrome-plated, not at all shocking, and the plots are repetitive from book to book. The solution of the paradox of James Bond’s popularity may be, not in considering the novels as thrillers, but as something very different, as historic epic and romance, based on the stuff of myth and legend.
Thus, the affectionate fondling of brand names, which readers cite as an example of authenticity, is a contemporary version of the conventional epic catalog. It is important for the reader to know that Bond wears Sea Island cotton shirts, smokes a Macedonian blend of cigarettes, tells time by a Rolex Oyster watch, fires a Walther PPK 7.65 automatic in a Berns-Martin Triple Draw holster, drives a Mark II Bentley Continental, and so on, just as it is important for the reader of the Iliad to be told the immense detail of Achilles’ shield. Instead of a catalog of ships, Fleming gives us a catalog of clothes, toilet accessories, or background material about some exotic place or some arcane field of knowledge. The catalogs reflect the culture: the long lists of brand names suggest the affluence of a capitalist civilization, just as Bond suggests the secure investment.
Bond fights epic battles, taking seriously what Pope used humorously in his mock epic, The Rape of the Lock—the epic game of cards. James Bond has won harrowing games of blackjack, baccarat, bridge, even canasta. Like Ulysses, he travels far, from Turkey to Las Vegas, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, even Miami Beach. He makes the obligatory trip to the underworld when he skin-dives in the Bahamas, travels through the sewers of Istanbul, visits the domain of Mr. Big in Harlem, negotiates Dr. No’s cruel tunnel of terror. His name indicates further facets of his character: he is entrusted with the mammoth task of safeguarding an entire civilization; the free world depends on his actions.
In Moonraker the situation parallels the Perseus-St. George myth, an appropriate one for Bond’s rescue of London from the great rocket of Sir Hugo Drax, the huge dragon menacing England. Drax has red hair, an ugly, burned face which even plastic surgery cannot mask, splayed “ogre’s teeth”; the great burst of fire he hopes to turn on London is the modern equivalent of the dragon’s flames. Fleming employs an ironic reversal of one aspect of the Perseus myth: instead of rescuing Andromeda from the cliff where she is chained, Bond and his Andromeda, Galatea Brand, are nearly killed when one of the Dover cliffs, with some urging from Drax, falls on them. Of course Bond survives and, after escaping steamhosing and the liftoff of the Moonraker rocket (more fire from the dragon’s nostrils), saves London. Alone among Bond novels, the hero fails to get the girl at the end: as a modern St. George, it would scarcely be appropriate for him to win the fair maiden.
In Live and Let Die, Bond travels to New York to confront Mr. Big, a giant Negro who controls a black brotherhood of crime, gathering gold to aid the Soviet Union. With his Negro network, his voodoo cult, his clairvoyant mistress, Mr. Big is almost omnipotent; his followers believe he is Baron Samedi, the Devil himself. He even controls the fishes of the sea, summoning shark and barracuda to defend his island. But Bond hurls the epic boast, which we know will clinch his victory, “Big Man? Then let it be a giant, a Homeric slaying.” His boast is fulfilled; just as he and Solitaire are to be dragged over a coral reef and shredded, Bond’s mine blows up Mr. Big’s boat and Big is devoured by the fish he tamed, his immense head bobbing bodiless in the sea. Bond again saves Civilization, this time from the powers of blackness.
Goldfinger is probably the most obvious reworking of early myth. Auric Goldfinger, who drives a gold car, carries his money in solid gold, dreams of robbing Fort Knox,  and likes his women gold-plated all over, is a reincarnation of King Midas. Midas was tone deaf and earned a pair of ass’s ears for misjudging a music contest between Pan and Apollo; Goldfinger, when Bond first meets him, is wearing a hearing aid and sunning himself with a set of tin wings resembling a pair of long, slightly pointed ears. Midas’ barber, unable to contain the secret of his master’s aural adornment, whispered his message into a hole. Later a reed grew and told the secret to all passersby. James Bond, in Goldfinger’s captivity, must foil the planned robbery of Fort Knox; he tapes his message to an airplane toilet seat, the only hole available, and thus transmits it to the outside world.
Fleming’s best-known book, Dr. No (there’s a movie version too), is the most purely mythic of his works. Dr. No is the archetypal monster who casts a blight on the land and who must be conquered by the unquenchable spirit of life. He inhabits a lavish underground fortress in a guano island in the Caribbean, from which he misguides American missiles with intricate electronic apparatus. He has come to the British government’s attention through complaints of the Audubon Society about the deaths of thousands of roseate spoonbills. Dr. No intimidates the natives and scares off the birds with a fire-breathing tractor made to resemble a dragon; his dragon is devastating the island of dung, killing the birds, the game wardens, all natural life. For his violation of nature, Dr. No must be punished by the grand spirit of affirmation, James Bond. Naturally