Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel 9780823294695

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Between Form and Faith

Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series Edited by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., Associate Director, The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies

Series Advisory Board Jill Baumgaertner, Wheaton College (Emeritus) Mark Bosco, SJ, Georgetown University Una Cadegan, University of Dayton Michael Garanzini, SJ, Fordham University Richard Giannone, Fordham University (Emeritus) Paul Mariani, Boston College (Emeritus) Susan Srigley, Nipissing University, Canada

Between Form and Faith Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

martyn sampson

Fordham University Press new york

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Copyright © 2021 Martyn Sampson All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. At the request of David Higham Associates Limited, the literary agent of Graham Greene’s estate, the original punctuation in quotations from him has been retained. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sampson, Martyn, author. Title: Between form and faith : Graham Greene and the Catholic novel / Martyn Sampson. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2021. | Series: Studies in the Catholic imagination : the Flannery O’Connor trust series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021020239 | ISBN 9780823294664 (hardback) | ISBN 9780823294671 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823294688 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Greene, Graham, 1904–1991—Criticism and interpretation. | Greene, Graham, 1904–1991—Religion. | Catholic Church—In literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PR6013.R44 Z833 2021 | DDC 823/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021020239 Printed in the United States of America 23

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For the love of my life, Claire, and for Peter, thinker extraordinaire

Contents

Introduction: The Uninstructed Catholic

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The Ache of Modernism: Theological Aesthetics in Greene’s Nonfiction

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Catholic Novels: Religious Anxieties in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter

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Creator of Heaven and Earth: Catholicism and the “Catholic” in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair

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Entertaining the Second Vatican Council: Creative Theologies in The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote

119

Theory and Theology: Graham Greene’s Remapping of Common Ground

161

Conclusion: Where Now?

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Acknowledgments

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Between Form and Faith

Introduction: The Uninstructed Catholic

This book is a prayer. My intention is to constructively reenergize critical responses to Graham Greene. I am especially prayerful that you, one (or more) of my readers, will discover afresh the joys of an author who is somewhat in the cold. Greene has not been assimilated satisfactorily into the environs of mainline literary and cultural theory. The reason for this is that his critics have often been attracted to the analysis of content over form in religious contexts. Greene’s work has been studied in ways that focus on belief, as distinct from its specifically formal dimensions. A reconsideration of Greene therefore has the potential to reappraise not just the relationship between Greene and literary, critical, and cultural theory; also subject to a radical reappraisal are elements of the relationships between mainline theology and theory as subjects of study in and of themselves. The archetypal form of “theory,” poststructuralism, as conceived principally through deconstructionist reading methods, could welcome Greene into its discursive dialogues. Such an approach is one of mining literary texts for their lacunae, apotheoses, and shifting intertextual conversations. These are, in brief, intercritical and intracritical endeavors that take as their foci metacritical gaps, interstitial breaks, textual fault lines and echoes, and interpretative knottings. Elliott Malamet describes the relationships between Greene and theory thus: “I think it is fascinating to consider whether an ‘afterlife’ is possible for deconstruction and, ironically perhaps, whether such a resurrection can’t take place precisely through an engagement with a writer like Greene, long excluded from the banquets of Derridean feasting” (3). To such a feast, Greene might invite

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his own special guests, not least of which would be any and all aspects of the feminine. Some of the core actors who are important to this meeting space include, especially, continental theorists such as Roland Barthes and Slavoj Žižek. Of special significance are their combined interests in the radical interpretative capacities of readers. Barthes focuses on the level of their unique sensibilities. Žižek is concerned with the potential issues and challenges concerning ever-approaching and receding critical horizons. Whatever the challenges from its detractors, and however specialist their literary interests, theory, in such a form is crucial to Greene. This is because its terms engender precisely the kind of hermeneutics that enables Greene’s own work to acquire its principal meaning. Hermeneutics, in Greene, is a form of reading that enables his writings to have a rigorous critical impact in terms of their potential to exert diferent kinds of change. In “Our Lady and Her Assumption: ‘The Only Figure of Perfect Human Love’ ” (1951), from The Tablet, Greene speculates on the reasons for recent appearances of the Virgin Mary. Specifically, he writes from the point of view of considering Her significance for our hermeneutical capacities, in this case, the terms a religious faith, a version of religion.1 His speculation herein is a critical disposition, that being one of the negotiation of the terms of belief within those of unbelief and nonbelief: an approach that poses a critique vis-à-vis the particularly speculative belief systems of agnosticism and atheism that are sometimes undermined by the very subject orientations that they position themselves against. As Greene states in his article on Our Lady: “It is legitimate, of course, to speculate why this precise moment in history has been chosen. I can write only as an uninstructed Catholic” (27). Greene rejects the possibility of assuming a stable position on his version of religion. Greene was, of course, Catholic, which involved at the very minimum a level of knowledge that is acquired during religious instruction. But he was also uninstructed, meaning that at any time, he may have chosen to reject his religious commitments in favor of those which were other. The latter kind are secularist, and therefore largely in opposition to the principles and values that proceed from diferent aspects of the Catholic religion. Greene’s Catholicism served as a system of thought that acted as his central subject matter, and as a challenge to every aspect of his imaginative and novelistic practices. His approach to religion is one of negotiating the relationships between diferent notions of the cognitive and the aesthetic, as well as the corporeal and the incorporeal. Those relationships find their principle apotheosis in Catholic belief as its own subjectdiscipline, whose investigative import the theological-cultural critic Michael Patrick Murphy defines as follows: “the intrinsic interdisciplin-

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arity of Catholicism, the fact that Catholicism, for better or worse, proposes a holistic and interdependent ontology, is precisely what is behind the historical tendency of literary writers and critics alike to jettison the myopia of their own narrow disciplines and foray into a more expansive and more interdisciplinary mode of scholarship” (5). Catholicism as a critical discourse, that being an expression of a specifically wide-ranging form of religion and counterreligion, is of a majestically complex critical range. In this instance, its importance is as a site of intersection, serving as a space within whose cultural cross-currents multiple hermeneutics of religious space and time meet. They are incarnated in their most defined form in the pinnacle of artistry that is the literary novel form. My interest is not in the extent to which this is an issue of theological or religious form, however so conceived. Rather, I am concerned with literary form as the central element of the analysis of an imaginative text. It is here, then, that we see there, an endpoint whose Apocalypse is also its beginning, the genesis of a diferent kind of meaning. Murphy considers the nature of such beginnings as one of numerous diferent starts and finishes, something special for the individual and society: “The Catholic imagination has become, perhaps in a spirit of déjà vu, one such ‘school’— in aesthetics and in religious criticism—a distinct expression within the boundless parameters of what I’ll refer to, broadly, as the ‘theological imagination’ ” (5). For Greene, the initiation of meaning is also that of a new form of interpretative activity, one that is closely related to the very notion of belief itself. Greene’s version of belief is exemplified by his debt to Robert Browning, an interaction that is alluded to by Richard Greene (unrelated to Graham Greene), who observes that “Graham often quoted or alluded to Robert Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’: All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt: We called the chess-board white—we call it black. [ll. 209–212] (R. Greene, Letters 152) Diferent kinds of faith and doubt, as conceived in opposition to metaphysical certainty, are the conceptual bases within whose terms diverse aspects of Greene’s work find their most vital meaning. If doubt provides a means by which the terms of faith are defined, the ability of the one to challenge the terms of the other has important meaning. This is that interpretative doubts themselves are never far from Greene. It would appear that in the act of interpretation, diferent critical interactions determine how Greene makes his own creative decisions. These are ways

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of writing whereby any form of doubt or belief is met with Greene’s individual religious and secular beliefs—beliefs that, for him, stem from his faculties of interpretative reasoning. In an interview, Greene himself pointed out some of the technical interactions inherent in his religious disposition, stating, “There’s a diference between belief and faith. If I don’t believe in X or Y, faith intervenes, telling me that I’m wrong not to believe. Faith is above belief. One can say that it’s a gift of God, while belief is not. Belief is founded on reason” (Allain 173). Whatever their precise definitions, faith and belief, in Greene, evade simplistic conceptualizations. Founded as they are in part on Greene’s pervasive sense of doubt, they acquire meaning on the basis of the tendency of one to both give substance to and undermine the critical bases of the other. For Greene, faith and belief need to be conceived according to the particular frames of reference that he invokes within and across his works. The definitions of faith and belief in the Oxford English Dictionary are perhaps the best starting points for an investigation into their exact investigative terms. The former consists of “the study or science which treats of God, His nature and attributes, and His relations with man and the universe; ‘the science of things divine’ (Hooker [266]); divinity.” The latter, on the other hand, is the “mental acceptance of a proposition, statement, or fact, as true, on the ground of authority or evidence.” To the degree that either lends itself to the institution of forms and concepts of limited reflection and reflexiveness, they stem from diferent kinds of dogma or dogmatism: ways of believing and thinking that are “based upon principles which have not been tested by reflection.” It is from here, that is, the imperative to read Greene so as to avoid the employment of reductive notions of religion and secularism, that my own critical endeavor begins. My enquiry starts with explicating the critically loaded potential of Greene’s religious, irreligious, nonreligious, and counterreligious perspectives. Morton Dauwen Zabel articulates in concise terms the problem of dogma in Greene, who consistently tended to make use of religious themes and ideas on diverse levels. This tendency constitutes an epistemological conflict, whereby Greene was “brought . . . squarely up against the problem of reconciling his religious and didactic premises to the realistic and empirical principles of the novel form; of harmonizing an orthodoxy of belief (however personal or inquisitive) with what George Orwell once called ‘the most anarchical of all forms of literature’ ” (41). Zabel quotes Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale” further in his observation that the problems concerning the nature of the novel form are not uncommon among

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the fiction of other novelists: “How many Roman Catholics have been good novelists? Even the handful one could name have usually been bad Catholics. The novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free mind, of the autonomous individual” (41–42). For Greene, the problems of religious belief and faith, however formulated, are consistent with those of some of his peers. How to write in a genre whose origins and premises are antithetical to many kinds of religion is a serious imaginative problem. My principal question is: What is a Catholic novel? A question of such broad scope, incorporating nearly all dimensions of literary, cultural, artistic, and religious experience, needs a subjectdiscipline that ofers precise terms. I shall use the field of contemporary theological aesthetics to such ends. This area of theological enquiry is especially fitting to a consideration of the imaginative concerns of Greene’s fiction. Like the evolutionary and progressive processes of process theologies, systems of theological aesthetics expand as diferent hermeneutical horizons in themselves change. Pioneered in its contemporary form by the twentieth-century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905– 1988), the field of theological aesthetics presents an important opportunity for my enquiry. Converging with what it means to be both individual and, in a literary-critical sense, interpretatively mindful, its approaches are especially enabling. The terms of theological aesthetics serve as a way of integrating the cognitive demands of belief into the critical scope of elements of a specifically Catholic religious faith: “the three primary features of aesthetic experience that both emerge from modern aesthetic theories and are of key importance for contemporary theological aesthetics is that it can be revelatory, transformative, and participatory” (Bychkov xii). Intersecting with this approach to the theological is the drama of novelistic creativity in the sense that, for Greene, the writing of fiction is also the writing of identity. Alluding to the critical bases and conceptual ideas of diferent notions of Catholicism in the context of his predecessors, Greene comments: “There does exist a pattern in my carpet constituted by Catholicism, but one has to stand back in order to make it out” (Allain 159). This comment alludes directly to the work of Henry James, whose main character in “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), Vereker, explores “something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet” (586). The decor and adornments in Greene’s unique imaginative place of residence are also those that adorn the rooms and spaces of the mind itself. It is the case that there have been a number of critical studies in relatively recent years that converge with the ideas considered in this study.2 In exploring how Greene’s work relates to aspects of Greene’s past as well

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as his lived experience, Neil Sinyard, writes that “his Catholicism . . . served as a moral authority against which he could react and as a set of doctrinal ideals against which he could, like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter [1948], masochistically measure his failure as a human being” (13). Sinyard tellingly considers Greene’s comments on the role and function of an author in his essay “François Mauriac” (1945), noting the auspicious tenor of Greene’s thinking: “ ‘The exclusion of the author can go too far. Even the author, poor devil, has a right to exist’ [93]—a witty, percipient comment which, if heeded, might have saved some literary theorists years of anguish” (116). Mark Bosco draws together features of Greene’s novelistic practice in a way that gives attention to its development from religion and the religious: “This inherent dichotomy exists in much criticism of Greene: his ‘Catholic’ versus his ‘post-Catholic’ novels or the early ‘religious’ versus the later ‘political’ or ‘secular’ ones” (Catholic Imagination 11). Bosco traces how “the Catholic Church performed its own purification and renewal through the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council,” (28) which was convened from 1962 to 1965. He suggests that the imaginative dimensions of Greene are also those of the diverse aspects and elements of the Roman Catholic tradition, especially by way of “a ‘development’ away from the church’s dialectical stand against the Reformation and the concomitant antagonism to Enlightenment thought in Western civilization to a more analogical stand toward the religious and political communities outside Catholicism” (28). To interpolate the authorial imagination by way of the terms of theology is a bold move and one that is especially fitting. This is because to problematize forms of interpretation that might seem other wise transparent is an important activity when raising questions and issues that are necessary in reconsidering Greene. Bernard Bergonzi, in contrast to Sinyard and Bosco, dwells on the nature of Greene’s identity as a person, suggesting that Greene “reinvigorates the venerable Romantic doctrine that reading literature is one way of encountering the soul of a great man” (Study 2). One consequence of such a conception of literature is that “now that Greene is among the illustrious dead his oeuvre is complete and can be read and interpreted as a totality” (3). Brian Lindsay Thomson focuses on Greene’s intent in his works, rather than his standing as religious or literary figure, suggesting that “books . . . mean something because an author intends them to mean something” (Politics 5). Michael G. Brennan, in one recent study, considers “how Catholicism provided him [Greene] with such a diverse and sustained source of inspiration for his writings” (Fictions ix). In a later study, Brennan suggests that “Greene habitually linked politics and reli-

