Abstract
In the first chapter of A Perfect Spy,1 the missing double-agent Magnus Pym prepares himself for the painful task of reconstructing the authentic account of his life. Attentive to all kinds of metaphorical equivalent for personal identity, he begins to write when prompted by the sight of his (stolen) briefcase, ‘strangely rigid from its steel lining’:
Everybody carried cases, he remembered, as he stared at it. Rick’s was pigskin, Lippsie’s was cardboard, Poppy’s was a scruffy grey thing with marks printed on it to look like hide. And Jack — dear Jack — you have your marvellous old attaché case, faithful as the dog you had to shoot. (p. 36)
The case-history he carries is both legal brief and psychiatric record, its confidential contents kept protectively secure. Pym’s well-defended personality none the less stands in contingent relation to others: his dead father, Rick (ostentatious and vulnerable), Lippsie, the surrogate mother and fantasy-lover of his childhood (fragile and unenduring), Poppy, the code-name of Axel, beloved friend, controller and surrogate father (consolingly familiar but self-concealing), and Jack Brotherhood, the reliable, paternal traditionalist (faithful but outdated). Pym’s case-history inscribes a network of semi-familial attachments; it includes the four characters who have variously produced and initiated him into identity.
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Notes
John le Carré, A Perfect Spy (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1986; London: Coronet (pbk), 1987). All quotations from le Carré’s novels are taken from currently available paperback editions.
Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1975) pp. 229–92, 382–9.
Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics (London: Pluto Press, 1982) chaps 3, 4. See also Sedgwick’s earlier essay ‘R. D. Laing: Self, Symptom and Society’, Salmagundi (Spring 1971), reprinted in Laing and Anti-Psychiatry, ed. Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1971) pp. 11–47.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1960; Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1965). Laing’s first book, subsequently abbreviated as DS in this chapter, contains in embryonic form his later assertions regarding the role of the family nexus in schizophrenia (see Sanity, Madness and the Family, with A. Esterson (London: Tavistock, 1964)); Laing’s concentration on the ‘individual’ person/patient in The Divided Self, however, makes this work peculiarly appropriate for comparison with A Perfect Spy.
John le Carré, Call for the Dead (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961; Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972).
John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963; London: Pan, 1964).
John le Carré, Smiley’s People (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980; London: Pan, 1980).
John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983; London: Pan, 1984).
John le Carré, The Naive and Sentimental Lover (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971: London: Pan, 1972).
F. Schiller, The Works, trans. uncredited (New York: John Williams 1880) vol. iv, pp. 287–309 and F. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Fricke and H. Göpfert (Munich: Hanser, 1965–7) vol. v, pp. 716–37.
For a dicussion of the centrality of Goethe’s ‘Society of the Tower’ both to the Bildungsroman and the development of the novel, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987) pp. 18–38.
Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931) pp. 259–69, see esp. pp. 260, 265.
Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 1919, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. B. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74) vol. xvii, pp. 219–52, see esp. p. 235, n. 2. Juliet Mitchell contrasts Freud’s distinction with Laing’s (Psychoanalysis and Feminism, p. 388).
In his study of Grimmelshausen’s life, Kenneth Negus describes: ‘certain [financial] peculiarities that are puzzling, particularly for assessing Grimmelshausen’s honesty’ and comments that in his writings, ‘extensive literary borrowings were blended with the autobiographical elements to form organic wholes that often defy attempts to distinguish between life and art’, Grimmelshausen (New York: Twayne, 1974) pp. 29, 37.
Edward Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (Oxford, 1843) provides the major contemporary account of (John) Pym’s part in the impeachment of Wentworth; Clarendon’s characterisation of Pym applies to both Rick and Magnus: ‘the most popular man, and the most able to do hurt, that hath lived in any time’ (p. 475). Clarendon sought to combine autobiography with history in his sequel volume, The Life, written in seclusion as self-vindication and left for posthumous publication (p. 914).
Compare D. W. Winnicott’s appraisal of deprived, delinquent and ‘dishonest’ children in ‘The Concept of the False Self’, ‘Delinquency as a Sign of Hope’ and ‘The Child in the Family Group’ in Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis (eds), Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1986) pp. 65–70, 101–11, 128–41.
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© 1990 Tony Barley
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Barley, T. (1990). ‘Loving and Lying’: Multiple Identity in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. In: Bell, I.A., Daldry, G. (eds) Watching the Detectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10591-5_10
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