Though Jacques Barzun in "Meditations on the Literature of Spying" (1965) reveals that he is no fan of recent developments in the espionage genre, he makes a number of observations that I, as an espionage addict, find suggestive, impressive, and useful. For example, he connects the success of the genre at the time of his writing -- the time of James Bond movies and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold -- to "the multiform attack on privacy" that causes vast amounts of anxiety in the populace. Barzun goes further:
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Psychoanalysis has taught even the common man that he is in some ways an impostor; he has spied on himself and discovered reasons for distrust and disgust: in all honesty he cannot turn in a good report. Nor do his surroundings help to restore his confidence. The world is more and more an artifact, everywhere facsimiles supplant the real thing -- the raucous radio voice, the weird TV screen. Just to find his bearing he must fashion a computer simulation of his case. So mimicry, pretending, hiding, which are part of the child's first nature and used to be sloughed off as true individuality developed, now stay with us as second nature, and indeed as the only escape from the bad self and the bad world.
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This is brilliantly put and one has to rub one's eyes a little recalling that the essay, so predictive of intellectual conversation to come, appeared back in the Spring 1965 issue of The American Scholar. While Barzun broadcasts his irritation with the espionage genre, at least he pays it the compliment of calling it, in his title, "the literature of spying," which is no mean thing in his book. -- DL
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