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gion within his fictions and public pronouncements” (Political Writer x). Richard J. Hand and Andrew Purssell pursue further the idea that Greene explores notions of meaning of which he himself is in a sense an enigmatic exemplar, suggesting that “Greene not only stands as a fascinating product of the twentieth century but also remains one of its most emblematic writers” (17). The opacity and the tone of these comments are revealing. However Greene and his work are conceived, the critical extent of his use of Catholic themes remains a subject in need of critical investigation. The core tensions in Greene’s work are between diferent imaginative pressures, which I shall term impulses. The impulse, as I mean it, refers not just to the need to consider Greene in the context of diferent creative and canonical domains. I also wish to bring into play the kinds of tensions, decisions, visions and revisions that characterize Greene as a writer of specifically Catholic sensibility. This range of imaginative factors serves to define the relationship in Greene between mainline theology and contemporary literary theory. Of especial use, here, is the critical tenor of Ian Watt’s seminal enquiry The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). Watt writes that “there are still no wholly satisfactory answers to” the question “is the novel a new literary form?” (9). Watt comments on the principles of his study by referring to his discarded “thirty-five page heavily-footnoted methodological introduction” that “successive revisions eventually boiled . . . down to one word: the ‘if’ in the opening paragraph which introduces the clauses ‘if we assume, as is commonly done, [that the novel is a new literary form]’ ” (“Serious Reflections” 206). It is this very element of Watt’s study with which I am myself concerned. Literary form, for Watt, is the critical foundation and technical structure by which novelists facilitate their individual critical approaches, engendering meaningful forms of representation. Employing such an approach to novelistic form is important in reconsidering Greene’s literary stature. Greene becomes an author of fiction whose imaginative playfulness is tightly interwoven with his handling of significant thematic dimensions. Whatever the merits of Malamet’s decision not to adopt in his study “a consistent principle of organization” (3), this means nevertheless accepting the very notions of belief that he himself rejects: “attempting to encompass an artist’s output within a governing explanatory framework, I believe . . . creates a tendency on the part of the critic to squeeze an author inside the parameters of a particular literary theory and may end up illuminating more about the theory than the writer’s work” (3). It is precisely through Greene’s capacity to acquire and undermine any specific way of reading that his work assumes meanings of critical significance. If, as M.M. Bakhtin asserts, “the novel

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as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (261), Greene’s texts are in themselves diversely created and re-created. One means of imposing order on the conceptualizations of Greene’s writings is to consider elements of the ways in which they have been conceived. I shall, therefore, expand Bosco’s approaches to Greene by theorizing aspects of his own investigative procedures. For Bosco, “theological interpretation of literary texts has been mostly displaced today by various strains of postmodern theory and secular ideology, making a ‘theological reading’ of someone like Graham Greene a mere historical footnote in the history of Greene criticism” (Catholic Imagination 7). My argument proceeds according to the premise that Greene’s own approaches to the secular and the religious converge and conflict in innumerable ways. By apprehending parts of them, attention is directed toward the interpretations that Greene’s novels can actually present, serving as they do as texts that are implicated within their own critical contexts. My approaches to the religious and the secular, and religion and secularization proceed according to Talal Asad’s presupposition that “a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable” (1). On this basis, in the ways that I am invoking them, “the main question . . . is how the relationship between the terms is constructed” (Kaufmann 624). If “ ‘Religion’ originally referred only to Christianity but was then generalized into a cross-cultural category” (624), it is also the case that specific forms of religion are vital to my argument. Christianity, in this sense, refers to any range of individuals, groups or communities who consider themselves to be adherents of particular aspects of its numerous beliefs, traditions, and practices. Of these, Catholicism, by which I mean any aspect of the many branches and denominations which are to a larger or smaller extent presided over and guided by the Roman Catholic Church in the Vatican, may be defined by its own adoption and appropriation of elements of them, whether by way of doctrine, dogma, sacrament, or other religious form. Religion and the religious each present, then, a means of referring to the capacities of the multiple expressions and dimensions of the terms to relate with one another and remain separate. The secular and its variants, on the other hand, are defined by the oppositions and intersections within and between those relationships, against which they are rendered visible and individually distinct. In relation to my argument, the terms shift in meaning according to their precise conceptual premise, orientation and context, as conceived by and within Greene’s version of religion. It is from this critical position,

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one of apprehending Greene’s work as its own particular subject of investigative apprehension, that one of my key terms emerges and finds its own meaning. The specifically religious impulse, a concept that will be subject to definition and redefinition as my enquiry progresses, is, in its most elementary form, that which stems from the Catholic daily office. By this, Catholic believers may find in their religious practices particular expressions of their own particular spiritualities. As St. Paul states in Galatians, which is quoted from Prayers during the Day: From the Liturgy of the Hours, “Learn to live and move in the spirit; then there is no danger of your giving way to the impulses of corrupt nature. The impulses of nature and the impulses of the spirit are at war with one another; either is clean contrary to the other, and that is why you cannot do all that your will approves” (Gal 5:16–17, qtd. in Catholic Truth Society 89). To the degree that reading novelistic fiction constitutes its own aesthetic, a role for diferent kinds of impulse (and impulsiveness) is core. Insofar as they also constitute a dialectic between one and another kind of behavior, the physical embodiment of literary representation is an element of lived experience. If one consequence of my approach is that my treatment of Catholicism appears to be one of a limited and limiting interpolation, my intentions are nonetheless pure. Catholicism remains the hottest arena for the debate of issues of contention, such as approaches to homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and the role of women in the church. To consider the religion in terms of impulses is to separate this feature of its identity from that of traditional means of critiquing literature. This approach is one of considering the expression of meaning in, not through, the text. Greene’s relationship to the body of criticism that can be labeled deconstructionism is varied and complex. In his monumental study on the contemporary relationships between the secular and the sacred, A Secular Age (2007), Charles Taylor presents insights that are important to my enquiry. Taylor writes: “The end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a viable alternative to Christianity in exclusive humanism; it also saw a number of reactions against this, and the understanding of human life which produced it” (423). For Taylor, the diverse preoccupations of the Enlightenment brought capacious influences to bear on the theory and practice of specifically literary interests. Those influences rested, essentially, on what, precisely, belief looked like: “This was the beginning of . . . the nova efect, the steadily widening gamut of new positions—some believing, some unbelieving, some hard to classify—which have become available options for us” (423). The range of positions that characterize what is secular and religious could be labeled in broad terms “theoretical” and “theological.”

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In his commentary on Taylor’s study, How (Not) to Be Secular, James K. A. Smith suggests that belief needs to be theorized as an imaginative device of complex historical roots. Belief, as a tool of interpretative reading, is necessary to an apprehension of the present times. Smith contends, “it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise” (47). For Smith, as critical perspectives on literary texts shift and change, so their conceptual bases become increasingly wide-ranging. Smith exemplifies these critical interactions by pointing to the experience of inhabiting a famous sporting arena, whose roof can open and close during a game: “Like the roof on Toronto’s SkyDome, the heavens are beginning to close. But we barely notice, because our new focus on this plane had already moved the transcendent to our peripheral vision at best. We’re so taken with the play on this field, we don’t lament the loss of the stars overhead” (51). The manner in which a given phenomenon is viewed is also how a mode of seeing itself is instituted. It might be contended that how individuals relate to society is how subjects and objects are apprehended as themes, forms and contexts for analyses. Smith elaborates on the dynamics that characterize his analytical position, in his suggestion that “exclusive humanism is an achievement: ‘the development of this purely immanent sense of universal solidarity is an important achievement, a milestone in human history’ ” (57; Taylor 255). In conceiving aspects of humanity in the context of “the charter of modern unbelief” (Taylor 257), it is the case that: “this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a ‘waste land’ for subsequent generations, and many young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries” (Taylor 770). By looking ahead in ways that take account of past, present and future subject-orientations, possibilities that are invested with novel meaning are operative. For the theologians Christopher Baker, Thomas A. James, and John Reader, serious interpretative issues are at stake in public approaches to creative texts, like novels. Relationships in investigative-critical domains are primarily matters of approaching issues of a divine nature, as voiced in their belief that “besides God, first of all, we need to engage the idea of ‘creation’ ” (101). Baker, James, and Reader suggest that relating to one another in authentic terms necessitates first and foremost developing a sensibility whose critical contours are shaped by the concerns of religion. This can be termed a “relational Christian realism” (126), whereby “God is not a personal agent who performs discrete acts that may be partitioned into

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categories like ‘creation’ and ‘redemption,’ but is rather the immanent virtual that is always creatively at work” (126). To apprehend a sense of immanence is to place oneself in the vicissitudes that are represented in a text. The excitement, joys, and dangers that are experienced during an immersion in an imaginative literary work are similar to those felt in any encounter with its contextual dimensions. These dynamics could be described as “finding expression in the empowerment of novel configurations between objects, enabling new connections and collections into an increasingly vast commonwealth of being” (126). Reading, in this sense, is neither an activity that is interpretatively innocent on an individual level nor absent of investiture in an institutional sense. To read Greene interrogatively is also to be subject to an array of potentiality that is unendingly complex in thought and conceptualization. In her study The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene’s Fiction (2015), Paula Martín Salván points to interpretative matters in terms of characterization. Specifically, she alludes to the situations that many of Greene’s characters find themselves in: “In a typical Graham Greene novel, a male character—we can tentatively call him the Greenean hero—becomes estranged from his communities of origin, such as family, profession, nation [and] becomes . . . committed to a cause or to a people, through acts of compassion and sacrifice” (1). According to Salván, characters in Greene’s fiction who could be considered heroic embody notions of estrangement and empowerment that place them at the ser vice of diferent narrative constructs. If, as Nathaniel Hill contends in his religious interpretation, “Greene gives us a rich tapestry of the complexity of religious temporality” (149), synchronic and diachronic investigations are plausible and sound. I apply my methodology to Greene by way of the following rationale for my selection and organization of his work. In my first chapter, I explore parts of Greene’s literary and dramatic criticism in terms of their capacity to present insights into his fiction. I focus on these elements of Greene’s nonfiction because their critical development points to how Greene develops the religious and secular concerns within his fiction.3 Chapter 2 will consider aspects of those concerns in Brighton Rock (1938) and The Heart of the Matter. I have selected these novels because considered together they dramatize how Greene has been critically conceptualized. In this chapter, I ofer a partial answer to my leading question by defining what a Catholic novel is in a manner which is commensurate with my argument at this point. Pinkie, the protagonist of Brighton Rock, a seventeen-year-old gang leader in the Brighton of the 1930s, is evil. Nonetheless, this aspect of his characterization needs to be considered

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within his capacity to be potentially redeemed by Rose’s attachment to him. Concomitantly, an interpretation of Scobie, the protagonist of the latter novel and a representative of the British police in wartime Sierra Leone, should consider the entirety of his characterization. This includes all dimensions of his emotions, and not only his pity, however distinctively Catholic this may be. The enquiry engendered by my consideration of Greene’s novels in Chapter 2 will direct my interpretations of The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951) in Chapter 3. I focus on these novels because interpreted together they show how any formal or thematic aspect of Greene’s work should be understood. I am not exploring the first in chronological order because Greene’s appropriations and reappropriations of the religious and secular dimensions within and between these particular texts draw attention to the consideration of context in Greene in vitally important ways. The whisky priest in the first novel may be true to the beliefs in the Roman Catholic Church over those of the Calles regime in Mexico in the 1930s. Nevertheless, Greene’s ideological investment in him is countered by the secularist and creative religious hatred of adulterer and novelist Bendrix, the protagonist of The End of the Affair. In Chapter 4, I explore The Honorary Consul (1972) and Monsignor Quixote (1982) in terms of how the secular and the religious actually relate, and, especially, the texts’ many appropriations of them within and without the conceptual parameters of the texts themselves. I have chosen these novels because between them Greene explores how their writing relates to their evaluation. The terrorist activities of Father Leόn Rivas may represent the destructive tendencies of a combined religious and secularist fervor in the fictional South American state. This re-presentation of mood converges with and diverges from the characterization of Monsignor Quixote, the guileless Spanish priest, who presents an insight into Greene’s own playful personality. Taken together, the novels point toward Greene’s relationship with theological and “theoretical” models of meaning as ways of conceiving how his work exhibits wide and specific social implications. This will be the subject of Chapter 5, in which I answer my leading question by defining what a Catholic novel is in a thorough manner. I will revisit the arguments of this chapter, along with those of each of the other chapters, in the Conclusion. Perhaps counterintuitively, I have not written a chapter on A BurntOut Case (1960) and The Comedians (1965), even as Greene pursues in each the vicissitudes of diferent versions of religion. I am setting the novels aside as “case studies” because they present investigative and methodological aims that are quite separate from my own. The first text, which traces

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the troubled Catholic beliefs of Querry, a nervous architect who is working in a Congo leprosarium, is, in Greene’s words, “an attempt to give dramatic expression to various types of belief, half-belief, and non-belief” (xiii). As invaluable as these notions in themselves are, particularly in regard to Greene’s dramatization of doubt, my concerns are quite diferent. I am predominantly interested in the theory of Greene’s version of religion, not its practice, whatever form this might take. I have not included The Comedians for a similar reason. Also set in a climate that is riven with conflict, that being the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier, the narrative voice in the text is that of the hotelier, Brown, a lapsed Catholic. The “I” of the novel is sometimes conceived to be a play on Greene’s own narrative voice, a charge that Greene earnestly defended himself against. Greene writes in his dedicatory letter to A.S. Frere, who was “associated with W. H. Heinemann Ltd” (Wobbe 140), that prefaces the novel: “I want to make it clear that the narrator of this tale, though his name is Brown, is not Greene” (Greene, Comedians xix). I am keen to counter any risk of dramatizing the character of Greene himself. In my opinion, biographical investigations into Greene are best left to specialist biographers and literary historians. Greene is a vital figure in the history of twentieth-century English literature. His representations of Catholicism were in every sense a valuable contribution to its impact on the world stage. He needs to be reconsidered because it is within the critical and creative concerns presented between, throughout, and across his texts that his approaches to Catholic matters and issues are best perceived. If, as Oleg Bychkov suggests, “the engagement between aesthetics and theology can at least potentially become a unified field of inquiry” (xxv), Greene’s work must be read in its totality.

