Text Matters, Number 11, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.02

Editorial: Literature and Security

Liam Francis Gearon

University of Oxford
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9381-0103

Literature is a lie which seeks to tell a truth. Espionage is a trade dependent on deceit. Where the two professions meet, the dissembling knows no limit (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”). John le Carré, the nom-de-plume of the late David Cornwell (1931–2020), reflected more than any novelist of our time on the interface of literature and security. In his case, that was a life lived in service, to the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the Security Services, MI5, and a life lived, too, in the service of literature. The author stated: “I’m a liar, born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist” (Sisman 1). In The Pigeon Tunnel, le Carré aptly characterizes his autobiography as “stories from my life,” the subtitle of his work. It is a narrative in which the dual worlds of security and secret intelligence are inseparable from his love of and dedication to writing; there is little or no separation from his life and his art.

Born in 1931 and educated in the English public-school system he was a patriotic schoolboy during the Second World War. Skilled at languages and loving literature, he left England, as he himself admits, to escape a difficult relationship with his father, and to study modern languages at the University of Bern in Switzerland. It was there, as his autobiography details, that a dedicated patriot developed an intense love of all literatures, especially German. David Cornwell’s national service as part of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps was put to good use in the interrogation of those who crossed from the other side of what was now called the Iron Curtain to where he was stationed in Allied-occupied Austria. Vienna, in the early period of the Cold War, was the crossroads of intelligence. Look simply to the novels of the time by Graham Greene above all to see the spies on those streets.

Completing his National Service, David Cornwell returned to England, and Oxford, in 1952, at an age when today he would be called a mature student, at Lincoln College. His unofficial and covert duties for MI5 including informal reporting on left-wing, Soviet-sympathizing students, covertly on the look-out on those post-War Oxford streets for enemies of the State. After an interruption in studies, Cornwell taught at a major public school in Somerset, Millfield, close to where I, too, was once a schoolteacher at the nearby country town of Glastonbury. Returning to Lincoln College, Oxford, he would graduate with a first-class degree in 1956. Two years later, in 1958, his role in MI5 was formalized as an Officer of Security Services. In 1961, under the cover of an administrative role in the British Embassy at Bonn he transferred—a move as uncommon, though not unknown, then as it is today—to the foreign service, MI6, whose renown already had a growing aura and mystique through the novels of one Ian Fleming, and the creation of a character called James Bond. It was Lord Clanmorris, who himself was to write espionage fiction as John Bingham, who encouraged Cornwell to write. His first novel was Call for the Dead, and the iconic, intellectual spy-master, George Smiley was born. So, too, in many a sense was John le Carré. From then on le Carré comes to the ascendancy of literary espionage fiction, a nuanced world of ideological conflict and conflicted loyalties that contrasts in unassuming ways with the exploits of James Bond, whose self-reflection is there in the pages of Fleming’s fiction but never to the fore. In 1963, The Spy Who Came in the Cold was published, just as James Bond was beginning to take hold of cinema screens, as the character has done ever since. The Spy Who Came in the Cold became the foundation, economic and literary, for le Carré to dedicate his life to fiction, most of which reflected the world of spying which he was soon, formally at least, to leave, though in his imagination, literary and autobiographical, it was a world from which he would never entirely extricate himself.

The curiously entangled relationship between literature, security and intelligence is, then, unsurprisingly replete with twists and turns of plot and an odd array of dual-facing characters. As I have long detailed (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”), in the complex interplay of spy fact and spy fiction, many practitioners of the former have engaged in writing the latter. Eric Ambler, John Bingham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Eliza Manningham Buller, Somerset Maugham and Arthur Ransome are among the well-known names on this list. And for writers of spy fiction who—except perhaps in their authorial dreams—were never spies, the real and imagined adventures and misadventures of actual spooks by necessity provide the storyline (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”).

