What do threats and the Cuban Missile Crisis have to do with Dangerous Liaisons?
On the eve of the French revolution, Choderlos de Laclos wrote a novel in which he described “deception and self-deception in high society. It is a tale of love and death which unfolds in just over five months. The action takes place almost exclusively indoors, either in Paris or in a country-house. External nature plays no role in this late eighteenth-century text. In a complex network of relationships, the main characters reveal varying degrees of gullibility and/or duplicity. At the end of the drama, the five major participants leave the stage. … In an age of sociability, they are socially dead” (Simon Davis, Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1987:9). The resemblance to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, in fact to the Cold War is striking. The Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded in only thirteen days, in which the two main protagonists, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev, displayed various degrees of duplicity. As I argue, the Cuban Missiles Crisis was about humiliation, prestige and