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The Ache of Modernism: Theological Aesthetics in Greene’s Nonfiction

Critics have commented upon the unusual theology of Graham Greene’s work and his own religious beliefs and commitments. Bernard Bergonzi observes his “idiosyncratic attachment to Catholicism” (Study 2), Mark Bosco writes on his “unorthodox treatment of orthodox ideas” (Catholic Imagination 4), and Robert L. Gale notes his “conflicted Catholicism” (2). Greene’s predicament as a novelist who embraces in his work both the empirical qualities of the novel genre,1 while also writing on Catholic subject matter, is epitomized by Thomas Hardy’s concept of “the ache of modernism” (124). David J. de Laura formulates this as “the insistence on the distress and rootlessness of those whose intellectual honesty forces them to live without a sense of Providence” (381), since it is premised on Hardy’s “rejection of all comforting theistic palliatives” (382). The concept is, nevertheless, useful for my argument, centered as it is on theology as a discipline within which par ticu lar forms of the religious are apprehended, and which is also subject to the disquieting manner in which those very forms intersect with troublingly secular concerns. Focusing on the nonfiction, this chapter therefore defines and explores theological aesthetics as that system of knowledge whose field of enquiry at one and the same time grows and transforms while also remaining static, drawing its interpretative terms from the engagement between Greene’s social speculations and his own distinctive version of religion. Greene’s essay on the early twentieth-century Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton (1944) reveals much about Greene’s position on his religion, although his position was far from being static. Greene explores Chesterton by distinguishing between theological and secular paradigms,

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especially those that are political: “To be a politician a man needs to be a psychologist, and Chesterton was no psychologist, as his novels prove. He saw things in absolute terms of good and evil” (106). Chesterton is unable to appreciate the full complexities of human behav ior because he tends to divide people into two distinct groups. His monolithic perspective on those groups, characterized as his perceptions are by diferent kinds of absolutism, also means that he conceives human behavior of any kind in singular terms: “His immense charity prevented him admitting the amount of ordinary shabby deception in human life” (106). Greene’s observation that Chesterton presents a limited perspective on human behavior is, however, close to the preoccupations of Greene’s novels. For example, alluding to T.S. Eliot’s concern with the metaphysical and the decadent in “Whispers of Immortality,” Roger Sharrock writes that “Greene manipulates his lyricism in order to reveal . . . the skull beneath the skin” (79). Through the Chesterton essay, therefore, Greene identifies two ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and their societies. One is to frame it in terms of good and evil, focusing on the binary in religious, as distinct from moral terms, an act that might also be called theological. The other way is to explain human social behavior in ways that theology does not, for example, by using the tools, procedures and techniques of psychology which, in their senses here, in themselves form a critical framework that is secular. But though Chesterton’s monolithic perspective means that he tends not to appreciate the full complexities of human behavior, for Greene, it is useful for communicating the ideas associated with theological dogmas. Greene writes that: “For the same reason that he failed as a political writer he succeeded as a religious one, for religion is simple, dogma is simple. Much of the difficulty of theology arises from the eforts of men who are not primarily writers to distinguish a quite simple idea with the utmost accuracy” (106). In contrast to politics with its reliance on a grasp of psychology, religion is “simple” because it depends on doctrines that are already laid down, which, for the purposes of my argument, I take as precisely that quality which the novel genre is not dependent on. Several questions relating to Greene’s position on the relationship between secular and theological paradigms arise here. Of special concern is his separation of dogma from fiction. This, as we will see, is one key to Greene’s practice as a novelist, especially as a writer of novels whose conceptual orientation proceeds from matters Catholic. For Greene, Chesterton’s novels are formulaic and predictable due to the author’s religious dogmatism. This directs attention to Greene’s practice as a novelist, because his own work can be conceptualized in terms

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of the opposition between dogma and novelistic realism. In particular, he concerns himself with the extent to which novels are interrogative of their own formal conventions and premises. The problems in defining the novel as a genre are articulated, albeit indirectly, by philosophers who are preoccupied by diferent notions of empiricism, by which I mean “the doctrine which regards experience as the only source of knowledge” (OED).2 Michael Oakeshott writes that experience is a philosophic term “most difficult to manage . . . [on account of] the ambiguities it contains” (9). Martin Jay argues that the term is fundamentally subjective because of its “ubiquity” (4) and has gained numerous definitions through disciplines such as religious studies, history, politics, and critical theory. Like Jay, I take as my starting point the Latin and Greek etymology of experience, a word that “derives from the Latin experientia, which denoted ‘trial, proof, experiment’ ” (10). The verb expereri, “‘to try’ . . . contains the same root as periculum, or ‘danger,’” meaning that experience is associated with peril and the idea of learning from risks (10). The Greek antecedent to the Latin is empeiria, which is also related to the English word “empirical” (10). The Greeks named their schools of medicine Empiriki, which were “opposed to the competing factions known as the Dogmatiki and the Methodiki” (10). “Experience,” broadly defined, is associated with an interest in risk, the accidental, the specific and the particular, as opposed to certainty, the general and the universal. Novelistic realism, including its formal and contextual dimensions, however they might be conceptualized, is therefore at odds with the opposition between the religious and the secular that Greene attributes to Chesterton.3 This opposition will direct my approach to Greene’s literary and dramatic criticism, premised, as parts of this are, on challenging aspects of its very nature.

Literary Criticism The manner in which the religious and the secular, including diferent kinds of dogma and novelistic realism, are both opposed and related in Greene is presented in a variety of ways in his criticism on the novel genre.4 An early example of his anxiety over the very possibility of separating the religious and the secular in the discussion of literature is found in his review “All the Facts of Fiction” (1934). Greene considers the fifth volume of Ernest A. Baker’s The History of the English Novel, The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance. In keeping with any unsophisticated separation of novelistic form and content, Greene’s deplores Baker’s “painstaking history” (170), which includes volumes such as The Elizabethan

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Age and After, The Later Romances and the Establishment of Realism, and Intellectual Realism. Baker’s crude approach to the novels covered in the present volume is betrayed by his general lack of “sympathy” for them, which means he categorizes the narratives by “literary fashions,” so failing to recognize the extent of their conceptual implications (170). From Greene’s perspective, Baker cannot shape his study with the sense of critical awareness necessary for an appraisal of “the germs of some tendency or . . . line of interest that others will pursue much further” (170). His rigid typology contrasts with “Miss Tompkins’s valuable work on the same period, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800,” which “noted the first lyric quickening of the romantic movement” (170). The discursive rigor of Tompkins’s analysis of the period results from her decision to “discard the term structure with its architectural suggestions, and think of these books in terms of colour” (170). On the basis of his opposition between Baker’s and Tompkins’s studies, it may be inferred that, for Greene, novels as creative forms are concomitantly dynamic in their critical application. The significance of Greene’s insights into the novel genre in his review of Baker is evident in their theological connotations. In particular, how Greene values Tompkins’s methodology in part anticipates the interrogation of stable notions of subjectivity described by Luke Ferretter, which can include “the metaphysical system [of Aquinas] in which creatures variously participate in the simple and universal perfection of God” (17). Like Aquinas’s system of theological investigation, whose “theory of analogy would itself be open to deconstruction” (17), the critical reach of Baker’s study can be dramatically expanded as “he naïvely notes ‘how . . . [Fielding’s] parsonages . . . always speak in character. . . . The story seemed to tell itself, and yet all the while his was a controlled realism, conveying a clear philosophy of life at the same time as it seemed to present a polished mirror to reality’ ” (“All” 170). For Greene, such an uncomplicated critique of reality, defined by its distinction from one’s daily experience, exhibits Baker’s “clotted style” (170), and is predicative of Greene’s criticism that G.K. Chesterton was unable to appreciate the full complexities of human behavior in ways that are not precisely often at odds with dogmatic Catholic accounts of experience. In displaying “an indiscriminating love of facts for their own sakes,” Baker, like Chesterton, fails to appreciate the “literary or even historical value” of the works he studies (170). By virtue of such a dogmatic critique, Baker “devoted” “as many pages . . . to forgotten novels as Ranke devoted to forgotten Popes” (170). Any study of fiction must account for its commentary of the world at large. This is because the value of fiction resides in its empiricist concerns, by

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which I mean its representations of diferent empirical qualities and forms of experience, as distinct from its resonance with the values of dogmatic institutions like the Roman Catholic Church.5 In “Creative Reading” (1935), a review of The Art of the Novel from 1700 to the Present Time by Pelham Edgar, Greene’s perceptions into the ways in which novels examine experience intersect with the theory and practice of their writing. Greene writes that “the novelist, as distinct from other artists, works for an uninstructed public” (256). Consistent with Greene’s own understanding of his version of religion, in which, as “an uninstructed Catholic,” he disturbs single critical approaches to his work, Greene frames the novelist and her diferent readers in a conceptually broad manner. Bound by no singular ideological position, whether that of the “musically educated,” or, in the case of painting, “a possibly prejudiced, possibly ignorant public,” “only the novelist among artists sufers from the heart-breaking sense that his methods will not even be noticed by the public which buys and enjoys his books” (256). Against the notion that fiction is anathema to the interpretative codes of a par ticular readership, Greene declares “that a sensitive enjoyment of the novel can only come from an understanding of a novelist’s problems and his method of meeting them, [or] to use Mr. Edgar’s phrase, from ‘creative reading’ ” (256). For Greene, contrary to the narrow generic foci of Baker, novels should be read in awareness of their technique, since by this, “the writer’s problem is [evident:] to communicate his subject ‘with the minimum leakage of value,’ ” including the representation of “vividness and verisimilitude” (256). By way of his framing of Edgar’s volume, Greene implies that a work of fiction is important before its capacity to evoke debate on the means of its interpretation, which, in turn, creates problems for any and every form of dogma and dogmatism. Through his awareness of both the inadequate commentaries on the novel genre, and his own sensitivity toward his contemporaries’ fiction, Greene can productively reflect on his own writing. In particular, he is interested in its forms of representation, “the author’s treatment of his material and not the material itself” (257). Whatever its limitations in terms of coverage and selection, Edgar’s “book is above reproach” precisely because its investigative presuppositions do not deviate from the notion that “the faultless novel does not exist” (257). Greene does not focus on categorizations of quality, since their agendas are often counterproductive to the exploration of those fictions “written with the conscience as well as the mind” (257). Rather, it is instructive to “admit that if recreation is our aim we shall derive a quite unique pleasure from the re-reading of a book of evident power in order to discover what the author put there,

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and what our first hurried contact failed to reveal” (257). For Greene, the novel genre is critically reflective of its individual forms and aspects in that it acts as a site for conversation within and between seemingly disparate readerships. This includes those whose values are to a greater or lesser extent religious in principle and tradition. Against the falsely polarized methods of reading applied to Greene, whereby the religious and the secular act as coordinates for a critic’s ideological agenda, the tools and procedures of criticism should be placed at the ser vice of the fiction as a specifically creative construct. Greene expands upon this concept in his review of The Art of the Novel, Henry James’s New York prefaces, collected and edited by R.P. Blackmur. In his article, “The Lesson of the Master” (1935), Greene challenges some of the evaluative positions by which his own work becomes significant. Reflecting on how James has been subject to “misleading criticism,” from “cruel caricature” to “snappy sentimentalities” (698), Greene explores the idea that more often than not the explicative discussion of religion and literature is reductively conceived. Significantly, Greene “remembers Mr. McCarthy’s astounding statement that the religious sense is almost entirely absent from James’s work,” and “innumerable examples . . . from Mr. Van Vechten’s bright modish criticism of deviations from the truth” (698). In opposition to such contentions, Greene remarks that “it is quite forgotten that the novel which lends its title, The Ivory Tower, to so many grudging appraisals has a subject as ‘real,’ even gross as it is religious: ‘the black and merciless things that are behind great possessions’ ” (698). Greene questions any interpretation of James that does not approach a moderately worthwhile appraisal by exactly the terms James himself adopts in his own work. Greene’s approach to James is in line with that of “the Master” of James’s short story, whom the narrator suggests is “essentially right” in his opinion of the junior writer, Paul Overt, “that Nature had dedicated him to intellectual, not to personal passion” (“Lesson” 606). James challenges the grounds on which the value of his work has been gauged by writing on the very themes and preoccupations which could be used to undermine its public reception, namely, “the cruelties and deceptions beneath civilized relationships” (“Lesson” 698). While for James, “a puritan with a nose for the Pit,” “life is violent and art has to reflect that violence,” it does so on the principle that “the novel by its nature is dramatic, but it need not be melodramatic” (698). If “the violence he worked with was . . . corrupt; it came from the Pit,” it can only “be fully understood” within James’s own collection of investigative contexts (698). In