The relationship between the literary imagination and the actual world of security and intelligence is not merely an historical curiosity. In 2017, Sir Alex Younger, then Chief of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, specifically discussed “the merits of what he considered to be appropriate characters in fiction” (MacAskill). He distinguishes between the portrayals of the late John le Carré and Ian Fleming, speaking in terms of real influence about characters who are, of course, entirely fictional: “I should make it clear that, despite bridling at the implication of a moral equivalence between us and our opponents that runs through novels, I’ll take the quiet courage and integrity of George Smiley over the brash antics of 007, any day” (Younger qtd. in MacAskill). Younger goes on to remark about the prominence of writing within and beyond the Service:

We have attracted some great writers; some have become famous, many more have set aside their vocation and remained in the service. Some of the operational correspondence I have seen during my career would grace many an anthology were it not for its classification. Spy fiction here seems to have some, if qualified, uses in the real world of espionage: despite inevitable tensions between the secret and published world, the relationship has generally been of mutual benefit. Literature gains an edgy genre. We are painted in the minds of a global audience as some form of ubiquitous intelligence presence. This can be quite a force multiplier, even if it means we are blamed for an astonishing range of phenomena in which we have no involvement at all. (qtd. in MacAskill)

As I have previously detailed, if we look glancingly at the relationships between the factual worlds of the security and intelligence agencies—the spies—and their fictional representations, numerous ironies can be perceived. Perhaps the most curious is that few seem wholeheartedly to believe governments who employ secret bands of men and women in the security agencies to uncover the truth, so that politicians can act on their intelligence, while many seem enthral to—and are willing to suspend disbelief when—reading novelists who are paid to lie.

Some spy writers have worked consciously to highlight actual, as well as imagined security and intelligence concerns. A good example of where the real and the imagined are themselves blended is in “the narrative threat of nations,” such as in classic stories of foreign invaders by Erskine Childers (The Riddle of the Sands) and William Le Queux (The Invasion of 1910). Others such as Ian Fleming create characters like James Bond who single-handedly save the free world from jeopardy, written by an author who had known active secret service in wartime naval intelligence.

Such authors, in turn, impact the world they represent. Le Queux, in particular, might be said to have been responsible for enhancing the milieu of threat which led to the formation of MI5 (Andrew). Others are by turns alarmed or flattered to see their own worlds of secrecy in the lie of fiction. The KGB and Politburo had strong views about the anti-Soviet propaganda of 007, strong enough to create a series of Soviet counter-fictions (Connick). Ian Fleming allegedly provided the bedside reading for both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald on the evening before the President’s assassination, part of a sphere of influence and intrigue that unites the reading public and political elites (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”).

More systematic consideration of these and related themes is evident in a chapter which Svetlana Lokhova contributed to my edited collection, Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies, on “Stalin’s Library.” There is here a sense in which literature is an intellectual subset of the broader and historically deeper relationship between espionage and the Academy (Gearon, Universities, Security and Intelligence Studies). I think often of these matters on the streets of Oxford, where I enter my twelfth year of service, and particularly when I pass Lincoln College; though the University City itself is replete with espionage associations, from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century foundations of the Bodleian Library in the figure of Thomas Bodley, or, some centuries later, a mere hundred or so yards from my own Department of Education, Lady Margaret Hall, where a former Director General of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller read, of all subjects of course, English literature (Gearon, “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters”).

From whatever perspective we look, the interface between literature, security and intelligence is rarely incidental. In many cases, books, like other forms of media, have been used as a direct part of ideological and intelligence apparatus, particularly in the history of propaganda, and it is the literary collective as much as particular literary and academic authors who are subjects of security interest, whether the protection of states or political doctrine (Wilkinson). Books and their authors are often therefore an integral part of the targeted action as a perceived physical or ideological threat. Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Maoist China are important cases here. Indeed, dictatorial regimes all over the world have long targeted authors alongside intellectuals who are the first threats to be eliminated or undermined, either through cultural and social exclusion, censorship and imprisonment, or the expedients of execution (Power). Read, for instance, the chilling double-entendre of Bytwerk’s Bending Spines for an account of how a synthesis of books and brutality were at the root of Nazi and other forms of totalitarianism.

