ok im reading this phd thesis and i'm already mad

le carre was never "realism" people are just bad at reading, and believe that in order for books to be good they must be "realist"

also something something masculinity ideology something something gritty something something the spy who came in from the cold

ok another complaint: tinker tailor deffo elides the concept of communism and the threat of nuclear war, but it is OBSESSED with the (decline of the) british empire. obsessed!! empire and imperialism are its most important backdrops!

george smiley is more than infantry in the cold war he LITERALLY heads up mi6 at one point

i know we all forget this because we hate the honorable schoolboy and we think of george as an independent actor because he is in most of the books he leads but he was LITERALLY head of the circus for a good while there

"Le Carre’s books’ personal emphasis also has a political function: an individualist rebuttal of the collectivist ‘dogma’ of Communism that is far easier than defending capitalism." but the point is that this fails! it doesn't work, because it can't!

you can't run a state with individualism! and if you're a believer in individualism, working for a state or even accepting one is a contradiction! this is why le carre's protagonists kill themselves!

"The intention in this thesis is to get beneath the novels’ surfaces that so mesmerise critics and commentators (the complex plots; the insider jargon)," irrelevant to my general critique but. "complex plots"

all the good le carre novels are just detective stories with a dash of geopolitics on top for flavor

and the spy who came in from the cold isn't "complex" it's "convoluted and full of holes"

if anyone wants to read along btw: https://oro.open.ac.uk/61277/1/13834661.pdf

"Indeed, quietly, and not always firmly, le Carre’s Cold-War protagonists are restorers of the British state and British status quo in every novel." yes obviously i agree but if the personal and the political are intertwined, what political meaning does it have that

they restore the british state and then must *kill themselves in penance*???

"le Carre ultimately affirms British state ends: the defence of the British ‘system’ - liberalism; capitalism - as against ‘expansionist’ Soviet Communism." you are drinking johnboy's own koolaid if you think there is a meaningful distinction between "ends" and "means"

the POINT is that liberal "ends" can only exist by illiberal "means" and therefore that liberalism is a failed and self-destroying ideology

that's what we in the biz call "contradictions"

i'm on page uhhhhhhh 12 of 287 this is gonna be a long thread

"Le Carre counterbalances these anxieties about state expediency with a potent
assertion of British national ‘decency’: this decency is invested in the hugely attractive
character of George Smiley. Smiley appears in all six of the novels in this thesis: he is le
Carre’s readers’

guide and moral compass through the Cold War; a reassuring figure for
British national identity (and British national anxieties), a champion of British values." but smiley is a hypocrite and a self-deceiver! an obsessive conformist! a guy who was "just following orders"!

like smiley is.... a terrible guy! the villain of all the books he's in! and you can see this if you pay attention. as he says himself in call for the dead, "who was then the gentleman?"

i am sympathetic to "as a british person, alec-guinness-as-george-smiley has poisoned my culture" but you must say that https://twitter.com/spywrite/status/1309683577085362176

"If British state and national ends are validated in le Carre, then this rather refutes the other main tenet of the critical consensus:20 that le Carre depicts East and West as morally equivalent.

This persists despite such public pronouncements as, 'the Western evil is far, far, far less evil than the Eastern one.'" yeah see THIS is reasonable but that's only because critics can't read

"Indeed, in le Carre, the Eastern bloc is presented as the ontological root of Cold-War expediency - the West only imitates, reacts, defends, while the Communist East is unscrupulous, conspiratorial, aggressive."

^^ i dunno this is, well, pretty arguable. the spy who came in from the cold is quite literally the story of an ATTACK on east german intelligence. control has that little spiel at the beginning, about how "we do disagreeable things, but we are defensive," as a piece of irony!

like, control is a liar and deceiving leamas hook line and sinker in that intro, we're supposed to look back on that first chapter and see that it was all lies and bullshittery

like we're specifically SUPPOSED to see that "western intelligence is defensive" is a smokescreen. that's why control says it. leamas doesn't say it, smiley doesn't even say it - CONTROL, THE BAD GUY, says it

like, dr. manning is right about the smiley-led novels, they are all defensive. and that is ideological, though it's also a bit because smiley is a detective - a whole different sort of propaganda.

still don't get too big for your britches, generalization is bad for one's health

also looking glass war doesn't feature a soviet incursion? it features the ephemeral and easily falsified SUSPICION of a soviet incursion, used to justify a BRITISH incursion by a failure of a man looking for glory who needed a justification

there's a lot of things going on in the looking glass war but that's DEFINITELY one of them

again dr. manning is right about critical consensus but that has nothing to do with the actual novels, it's just because critics love to jerk off. the novels support critics' liberalism because complex novels can be twisted lots of ways depending on the politics of the reader

also i blame a TON of this on martin ritt and richard burton, and even MORE of it on john irvin and alec guinness

this is a bit of a tangent but like, if you read this and recognize that lacon is a clown whose verbiage we should deride rather than believe, you will see that he posits that one COULD live by "morality as method" but spies don't - and this is a critique of spies

like the POINT is that the method is bad and it poisons the aim, but there is no other possible method, so the aim is inherently poisoned

again i don't think le carre knows that that's what he's writing i think, or he doesn't understand the political implications, but that shouldn't matter

this is what happens when we let straight men who know nothing about freud interpret books

truly i do believe that i am able to see the deep fundamental irony in le carre only because i am gay

i can see that george smiley has some repressed homosexuality that he is never going to deal with, so i can also see the many other ways in which his worldview is a series of self-deceptions

fundamentally i am really just nitpicking but the world dr. manning is ostensibly living in is a world in which le carre is a very boring writer and that is simply not true!

"However, popular commentary and literary criticism do guide and even ‘fix’ readings, making it harder to comprehend le Carre’s work beyond a critical discourse which proclaims his work as oppositional whilst affirming consensus ideology." yeah that's fair

like i do not argue that dr. manning is necessarily wrong about cultural impact, just about whose fault that is lmao

"So let us examine this issue of ‘pleasure’ in a ‘reactionary’ text. Just as female-targeted romantic novels interact with culturally encoded female fantasies, as described in Cora Kaplan’s ground breaking

Thornbirds essay, thrillers interact with culturally encoded masculine fantasies." dr. manning you better do a good job here or i'm coming for you

this is my house that you have entered

ok this IS a spicy take which kind of rules but i also need you to explain smiley's people to me

smiley's people is the masculine fantasy as contrasted with tinker tailor which is even at the best of times pretty emasculating for george

ok tangent time but you can't talk about le carre + ideology without talking about the shift in his later post cold war books

like you can say all you want that there was no morally ambiguous conflict blah blah blah but you can make any conflict ambiguous if you're willing to make your protagonist wrong for a while

the problem with late stage le carre is that he stopped writing villain protagonists. like, generally in a pre-aps le carre novel the protagonist is a *bad guy* and his choice in the end is to live with being a bad guy or destroy himself

this *evaporates* after aps. the only post aps le carres (that i've read, i'm still procrastinating the constant gardener and our game, oops) that have this are the tailor of panama and soooort of the secret pilgrim though pilgrim is Weird

all the others have the main character either an innocent victim or a successful self-sacrificial rebel, which is 1) way less interesting and 2) says some kinda thing about le carre's relationship to Cold War Ideology

(the words "late stage le carre" to be read in the same tone as the words "late stage capitalism")

i have to say that i don't know enough about the history of high minded literary theory to know what manning is arguing about in some parts, but those are the parts where i really don't have a problem with his argument. i mainly have a problem when he engages jlc directly

also manning read a small town in germany challenge

i know i don't remember that book but i remember it being a weird one

"In both Denning and Martin, the Cold War recedes (Martin doesn’t even mention the Berlin Wall), affirming consensus views like Masters’ genre study’s claim that le Carre 'is not interested in the political aspects of espionage'." damn people do this huh

what is a piece of culture but an expression of geopolitical id??? what a boring way to look at the world, ignoring that.

anyway have i mentioned in this thread that i watch a lot of star trek? lmao