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Greene’s terms, James is an author for whom the novel is a genre premised on multiple interpretative principles. In engaging first with the craft of the novel and second with the critical heritage associated with that craft, James anticipates the guiding principle that Greene adopts in his own fiction. For Greene, James “never hesitated to break his own rules, but he broke them with a full consciousness of his responsibility” (698). Within this perspective on James, Greene reveals his own attitude to the more or less religious and secular tensions that proceed from any notion of Catholic dogma. In demonstrating an acute awareness of his technique, James sets an example for novelists to follow: “No novelist can begin to write until he has taken those rules into consideration; you cannot be a protestant before you have studied the dogmas of the old faith” (698). According to Greene, it is by way of a sustained exploration of what it means to adopt an established religion that insights into questions of genre are achieved, especially those associated with the novelistic. James enables novelists to write for the many rather than the few precisely owing to the fact that his “dogma” is the product of his own practice rather than the workings of an institution (698), such as the Catholic Church, whatever the nature of its material circumstances and contexts. Greene concludes his review by returning to the main theme of “Creative Reading,” that being the biases and prejudices which mark the interpretation of a writer’s generic preoccupations, remarking on how James’s penetration of dominant analytical agendas also extends to “the common reader . . . for our enjoyment of a novel is increased when we can follow the method of the writer. . . . The numinous pleasure is not lost if we know a little of the way in which it has been transmitted” (698).6 Whatever the religious significance of a specific novelist’s work, her examination of the dogmas she both inherits and creates is of value only insofar as those dogmas facilitate the wide contemplation of who a novelist’s readers could be and what could constitute their characters. For Greene, a novelist’s many and various techniques render the idea of a “common reader” disingenuous,7 placing emphasis on the role of the critic in the constitution of a novelist’s readership. As such, novelists and critics play complementary roles in the reading, and, in a sense, the writing of a text. Greene’s return to such a concept points to his own novelistic technique, since his debt to both the expectations associated with genre and the dogma of the Catholic Church is vital to his fiction. Greene expands upon what might constitute this debt in “Men and Messages” (1938), his review of Baker’s The History of the English Novel:

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The Day Before Yesterday. For Greene, the “purpose” of “Dr. Baker’s voluminous work . . . becomes more and more acute” (310), since Baker’s range of vision is of increasingly narrow proportions. His investigative methodology is poorly conceived, inviting readers to consider whether an author has a “message” and in what ways that particular writer’s work invites Baker’s readers to “criticise” his subjects’ work (310). By applying interpretative procedures that frame the novel as personalized and generalizing in its generic dimensions, the novel loses its status as an exploratory text and, ironically for Baker, its critics become redundant in their roles as commentators of its textual significance. Instead, Baker is party to the kinds of investigations made by “the History school at Oxford,” in which “one could usually assume that the reigns of Edward the Fourth and Henry the Seventh would not supply essential questions. . . . The result in after-life has been a lack of conviction that these men ever really existed” (311). Baker’s tendency to describe the work of novelists through the medium of their historical circumstances means his “painstaking” approach is, contrary to intent, far from an “ ‘exhaustive’ method,” since “entertainment . . . one of the qualities of a good novel” receives little emphasis, and, moreover, can in fact be found “in this interminable history, though it does have to be dug out” (311). According to Greene, Baker’s study is confused in both the clarity of its aims and the efectiveness of its style. Baker fails to deliver a critique that attends to his subjects’ formal experimentation. Instead, his study becomes subject to the very efects that Baker should in and of himself be observing. In opposing the varied responses that fiction can provoke to the diminutive observations of Baker, Greene anticipates his own responses to the range of ways in which novelists explore their intellectual climates. Before considering in detail what form Greene’s responses take, it is helpful to consider his review of Ford Madox Ford’s The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times, “Last Journey” (1939). This is because the article serves as a forerunner to the religious concerns of British Dramatists (1942), in which Greene charts the evolution of his fiction from Catholic notions of drama. At once accessible to a wide readership and hermetic in the vastness of its content, Greene writes that Ford’s book “will probably ofend a great many academic critics who know far more about Chinese, Hebrew, Italian or Spanish literature than Ford ever did” (696). In this sense, Ford is self-defeating in his compass, since “you will not find a universal critic any more than you will find another writer capable of so vast a synthesis” (696). Nevertheless, during his “immense journey” Ford writes “freshly”

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of diferent settings and places, includes a “breadth of . . . references” to his subjects’ work, as well as bringing “novelty and excitement . . . to the[ir] consideration” (696). Yet, “with the death of Virgil and the birth of Christ the magnificent poetic range, the wide comprehension of this curious Catholic, breaks abruptly of” (696). While Ford achieves some of the academic objectivity which eluded Baker, he cannot maintain the necessary scholarly distance from his subjects when their work does not display “the otherworldliness which is the mark for him of greatness” (696). For Greene, the study falters when “we have reached nationalism, and with no leaders the caravan is going astray. This is the Balkanisation of literature . . . until we at last stagger into the unsatisfactory caravanserai of the nineteenth century,” where “this great writer takes his bow . . . as one of the scamps of literature” (696).8 Ford’s book is dependent on the presence of figures, real and imagined, whose characteristics facilitate the depiction of his idiosyncratic brand of humor and methods of interpretation. Ford acts as a model for Greene’s approach to his own work in that his insights into religious matters are the product of his willingness to probe his notions of the “otherworldly.” Greene’s early reviews present in incipient form his approach to writing fiction. In “All the Facts of Fiction,” Greene sets out his pronouncement that fiction is of value in and of itself because it is empiricist in framework and conception, as distinct from being the product of religious dogma, whatever form that dogma may take. In “Creative Reading” he enlarges on this idea by suggesting that the agenda which critics carry to any novel should proceed from the details of the fiction as a creative construct. Implicit in this observation is the idea that critics in general, and particularly Greene’s, tend to overlook what novels can mean critically and creatively. In “The Lesson of the Master” Greene turns his attention to novelists themselves in suggesting that if dogmas are present in fiction, they are created by the novelist and not the critic, even while those dogmas may in turn be identified and in some sense shaped by the critic. Greene is keen to assert in “Men and Messages” that a novel’s reception by any reader is first the product of the fiction on the grounds that the obverse position is to “find some gentle diversion in . . . the minor novelists” (311). By this knowledge, Greene implies that his fiction may be read over against innumerable reductive agendas, including those that fail to acknowledge the capacity of the writer to set down agendas of her own. Greene sums up this set of declarations in “Last Journey” through the implication that if his work does exhibit dogma, it is created by him and not the body of criticism leveled at him. In keeping with the investigative

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tenor of Greene’s conclusions that novels are conceived and received by way of a range of critical terminology prompted by the texts themselves, let us now consider what this means for his own novelistic practice.

Drama Criticism Greene’s theory and practice as a novelist derive from his conception of himself as a novelist, and this stems from his dramatic criticism, closely related as parts of this are to that which is literary. In particular, his selfconceptions proceed from his insights into how the history of drama since the Middle Ages can intersect with particular notions of modernism that were contemporaneous to his work. He was particularly interested in “the disappearance of the religious sense in the English novel after the death of Henry James in 1916,” when the “purely subjective” writings of modernists like Woolf replaced those of a world founded on “God’s making” (Sinyard 115). Greene concluded his review of Baker’s The History of the English Novel: The Novel of Sentiment and the Gothic Romance with the observation that its critical weaknesses can be summed up in Baker’s claim “that the novel secures ‘an illusion of actuality in the reader’s mind, difering psychologically, but hardly less powerful than that evoked by living actors with scenery mimicking the real world’” (“All” 170). For Greene, Baker’s appreciation of the scope of a novel’s relevance to its readers is limited by his belief that it resembles unsophisticated forms of drama. Greene explores the analogy with which he concludes his review in his study, British Dramatists (1942). This was written for “Collins’s muchloved” Britain in Pictures series (R. Greene, Russian Roulette 139), a collection of reflections on “a British institution or custom” published between 1941 and 1950 and aimed at a general readership (A. Harris 137; Lewis 318). Greene opposes the forms of drama that occur in Roman Catholic ser vices with the ways in which fiction has evolved from them until the time of writing. Greene begins the study by describing the dramatic rituals that take place in Roman Catholic services: “Anyone who goes into a Roman Catholic Church during the Holy Week ser vices, can see for himself the origin of our drama: on Palm Sunday the priest knocks on the door of the church and demands to be admitted, the palms are borne along the aisle” (5). Greene describes the rituals that take place on this date of the Catholic Church’s calendar by alluding to the diferent roles played by ministers and the laity. He continues, “on Good Friday the shrill voices of Judas and the High Priest break into the narrative of the Gospel: the progress to Calvary is made more real by human actors” (5). Aspects of the contemporary theater resemble this reenactment of Christ’s

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life and passion because it uses props, sound efects, human actors, and a dramatic narrative. Whatever the themes and subject matter of theater, it has much in common with the Church: “It seems a long road to have travelled – from this to the drunken ladies of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. . . . But there remains all the same . . . the sense of ritual” (5). Insofar as the modern and contemporary stage is a response to Roman Catholic ser vices and rituals, it does not matter what forms of individualism plays may represent. Due to its means of expression, the theater will have much in common with multiple elements of the Catholic religion. Greene’s dramatic insights are important to aspects of the Catholic specific to his novels, by which I mean their adoption of and challenge toward particular forms of the religious and the secular. This is because the texts are founded on the desire to recall the kinds of efects that characterized drama during its early stages. In line with Helen Gardner, for whom “Shakespearean Tragedy is agnostic and concerned with the relation of man to man” (14), Greene writes fiction that interrogates “the whole notion of literary ‘kinds’ ” (16). Greene and “critics [like Gardner] should feel impatient at discussion of a ‘kind,’ and at generalizations which, of necessity, obscure the individuality of works of art” (16). This is because of the need to close the distance between dramatic forms that were close to the principles of the Church, and the empiricist domains of fiction, so as “to discover the proper response to individual works” (16). This means that Greene is interested in provoking his readers to respond to his fiction in ways that help them engage with what for him constitute the most enduring aspects of the stage, and the discussion of literature in general: by contemplating “the relations of religion to art and secular learning,” his readers are “drawing fresh inspiration and discovering new directions from religion, religion taking up and using the secular achievements of civilization” (143). For Greene, the intersection between the religious and the secular is vital to an appreciation of the relationships between fiction and the world at large. For example, by contemplating the religious dimensions of dramatic forms, “men [can] derive . . . some ‘new acquist of true experience’ ” (17). As readers challenge diminutive approaches to the presence of Catholic dogma in drama, and its convergence with the novel, they can discover new and productive ways of reading and engaging each other’s interests. Greene’s opinions on modern and contemporary drama change to the extent that its various means of expression developed apart from the arena of the Church. He notes that as drama left the domains of the institution in the later medieval period, it also grew less preoccupied with the redemption story. After “Mass with its dramatic re-enactment of the

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Last Supper” (British 6) next came the Mystery and Miracle Plays, “often by priests, in the precincts of Churches” (6). After this point, secular drama began. Its change in subject matter is indicated by the tone of Greene’s writing: “Popularity drove these plays out of the church into the churchyard where the feet of the mob trampled over the graves. And so to save the graves they had to go further and become more secularised. Acted at fairs on moveable scafolds, forming part of the riotous medieval processions . . . their subject-matter widened. Noah could be drunk in a market-place as he could not be in a church” (6). While to an extent Greene may like “to think of drama’s raucous, demotic beginnings,” to which, according to Alexandra Harris, “the puritans put an end” (139), it is nevertheless the case that within the context of Greene’s specifically religious and secular concerns, he did not necessarily wholly approve of them.9 Greene is critical of the plays because they led to a disrespect for sacred space, a lack of social order, and a disdain for the sacred stories from which they had emerged. His antipathy to the secularization of the theater, including its tendency not to stage the kinds of ritual that initially marked dramatic genres, gives basis to the religious themes exhibited in his own work, even as it engages the kinds of modernism advocated by Woolf. Greene’s ambivalent relationship with modernism proceeds from his anxieties about its diverse conceptualizations during the interwar period. Andrzej Gasiorek undermines the extent of Greene’s anxieties with the movement by literalizing Greene’s response to “a shrinking world” (18). In suggesting that “the proto-modernists whose work he celebrated were in touch with the social realm he himself wanted to explore” (20), Gasiorek diminishes the compass of Greene’s “religious sense” outlined in “François Mauriac” (1945), whereby “the visible world . . . ceased to exist as completely as the spiritual” (91–92). Against Gasiorek’s contention that Greene’s theorization of modernism was personalized in focus, it is more helpful to contemplate the coterminous notion that Greene was also preoccupied with dogmatic notions of religion. This is exhibited in his review of Woolf ’s Three Guineas, “From the Mantelpiece” (1938). In suggesting that “there is a mythical quality about Mrs. Woolf” (1110), Greene points to his own troubled engagement with her modernist stylistics. He writes that Woolf’s close resemblance to the Schlegel sisters of Howards End means that “it is sometimes hard not to believe that she is a character invented by Mr Forster” (1110). Greene conceives of Woolf’s approaches to politics, the desire “that public life should mirror whatever is good in the life within” (1110; Forster 25), in fictional terms. As such, whatever the virtues of Woolf’s ideas on the social subjugation of women, including

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their incapacity to “prevent war” (1110), Greene’s framing of the issues as such renders his views on her thesis undecided and ambivalent. Greene’s opinions on Woolf galvanize his religious approach to drama inasmuch as any representation of the truth claims of Catholicism is in turn subject to its dramatic representation. While on one level Greene agrees with Woolf ’s commitment to “the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men—poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties—but combine[d] . . . with some wealth, some knowledge, and some ser vice to real loyalties” (1110; Woolf 92), he is also keen to stress that “chastity is given a very wide, very intellectual meaning: it has nothing—in Mrs.  Woolf ’s argument—to do with sexual experience; though it is hard to understand why Mrs. Woolf should rule out genuine chastity . . . from the value of their education” (1112). Woolf’s treatment of sexual orientation is indicative of a concerning unevenness when her “argument touches morality or religion” (1112). Her definition of chastity as a quality specific to the interests of women is predicative of her discussion of “Christianity only in terms of the Church of England” (1112), since one cannot imagine the most agnostic Frenchwoman—a countrywoman of Maritain, Bloy, Péguy, Mauriac—writing of the moral laws: “That such laws exist, and are observed by civilised people, is fairly generally allowed; but it is beginning to be agreed that they were not laid down by ‘God,’ who is now very generally held . . . to be a conception, of patriarchal origin, valid only for certain races, at certain stages and times.” (1112; Woolf 203) The suggestion that the core of British society’s ruling character centers on the afairs of men undermines Woolf’s aims and objectives inasmuch as she emphasizes the social construction of her own identity, which, for Greene, is suggestive of a fiction. On the basis of the critical instability of Woolf’s identity, Greene concludes that “it is all a little reminiscent of the words of that good man who would rather have given his daughter poison than a copy of The Well of Loneliness” (1112). For Greene, Woolf’s feminist aims and objectives are compromised by her own religious terminology because this rests on a modernist aesthetic whose guiding principles are overly subjective in orientation. Greene’s conception of elements of twentieth-century drama as Catholic in origin,10 therefore, is steered by a concomitant assertion that the central dogmas of the Catholic religion are predicative, in part, of an individual’s social circumstances, however unconventional those circumstances might be. For Greene, any particular Catholic dogma thus resonates within and across generations, no matter how individualistic their