To a lesser extent and often more subtly (or covertly), such methods of cultural influence have not been unknown in western democratic states too (Miller Harris; Reisch; Risso; Rockhill; Stonor Saunders; Whitney; Wilford). Propaganda has often been a weapon of war, books and bombshells engage in similar or opposing ideological trajectories (Bernays; Cooke; Welch). It is in this way that Philip M. Taylor defines propaganda as “munitions of the mind,” and O’Shaughnessy describes the phenomenon as a “weapon of mass seduction.” In “A Landscape of Lies in the Land of Letters: The Literary Cartography of Security and Intelligence” I detail much of this framing for the interface of literature, security and intelligence, while with Marion Wynne-Davies I write on “Literature and Security: CIA Engagement in the Arts.”

There is more, however, to the interface of literature and security than the spy story. In the modern era, the art of total war provides the ultimate societal justifications for warfare. In so doing, the art of total war brings all the artifice of culture and society to the battlefront. In the art of total war, the arts and literature themselves become integral to the art of war.

Few military strategists would then have predicted how important the broader societal context would become in the twentieth century. Authors such as H. G. Wells had envisaged this development a year before the First World War. In a work published in the year the War began, The World Set Free, Wells foresaw in the new invention of manned flight the possibility of war being brought to unarmed civilian populations (Wells). More prescient still were Wells’s predictions of the new atomic knowledge being used as weaponry: “Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands” (Wells).

Michael Frayn’s 1998 play Copenhagen remains here the single most important dramatic reconstruction at the wartime meeting place of literature and existential security. A recent review of a new theatre production states the centrepiece of the drama succinctly, describing it as the story of “the ruptured friendship between the German atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg, and his former mentor, Niels Bohr, after their meeting in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen in 1941”:

Frayn offers us several alternative versions of what might have happened when the two men met under the watchful eye of Bohr’s wife, Margrethe. But one of the beauties of the play is that, reinforcing a rule of quantum mechanics, it seems to change depending on how it is observed. At different times, it has seemed to me about the moral dilemma of the nuclear physicist, and the motives for Heisenberg’s visit—whether he was seeking absolution or information from his spiritual father. (Billington)

The atom bomb would see the rise of its own apocalyptic art form, particularly in film and literature (Brians; Torry).

The evolution of mass death through new technologies would seem to trivialize developments in the arts. But the arts, literary and cine-visual, are there to take note, and to convey the horror, the prospect of worse to come. Thus if civilian populations would not suffer the full extent of aerial bombing until the Second World War, the preceding years showed this prospect on a late afternoon of 26 April 1937 with the German bombing during the Spanish Civil War of the Basque town of Guernica. So memorably represented by the modernist distortions of human death represented by Picasso in the same year, it is an iconic art work contemporaneously commemorating the death and destruction of the bombing itself, and considered decades later to prefigure Nazi mass annihilation (Tharoor).

The years that followed Guernica would witness worse. 1939–45 showed the deathly potential of new war technology further realized: from the Luftwaffe Blitz raids and V2 rocket attacks over England to the Allied carpet bombing of Germany (Crang and Addison; Friedrich; F. Taylor, Dresden). In 1947 “Bomber” Harris provided his own autobiographical account of the shift in war tactics (Harris). Condemned at Nuremberg, and sentenced to imprisonment at Spandau Prison, Albert Speer presents an interesting case of the interface of literature and security. Released from Spandau since 1966, in 1970, Albert Speer, the most senior ranking member of the Third Reich, Hitler’s architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production would tell his own story. The writing of Inside the Third Reich would take place after his release, but inside Spandau, formally denied writing paper he would find sources of his own, even in defeat and incarceration, literature would find its outlet in Spandau: The Secret Diaries. Post-war moral debate would intensify, arguments around Allied and Axis targeting of densely populated cities alongside military and strategic targets. The 1943 Hamburg bombing might be justified as an industrial-military complex, but other cities, particularly the firestorm of Dresden in February 1945, could not (Overy). Postmodernist fiction such as that of Kurt Vonnegut is there decades later to represent the symbolic epicentre of Dresden. The close of the Second World War was the zenith of this through new atomic and nuclear weaponry, the devastating aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki recorded in the modern journalism which accounted for the impact on ordinary lives of war strategy by the noted figures of world history (Hersey).

