Book Review – The Covert Sphere

This is a break from the theme, but this book is important.

So, in The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State, Timothy Melley uses both Cold War and contemporary fiction, both books and film, to show that “we have institutionalized undemocratic means of preserving our democracy” (222). Melley identifies the existence of the “covert sphere”, or this kind-of public half knowledge of what the government does. It’s a half-knowledge because the government’s actual actions are represented in fiction, but the official policy denies these actions. This results in sort of a sticky duplicity where people kind of know the questionable things their government does, but, at all times, it’s easy to brush it off as just being a movie.

Melley starts and ends with the show 24, a show which began filming in 2000, but the bulk of the seasons are after 2011, and the torture of terrorists in Guantanamo and other locations, post-9/11. He concentrates on Jack Bauer, the main character in 24 and how he breaks the rules to defeat both external threats – terrorists – but also internal threats like the State gone wrong. In season 3, the villain is the US President. Consequently, Jack Bauer is a microcosm for this ‘rogue individual’ who does things to get a result that is people really knew, they might not agree with his tactics.

I want to pause for a second and talk about my personal opinion of this book. I thought it was amazing, and I definitely recommend reading it, especially now that we’ve got all this COVID-19 stuff happening and some people on social media are screaming about other people “not taking this seriously omg we need Wuhan-style lockdowns” and other people are more or less still convinced it’s all a conspiracy theory. Recall Franklin’s quote about security and liberty. But anyways, back to 9/11, so my birthday is September 12^th and so my entire life whenever I would talk about my birthday, people will say “oh-my-gosh, that’s the day after 9/11!” To which I always respond, “well actually, since I was born in 1995, 9/11 is the day before my birthday”. Needless to say though, having been turning six in 2001, people my age or in my graduating class are probably among the youngest people to actually remember 9/11. I remember it, I was in kindergarten. What’s interesting though, is I also remember the day Osama Bin Laden was killed in 2011. I was at club swim practice and when the coach told us, we all made jokes about how it was the high school swim coach, an ex-Navy Seal, who swam across the ocean wearing nothing but a speedo and flippers to single-handedly run the operation. What’s interesting is this is pretty similar to the type of state-yet-non-state sanctioned figure that Melley discusses in Covert Sphere. Additionally, is it really the 4^th of July without fireworks and Toby Keith? In college a guy from Champaign, IL and I were able to sing “American Soldier” by heart (ahem, at a bar, karaoke) and we thought everyone knew this song, but this girl from California had never heard it before. This again points to the strong narrativization of state policy, American exceptionalism, etc. etc. which I’ve always wondered if it shows up differently here in the Midwest or on the coast. And, it’s always been personal to me, because I see these narratives enacted in the culture I grew up in. This, I think, reiterates why it’s important to study English and why Melley’s book is so fantastic, it articulates this connection between literary texts and the ‘real world’ in such an astounding way.

So Melley breaks his book into six chapters, plus an introduction: “Brainwashed”, “Spectacles of Secrecy”, “False Documents”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Plausible Deniability”, “Postmodern Amnesia”, and “The Geopolitical Melodrama”. The middle chapters, “False Documents” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Plausible Deniability” are the most literary-analysis heavy chapters, they discuss post-modern fracturing of narrative, simulacra, etc. in the most detail. The opening and concluding chapters are in my opinion the strongest and they concentrate most on relating what happens in fiction to actual policy and policy discussion. For example, his chapter on “Brainwashing” illustrates how the concept of brainwashing people into being automated state killers/citizens started as a fiction to generate anti-communist sentiment during the Cold War, but then decades later the same techniques were used to interrogate terrorists because common belief was that they actually worked and they had been represented in media for decades now. Here, the fiction of policy had passed into the public sphere and then was back to the state, now as “truth”.

Melley is also balanced in his approach; he critiques both the Bush and Clinton administrations, the CIA, FBI, etc. , that is, he is sure to point to this phenomenon of the public sphere as the nature of the US government, not a Democrat or Republican thing. I think this is very astute. My one critique is that he often mentions “the effects of American imperialism” without providing much information about what those effects are beyond the My Lai massacre. This is but a small critique though, one can only fit so much in a book.

Anyways, read it. It will make you think.

Melley, Timothy. The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction and the National Security State. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012.

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