James Bond 007 and the Name of the Order
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Bond), most of the scholarly criticism on James Bond has been either of an historical
nature (as Chapman’s License to Thrill: A Cultural History o f the James Bond Films or
Black’s The Politics o f James Bond: From Fleming's Novels to the Big Screen) or
resolutely post-modern, as represented by some of the approaches featured in the The
James Bond Phenomenon: A Critical Reader and particularly in the recent Ian Fleming &
James Bond: The Cultural Politics O f 007. Since Eco’s essay “Narrative Structures in
Fleming,” very little has been done in terms of structural and semiotic approaches
(Ladenson’s “Pussy Galore,” Stock’s “Dial M for Metonym” in The James Bond
Phenomenon) and never from a comprehensive point of view.
Ian Fleming’s interview in Reader’s Digest, quoted in Chancellor. See also the
YouTube video of Ian Fleming’s interview “How Ian Fleming created James Bond.”
The Listerdale Mystery by Agatha Christie, published in 1934 by Collins for the Crime
Club series of books, included 12 short stories, among which we find “The Rajah’s
Emerald,” reprinted in 2002 along with others by Macmillan under the title The Golden
Ball and Other Stories. The credit for the finding belongs to the James Bond 007
Magazine online.
4 Whether the name “James Bond” came from Birds o f the West Indies or from a memory
of reading Agatha Christie which Ian Fleming did not acknowledge will remain an
unsolved mystery, showing in passing the limitations of biographically oriented historical
criticism; Ian Fleming might have lied in order to prevent any type of relationship with
another best-selling author, or simply because he considered the story of Birds o f the
West Indies more exotic or literary. It is also possible that he honestly did not remember
Agatha Christie’s story. The structuralist analysis, however, focusing solely upon the text
does provide us with an interesting clue: “The Hilldebrand Raritie” published in the
Fleming’s collection of short stories Octopussy present an identical narrative structure to
that of Christie’s Murder On the Orient Express and uses a similar setting as Death on
the Nile.
5 See Ian Fleming describing how and why he chose the name James Bond in “How Ian
Fleming created James Bond.” YouTube video.
Eco speaks of “economical” by opposition to “uneconomical” interpretation when the
connotations reinforce the semantic value of the syntagm (Interpretation and
Overinterpretation, 67-71). By adopting instead the notions of complementarity and
supplementarity, we can distinguish more clearly the type of information that
supplements the text, i.e., biographical circumstances, historical context, and that which
complements it, i.e., the connotations found within the text which establish a semiotic
code complementing the narrative syntagm.
7 The latest James Bond film. Quantum o f Solace, not yet released as I write these lines,
presents as well a James Bond brave to the point of disobeying M and transcending the
rules of M16.
Most graphic representations of James Bond show him holding a gun in a vertical,
albeit slightly slanted, direction, as in the very first French editions of Fleming’s novels
(Plon, 1964-66) or as in one of the posters announcing the up-coming film Quantum o f
Solace-, the only noticeable difference is that the gun has grown much larger.
9 In English, “to be ballsy, to have balls”; in Spanish “Tener cojones\ tener huevos”; in
French: “Avoir des couilles au cul."