When the full extent of the Nazi concentration and death camps became evident we were, as Wyschogrod writes, at the zenith of man-made mass death. It had started of course, in at least symbolic terms, with the burning of books. Always worth restating are Heinrich Heine’s oft-quoted prophetic lines from his 1820 play Almansor: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people” (USHMM). Literature may have served its historic and contemporary role as a weapon of war, but the flames lit by German professors and their students, with little prompting by the Nazi hierarchy across the heart of the European Enlightenment, conjoining book burning and bombshells, an ideological and military synthesis which was at the heart of what Goebbels would define later as “total war.” Without the Nazi narrative the war effort would have long before faltered (Bachrach).

The literature of the Holocaust provides survivor narratives in diary, fiction, poetry and drama, and distinctively terrible chapter in a longer history of anti-Semitic oppression (USHMM). Some of the most noted accounts are seemingly semi-detached attempts to give autobiographical and fictional sense to the concentration camps of Europe into the stuff of chemistry, no other work achieving the same profundity here as the Nobel-Prize-winning work of Primo Levi’s Periodic Table.

To others, none of this was especially new. If the means of civilian population death were more dramatic than they might once have been, to Talmon the history of totalitarianism can be traced not simply to the twentieth century but the eighteenth: Talmon’s History of Totalitarian Democracy paralleling the Terror of the French Revolution with that of the terror that would follow across Europe two centuries later.

It is Raymond Aron in The Opium of the Intellectuals who notes totalitarianism’s rise from the technocratic rationalism of post-Enlightenment modernity. Totalitarianism provided a new political lexicon and spawned its own critical literature. Foundational Second World War works such as Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies more than any other set the heart of this seemingly new political phenomenon in the cultural heritage of the West going back not centuries but millennia. The cultural and literary framings were as important in Friedrich and Brzezinski’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy; in David D. Roberts’s The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics; in James A. Gregor’s Marxism, Fascism, and Totalitarianism: Chapters in the Intellectual History of Radicalism; and in Schapiro’s Totalitarianism. For Hannah Arendt, though, the textual heartlands of totalitarianism were already presaged in long centuries of European cultural colonialism and anti-Semitism.

The political critics of totalitarianism form a long line (Isaac), as do those who place totalitarianism into the cultural milieu of the literary and artistic modernism of its time (Adamson). Santiáñez thus portrays the critical influence of literature in the art of war, in victory and defeat; his The Literature of Absolute War: Transnationalism and World War II is a particularly important critical summation. For Santiáñez absolute or total war has its own semantic clusters and genres—“traditional realism,” “traumatic realism,” “the fantastic” or “catastrophic modernism”— conjoined with an unholy trinity of “horror,” “terror” and “spectre.” For Griffin, too, fascism is a “socio-political modernism” where fascist regimes harnessed the arts “to produce a new culture, a new order, a new man, and a new civilization,” these “modernist states . . . seeking regeneration and palingenesis in every aspect of cultural, social, economic, military, imperialist, and in the case of the Third Reich, racial policies” (Griffin 125).

The lexicon of totalitarianism was a cultural-political conceptual nexus coined most influentially by Giovanni Gentile and put to use for Mussolini (Roberts, “Myth”). Yet it was Josef Goebbels who might be placed at the embodied epicentre of totalitarianism’s efforts to incorporate national culture into the collective war effort. Illustrating this in cultural-political terms is Goebbels’s conjoint ministerial roles in the Third Reich as both Minister of Armaments and Propaganda. In the light of significant setbacks in the east, Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech of February 1943 called for “total war”:

The tragic battle of Stalingrad is a symbol of heroic, manly resistance to the revolt of the steppes. It has not only a military, but also an intellectual and spiritual significance for the German people. Here for the first time our eyes have been opened to the true nature of the war. We want no more false hopes and illusions. We want bravely to look the facts in the face, however hard and dreadful they may be. The history of our party and our state has proven that a danger recognized is a danger defeated. Our coming hard battles in the East will be under the sign of this heroic resistance. It will require previously undreamed of efforts by our soldiers and our weapons. A merciless war is raging in the East. The Führer was right when he said that in the end there will not be winners and losers, but the living and the dead. (Goebbels)

So, Goebbels reasons:

Total war is the demand of the hour. . . . It bothers us not in the least that our enemies abroad claim that our total war measures resemble those of Bolshevism. They claim hypocritically that that means there is no need to fight Bolshevism. The question here is not one of method, but of the goal, namely eliminating the danger. (Goebbels)

Goebbels had learnt the oratorical power of political passion from his master (Bytwerk, Landmark Speeches). Aside from the Nazi-rousing rhetoric of Adolf Hitler’s own speeches, in Mein Kampf, Hitler had stated that the “power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word” (Levy et al. 307). For Goebbels himself, thwarted literary ambitions did not mean an end to his ambitions for literature in the theatre of war (Longerich; Thacker).

Yet it was not only the Axis powers that recognized the power of words. In terms of the relationship between literature and war few tower higher than the figure of Winston Churchill, whose literary talents were barely thwarted, indeed were enhanced, by his role as a war Prime Minister. In 1953 he was, unique to any political leader, the winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature, the award given in recognition for Churchill’s “mastery of historical and biographical description, as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values” (Siwertz). The curiously awkward-sounding award ceremony speech, at which Lady Churchill was there to collect her husband’s prize, by a member of the Swedish Academy, acutely states this point. Siwertz, if anything, goes into hyperbolic overdrive—and for our purposes near completes the circular link to the classical age—when he states:

Very seldom have great statesmen and warriors also been great writers. One thinks of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and even Napoleon, whose letters to Josephine during the first Italian campaign certainly have passion and splendour. . . . Churchill’s political and literary achievements are of such magnitude that one is tempted to resort to portray him as a Caesar who also has the gift of Cicero’s pen. Never before has one of history’s leading figures been so close to us by virtue of such an outstanding combination. In his great work about his ancestor, Marlborough, Churchill writes, “Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare.” Yes, but great, living, and persuasive words are also difficult and rare. And Churchill has shown that they too can take on the character of great deeds.

Listing the number of multiple literary works which mark Churchill’s accomplishment, Siwertz, though, highlights Churchill’s wartime speeches: “With his great speeches he has, perhaps, himself erected his most enduring monument.”

As to this interconnectedness between writing and political life in Churchill’s life, there is no better guide than Peter Clarke’s “Mr Churchill’s Profession.” In a subsequent address to the International Churchill Society, Clarke gives a succinct summary of this inextricable relationship. “For Churchill,” he writes, “there was never a clean break between fighting and writing”:

The tension between writing history and making history is surely relevant to our broad theme of fighting and writing. Thus we can make a distinction between what I will call “fighting as writing,” as opposed to “writing as fighting,” and categorise Churchill’s books on that basis. Under the first head, “fighting as writing,” we can include all the books that he retrospectively made out of his own experience of war. (Clarke)

These would include Churchill’s six volume history of the Second World War. For Clarke, under the second heading,

“writing as fighting,” we can see the significance of his profession as a writer, in equipping him with a literary arsenal: enabling him to deploy the weapons of rhetoric as a war leader. As Churchill said himself, when he assumed power in 1940, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.” Now these well-known words reflect a view of his political career. But perhaps his other career—as a writer—had also prepared him. For when we read Churchill’s great oratory of the wartime years, we are reading the words of an author who had just finished his own draft of his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. (Clarke)

It is easy to see the divide between Allies and Axis, victors and defeated.

Kempowski’s Swansong 1945 brings them together, chronicling in montage—a blend of “civilians fleeing on foot to the west, British and American POWs dreaming of home, concentration camp survivors, loyal soldiers from both sides of the conflict and national leaders including Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini,” as Granta, the publisher, states—four significant days in World War Two’s final weeks: with a curious starting point of 20 April, Hitler’s birthday; through the meeting of US and Soviet troops at the Elbe on 25 April; the day of Hitler’s suicide in the Berlin bunker on 30 April; to the German surrender on 8 May. “Kempowski’s War” (Santiáñez) is an analysis of these and other accounts of Germany in defeat. In All for Nothing, Kempowski’s fiction of defeat has all the force of documentary. In the east, the War had also mobilized imperial Japanese culture as the Third Reich had utilized its “Aryan” heritage; in its defeat the political management of an essentially occupied Japan by US forces were as culturally-educating as all efforts at denazification in post-War German (Taylor, Exorcising Hitler). And the literature of post-World War II Japan reflects the far from glorious new cultural legacy:

