Lies & lies
Zeno, the protagonist of the masterpiece of the would-be violinist Svevo, shamelessly lies to the reader as he does to his analyst. But while the latter, always silent, seems to intuit the fabricated story, the reader falls fully into the deception of the inept Zeno Cosini, who is anything but inept. The only true thing about the lying construct is that he always smokes one last cigarette, something a smoker can't lie about even proposing. The rest are all bullshit.
The cynical Agatha Christie continually tries to mislead the reader and one must have Maradona's technique to avoid the banana peels that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, with whom there is total identification, disseminate on the reader's path. The latter, poor fellow, tends to give credit to their intuitions made to send him off track. In the end, the only mistake the assassin made is that he didn't foresee the presence of Hercule Poirot. It's like telling the reader that he's a jerk. Thanks Agatha.
Perhaps the only honest one in the lying act was Graham Green with his Our agent in Havana. Here the object of the lie is indeed a lie, but a prophetic lie because, like a premonitory dream, it anticipates a reality that really happened.
Cuba, I love you
Graham Green's life is a garden of delights for consumers of biographies. Exotic acquaintances, intelligence activities, passionate flirting and his sincere inspiration for Catholicism make Green himself a perfect subject for fiction. In a recently released English-language book, Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel (324 pages), Christopher Hull, scholar of Cuba, develops one of the themes linked to the adventurous life of the English writer, that of espionage which is at the center of the novel Our agent in Havana.
A film directed by Carol Reed with Alec Guinness and Maureen O'Hara was also based on Green's novel, shot in Havana in 1959 precisely on the occasion of the fall of Fulgencio Batista and the arrival of Fidel Castro in power. Castro also visited the film set because he loved Green's work. The latter had visited Cuba in 1954 during his deportation from Puerto Rico caused by a joke: in a student meeting he had declared himself a communist.
Although he detested the Batista regime, Green was captivated by Havana's climate and nightlife. Over the next 10 years he would return to Cuba many more times. Green admired the social reforms initiated by Castro but abhorred his puritanical approach to the brothels of Havana. Green directly supported the Castro insurrection with an intelligence activity aimed at hindering the supply of weapons to the Batista regime.
With fake photos, which are actually assemblages of spare parts for vacuum cleaners, the protagonist of "Our Agent in Havana" makes the M16 believe in the existence of weapons and military buildings in Cuba. Do you remember anything?
It was at this juncture that he gathered the ideas for Il our agent in Havana, which actually takes place in the last period of the Batista regime. The protagonist is James Wormold (old worm), a vacuum cleaner salesman hungry for money and seduced by the nightlife of the Cuban capital. The man is enlisted by MI6 on some kind of commission contract. The more information he collected and passed on to the services, the more his pay would grow.
Under this incentive Wormold set up a system of fake news that would be the envy of Russian hackers. He pretended to have built a network of operatives who produced a mountain of information, of course the fruit of Wormold's wild imagination, to the delight of the useful idiots of MI6 in London. Zen was reached by a series of reports of strange movements in the mountains.
An information validly supported by a series of improbable aerial photos that showed strange constructs. In reality they were artificial constructions assembled by Wormold himself with the spare parts of the vacuum cleaners. Eventually the "old worm" was exposed, but such was the embarrassment of M16 that instead of being punished, the story-teller got commendation, a promotion and married the agent MI6 had sent to Cuba to spy on him.
A perfect paradigm for narrative art.
Graham Green, the clairvoyant
In his book on Graham Green's masterpiece, Christopher Hull shows that the writer, in addition to using his intelligence experience to ridicule Cold War intelligence activities, displays a singularly prophetic streak regarding the 1962 Cuban missile crisis .
Indeed, the crisis erupted when an American reconnaissance flight detected buildings on the island that looked like missile sites. A coincidence between Green's novel and historical reality that leaves us quite stunned. Hull also finds Greene's "clairvoyance" in the case of the fabricated evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction on which the narrative of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was based. Another narrative.
The lie of literature can also function in reverse, as a prequel to reality.
