The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/A New Politics of Form in Harlot's Ghost: Difference between revisions

under other circumstances he might have settled as a writer (just as Mailer states in the “Author’s note” that under other circumstances he might have been a CIA agent, which reveals similarities between the two “spooky arts”) but he wonders if anyone will ever read his document. We flash back to his early life where, notably, there are many common features between the tradecraft of writing and espionage. Hubbard learns that espionage is an art. He finds out that “codes” express and determine the life of an agent. Codes change an individual’s name, and Hubbard expresses the view that “the change of name itself ought to be enough to alter one’s character” (196) and that “even as shifting one’s cryptonym called forth a new potentiality for oneself, so there was a shiver of metamorphosis in this alteration of appearance”(197). Developing a code name is taken as the construction of a personality, one of the primary tasks of writers and CIA agents alike. Being an

effective agent is almost directly compared to the kinds of imagination and creativity required for producing powerful literature. For example, Hubbard describes his early training:

 

 

[n]ext, we were asked to visualize a wall, a table, a lamp. If the first three digits of the telephone number were 586, we were to picture a red wall behind a gray table on which was sitting an orange lamp. For the succeeding four numbers, we might visualize a woman in a purple jacket, green skirt, and yellow shoes sitting on an orange chair. That was our mental notation for 4216. By such means,586-4216 had been converted into a picture with seven colored objects.... I became so proficient at these equivalents that I saw hues so soon as I heard numbers. (197–198)</blockquote>