In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy.
In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation's foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism.
The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O'Brien, and many others.
Table of Contents:
PrefaceIntroduction: The Postmodern Public Sphere
Cold War Redux
We Now Know
Public Secrets
Mere Entertainment
Strategic Irrationalism
Representations of the Covert State1. Brainwashed!
The Faisalabad Candidate
Brain Warfare
Little Shop of Horrors
Softening Up Our Boys
Renditions2. Spectacles of Secrecy
Trial by Simulation
Political Theater
Recovered (National) Memory
The State's Two Faces
Fakery in Allegiance to the Truth
The Fabulist Spy3. False Documents
True Lies
Enemies of the State
Psy Ops
The Epistemology of Vietnam4. The Work of Art in the Age of Plausible Deniability
Narrative Dysfunction
Calculated Ellipsis
The Feminization of the Public Sphere
The Journalist as Patsy
Metafiction in Wartime5. Postmodern Amnesia
Assassins of Memory
The Dialectics of Spectacle and Secrecy
Secret History
The Magic Show6. The Geopolitical Melodrama
Ground Zero
Enemies, Foreign and Domestic
Whatever It Takes
Demonology
Melodrama as PolicyNotes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author :
Timothy Melley is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is the author of Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, also from Cornell.
Review :
"His study impressively documents how state secrecy became a privileged topos for reflecting on power and knowledge in late twentieth century American literature and cutlure." —Alexander Dunst,Journal of American Studies
In his exploration of the national security state and the fiction it inspires, Melley engages in a spirited and cerebral examination of certain cultural and political tropes of the Cold Warand beyond, illustrating how often they have been rearticulated in a twenty-first-centurycontext as the War on Terror gathered pace in the wake of 9/11.
- Sam Goodman (Literature & History)
