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conducted, if it were not that this artifice forces one to praise in the works of Fleming not the shrewd elaboration of the different stories but a literary phenomenon. |
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The play of Midcult in Fleming sometimes shows through (even if none the less efficacious). Bond enters Tiffany's cabin and shoots the two killers. He kills them, comforts the frightened girl, and gets ready to leave. |
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At last, an age of sleep, with her dear body dovetailed against his and his arms around her forever. |
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Forever? |
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As he walked slowly across the cabin to the bathroom, Bond met the blank eyes of the body on the floor. |
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And the eyes of the man whose blood-group had been F spoke to him and said, "Mister, nothing is forever. Only death is permanent. Nothing is forever except what you did to me." |
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The brief phrases, in frequent short lines like verse, the indication of the man through the leitmotiv of his blood-group, the biblical figure of speech of the eyes which 'talk'; the rapid solemn meditation on the factobvious enoughthat the dead remain so. . . . The whole outfit of a 'universal' fake which Dwight MacDonald had already distinguished in the later Hemingway. And, notwithstanding this, Fleming would still be justified in evoking the spectre of the dead man in a manner so synthetically literary if the improvised meditation upon the eternal fulfilled the slightest function in the development of the plot. What will he do now, now that he has been caressed by a shudder for the irreversible, this James Bond? He does absolutely nothing. He steps over the corpse and goes to bed with Tiffany. |
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6.5. Literature as Collage |
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Hence Fleming composes elementary and violent plots, played against fabulous opposition, with a technique of novels 'for the masses'. Frequently he describes women and scenery, marine depths and motorcars with a literary technique of reportage, bordering closely upon Kitsch and sometimes failing badly. He blends his narrative elements with an unstable montage, alternating Grand Guignol and nouveau roman, with such broadmindedness in the choice of material as to be numbered, for good or for ill, if not among the inventors, at least among the cleverest exploiters of an experimental technique. It is very difficult when reading these novels, after their initial diverting impact has passed, to perceive to what extent Fleming simulates literature by pretending to write literature and to what extent he creates literary fireworks with cynical, mocking relish by montage. |
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