When the war ended in 1945, Japanese literature was at an extremely low ebb. The pressure exerted on writers by the military to write in support of the war had on the whole been successful. Many wrote stories and poems that they refused to have included in postwar collections of their writings. Only those who could count on receiving royalties from old works were able to refuse to support the ideals of the “Greater East Asia War.” (Keene)

The legacy was not, however, born simply with the advent of WWII. Just as Trotsky, despite busy duties as the head of the Red Army, had taken time in to publish Literature and Revolution, so, too, Heather Bowen-Struyk and Norma Field show the interconnectedness of cultural warfare in Japan which dates to the revolutionary politics of 1917, from which time they date the use of “art as a weapon.”

In the decades after the Second World War the story of literature and security intensifies. As that war drew to a close in Europe on VE day in May 1945, a scheduled meeting of the nascent United Nations would be in preparation for a gathering in San Francisco that June, and a matter of only several weeks later, the war with Imperial Japan would end, a matter of days after Hiroshima, and the decisive second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The revolutionary war in China, though, led by a now middle-aged Mao Tse-tung, was not yet ended. Mao Tse-tung wrote a number of treatises on military strategy, most notable among them being Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War, Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan, On Protracted War and Problems of War and Strategy. Mao Tse-tung would continue this tradition of total war in the Cultural Revolution. His main writings on warfare have recently been collected under the title of The Art of War to establish, as the publisher suggests, “a direct lineage of culture and genius spanning twenty-five centuries.” In power, nascent only with the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman Mao would consolidate communist doctrine in ways distinctive to but derivative of the Marxist-Leninist neighbour in the north. A strong internal security apparatus went hand-in-hand with control of Party doctrine over all aspects of Chinese society, whatever its consequences for the populace. Just as rapid economic development had tragic impacts, including mass starvation, of millions in the Soviet Union, famine came, too, to China with the Great Leap Forward. The apparent openness to critique which followed, allowing “a thousand flowers to bloom,” was merely a ruse to expose opponents of the regime.

The Cultural Revolution which followed—1967, the same year in which the West, in America especially, was seeing the height of its own revolutionary “counter-culture”—saw the decimation of dissent, a systematic purging of reactionaries. What was ostensibly a security assault on counter-revolutionary ideology as a threat to the security of the State targeted people as much as ideas. Heinrich Heine’s prescient nineteenth century commentary on cultural repression—“Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people”—was no less true in China than it had been in Nazi Germany. As a young revolutionary hardened by insurgency against the legacy of the Imperial China into which he was born in 1893, Mao’s struggles against Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, were also a struggle against the colonialism of the West—the legacy of Hong Kong is hardly ended today—and against China’s aggressively imperial neighbour Japan. Slavoj Žižek’s introduction to Mao’s revolutionary doctrine highlights a strong anti-intellectual strand in Maoism, seemingly manifest by the Cultural Revolution. Mao’s On Practice and Contradiction is the assertive doctrine of the Communist leader openly focusing on “doing” rather than “knowing.” Written with full knowledge of Hiroshima, Mao dedicates a whole chapter to why “The Chinese People Cannot be Cowed by the Atom Bomb.” Mao also writes on why the people “Oppose Book Worship.” The irony of course here is that Mao’s books themselves became the centrepiece of the cult of the man himself. Just as Hitler’s Mein Kampf became a bestseller in Nazi Germany, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was in its time ubiquitous; and like Mein Kampf, the sayings of Chairman Mao became the epicentre of Chinese culture and politics. Conflict and watchfulness against known and as yet unknown enemies constituted a war on all fronts, without time limits or restraints, no beginning and no end. Total war by any other name.

I elaborate on the still-broader notions of literature and its role in the maintenance of states and political systems in a number of other papers, particularly “Engineers of the Human Soul: Readers, Writers, and Their Political Education,” where, drawing on Stalin’s diktat that artists should be “engineers of the human soul,” I argue for a closer look at the interface of literature and security. And here, it is in the era of mass communications, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, that authors become, in increasingly intensified ways, integral elements of the security apparatus of the state. From Britain’s secret Propaganda Bureau in the First World War, for which many notable British novelists worked, to Stalin’s designation of artists as being “engineers of the human soul” through to the CIA’s involvement with the literary and visual arts, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution, literature, amongst all the arts, is a critical chapter in the art of war (Gearon, “Engineers”). This issue of Text Matters represents a call for scholars from a range of literary backgrounds with interests in the political, security and intelligence dimensions of literature to contribute to furthering academic consideration of this intersection of literature and security.

