Espionage as a strategy of literary and cultural politics

Abstract

A nation-state is constructed on the imagined unity of race, nation, and citizenship. Ideally, one is a subject of a certain state where he/she belongs to the one and the same race, which shares the same culture and speaks the same language (as a mother-tongue). The imaginary nature of such a unity has been powerfully demonstrated in the recent critical theory with such key concepts as hybridity, diaspora, linguistic pluralities, (language as) translation, etc. This paper is yet another attempt at deconstructing the myth of a nation-state by exploring the critical significance of ‘‘espionage.’’ It is here mostly conceived as a literary/ textual construct, but not as a historical fact. This is not to say that I am concerned only in fiction, and not in history, if recent narratologists are correct in assuming that history itself is a form of narrative. In that sense I will take ‘‘espionage’’ as largely a literary, cultural, and historical phenomenon. I will be treating several rather unrelated episodes from both ‘‘real’’ history and literary works. The emphasis is not so much on the biographical connection as on the thematic coherence except that all of the episodes have to do with the imagined trinity of nationalism. The first one took place on an American street in the beginning of the twentieth century. Okakura Tenshin, the most influential art historian of modern Japan was once walking in Boston with his Japanese colleagues when he was accosted by an American. The latter asked them, ‘‘What sort of ‘nese are you people? Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese?’’ The art historian answered in perfectly fluent English, ‘‘We are Japanese gentlemen. But what kind of ‘key are you? Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey?’’ (Saito 2000, p. 39). The author, from whose book I quote this well-known episode, describes the question of the American as ‘‘insulting and prejudiced toward Asia.’’ Now, what makes his question ‘‘insulting’’?