Page 103 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 93
oppositions. So the opposition of Bond and the villain is accompanied by an
opposition between the western world and the Soviet Union, between Britain and
non anglo-saxon countries, between ideals and cupidity, between chance and
planning, between excess and moderation, between perversion and innocence,
between loyalty and disloyalty.
The internal oppositions within the text are obviously part of wider ideological
discourses, notably the ideology of the Cold War. Eco makes this clear in the
character of some of the oppositions, particularly that of Bond and the villain.

The villain is born in an ethnic area that stretches from central Europe to
the Slav countries and to the Mediterranean basin: as a rule he is of mixed
blood and his origins are complex and obscure; he is asexual or
homosexual or at any rate, is not sexually normal; he has exceptional
inventive and organizational qualities which help him to acquire immense
wealth and by means of which he usually works to help Russia: to this end
he conceives a plan of fantastic character and dimensions, worked out to the
smallest detail, intended to create serious difficulties either for England or
the Free World in general. In the figure of the villain in fact, there are
gathered the negative values which we have distinguished in some pairs of
opposites, the Soviet Union and countries which are not Anglo-Saxon (the
racial convention blames particularly the Jews, the Germans, the Slavs and
the Italians, always depicted as half-breeds), Cupidity elevated to the
dignity of paranoia, Planning as technological methodology, satrapic
luxury, physical and psychical excess, physical and moral Perversion,
radical Disloyalty. (Eco, 1960, p. 44)

Moreover, Eco takes his concern beyond the structure of the text (the Bond
novels) in other ways in examining the relationship between the ‘literary
inheritance and the crude chronicle, between eighteenth-century tradition and
science fiction, between adventurous excitement and hypnosis’ (Eco, 1960, p.
74). In seeking to establish relationships both with previous literary forms and
more minimally and dubiously with audience response, Eco attempts to go
beyond a predominantly inductive analysis such as that of Propp to place the
narrative structure of the Bond novels within literary discourse and to suggest the
necessity of placing the reading and understanding of the meaning of the novels
in specific social practices.
Eco’s analysis also indicates the tension in semiology between formal textual
analysis and the realm of the signified and between different texts and between
different signifying systems. It is in this area that semiology becomes vitally
concerned with ideology. The principal conceptual tool of Saussurean linguistics
was the sign and the concept of the sign distinguished between various elements
in the process of speech, in the now classic formulation: