Abstract
This chapter addresses the way that fiction was used both to support and to challenge the dominant ideologies of the Cold War. As the international trade in novels grew, governments came to see reading as an important way to shape the attitudes of citizens and non-citizens and to win the battle for hearts and minds. At the same time, novelists found ways overtly and covertly to resist what they saw as exploitation of their artistic purposes. The chapter considers the ways that state security agencies used novels for defining the superiority of the two superpowers, as well as the ways in which novelists drew on the tools of propaganda to satirise, question and recast those tools.
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Notes
- 1.
Pynchon, ‘The Heart’s Eternal Vow’, New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1988, p. 1.
- 2.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 3.
See Allison E. Fagan, ‘Looking into a Speaking Mirror: Politics, Interpretation, and the English Translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 41: 1 (2008), pp. 46–55, and Deborah Cohn, ‘A Tale of Two Translation Programs: Politics, the Market, and Rockefeller Funding for Latin American Literature in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s’, Latin American Research Review, 41: 2 (2006), pp. 139–64. While it may have had nothing to do with Harper’s interest in García Márquez, the publisher had a longstanding connection to another CIA front, the Fairfield Foundation, through Cass Canfield, who was at the time House Senior Editor (Frances Stoner Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 114.
- 4.
Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 490.
- 5.
García Márquez, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, trans. by Richard Cardwell, in Barnard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 209.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 210.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 211.
- 8.
John B. Hench, Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 45.
- 9.
See Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond, trans. by Charles Rougle (1988; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 33–4, and Hench, Books as Weapons, pp. 45–50.
- 10.
Quoted in Dana Healy, ‘Poetry, Politics and War: Representations of the American War in Vietnamese Poetry’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 115.
- 11.
Quoted in Mark Kramer, ‘Introduction: Book Distribution as Political Warfare’, in Alfred A. Reisch, Hot Books in the Cold War: The CIA-Funded Secret Western Book Distribution Program behind the Iron Curtain (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2013), p. xiii.
- 12.
Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 1–18.
- 13.
Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 7.
- 14.
Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 2; Stephen Lovell, ‘Publishing and the Book Trade in the Post-Stalin Era: A Case-Study of the Commodification of Culture’, Europe-Asia Studies, 50: 4 (1998), p. 679.
- 15.
Patch, Closing the Circle: A Buckalino Journey around Our Time (Wellesley: Wellesley College Printing Services, 1996), p. 130.
- 16.
Friedberg, Russian Classics in Soviet Jackets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 14.
- 17.
Bhasthi, ‘Growing Up with Classic Russian Literature in Rural South India’, Literary Hub, 28 February 2018, https://lithub.com/growing-up-with-classic-russian-literature-in-rural-south-india/ (accessed 9 January 2019).
- 18.
Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 6–7.
- 19.
Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. by Diana M. Wolf (1989; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 128.
- 20.
Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, 1946–1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 28.
- 21.
Kanig, ‘Establishing a Beachhead: Literature and Reeducation in Occupied Germany, 1945–1949’, in Greg Barnhisel and Catherine Turner, eds, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), p. 71.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 72.
- 23.
See ibid., p. 75.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 84.
- 25.
Laugesen, Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2017), p. 108.
- 26.
Quoted in Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, p. 101.
- 27.
See Hench, Books as Weapons, pp. 254–6.
- 28.
See Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, p. 101.
- 29.
Hench, Books as Weapons, p. 264.
- 30.
Rice, ‘Cowboys and Communists: Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonization and the Cold War in French West Africa’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 11: 3 (2010), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_ colonialism_and_colonial_history/v011/11.3.rice.html (accessed 24 February 2019).
- 31.
McCleery, ‘Minding Their Own Business: Penguin in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44: 3 (2018), p. 512.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 515.
- 33.
See Link, Uses of Literature, pp. 213–14.
- 34.
See ibid., pp. 284–318.
- 35.
Ibid., p. 205.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 205.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 205.
- 38.
Quoted in Robert F. Arnove and Harvey J. Graff, ‘Introduction’ to Arnove and Graff, eds, National Literacy Campaigns: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Plenum Press, 1987), p. 7.
- 39.
Kozlov, Readers of Novyi Mir, p. 3.
- 40.
Quoted in Jeff Unsicker, ‘Tanzania’s Literacy Campaign’, in Arnove and Graff, eds, National Literacy Campaigns, p. 223.
- 41.
See Arnove and Graff, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.
- 42.
Charles Dorn and Kristen Ghodsee, ‘The Cold War Politicization of Literacy: Communism, UNESCO and the World Bank’, Diplomatic History, 36: 2 (2012), p. 392.
- 43.
Quoted in Matthews, Reading America: Citizenship, Democracy, and Cold War Literature (Amhurst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), p. 13.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 65.