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characteristics. It can be deduced from this proposition that what Greene means by modernism are those aspects of literature that to a greater or lesser degree afect the incisiveness, accuracy, authenticity, and relevance of an author’s insights into her social, political, and religious climates. I am concerned therefore with modernism in the ways that I believe Greene is himself concerned. In Greene’s terms, modernism is a movement that both enlarges and reduces the capacities of writers to make searching and inquisitorial contributions to their intellectual climates. Greene’s approaches to the secular and Catholic dimensions of drama, including its disturbance by diferent aspects of the secular and its use of ritual, anticipates Ferretter’s interpretation of the relationships between psychoanalysis and “the truth-claim of Christian theology” (83). Ferretter looks at Sigmund Freud’s representation of ritual in Totem and Taboo. For Freud, the ceremonial acts performed in some primitive tribes are “a product of the conditions involved in the Oedipus complex” (193). In line with Charles Darwin’s concept of the “primal horde” in The Descent of Man (1871) (Ferretter 84), the ancient tribal laws “not to kill the totem animal and to avoid sexual intercourse with members of the same totem clan” (84) parallel “the development of religion from totemism to monotheism” (85), in which “God is nothing other than an exalted father” (Freud 209). The closeness between the pleasure principle and the reality principle in discourses on the “process[es] of civilization” (Ferretter 86), relates to aspects of Saint Augustine’s conception of original sin.11 Greene’s conception of modernism as widely religious in its core principles converges with the theological dimensions of his own work in several key respects. Greene approves of the theatrical development that occurred alongside the Miracle Play, the “Morality, of which the story was only the vehicle to illustrate the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice” (British 9). For Greene, the best example is Everyman. The play is structured by religious dogma in its use of type characters like Death, Knowledge, and Confession, who guide Everyman’s search for redemption in a morally corrupt age. This theme, the opposition between vice and virtue, is a standard for all drama: “It is the bones without the flesh, just as so often in twentieth century drama we have the flesh without the bones – characters who act a plot before us and have no significance at all outside the theatre, who are born when the curtain rises and die when it falls” (9). Greene displays an antipathy for theater that does not place vice, and a character’s actions in general, in an interrogatively religious and secular context. He admires work that exhibits diverse notions of Catholic dogma, by which I mean the capacity of a particular text to evoke within its creative terms its own methods of interpretation. These perspectives

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on the relationships between genre and religion are crucial to Greene’s fiction by virtue of its wide appeal. In this vein, Dorrit Cohn writes that “the study of techniques for rendering consciousness . . . necessarily spills over into the larger problem of narrative genres (and the narrative genre)” (17). In part, Greene’s fiction is an interrogation of how a text’s narrative is subject to the form chosen by a writer. Greene is keen not to distinguish form from content in his explorations of the relationships between institutional dogma and the diferent creative concerns against which they are opposed. This has the efect of creating in his readers the awareness of a conflict between the acts of writing and reading a text. In “Authors and Writers,” Roland Barthes, describing the conflict, announces that “the author performs a function, the writer an activity . . . an interrogation of the world: by enclosing himself in the how to write, the author ultimately discovers the open question par excellence: why the world? What is the meaning of things?” (186–187). In Barthes’s terms, Greene’s novels are indicative of the kinds of concerns that arise between religious and secular readers when they attempt to interpret his texts. His “conflicted Catholicism” is epitomized by Barthes’s paradoxical pronouncement in “The Death of the Author” (1968) that “every text is eternally written here and now” (145). In the context of Greene’s anxieties over the relationships between form and content, this is an expression of “a certain back-and-forth motion” which J.M. Coetzee describes in “Thematizing”: “First you give yourself to (or throw yourself into) the writing, and go where it takes you. Then you step back and ask yourself where you are, whether you really want to be there” (289). The religious dynamics of Greene’s fiction exhibit the preoccupations that trouble both novelists and critics. He stages debates on the intersection between religious and secular notions of meaning, which is worked out systematically across his body of work. For Greene, the relationship between Catholic notions of drama and those that are “other” is subject to a diferent emphasis from repeated accounts of the development of novelistic fiction. They include Ian Watt’s approaches to the eighteenth-century origins of the novel genre in The Rise of the Novel,12 “the most detailed account for the case for the genre as essentially realistic” (Woodman, Faithful ix). In Greene’s terms, society became increasingly unpleasant and unstable as it moved away from the Catholic religion, which was articulated in its literary, cultural, and historical climates: “In Tourneur and the earlier Webster we are in the company of men who would really seem to have been lost in the dark night of the soul if they had had enough religious sense to feel despair: the world is all there is, and the world is violent, mad, miserable and without point”

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(British 37). Within Greene’s critical framework, the oppositions between the religious and the secular which were implicated in the early modern period converge with those associated with the novel’s rise. He continues: “The religious revolution had had its efect: this was the rough uneasy straits which led to the serene Anglicanism of Herbert and Vaughan, and to the sceptical doldrums of the eighteenth century: in between the old unquestioning faith and the new toleration lay an unhappy atheism” (37). The distance between society and the Catholic Church, created by Protestantism and the phi losophers preoccupied with the secular, like Locke and Newton, had adverse efects on Britain’s moral and spiritual well-being. Herbert and Vaughan did not display participation in a creed that could withstand the social efects of these changes. I suggest that they are in fact core to Greene’s writing inasmuch as it is concerned with the kinds of religious dogma that gave shape to this earlier period of time. That is, I am interested in the far-reaching theoretical and theological discourses akin to Greene’s version of religion. Greene’s novel-writing intersects with the social behaviors and doctrinal approaches that mark the political, cultural and philosophical spectrums that characterized elements of the Church prior to the Reformation. In the context of my discussion of Greene’s conflicted version of religion, this can be conceived as an expression of Jacques Derrida’s “desert [of] messianism which he associate[d] with a universal rational religion[;] . . . a ‘ faith without dogma’” (Ferretter 32; Derrida, “Faith” 18). Derrida’s “negative theology,” a discourse premised on “negating the [subject] positions of a given tradition,” particularly Christianity, like Greene’s own aesthetics, “does not escape . . . [its own] problematic” (Ferretter 34). Greene’s fiction intersects with Derrida’s diverse notions of the messianic inasmuch as both are characterized by the interrogation of societal discourses, theories and traditions that could provide the reader with stable centers of critical analysis. Exploring the eschatologies of Marx and Christianity, in particular their beliefs in “the coming of the other” (Derrida, Spectres 28), Derrida asks, “Why keep the name, or at least the adjective [i.e., messianic] . . . there where no figure of the arrivant, even as he or she is heralded, should be pre-determined, prefigured or even prenamed?” (167–168). Similar to Greene, for whom the fragmentation of a dogmatic religious system weakened Britain’s centers of social and cultural cohesion, which for James would include the threat of the “dark ‘psychological’ abyss” posed by romance (Preface 20), Derrida’s disbelief in any notion of dogma threatens to collapse the theological foundations associated with the via negativa it critiques.

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Commenting on the theoretical elements of the kind of deconstructionist thematic within which Greene might be implicated, Ferretter writes: “As an ethics, deconstruction resembles to a fault, that is, has precisely the same structures as, negative theology. . . . When Derrida writes that the thought of the messianic ‘makes its way through the risks of absolute night,’ the night of non-knowledge to which he refers is no more absolute than in negative theology” (35). Greene’s belief in the “dark night” that was part of eighteenth-century Britain is close in conception to many of the religious models of meaning explored in diverse deconstructionist forms and contexts. I suggest that Greene’s novel writing proceeds from his theological reflections because of its resonance with his need to critique any notion of empirical knowledge, including that which can collapse the centers of intellectual enquiry founded on the dogma of the Catholic Church. In his concluding remarks to British Dramatists, writing at the start of World War II, Greene describes his anx ieties over the social and cultural health of Britain. These are in keeping with how he would respond to any unsophisticated polarization of religious dogma from its opposing forms of knowledge, including the account of the novel’s origins by Watt, for whom, in Thomas Woodman’s opinion, the genre “is a sideproduct of the process by which history replaces theology as the main mode of organizing and understanding human experience” (Faithful x). Greene indicates his antipathy toward both medieval forms of drama that stood aside from the Catholic Church and the dramatists who proceeded in such vein, including Webster, Ford, and Tourneur. According to Greene, they exhibited in their work “no moral centre, no standard of moral criticism” (British 37). This, in turn, predicates his aversion toward the features of modernism that are antitheological. After summarizing the theater’s development, he writes: “Now we are heading either for chaos of such long duration that the theatre will not survive our civilization, or a world so new and changed it may well be that in the theatre it will seem as though Elizabeth were on the throne again” (85–86). Greene wrote the study aboard ship on the way to Freetown as an MI6 agent in 1941 (N. Sherry 2:94), which might account for his allusion to the world’s political turmoils. I believe his second comment, on Queen Elizabeth, in part exhibits his anxiety toward those elements of modernism which were far from stable in their secular orientation. Greene points to how modernism is subject to troubling and conflicting debate over the tenets and principles that can sometimes guide the study of its religious dimensions, especially those that are Catholic in form and aspect.

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Greene, Modernism, and Modernity The ways in which Greene explores modernism as a dynamically wideranging movement may be usefully apprehended by considering Marshall Berman’s approaches to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernities. His work is helpful because it presents a way of conceptualizing Greene’s distinctively religious approaches to modernism. Berman explores the dialectic between “the distinctive sign of nineteenth-century urbanism . . . the boulevard, a medium for bringing explosive material and human forces together,” and “the highway,” “the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism,” which is “a means for putting them asunder” (165): Berman argues that “one mode of modernism both energizes and exhausts itself trying to annihilate another, all in modernism’s name” (165). For this author, the stages in which modernism develops are characterized by both “self-discovery and creation” for the individual and society, as well as the threat of “a tide of greater complexity and dissolution” (Brooker 74), that is, the dangers posed by those who would seek a variety of material, social, and even spiritual gains over and above a particular society’s degree of modernization. Whereas some modernists style themselves as “visionaries of cultural despair,” like Eliot and Pound, Berman perceives societal changes beyond the “profound enslavement and horror” of the century’s scientific and technical advancements (169–170). Before Berman’s opinions on the development of modernism, Eliot and Greene, in their diferent ways, both question who might proceed the First and Second Man. If Eliot asks, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” (Waste Land l. 360), Greene’s Third Man is a figure of wide sociodynamic significance, at once evading and falling subject to the diferent forms of authority of a Vienna on the edge of wholescale political, social, and cultural upheaval.13 On a similar note, in his essay “Ideas in the Cinema” (1937), Greene considers in an opposing sense to Pound the worth not of “a small intellectual avant-garde public, but a national public” (422). Nevertheless, whatever the sites of conflict between modernism and reactionaries such as Greene, Berman believes it is possible to reverse the cultural tendencies that had led to “the mystification of modern life and the destruction of some of its most exciting possibilities” (170). In contrast to urban spaces that are “socially and spiritually dead . . . the vestiges of nineteenth-century congestion, noise and general dissonance that kept contemporary urban life alive” can find representations through a new (170), less culturally regressive modernism. Over against the “paradigms of order” that have been “mechanical, reductive and shallow,” individuals like Greene, and society at large, can

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seek to rediscover “the old urban ‘moving chaos’ . . . a marvellously rich and complex human order” (170). This struggle, for Berman, is epitomized by the symbols “the halo and the highway” (171), on account of Marx’s belief in The Communist Manifesto that “the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every activity hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has transformed the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers” (157; Marx 5). Interpreted by way of the “modern poet’s” loss of his halo in Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Loss of a Halo” (156), Berman anticipates how “the boulevard will be abruptly transformed into the stage for a new primal modern scene” (163). Baudelaire’s desire to create a paradigm of Western society that is characterized by reinvigorated social values is pursued by Greene, especially through the idea that “the knowledge of Good and Evil . . . are not natural Good and Bad or Puritan Right and Wrong” (Eliot, “Baudelaire” 428–429). This is conveyed particularly by way of his adoption of ways of writing which are characterized by organic, as distinct from mechanical, formal dimensions, including his methods of characterization, which converge with the redemption message of a Christian worldview. Greene’s contention that “[t]he main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author” (Ways 15) carries theological resonance insofar as those characters are in a sense given “the breath of life” (NIV, Gen 2:7). Concomitantly, Paul’s belief that by “the renewing of your mind” the Christian believer can be “transformed” (Rom 12:2), discovering new revelations of God’s will for His creation, falls in line with Berman’s conclusion on how modernism can ofer ways of redeeming a society in sociocultural decline: “If we learned through one modernism to construct haloes around our spaces and ourselves, we can learn from another modernism—one of the oldest but also, we can see now, one of the newest—to lose out haloes and find ourselves anew” (171). Greene’s adoption of specific notions of modernism serves as a critique of the more or less dogmatic religious notions of meaning with which they converge. Berman’s perspectives on the ways in which capitalist societies like Britain can enjoy a renewed affirmation of the diversity of their values are predicative of Greene’s own creative and critical capacities insofar as they exhibit an ambivalent engagement with modernism’s secular and religious dimensions. For Greene, the “ache of modernism” is, then, not a persistent malady spilling over from the nineteenth-century into twentieth-century fiction and culture. Rather, it is a mark of burgeoning imaginative possibility premised on challenging any range of reductive oppositions between the religious and the secular. Greene’s theological aesthetics, that is, his appropriation and reappropriation of the relationship

