the fiction of identity, observation and conspiracy

This page highlights fiction about surveillance and identity, from ETA Hoffmann and Herman Melville to 1984 and beyond. It's eclectic and not all-inclusive; many of the academic studies noted below include detailed bibliographies.

The page is currently under construction: we'll be adding more pointers in future.

    who is who?

As Gilbert & Sullivan lamented in HMS Pinafore (1878) "things are seldom what they seem: skim milk masquerades as cream". There's an extensive critical literature about questions of identity, dissimulation and observation in Western poetry and prose. For folk literature about changelings and possession a starting point is Katherine Briggs' magisterial four volume A Dictionary of British Folk Tales (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 70).

For the Doppelganger see Karl Miller's intelligent The Double: Studies in Literary History (London: Oxford Uni Press 85), The Double in 19th-Century Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan 90) by John Herdman and The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-romantic Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan 88) by Paul Coates. Muriel Spark's Aiding & Abetting (London: Viking 00) is recommended.

For anxiety about status and false identity see much of the work of the underappreciated ETA Hoffmann and heirs such as Dumas (The Count of Monte Christo) or Stevenson (Dr Jeckyll & Mr Hyde). Hawthorne, notably in The Scarlet Letter, and Herman Melville explore the tension between 'is' and 'seem' in public identity.

For impersonation two masterworks are Thomas Mann's Felix Krull and Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Downmarket it's just a blur of costume changes and fast talking in works such as Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel.

    possession

In literature, as online, things are not always what they seem and possession - upmarket identity theft - abounds. Highlights include Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satan in Goray.

    anonymity

The hero in Robert Musil's superb The Man Without Qualities suffers from having too little identity in the last years of the Hapsburgs, a society in which all social relations seem to take on the shrillness and uncertainty of the internet. Ralph Ellison's 1952 Invisible Man (dispatched in a tart review by Irving Howe) agonises that lack of identity subjects the author - and the reader - to manipulation by more powerful forces.

HG Wells' cruder 1897 novella The Invisible Man features arson, disappearing cats, murder, dreams of domination and an angry mob after immersion in the fin-de-siecle anonymiser brings out the worst in the anti-hero.

    surveillance

For omipresent surveillance the benchmark is probably George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although Animal Farm presents a more convincing picture of social relations - online or off. Bernard Crick's George Orwell: A Life (London: Secker & Warburg 80) considers Eric Blair's assumption of someone else's name and - with less success - personality. Two important but less influential works are Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita and Evgeni Zamyatin's We.

There's a fashionable introduction in CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge: MIT Press 02) edited by Thomas Levin & Peter Weibel and in Oscar Gandy's The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Boulder: Westview 92).

For SF see Brian Aldiss's brisk and refreshingly iconoclastic Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Gollancz 86) and Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke Uni Press 93).

    and paranoia

Timothy Melly's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 00), highlighted later in this profile, comments that workNorbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders (1951), Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man (1964), Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1970), and Michel Foucault’s books of the 1970s and 1980s: Discipline and Punish (1977), The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., (1978-1986), and Madness and Civilization, (1988). What all of these commentaries have in common is that they share an awareness of the individual’s sense of loss of control over major aspects of life. Melley calls this "agency panic" which he defines as "anxiety over the way technologies, social organizations, [chiefly government and corporate bureaucracies], and communication systems have reduced human autonomy and uniqueness" (p. 7).








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