Pre Cold War British Spy Fiction, the “albatross of self” and lines of flight in Gravity’s Rainbow

Abstract

In his introduction to Slow Learner, Thomas Pynchon suggests that an influence in his short story ‘Under the Rose’ was the spy fiction he had read as a child. What he takes from the form, he says, is an enjoyment of “lurking, spying, false identities, psychological games.” I hope to show that this youthful reading has interesting things to tell us about Pynchon’s writing beyond ‘Under the Rose’ and in more complex ways than his quote suggests. To do this I want to focus on that perennial issue of spy fiction - the maintenance and manipulation of identity. Negotiating ideas of subjectivity is a core concern in Pynchon’s work and to consider it I want to use the four spy novelists he mentions in the Slow Learner introduction - John Buchan, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Helen MacInnes and Geoffrey Household. This is a more disparate quartet of authors than Pynchon’s grouping suggests and I want to employ them to consider a variety of strategies used to ‘build character’ and the way Pynchon’s work approaches these strategies. This allows a reflection on questions of disguise, doubles, animals and the nomad within the context of a variety of postcolonial theories and aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s “nomadology”. V. would appear an obvious place to see connections to spy fiction, but, though I touch on some aspects of this novel, my focus will be very much on Gravity’s Rainbow because it has a much more concerted focus on the subject of Empire. Some intriguing echoes are to be found in the work of Pynchon in these authors and I hope to show how Pynchon’s attempts to formulate US “superimperialism” (Aijaz Ahmad) are reflected in the imperial concerns of what I would term the pre-Cold War British Spy fiction that engaged Pynchon in his youth.