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between literature as a creative form and theology as a significant critical context are vitally important: they act as a means of engendering dialogue between communities, groups, and individuals who could otherwise confront a potentially irreconcilable series of interpretative conflicts. In order to explain the significance of Greene’s intersection with the religious and the secular dimensions of modernism it is necessary to consider his implications with specific aspects of Catholic theology that have long been pertinent. In its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes (1965), the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) sums up the kinds of anxieties that Greene articulates in the writing of British Dramatists: “Christians, on pilgrimage toward the heavenly city, should seek and think of these things which are above. This duty in no way decreases, rather it increases, the importance of their obligation to work with all men in the building of a more human world” (Pope Paul VI, par. 57). For the Council, Christians are to work toward a more just society by seeking in “all things . . . man as their center and crown” (par. 12). This means that Berman’s dynamically modernist appropriation of Marxism, and the antidogmatic elements of Derrida’s deconstructionism, are to be engaged with for their value in creating a society characterized by a radical form of social justice, albeit one that is a panacea. In Marxism and Christianity (1968), Giulio Girardi writes, “Christianity cannot be resolved into an affirmation of the primacy of God, but sees itself as an answer to the problem of man and of terrestrial existence in the light of God” (74). For Girardi, the Council’s focus on a “common good” enables “man—every man—to fulfil himself as an end” (Ferretter 55; Girardi 77), not in the model of master to slave relations, but as an expression of “God’s love for man”: “the affirmation of God is at the same time the affirmation of man” (Ferretter 55). Greene positions himself as someone who is caught between the experiences of a world in political turmoil and who is aware of the need to find a form of justice that can give the world order, such as the Christian values displayed in dramatic forms prior to the reign of Elizabeth. He appropriates in numerous respects modernism as a movement that is subject to diverse forms of cultural, social, and political change and upheaval. The collection of literary tendencies known as modernism remained part of British culture at the time that Greene was writing British Dramatists (Kreshner 854–855). Instructively for my argument, its characteristics have similarities with the unstable notions of culture and society that marked how drama developed apart from the medieval Church: “modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in

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the universe and many (in some cases remarkable) experiments in form and style” (Cuddon 515–516). In the vein of Greene’s complex engagement with diferent forms and aspects of the religious and the secular, it is helpful to explore aspects of his own version of religion, since they engender insight into his novelistic technique. Adam Schwartz has recently explored the degree to which Greene considers a series of distinctively Catholic perspectives on a variety of social matters during the early part of his career: “By depicting faith as compatible with (and indeed rooted in) reason, he was challenging radically secularism’s dismissal of the sacred by asserting that religion is not inherently irrational” (146). Schwartz’s opinions on this aspect of Greene’s writing have, nonetheless, themselves been conceived as religious in aspect and principle. For Jay P. Corrin, the critic pursues how Greene was part of “a perspicacious, spirited attempt to reverse the corrosive, secular trajectory of the modern age but laments that the seeds of its fruit fell on rocky soil” (839). In contemporary terms, one consequence of this understanding of Greene’s fiction is that any particular conception of his specifically “anti-modernist concerns . . . [may] find a sympathetic audience in Rome” (839).14 Greene’s approaches to notions of the literary that are preoccupied by the secular, then, are also a means for conceiving how their associated forms of critique actually relate. Greene himself positions his approach to any opposition between the religious and the secular in more complicated terms than either Schwartz or Corrin consider. Reflecting on his own interpretation of the Bible, particularly the possibility of assuming a stable position on its well-known motifs, he writes in his letter “Catholic Debate,” printed in The Times on September 10, 1971: “You report . . . in an appeal for harmony in the Roman Catholic Church Bishop Harris said: ‘Christ came to reconcile.’ Isn’t this rather unorthodox? In my copy of the New Testament Christ said: ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword,’ and spoke of new wine having to be put in fresh wineskins and cursed Capharnaum. If Christ had come to reconcile would he have been crucified?” (13). Contrary to Corrin and Schwartz, Greene’s conception of the figure of Christ and, moreover, his conception of himself was one of expanding the other wise insular relationship between diferent versions of religion and the world at large. In this sense, he is keen to remove himself from the kinds of debate even recently pursued by his religious commentators.15 This includes those whose ways of approaching Greene’s notions of the secular means that they are in fact themselves antimodernist in critical disposition. Greene’s disengagement from any possibility of a theologically regressive antimodernism is considered in “The Virtue of Disloyalty” (1969), his “address given upon the award of the Shakespeare Prize by the

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University of Hamburg” (270). There he writes, “Isn’t it the story-teller’s task to act as the devil’s advocate, to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval?” (268). According to Greene, innumerable diferent acts of conflict in the writing and critiquing of a fiction are necessary for its very interpretation. He continues, “the writer is driven by his own vocation to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist state” (268–269). For Greene, only by attempting to understand her society in the fullest possible sense can an author achieve a remotely moderate understanding of its diverse individuals, groups, and communities. In his earlier pamphlet, Why Do I Write? (1948), from which passages of his speech were reproduced, he writes, “Perhaps the greatest pressure on the writer comes from the society within society: his political or his religious group, even it may be his university or his employers. It does seem to me that one privilege he can claim, in common perhaps with his fellow human beings, but possibly with greater safety, is that of disloyalty” (31). Greene’s rejection of any singular range of interests and preoccupations in favor of those that are in multiple ways diverse positions him as an author of dynamically broad social implications. Greene points to the implications of his notions of disloyalty in his review of Eliot’s “After Strange Gods” (1934): “Moral criticism, indeed, if one accepts the truth of Christianity at all, is of far greater importance than literary criticism, which is concerned only with refining the intellectual pleasures, while moral criticism is concerned with the saving of souls” (112). For Greene, a particular understanding of the religious may also be conceived as its very rejection. If he is combative in his approach to the act of writing, whether critical or creative in nature, it is so as to reframe any range of issues that have been falsely polarized. This means conceiving his work within notions of critique that acknowledge the diversity of his readers, however religious such a form of critical exploration may in itself seem. This way of reading presents itself as particularly acute since the event of the Second Vatican Council, as voiced by J.C. Whitehouse in his study, Vertical Man: The Human Being in the Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Sigfrid Undset, and Georges Bernanos (1999): As a religious and philosophical system, Catholicism has traditionally proposed both belief in God and a specific view of human nature. . . . Recently . . . the old view of a creature in an individual relationship with his creator (“vertical man”) has largely given way to a representation of the human being as a nexus of social relationships (“horizontal man”) (xi).

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The critic is, then, a figure who facilitates constructive conversation between authors and a range of individuals, whether contemporaneous to those authors, or conceived by them figuratively. By way of her understanding of a diverse range of religious and secular notions of meaning, she serves to convey Greene’s own critique of their innumerable forms of convergence. Greene’s critical writing exhibits a dynamic range of ways of conceiving forms of critique that are in large or small part religious or secular in nature. The practice of those diferent ways of understanding a literary text in turn points to his own creative practice as a novelist. This may be usefully apprehended in both general and specific ways. In theological terms, his novels react against the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “modernist crisis,” when, “like the Nominalism of the post-Scholastic era, Modernism held that there can be no real continuity between dogmas and the reality they presume to describe. Dogmas have a negative function at best.16 They warn against false notions. They are above all practical” (McBrien 49). Greene adopts this position insofar as his work exhibits a belief in the necessity of critiquing his society in as impartial a manner as can be sustained. On the one hand, his nonfiction presents a critique of modernism which might be termed nostalgic in its critical framework. Berman’s conception of modernism as more or less Christian in sensibility is, in this manner, dynamically humane, acting to frame singularly secular forms of critique within a religious context. On the other hand, Greene’s nonfiction exhibits notions of meaning that threaten to collapse their centers of analysis, as presented by Ferretter’s exploration of deconstructionist notions of the messianic. Greene’s critical writings are close to the Church’s dogma because they show an attempt to respond to both the negative and positive aspects of modernization and the diverse forms of modernism that proceed from them. These are summed up by Richard P. McBrien in his volume of systematic theology: “Modernisation has . . . had a strong impact on religion in general and on Christianity in particular. Positively, religion has been increasingly purified of magical and superstitious overtones; negatively, many have abandoned the practice of religion as they have embraced rational and scientific explanations for problems once resolved by formally religious principles” (95–96). To the degree that Greene’s nonfiction is a body of work of broad critical implications, it is also a means of challenging the terms within which they are presented. This includes those associated with the practice of religion itself. The “ache of modernism” is, on this basis, for Greene, both a means of relating to his society and a way of challenging how that society actually apprehends its capacity to comprehend itself.

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Catholic Novels: Religious Anxieties in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene’s novels Brighton Rock (1938) and The Heart of the Matter (1948), among other matters, address the relationship between the individual and society. The first frames the question in specifically Catholic notions of dogma—and challenges them as well. Both texts are less singular in their mutual aims and objectives than a vital means of understanding Greene’s version of religion, representing diferent aspects of Roman Catholic religion in ways that are to a greater or lesser degree unconventional in character. My principal questions here concern the extent to which, first, Greene’s “characters have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose” (Greene, “François Mauriac” [1945], 92); second, given the multiple kinds of authority implicated within this statement, how the places in which Greene’s novels are set afect his approaches to genre; and third, how Greene’s work suggests that his “interest’s on the dangerous edge of things” (Why the Epigraph? [1989] 10; Browning, l.395). One key to conceiving how the individual and society relate to one another in the context of Greene’s work is to explore its classification as fiction, especially as fiction that exhibits Catholic themes, perspectives, and ideas.1 In his investigation into “the development of the novel” (Faithful ix), for Thomas Woodman the genre is implicated in all aspects of experience, and especially that which is religious in nature: “Catholics have contributed more than their proportionate share to aesthetic speculation in the English novel” (xiv). Of particular interest to Woodman is Peter Ackroyd’s observation that one of the efects of “a Catholic upbringing is a sense of the ‘sacramental view of language. Chanting those Latin chants for your formative years is a great help when trying to write

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English prose. The greatest gift religion can give anybody is the use of language’ ” (xiv; Appleyard 53). Whatever the merits of these observations by Woodman and Ackroyd, they underplay the extent to which fiction is not necessarily the product of a given collection of circumstances, however forceful their social or personal impact on the life of any individual or group. Woodman and Ackroyd nevertheless do raise important issues about the diverse ways in which fiction is implicated in the society of its writing. For me, those issues are convincingly considered by Erich Auerbach, especially his observations about the development of literature as a form of creativity centered on ancient biblical and classical traditions: “As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together—but the various components all belong to one concept of universal history and its interpretation” (17). According to Auerbach, any act of critical interpretation is also a means of understanding particular aspects of a specific society. He continues: “If certain elements survived which did not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them; and so the reader is at every moment aware of the universal religio-historical perspective which gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose” (17). Against Woodman and Ackroyd, fiction is, then, not marked by personalized or institutionalized notions of meaning. Rather, its very identification as literature resides within a complex series of interpretative gestures, of which none is dominant in the act of interpretation. In relation to the growth of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, Auerbach writes that: “As dogma was established, as the Church’s task became more and more a matter of organization, its problem that of winning over peoples completely unprepared and unacquainted with Christian principles, figural interpretation must inevitably become a simple and rigid scheme” (119–120). It is the rejection of any such scheme that forms the methodological basis for this chapter. In the same way as literature in its most complete form is written against any single interpretative procedure, so Greene’s novels should not be defined as Catholic in a narrowly religious sense. Instead, they are characterized by their implication within multiple individualist and collectivist notions of meaning. It is the nature of the interrelationships within and between those notions of meaning in their totality, which, I suggest, constitutes the interpretative core of Greene’s fiction. I focus on Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter for two reasons. First, in the former, Greene points to the necessity of reading his work in ways that acknowledge the extent to which it is religious in theme and

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idea. Elliott Malamet alludes to such ways of reading in his characterization of Pinkie as a figure who is determined to escape all forms of detection, even that which is emotional and spiritual in nature: “Determined to foil any surveillance of his inner being, he utterly rejects any attempt to categorize or define him; when he is criticized by a former member of his gang, he aligns himself with Christ as the paradigm of the misunderstood figure prone to the subjective fancies of others” (18–19). Pinkie is a character for whom diferent methods of detection paradoxically serve as a means of raising his profile among the very people intent on restraining him. Malamet concludes that, “for all his pursuers . . . Pinkie emerges as profoundly indecipherable” (19). This reading displays several fundamental weaknesses. First, while Pinkie may well be someone who is pursued in numerous ways, that pursuit, in its total form, is not necessarily an aspect of Pinkie’s characterization. Rather, it is a characteristic of the text itself, centered on exploring how and why particular aspects of a fiction are rendered meaningful. They include those features of the text which depend for their meaning on a given notion of religious belief. Second, in considering how Brighton Rock is subject to its own range of interpretative conventions, Greene invites forms of critique that interrogate the relationship between this text and the rest of his work. This novel is less about a narrow collection of critical or creative concerns, then, than its very status as fiction. This leads into my second reason for focusing on the two novels. If the former text lends itself to ways of reading that in part resist the imposition of a particular interpretation, in the latter Greene both increases and decreases the significance of this act. Malamet observes that in this novel: “there is little of the violence and fervent pursuit that epitomises many of Greene’s preceding fictions, and the narrative has a kind of muted, internalised quality (much of the action is contained within Scobie’s thoughts)” (60). The text is nonetheless notable in several key respects: “The Heart of the Matter resembles a thriller in its growing atmosphere of spying and suspicion, trust and distrust, centred around Scobie’s attempts to hide his adultery and reconcile his desire to remain uncompromised with his dealings with the Syrian trader, Yusef” (60). On the one hand, this novel, like Brighton Rock, is centered on the religious preoccupations of its protagonist. On the other hand, those same preoccupations manifest themselves in an altogether diferent sense, whereby the text itself is subject to forms of anxiety that reside without its fictional parameters. Greene’s implication within multiple forms of anxiety occurs in several ways. As well as exploring the nature of “the hidden detective . . . of a faceless yet omnipotent divine hound” (62), he also considers a range of

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irreligious notions of authority. They include D.A. Miller’s conceptualization of the police as a specifically secular embodiment of power: “the police are only—as Gaboriau . . . called them—a ‘Providence au petit pied’ . . . a ‘ little providence’ fully analogous to the great. What matters is that the faceless gaze becomes an ideal of the power of regulation” (24). The police embody a form of authority parallel to that which is religious. Except—in opposition to Malamet, for whom Miller’s observation may point to the opposition within the novels between “mortal knowledge and the perdurable mysteries of the human heart” (72)—I suggest that this text has implications beyond any religious, irreligious, or nonreligious set of concerns. If, through Brighton Rock, Greene explores his society by way of a collection of preoccupations that is specifically Roman Catholic in origin, in The Heart of the Matter those preoccupations are themselves the subject of the text.

