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Page 146
moments of boredom, usually in the bar of an airport but always in the form of a casual daydream, never allowing himself to be infected by doubt (at least in the novels; he does indulge in such intimate luxuries in the short stories).
From the psychological point of view, the conversion has taken place quite suddenly, on the basis of four conventional phrases pronounced by Mathis, but the conversion should not be justified on a psychological level. In the last pages of Casino Royale, Fleming, in fact, renounces all psychology as the motive of narrative and decides to transfer characters and situations to the level of an objective structural strategy. Without knowing it Fleming makes a choice familiar to many contemporary disciplines: he passes from the psychological method to the formalistic one.
In Casino Royale there are already all the elements for the building of a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules. The presence of those rules explains and determines the success of the '007 saga'a success which, singularly, has been due both to the mass consensus and to the appreciation of more sophisticated readers. I intend here to examine in detail this narrative machine in order to identify the reasons for its success. It is my plan to devise a descriptive table of the narrative structure in the works of Ian Fleming while evaluating for each structural element the probable incidence upon the reader's sensitivity. I shall try, therefore, to distinguish such a narrative structure at five levels:
(1) the opposition of characters and of values;
(2) play situations and the story as a 'game';
(3) a Manichean ideology;
(4) literary techniques;
(5) literature as collage.
My enquiry covers the range of the following novels listed in order of publication (the date of composition is presumably a year earlier in each case):
Casino Royale (1953);
Live and Let Die (1954);
Moonraker (1955);
Diamonds are Forever (1956);
From Russia, With Love (1957);
Dr. No (1958);
Goldfinger (1959);
Thunderball (1961);
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963);
You Only Live Twice (1964).

 
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