Bond’s mission fails at first; he is detected and captured by the evil doctor. After a rich meal and an opportunity to enumerate and use the deluxe living accommodations of the island fortress, Bond is subjected to an agonizing series of tortures in a tunnel of horrors, including an ordeal by fire and by water. He manages to crawl through the bowels of the island (anthropomorphically, the bowels of the monster as well), and kill Dr. No’s pet giant octopus, displaying all the while superhuman strength and stamina. He buries Dr. No alive in a small mountain of guano. He has brought back the fertility of the land by ridding nature of the destroyer. As his reward, he spends a night with Honeychile Rider, the nymph of the Bahamas, who knows the secrets of snakes, spiders, and seashells. His heroic reward is the possession of the nature spirit herself; it is richly deserved. James Bond has redeemed the Waste Land.
The much-touted background which distinguishes the Bond novel, the close attention to real places and real names, the bits of esoteric information, are all products of an expensive research organization. Aside from their epic function, the lists of names lend only a spurious authenticity which is negated by other lapses from realism. Not only do people like Dr. No and Mr. Big inhabit an unreal world, but even their surface reality is questionable. Fleming’s painstaking tour of Manhattan with Bond in Live and Let Die proves only that he can read a New York City map. Mr. Fleming is maladroit at transcribing American English; his Negro dialect echoes Porgy and Bess. His Americans, from cabdrivers to CIA agents, speak like graduates of non-U public schools. In Diamonds Are Forever, Bond thinks the tails attached to automobile antennas are beaver tails. No one in America hunts beaver for their tails or for anything else and not even teenagers fly squirrel tails (which don’t look at all like beaver tails) from their cars any more. It’s been thirty years since jaded Café Society types slummed in Harlem; Fleming seems to think it’s still fashionable.
But no matter; we are dealing with myths. Vivienne Michel, the breathless French-Canadian girl who narrates The Spy Who Loved Me, may be intended as a representation of the typical James Bond fan. Most of the book concentrates on her rather unexciting sexual reminiscences in an odd fusion of True Confessions and McCall’s. She is rescued from a pair of gangsters in an Adirondack motel by the coincidental appearance of our agent. After first fumbling the job (he can’t kill in cold blood, he explains, forgetting that he’s hired for that job and in another book he’s detailed a couple of these jobs), Bond triumphs. He and Vivienne couple hygienically (in air-conditioned comfort, on Beautyrest mattresses, with Sanitized toilet facilities), and Vivienne comments on the action, “He had come from nowhere like the prince in the fairy tales, and he had saved me from the dragon . . . and then, when the dragon was dead, he had taken me as his reward.” Vivienne doesn’t have Bond’s powerful Bentley, she drives a “cute little Vespa.” She lists a variety of brand names, but hers consist of clothes and motel appliances. Her comments about the dragon indicate that she, at least, recognizes what’s up.
In Fleming’s most recent novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond saves England from biological warfare waged by Ernst Blofeld, the elusive chief of SPECTRE. He narrowly escapes death and matrimony. Blofeld murders Bond’s bride of a few hours and escapes, no doubt to reappear in a future novel. Bond, though hardly chaste, still must be unmarried, celibate in his fight against evil. Since there can be no Son of Bond, Blofeld does agent 007 a great service.
Mr. Anthony Boucher, an astute and prolific critic of thrillers, complained in a New York Times review of the book that only bad shooting enabled Bond to escape his enemies. Mr. Boucher is correct, but he criticizes the book as a poor thriller, neglecting the myth: since Bond leads a charmed life, no one can ever shoot him dead.
Perhaps centuries from now, scholars will trace assiduously those references to Yardley soap, Kent brushes, Lanvin perfume, Sanitized toilet seats. Perhaps there will be a variorum Fleming, and “Fleming men” as there are “Milton men.” Theses may be written on the epicene role of M, clearly a father figure (yet why unmarried? and that maternal sounding initial is rather damning). For James Bond is the Renaissance man in mid-century guise, lover, warrior, connoisseur. He fights the forces of darkness, speaks for the sanitary achievements of the age, enjoys hugely the fruits of the free enterprise economy. He lives the dreams of countless drab people, his gun ready, his honor intact, his morals loose: the hero of our anxiety-ridden, mythless age: the savior of our culture.


Suggestions for Discussion

1. In what ways is James Bond “stupid”?

2. What is the importance of brand names in the Bond series?

3. Explain the mythic qualities Grella ascribes to the Bond novels. Which of the allusions made by Grella seem most convincing to you?

4. Discuss Bond as “the hero of our anxiety-ridden, mythless age: the savior of our culture.”


Suggestions for Writing

1. To what extent can any of Grella’s observations apply to the James Bond movies that you have seen?

Discuss the use of violence in a Bond novel or film.