Brighton Rock Brighton Rock is about a seventeen-year-old gangster and Catholic named Pinkie Brown. He has murdered a journalist, Hale, whose work led to the murder of Kite, former leader of Pinkie’s gang and father figure to Pinkie. Pinkie attempts to remove all clues of his crime, marrying the young waitress Rose, also a Catholic, who could other wise act as a witness. On one level the novel explores the social experience of 1930s Brighton. Writing in The Evening Colonnade in 1973, Cyril Connolly describes two Brightons of the time in which the novel was set: “The cofeetable Brighton of Georgian terraces, the piers and the best hotels, and then the Brighton of Brighton Rock, ‘one of the ugliest seaside towns in the world climbing upwards in row after row of jerry–built brick and slate . . . of dreary department stores and stained steel windows, of neonlit trinket shops along the front, of pebble beaches littered with layabouts, of race gangs, receivers, graft and gloomy industrial suburbs’ ” (Sharrock 79; Connolly 59). Greene interrogates two levels of a Brighton characterized by sharp divisions in wealth and fortune. Roger Sharrock writes that Greene “reveal[s] the other ugly and dangerous Brighton under the cofeetable surface” (79). But implicated in this social critique is an opposition to the malign. Pinkie’s “slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went” (Greene, Brighton 20).2 The character of Pinkie, rather than his relationship to his society, is responsible for his damnation. Pinkie rejects Rose, who might be his only hope of salvation. At the end, the authorities close in on Pinkie and he seeks to get rid of her, the

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only witness. He dies by falling of a clif after an attempt to manipulate her into killing herself: she loved him to the extent that she would damn herself to remain with him. Her afection for him remains after the event and her priest tries to comfort her: “A Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone . . . because we believe in Him—we are more in touch with the devil. . . . But we must hope . . . hope and pray” (268). Rose holds on to the hope that Pinkie loved her and therefore must have been some good in some way. But she has yet to hear a recording made in a carnival booth where he declares his hatred for her. The novel ends with the sentence, “She walked rapidly in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all” (269). Readers may assume that Rose will not pray for Pinkie. They can perceive that Pinkie himself is responsible for his fate. The novel subverts absolutism through its social critique. Pinkie is presented sometimes as a victim of his circumstances and at other times subject to Greene’s own versions of an absolute. As much as this novel is concerned with the discourse of 1930s Brighton, its religious dimensions mean that Greene also pursues Catholic concerns of damnation and salvation. Recent critics have understood Brighton Rock to be the representation of a specifically dogmatic notion of reality, both religious and secular. For Stephen K. Land, the novel is principally about the characterization of Pinkie, particularly in terms of how he needs to conduct himself as a young person in an adult environment. Land writes that “the focus of the novel is upon this boyish figure and upon the question of how he will respond to the increasing challenges of adult life. The reader learns of Pinkie’s state of mind, of the early life which brought this about, of the influence upon him of Kite, and of his role as Kite’s successor” (34–35). However valid these observations by Land, including his attempts to schematize Pinkie’s diverse experiences, his study nevertheless seems to be undermined by his tendency to describe those experiences by way of an abstract terminology. For example, he suggests that “although his drift into crime and his inherent cruelty can reasonably be seen as the outcome of childhood hardship and negative feelings towards his parents, there is also in Pinkie’s past a significant body of positively remembered experiences which still color his thinking” (38–39). Characterized by abstractions such as “feelings” and “thinking,” Land’s study is not necessarily “a fine example of how a detailed study of technique can point to meaning,” as suggested by David Malcolm. If Land does emphasize the “internal organization” of Greene’s work, it is in the ironic sense of pointing to the need to render in concrete terms the very thoughts, feelings, and events that he tries to order.

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Michael G. Brennan’s reading of Brighton Rock may be criticized on similar terms. If Land’s study is marked by a lack of critical precision, Brennan’s observations are characterized by a version of religion that appears to proceed less from Greene than Brennan. Brennan suggests that Greene’s work is preoccupied with the utterance of Manichean motifs and tropes. But Brennan seems to define those beliefs so vaguely that their usefulness in the interpretation of Greene’s fiction is impaired. For Brennan, Greene’s version of Manichaeism is characterized by a world in which “goodness always seems insubstantial while the evils of the material world are tangibly present” (Fictions 2). Pinkie is characterized as a figure who “dominates the novel and is variously cast as a fallen angel, a diabolical apostle and a priest manqué who feels genuine nostalgia for the Latin Mass and the Catholic choir of his youth” (48). However well founded these observations, their validity as comments upon Pinkie’s characterization depends upon the assumption that Pinkie embodies a particular form of religious doctrine.3 It is more helpful to conceive of Greene’s novel as a fictional text that expands diferent versions of religion, rather than as the vehicle for the utterance of an established body of secular or religious belief that is to a smaller or greater extent subject to limited degrees of change. If, as Brennan suggests, “Pinkie endows the novel with a haunting religious dimension” (48), that dimension of the text is implicated within the imaginative framework of the novel itself. For Cedric Watts, “Greene seems to be conducting a taxing literary experiment: to see how far the reader’s pity can be won for a person who seems to be irredeemably evil and monstrously callous” (Preface 172). In extended terms, this conceptualization of Brighton Rock is a means of implicating within its fictional parameters a specifically Catholic approach to grace. As J.M. Coetzee comments, “God’s grace, in Catholic teaching, is unknowable, unpredictable, mysterious; to rely on it for salvation—to postpone repentance until the moment between the stirrup and the ground—is a deep sin, a sin of pride and presumption” (Introduction vii). For Coetzee, grace is both a distinctively religious notion of meaning and a quality which provokes diferent forms of emotion. He continues, “one of Greene’s achievements in Brighton Rock is to raise his unlikely lovers, teenage hoodlum and anxious child bride, to moments of comical yet awful Luciferian pride” (vii). Similar to the way in which Pinkie and Rose are proud in their assumption of a personalized approach to grace, so the critical reception of the text is marked by interpretative approaches that rely on unhelpfully collectivistic notions of belief. Bernard Bergonzi presents an alternative reading of Brighton Rock that is helpful to an understanding of its religious dimensions: “It is generally

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agreed that Brighton Rock is readable and often powerful, if in disagreeable ways. Beyond that its nature is elusive; it is not easy to know whether to regard it as a thriller, a realistic account of Brighton low-life, or a moral fable. In my view it is all of these, and other things too” (“Upon” 81). For Bergonzi, Greene’s novel is subject to multiple forms of representation, especially those which are premised on the discussion of genre. Of their efects, Bergonzi writes, “much of the book’s strength comes from the tensions between the diferent generic elements” (81). It is precisely the capacity of Greene’s work to be interpreted within its own range of investigative premises which I shall pursue in this section. Brighton Rock neither exhibits a narrow representation of Catholicism, nor do its terms center on questioning a given set of religious preoccupations. In this novel, Greene interrogates genre in the most fundamental sense. By considering how Greene is preoccupied with Brighton Rock as a dynamically wide-ranging fiction, as distinct from a means of exploring notions of character that are to a greater or lesser degree religious in critical focus, fresh attention is directed to its status as a novel. Brighton Rock may be theorized less as a conceptualization of character than as a characterization of the conceptual. From this perspective, Pinkie’s remark to Hale about his appearance in the newspaper points to how Brighton Rock serves as its own critical framework: “ ‘We were all reading about you,’ he said, ‘in the paper this morning,’ and suddenly he sniggered as if he’d just seen the point of a dirty story” (6). In the same way as Pinkie lacks maturity in sexual matters, so he understands Hale to be a figure of no importance, inside or outside of Brighton. When Hale tries to escape Pinkie while listening to “a woman’s winey voice singing . . . a Victorian ballad” (13), Greene implicates him within a diverse range of texts. Inasmuch as none of these is dominant in its writing, Brighton Rock is not centered on a single character. Rather, its many characters invoke aspects of each other’s diverse interests within its totality as a fiction of broad critical implications. One key to the character of the text is presented by way of Pinkie’s concerns about Rose’s inquisitiveness. They exhibit an insight into the very means by which he himself will be traced by Ida. For example, his thought that “already she had apparently forgotten his exploring hand” (26) points to how Ida will question Rose. Similar to the way in which he wonders, “but would she remember . . . if later people asked her questions?” (26), so Ida is someone who “had instincts, and now her instincts told her there was something odd, something which didn’t smell right” (30). Of Hale’s largely inconsequential inquest, she therefore reflects, “I’d like to ’ave asked some questions” (31). Which, of course, she does of Rose, even as

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Clarence irritably remarks, “Questions, questions . . . You keep on saying questions. What about beats me” (32). Ida is, then, someone who interrogates all aspects of Brighton’s society, even those that would be otherwise overlooked. Observing the new front page of the newspaper on which Hale worked, Ida is shocked to find that Hale has been replaced: “On the front page was another photograph—the new Kolley Kibber: he was going to be at Bournemouth tomorrow. They might have waited, she thought, a week. It would have shown respect” (32). Ida’s approach to any aspect of Brighton’s society is, then, opposed to Pinkie’s, for whom Brighton is a town of no particular importance. On the basis of Ida’s ability to understand her society in many diferent ways, Brighton Rock is a text whose events take place within multiple acts of interpretation. Against the clergyman’s belief that “our brother is already at one with the One. . . . He has attained unity” (34), for Ida, as for Greene’s text, any such sense of unity is found less within a given body of religious doctrine than a dynamically imaginative sense of enquiry: “It’s the least you can do for anyone—ask questions, questions at inquests, questions at séances. . . . If you believed in God, you might leave vengeance to him, but you couldn’t trust the One, the universal spirit. Vengeance was Ida’s, just as much as reward was Ida’s. . . . And vengeance and reward—they both were fun” (36). Determined to bring justice to Hale’s murder, Ida rejects any singular notion of authority in favor of that which is centered on tracing how and why a wrongful event has occurred: “ ‘Right and wrong,’ she said. ‘I believe in right and wrong,’ and delving a little deeper, with a sigh of happy satiety, she said, ‘It’s going to be exciting, it’s going to be fun, it’s going to be a bit of life’ ” (43). By exploring how Brighton Rock is a novel whose very status as a fiction is in question, Greene rejects any reductive interpretative approach. Greene himself comments on how Brighton Rock exhibits questions of genre. He writes: “Brighton Rock I began in 1937 as a detective story and continued, I am sometimes tempted to think, as an error of judgement. . . . Now I was discovered to be – detestable term! – a Catholic writer” (Ways 58). By Greene’s own terms, then, the secular and religious dimensions of the novel have been opposed in too distinct a sense. Brian Diemert offers several helpful insights on Greene’s position in relation to the genre of his text. He writes, “Whatever Greene may say, Brighton Rock, though it is many other things, is also a detective story. . . . Brighton Rock makes reading a principal theme and so comments on how it is to be read” (386). Characterized for Diemert by “scenes of reading” and “the residual structure of the detective story,” Greene points to “a larger interpretive frame

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that is the detective’s investigation of a criminal’s fictions” (386). Whatever the nature of “these thematic and structural concerns,” however, Greene’s novel is not necessarily a text that “always presents the critic with his or her own activity of reading and interpreting” (386). If Greene’s novel can be “cast . . . in a new light” (386), it is one whereby Greene interrogates the very religious and secular thematics by which his text has been conceived. Greene points to an alternative way of comprehending Brighton Rock in his essay on “François Mauriac” (1945). According to Greene, François Mauriac “is a writer for whom the visible world has not ceased to exist, whose characters have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose” (92). Greene therefore writes against the terms of “the dogmatically ‘pure’ novel, the tradition founded by Flaubert and reaching its magnificent torturous climax in England in the works of Henry James” (92). Inasmuch as aspects of this conception of fiction take “the form of a maze,” and, therefore, engender varying degrees of anticipation about a “world outside” (92), Greene rejects any narrow imaginative framework. In particular, he writes against any reductive representation of the religious, whereby “the designer of the maze has in fact overprinted the only exit” (93). Ian Ker’s suggestion that Greene’s notion of Hell implicates “the thrill of danger involved in the paradox of the Catholic position” (122) depends less on a particular notion of religious belief than on a range of issues presented within the text itself. Brighton Rock may be conceived as a novel that counters any reductive range of conceptual concerns. Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “the properly Christian gesture” presents one way of conceiving Greene’s challenge toward the tendency to read the text by way of religious and secular absolutes (“Fear” 75). I find Žižek’s approaches to the act of critical interpretation helpful because he considers the innumerable ways in which the religious and the secular converge. For Žižek, “Christ signals the overlapping of the two kenoses:4 man’s alienation from/in God is simultaneously God’s alienation from himself in Christ” (75). Similar to how the act of reading is, for Greene, also the confrontation of any narrow act of imaginative conceptualization, so, for Žižek, religious and secular notions of meaning dynamically intersect: “it is not only that humanity becomes conscious of itself in the alienated figure of God, but: in human religion, God becomes conscious of himself ” (75). The models of meaning presented within the diverse relationships specific to any given Christian notion of theology should, then, be expanded to include those which are not solely religious in character.

