The case of Bond

The case of Bond

One particularly instructive example of narratology as applied to media contents is Umberto Eco’s study of Ian Fleming’s bestselling novels about secret agent James Bond, “Narrative structures in Fleming” (1987b). Eco’s main concern, again, is with langue, in this case the narrative system behind the individual novels. At one point,

he compares a Bond novel to “a game of football in which we know beforehand the place, the numbers and personalities of the players, the rules of the game, and the fact that everything will take place within the area of the great pitch” (p. 160), adding that in this particular case even the result of the game is known beforehand.

More generally, Eco regards the ten Bond novels as the work of “a machine that functions basically on a set of precise units governed by rigorous combinational rules” (p. 146). The narrative units are described as a series of oppositions. First, a limited number of central, opposed characters with fixed features and spheres of action appear

Fictional media content 127

in all novels, constituting a set of narrative agents (for example, Hero/ Villain). Second, a set of basic values is the background on which these agents act. In establishing the combinational rules of the narrative units, Eco employs a procedure inspired by the Russian Formalist Vladimir Propp’s (1958) influential study of the fairy-tale. Using the main actions and events of the novels and their causal connections as his elements, Eco breaks down the narrative of each novel into a string of narrative “moves,” showing that not only do the same types of action appear in each novel, but they also appear in the same order, with only minor modifications. Each novel, accordingly, may be said to represent a variation of a single “archetypical” narrative, which Eco, with a touch of irony, summarizes as “Bond moves and mates in eight moves” (p. 156). Whereas the underlying narrative system is established by reducing the richness and variety found at the textual surface, the resulting deep structure or “archetype” does not imply reductionism. The novels are actualizations of this organizational framework, which, among other things, is what the reading public presumably expect from a Bond novel. Moreover, Eco later in the study examines the surface features in some detailed stylistic analyses.

Still, Eco’s discussion of the (ideological) message of the Bond novels is premised on their system or deep structure. In opposition to earlier conceptions of ideology within semiology, however, his argument is that such texts do “entail ideological positions, but these do not derive so much from the structured contents as from the way of structuring them” (p. 161). The opposing values which are put into play by Fleming’s narrative machine are often political or racist stereotypes, and do as such carry ideological implications. But the point is that while the specific ideological message may vary according to its historical context, the deep structure of opposing values is permanent: “If Fleming is a reactionary at all, it is not because he identifies the figure of ‘evil’ with a Russian or a Jew. He is a reactionary because he makes use of stock figures” (p. 162). Perhaps, then, the structure is the effect.