The contributing authors here have certainly expanded these horizons of literature and security. Grzegorz Czemiel’s “‘Brought up to Live Double Lives’: Intelligence and Espionage as Literary and Philosophical Figures in Ciaran Carson’s Exchange Place and For All We Know” examines the figure of the spy, alongside themes related to espionage, as employed in two books by the Northern Irish writer Ciaran Carson (1948–2019): the volume of poems For All We Know (2008) and the novel Exchange Place (2012). In what came to be known as the era of the “Troubles,” as Czemiel asserts, Carson, along with other writers, was important in conveying the experience of living in a modern surveillance state. Wit Pietrzak’s “Shibboleths of Grief” examines Paul Muldoon’s “The Triumph,” itself an elegy for Ciaran Carson—the subject of the first essay—evoking “a ground where political, cultural and religious polarities are destabilized” and the literary takes poetic and musical form as points of cultural identity in a city which was the epicentre of the Troubles: Belfast. Ryszard Bartnik retains the focus on Northern Ireland, but post-Troubles, through literary analysis of “Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security,” but where “the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region.”

Vincent Pacheco and Jeremy De Chavez’s treatment of Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing brings an important broadening of interpretation of modern security. Detailing with powerful literary intent and analysis the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, in which by any account the death toll is in the thousands, the authors examine the recently published Patron Saints of Nothing to see this tragic narrative through the ideas and interpretive lens of a Filipino-American who returns to the Philippines to uncover the truth behind the death of a cousin. This is where the novel brings to life the emotional reality behind the numbers of the dead.

Minu Susan Koshy’s locus is also in Asia, and draws, too, like the wars on drugs, on terrorism as a dominating theme in modern-day security, here examining populist and fictional notions of the migrant as “terrorist” in Kabir Khan’s New York and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire as a way of illustrating the fiction/reality-mirroring conceptions of “normative” and “non-threatening mainstream” in terror narratives.

If these analyses deal with the real-world, historical and contemporary interfaces of literature and shifting notions of the security, Anna Reglińska-Jemioł takes us to the dystopian, post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max and Fury Road. Drawing on feminist motifs, Reglińska-Jemioł narrates “the evolution of this post-apocalyptic vision from the male-dominated world with civilization collapsing into chaotic violence visualized in the previous series to a more hopeful future created by women in the last part of the [Mad Max] saga”.

Lech Zdunkiewicz draws us back into history but also into the internal psychological notion of security in “Aligning with Sociopaths,” developing a most original interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955). Drawing on Highsmith’s motivations for writing—“to see if she could elicit empathetic engagement for her immoral protagonist Tom Ripley”—Zdunkiewicz contrasts this with Anthony Minghella’s film version of Ripley, which, leaving more interpretative leeway, allows for the protagonist’s transformation. Here we are thus in the interpretative realm of existential and psychological security and insecurity.

And on the not unrelated theme of emotion, I write, in closing, with much sadness at the passing of Professor Dorota Filipczak. We had never actually met in person. We had over the years been in many communications over scholarly issues and research—we had both published books on the British-Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore, I in 2002, and Dorota a decade or so later. This connection had flourished into a collaboration with her wonderful Text Matters journal in which I was privileged last year to publish an article on Bob Dylan. And more directly Dorota and I were working together on this current issue of Text Matters on literature and security. We were looking forward to a launch in Łódź. And then came the sad and shocking news of her passing. Under such circumstances, special thanks are due, sincerely and wholeheartedly, to Agata Handley and Tomasz Fisiak who have done so much work in enabling the journal’s issue to come to publication. This issue will be a touching legacy to and for the lamented Dorota.

Liam Francis Gearon is Senior Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College and Associate Professor in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. A Docent of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham, he is also concurrently Conjoint Professor, Newcastle University, Australia; Visiting Professor Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland; and Extraordinary Professor, North-West University, South Africa.

liam.gearon@education.ox.ac.uk