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Page 169
Fleming is more literate than he gives one to understand. He begins chapter 19 of Casino Royale with "You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming." It is a familiar idea, but it is also a phrase of Novalis. The long meeting of diabolical Russians who are planning the damnation of Bond in the opening chapter of From Russia, With Love (and Bond enters the scene unaware, only in the second part) reminds one of Faust's prologue in the Hell.
We might think that such influences, part of the reading of well-bred gentlemen, may have worked in the mind of the author without emerging into consciousness. Probably Fleming remained bound to a nineteenth-century world, of which his militaristic and nationalistic ideology, his racialist colonialism, and his Victorian isolationism are all hereditary traits. His love of traveling, by grand hotels and luxury trains, is completely of la belle époque. The very archetype of the train, of the journey on the Orient Express (where love and death await him), derives from Tolstoy by way of Dekobra to Cendrars. His women, as has been said, are Richardsonian Clarissas who correspond to the archetype brought to light by Fiedler (see Love and Death in the American Novel).
But what is more, there is the taste for the exotic, which is not contemporary, even if the islands of Dream are reached by jet. In You Only Live Twice, we have a garden of tortures which is very closely related to that of Mirbeau in which the plants are described in a detailed inventory that implies something like the Traité des poisons by Orfila, reached possibly by way of the meditation of Huysmans in Là-bas. But You Only Live Twice, in its exotic exaltation (three-quarters of the book is dedicated to an almost mystical initiation to the Orient), in its habit of quoting from 'ancient poets recalls also the morbid curiosity with which Judith Gauthier, in 1869, introduced the reader to the discovery of China in Le dragon impérial. And if the comparison appears farfetchedwell, then, let us remember that Ko-Li-Tsin, Gauthier's revolutionary poet, escapes from the prisons of Peking by clinging to a kite and that Bond escapes from the infamous castle of Blofeld by clinging to a balloon (which carries him a long way over the sea, where, already unconscious, he is collected by the gentle hands of Kissy Suzuki). It is true that Bond hung on to the balloon remembering having seen Douglas Fairbanks do so, but Fleming is undoubtedly more cultured than his character is. It is not a matter of seeking out analogies and of suggesting that there is in the ambiguous and evil atmosphere of Piz Gloria an echo of Mann's magic mountain: sanatoria are in the mountains and in the mountains it is cold. It is not a question of seeing in Honeychile, who appears to Bond from the foam of the sea, Anadiomene, the bird-like girl of Joyce: two bare legs bathed by the waves are the same everywhere. But sometimes the analogies do not only concern the psychological atmo-

 
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