- 45.
See Peter Finn and Petra Couvée, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book (New York: Knopf, 2014), pp. 113, 205.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 116.
- 47.
See ibid., p. 216.
- 48.
Quoted in ibid., p. 191.
- 49.
Conquest, The Pasternak Affair: Courage of Genius: A Documentary Report (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961), p. 102.
- 50.
Finn and Couvée, Zhivago Affair, p. 144.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 52.
Reisch, Hot Books, p. 10. West Germany also objected to the programme as it interfered with air traffic.
- 53.
See Jeffrey Cohan, ‘Judith Friedberg: Travel Magazine Editor, Globe-Trotting Author’, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 June 2003, p. 31.
- 54.
Quoted in John P.C. Matthews, ‘The West’s Secret Marshall Plan for the Mind’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, 16: 3 (2003), p. 416.
- 55.
Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 141.
- 56.
Faulkner, ‘Percy Grimm’, in Faulkner, The Portable Faulkner, ed. by Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1946), p. 692.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 694.
- 58.
Stecopoulos, ‘William Faulkner and the Problem of Cold War Modernism’, in Jay Watson and Ann J. Abadie, eds, Faulkner’s Geographies: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), p. 144.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 159.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 147.
- 61.
Quoted in ibid., p. 148.
- 62.
Quoted in ibid., p. 148.
- 63.
Quoted in ibid., pp. 148–9.
- 64.
Quoted in ibid., p. 150.
- 65.
Kennan, ‘Totalitarianism and Freedom’, in Karl Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p. 19.
- 66.
Ibid., p. 20.
- 67.
See Olcott, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), pp. 154–62; and López-Calvo, ‘Factography and Cold War Ideology in the Cuban Detective Novel’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 30–40.
- 68.
Kozlov, Readers of Novyi Mir, p. 4.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 70.
Quoted in ibid., p. 68.
- 71.
Quoted in ibid., p. 68.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 79.
- 73.
Quoted in Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, p. 55.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 75.
Caute, Dancer Defects, p. 26.
- 76.
Osgood, Total Cold War, p. 296.
- 77.
Huebsch, The Reminiscences of Ben W. Huebsch (New York: Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, 1965), p. 113.
- 78.
Quoted in Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom, pp. 189–90.
- 79.
Quoted in John Crewdson and Joseph Treater, ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA’, New York Times, 26 December 1977, p. 47.
- 80.
Quoted in ibid., p. 47.
- 81.
Rogachevskii, ‘The Cold War Representation of the West in Russian Literature’, in Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 32.
- 82.
Ibid., p. 33.
- 83.
Quoted in Elizabeth le Roux, ‘Miriam Tlali and Ravan Press: Politics and Power in Literary Publishing during the Apartheid Period’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44: 3 (2018), p. 442.
- 84.
McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 140.
- 85.
Quoted in le Roux, ‘Miriam Tlali’, p. 431.
- 86.
Quoted in ibid., p. 438.
- 87.
Readers reports quoted in ibid., p. 443.
- 88.
See McDonald, Literature Police, pp. 139–40.
- 89.
Rahimieh, ‘Reflections of the Cold War in Modern Persian Literature, 1945–1979’, in Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature, p. 96.
- 90.
See ibid., p. 97.
- 91.
Davis, ‘Preface’ to Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon, trans. by Dick Davis (1973; Washington: Mage, 1996), p. 7.
- 92.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 93.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 94.
Matthews, Reading America, p. 106.
- 95.
Quoted in ibid., p. 106.
- 96.
Ibid., p. 127.
- 97.
Nina Kolesnikoff, Russian Postmodernist Metafiction (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 47.
- 98.
Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 255.
- 99.
Milkova, ‘Reading Games/Games of Reading: Iurii Trifonov’s House on the Embankment and Forms of Play beyond Samizdat’, Poetics Today, 30: 1 (2009), p. 73.
- 100.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 101.
Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, new edn (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 23.
- 102.
Ibid., pp. 197, 192.
- 103.
Ibid., p. 206.
- 104.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 105.
Ibid., p. 198.
- 106.
Ibid., p. 208.
- 107.
See Wendy Larson, ‘Introduction’ to Wang Meng, Bolshevik Salute: A Modernist Chinese Novel, trans. by Wendy Larson (1979; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), pp. xvii–xviii.
- 108.
Meng, Bolshevik Salute, p. 4.
- 109.
Ibid., pp. 4–5.
- 110.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 111.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 112.
Ibid., p. 49.
- 113.
Ibid., p. 130.
- 114.
Ibid., p. 132.
- 115.
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 693.
- 116.
Ibid., p. 693.
- 117.
Ibid., p. 694.
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Turner, C. (2020). Freedom and Fabrication: Propaganda and Novels in the Cultural Cold War. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_2
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