In You Only Live Twice (1964), James Bond gives up on a fifty-guinea course of hypnosis, psychiatric medicine, and therapy, before deciding “to sit in this secluded garden before going back to his office ten minutes across the park.” What follows is a stream-of-consciousness passage that seems more characteristic of Modernist experimentation than a spy novel: Bond’s thoughts flit in rapid-fire melancholy from the death of his wife Tracy, to atomic annihilation, to the lives and deaths of insect colonies. The passage evokes an underlying current to many of Fleming’s Bond novels, one excised from the films: Bond’s psyche proxying Britain’s Cold War political imaginary. It is my contention that, through depicting Bond as a depressed Late Modernist hero, Fleming illustrates a Britain frozen by its own anxieties.
This moment is not a blip but a recurring phenomenon in Fleming’s Blofeld Trilogy, which also includes Thunderball (1961) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). In these novels, Bond is akin to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or Christopher Isherwood’s George Falconer, as he grapples with the cognitive dissonance of an adulthood contrary to childhood innocence and with his job performance after losing his spouse. This embrace of a protagonist’s unstable psyche, alongside political anxieties, are hallmarks of Late Modernism, which simultaneously co-opts Modernist techniques while eschewing ebullient wordplay and formal experimentation. Here, Late Modernism functions as a double agent of aesthetics: Modernist techniques infiltrate other literary modes, but without difficult, innovative forms. This results in what I term “stealth Modernism,” a process by which popular genres manipulate Modernist themes, tropes, and techniques. To elaborate on this position, this essay will draw from Modernist criticism including Virginia Woolf’s “Character and Fiction” and Lionel Trilling’s “Art and Neurosis,” as well as recent scholarship on genre fiction, mental health, and the legacies of Modernism.
About the presenterPatrick Thomas Henry
Patrick Thomas Henry is the Associate Editor for Fiction and Poetry at Modern Language Studies. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Fiction Southeast, Souvenir Lit, Passages North, Clarion, and others. His essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from European Romantic Review, Response, Massachusetts Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and others. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. You can find him online at patrickthomashenry.com or on Twitter @Patrick_T_Henry.