Authors of Truth: Writers, Liars, and Spies in Our Man In Havana

Abstract

Graham Greene's *Our Man In Havana* is a parody of the spy world that portrays the search for secret information as a laughable exercise in mistaking fiction for reality and language for truth. When Wormold, the protagonist of the novel, falsifies some of his espionage reports for the British Secret Service, he is surprised to discover that his fictional agents are turning up dead. This production of reality out of fiction disturbs the boundaries that we construct whenever we approach a fictional text, and asks us to re-evaluate our relationship with language. *Our Man In Havana* thus threatens our false transpositions of reality into language just as much as it parodies the efforts of spies. My thesis, which uses the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche as a theoretical basis, is therefore an exploration of the power-struggle that takes place over knowledge within the spy world as Greene depicts it, but also within the act of communication through language as a signifying system.