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sphere. They are structural analogies. Thus it happens that "Quantum of Solace," one of the stories in For Your Eyes Only, presents Bond sitting upon a chintz sofa of the governor of the Bahamas and listening to the governor tell, after a lengthy and rambling preamble, in an atmosphere of rarefied discomfort, the long and apparently inconsistent story of an adulterous woman and a vindictive husband, a story without blood and without dramatic action, a story of personal and private actions, after the telling of which Bond feels himself strangely upset and inclined to see his own dangerous activities as infinitely less romantic and intense than the events of certain private and commonplace lives. Now, the structure of this tale, the technique of description and the introduction of characters, the disproportion between the preamble and the story, the inconsistency of the story, and the effect it producesall recall strangely the habitual course of many stories by Barbey d'Aurevilly. And we may also recall that the idea of a human body covered with gold appears in Dmitri Merezkowskij (except that in this case the culprit is not Goldfinger but Leonardo da Vinci). |
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It may be that Fleming had not pursued such varied and sophisticated reading, and in that case one must only assume that, bound by education and psychological make-up to the world of today, he copied solutions without being aware of them, reinventing devices that he had smelled in the air. But the most likely theory is that, with the same effective cynicism with which he constructed his plots according to archetypal oppositions, he decided that the paths of invention, for the readers of our century, can return to those of the great nineteenth-century feuilleton, that as against the homely normalityI do not say of Hercule Poirot but, rather, of Sam Spade and Michael Shayne, priests of an urbane and foreseeable violencehe revised the fantasy and the technique that had made Rocambole and Rouletabille, Fantomas and Fu Manchu famous. Perhaps he has gone further, to the cultured roots of truculent romanticism, and thence to their more morbid affiliations. An anthology of characters and situations treated in his novels would appear like a chapter of Mario Praz' The Romantic Agony. |
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To begin with his evil characters, the red gleams of the looks and the pallid lips recall the archetype of the baroque Giovan Battista Marino's Satan, from whom sprang up (through Milton) the romantic generation of les ténébreux: |
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In his eyes were sadness lodged and death
Light flashed turbid and vermillion.
The oblique looks and twisted glares
Were like comets, and like a lamp his lashes
And from the nostrils and pallid lips. . . . |
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