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Inasmuch as Žižek explores the religious and the secular in the context of commonplace experience, the individual and society serve as key figures by which to understand Greene’s novel. Žižek writes that “it is not enough to say that people (individuals) organize themselves in the Holy Spirit (Party, community of believers): in humanity, a transsubjective ‘it’ organizes itself” (75–76). On the grounds that the “notion of the ‘negation of negation’ ” is premised on “opposed terms,” whereby “the ‘lowest,’ ‘transgressive’ one” is privileged (70), this act of organization is also one of transgression. It is such an act of transgression that is at issue in Brighton Rock. According to Žižek, Christ may be conceived less as somebody whose nature is primarily kenotic, than a figure of radically subversive potential. In a similar way, Greene’s text should be read by way of its capacity to challenge any notion of the absolute. Summarized as “Christ’s monstrous singularity” (76), this form of the transgressive is, for Greene, implicated in the very genre of his text: “mutatis mutandis, that is the monstrosity of Christ: not only the edifice of a state, but no less than the entire edifice of reality hinges on a contingent singularity through which alone it actualizes itself” (80). Except, against Žižek, I suggest that for Greene, this form of transgression is not confined solely to matters of religion. Similar to how Greene’s text may be positioned against particular notions of society, especially those which are religious in orientation, so those same notions nevertheless remain a core part of his fiction. Žižek writes that “all that remains of reality without Christ is the Void of the meaningless multiplicity of the Real. This monstrosity is the price we have to pay in order to render the Absolute in the medium of external representation . . . which is the medium of religion” (80). For Žižek, any given form of the religious presents interpretative imperatives which are equal in importance to those which proceed directly from distinctively secular bodies of knowledge. Such imperatives include those exhibited by diverse forms of fiction. For Greene, by contrast, the medium of fiction is in itself a way of theorizing religion. Neither the product of a reductive notion of Catholicism nor a characteristic of singularly secular genres of writing, Greene’s novel is a text in which religion and literature are subject to radical convergence. In this sense, Brighton Rock’s very identification as a text depends upon its capacity to be read by way of a range of approaches to fiction that are specific to the author himself. To the extent that Brighton Rock exhibits interpretative approaches that question its very genre as a fictional text, the novel is characterized by its own collection of religious anxieties. These are presented in the relationships between Pinkie and Brighton’s diverse characters. Even as Pinkie

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utters a veiled threat of murder to Spicer, “the imagination hadn’t awoken. That was his strength. He couldn’t see through other people’s eyes, or feel with their nerves” (47). Pinkie’s incapacity to empathize with anyone, whether in serious or minor matters, separates him from all aspects of Brighton’s society, including those associated with major issues. Pinkie tells Rose about a woman who was injured by vitriol after involving herself in a gang by alluding to her appearance in the newspapers: “You read about Peggy Baron, didn’t you? . . . It was in all the papers” (49). To Rose’s reply, “I didn’t see any papers till I got this job. . . . I wouldn’t get mixed up with a mob like that,” Pinkie responds, “You can’t always help it. It sort of comes that way. . . . You tell me if anyone asks questions. . . . Get me on the blower at Frank’s straight of. Three sixes” (50). In the context of Pinkie’s society, the capacity to respond imaginatively to another depends as much on a series of written texts as it does on the characteristics of a particular personality. By way of his telephone number, Greene suggests that Pinkie’s evil is something that proceeds from his own set of circumstances and behaviors as distinct from those of the other characters in the text. It may be inferred, then, that for Greene, as for Pinkie, the imagination is less a quality par ticular to a given individual, whatever their personal or religious background, than the product of the society within which it assumes a specific meaning. The need to explore Brighton Rock within the critical preoccupations presented by the text itself, as distinct from any other collection of interpretative concerns, is displayed in Pinkie and Rose’s religious beliefs. Pinkie’s utterance, “Of course it’s true. . . . [I]t’s the only thing that fits. . . . Of course there’s Hell. Flames and damnation,” is set against the town of Brighton: “the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace pier, ‘torments’ ” (54–55). Insofar as Pinkie’s relationship with Rose proceeds from his own perspectives on Brighton, they also guide his responses to the other individuals whom he encounters. Dallow’s comment, “You’re a grand little geezer, Pinkie. . . . You go straight for things, Pinkie” (57), indicates how Pinkie contrasts with Colleoni, a senior rival: “There wasn’t a point, he seemed to be indicating, fingering his gold lighter, at which their worlds touched” (67). The version of Brighton specific to Pinkie’s characterization depends on its opposition with that of a contrasting social status. In this sense, Brighton is a town whose many levels of wealth are in part the product of Greene’s capacity to sustain a given imaginative response. Neither a text particular to the preoccupations of any singular character or characteristic nor representative of a particular approach to genre, Brighton Rock exhibits a dynamic range of critical and creative enquiry.

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In one sense, the characterization of Ida provides the context within which to conceptualize Pinkie’s version of religion. Spicer’s “thought: that woman—how does she know anything—what’s she doing asking questions?” (90), from this perspective, points to the need to read Greene’s novel by way of a distinctively secular set of values. The text should, nonetheless, also be considered in terms of how Pinkie is a figure particular to its dynamically fictional terms. Rose’s thoughts about the poverty she shared with Pinkie, from this perspective, present the need to interpret Greene’s novels in terms of how they proceed from his own creative decisions: “ ‘You’re a Roman too. We were all Romans in Nelson Place. You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she don’t believe a thing.’ She said bitterly, ‘You can tell the world’s all dandy with her’ ” (96). It is this way of conceiving Greene’s novel that for me points to the critical procedures that should guide its interpretation. Pinkie’s accusation to Spicer that he “went walking blind straight to There” (101), is, then, not only a mark of the murder they try to hide, but also an expression of the need to look beyond this event toward ways of reading that reject any singular interpretative approach.5 As Pinkie himself utters to Spicer, “There’s only one There. . . . You think about it and you dream about it. You’re too old for this life” (101). Both the site of Hale’s murder and a location par ticular to Spicer’s ambitions, “There,” for Pinkie, as for Greene, is a place without specific importance, whatever its significance to the events of the novel itself. Brighton Rock is, then, a text composed within multiple critical and creative acts, as much as one whose imaginative framework proceeds from specifically Catholic notions of meaning. Pinkie’s relationships with the other characters stem from both elements of his religious background and Greene’s own presence as the writer of his novel. If his characters do “have the solidity and importance of men with souls to save or lose,” it is in no narrow religious or secular sense. Rather, the status of their souls proceeds from the ways in which Brighton Rock is reflective of itself as fiction. For Greene, as for the text itself, the version of religion presented in Brighton Rock is meaningful within and without the novel. Pinkie and Rose’s Catholicism serves as a means within which to interpret Greene’s diverse approaches to genre. Those aspects of the text nonetheless lack a stable framework within which to conceive its approaches to diferent forms of religious and secular belief. If Brighton Rock can sustain interpretations that are particular to its distinctively Catholic dimensions, it is because those aspects of the text also proceed from Greene’s own creative decisions. The interpretative procedures implicated in reading Greene’s novel as distinctively Catholic in genre include the following. The role of Greene

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himself in the imaginative conception of his work, especially its core characteristics, must be considered of prime importance in its interpretation. A presence who is both subject to and the subject of his texts’ multiple interpretative terms, Greene is, in diferent ways, “dramatized in his own right” (Booth, Rhetoric 151), that is, someone who himself becomes and questions the value of “the implied author (the author’s ‘second self’)” (151). Within this approach, Greene’s very role as an interpretative guide nevertheless should also be subject to the capacity of his work to be read over and above any singularly religious or secular critique, however dynamic its scope. Finally, whatever the nature of the critical framework implicated in Brighton Rock, this dimension of the text should be considered as creative in and of itself. On this basis, and subject to how my argument progresses, a Catholic novel may be defined in the following ways. First, it is a narrative whose events, characters, and forms of expression both challenge and render visible every aspect of its representation, whether specifically Catholic in nature or conceived in opposition to matters Catholic. Second, it disturbs the very means within which it is conceived and received as a literary form. Third, the manner in which it is interpreted as a text of a particular meaning and significance is itself the subject of its capacity to provoke a specific imaginative response. A Catholic novel is, then, a subgenre of the novel, which, according to its status as a focus for multiple interpretative acts, serves to upset at every level any single interpretation, especially that which is singularly Catholic in orientation. My definition of the Catholic novel rests in part on an account of the notion of diferent imaginative impulses. These may be defined as the staged ways in which Greene’s fiction acquires its own particular critical significance. In the context of Brighton Rock, such staging manifests itself by way of the intersection between the content of Greene’s novel and his own appropriation of religious and secular notions of meaning. The degree to which Greene as an authorial figure imposes himself imaginatively upon the par ticu lar shape of his fiction is in itself compelling. Greene is both the active agent in the imaginative construction of his texts and a figure who withdraws from them as other forces, some of them ideological, come into play. One creative factor that appears to exert particular pressure in Greene’s writings is the religious impulse. This is vital to my enquiry because of its challenge to potentially reductive interpolations of diferent novelistic practices. In the context of Brighton Rock, the religious impulse may be defined as the combined negotiation and rejection of emotional afect that is sometimes experienced in a critical encounter. Founded on how Greene’s

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novel is part of the very manner in which its genre and writing are identified, the religious impulse is vital. Its nature and constitution, in being an aspect of the subjectivities of readers themselves, serve as a means within which to appraise some of Greene’s central concerns and preoccupations. John Cottingham is especially helpful in describing the range of emotions that such a form of afect engenders. Referring to monastic forms of prayer, he suggests that “there is in the end a single underlying religious impulse, perhaps as old as humanity itself, which is manifesting itself here” (134). In a complementary sense, the late atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens gave voice to the broad range of critical appreciation that is invoked by a reading founded on religious feelings. He suggests that the intersection between the terms of religion and those of secularism give expression to an especially multivalent investigative quality: “I’m a materialist . . . yet there is something beyond the material, or not entirely consistent with it, what you could call the Numinous, the Transcendent. . . . It’s in certain music, landscape, certain creative work, and without this we really would merely be primates” (qtd. in Cottingham 134; Evans). Such encounters, inflected as they are by a personal spirituality, prompt Cottingham to ask, “How are we to interpret these ‘sacred’ or ‘numinous’ experiences, which seem to be a part of our universal human birthright?” (135). The question that a reader of Greene might wish to ask is what her subject-positions are culturally, politically, and socially. She may find herself intellectually engaged at the level of her own individual sensibilities, whatever their particular material or immaterial manifestations. Equally, she might find herself stretched across numerous diferent concerns that span the critical spectrum, subject-orientations whose potential impact could create dynamic resonances when consuming fiction. It could perhaps be suggested that Greene presents his own version of an Omega Point. This is a concept particular to process thought, presented in seminal terms by the process theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. For him, humanity, and all of creation, “become involuted to a point which we might call Omega, which fuses and consumes them integrally in itself” (259). Physical and notional matters find their shape in a series of concerns that becomes its own end-point, meaning “the sphere of the world . . . exists and is fi nally perceptible in the directions in which its radii meet—even if this were beyond time and space altogether” (259). Phenomena of all kinds are best conceived in the context of their critical apprehensions, such that how they are experienced can itself become a valuable subject of critical investigation. In Teilhard de Chardin’s terms, a subject’s diferent constitutional elements are independent of its existence

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and centrally elemental: “the more immense this sphere, the richer and deeper and hence the more conscious is the point at which the ‘volume of being’ that it embraces is concentrated” (259–260). To be conscious is to find oneself oriented in a concept of mind because a particular form of vision, “seen from our side [emphasis added], is essentially the power of synthesis and organisation” (260). In a vital and evolving way, subjectivity and intersubjectivity are one and the same in aspect and principle. Belief and doubt, as manifestations of the thinking and feeling selves, are codependent, acting as two sides of the same mode of inquiry. Doubt, as a verb, which originates from the Latin dubitāre, “to waver in opinion, hesitate,” is related to dubius, “wavering to and from” (OED). Defined in its noun form as “the (subjective) state of uncertainty with regard to the truth or reality of anything, undecidedness of belief or opinion” (OED), doubt is vitally contextualized by belief. Its Germanic-feminine root, galaub-, means “dear, esteemed, valued, valuable” (OED). Taking their interpretative essences, as Greene’s writings sometimes do, from modernistic critical tendencies, Greene’s work is inflected by the anxieties of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, who faces “a hundred indecisions, / And . . . a hundred visions and revisions” (ll. 32–33). As Mark Bosco and Beatriz Valverde have recently argued, in “the orthodox prescriptions of his Catholic faith” (42), Greene met compromises at every turn: “This borderland of conflict— social, political and religious—became Greene’s primary interest” (43). Greene was often wholly at odds with how he conceived himself and how he approached the artistic and aesthetic preoccupations of his times. Greene demands of his readerships “a disloyal, dialogic stance” (43), presenting “discourses” that “tend to engage in only dialectical opposition of one another” (44). For Lynne W. Hinojosa, a core concern in different discursive interactions is “a kairos moment” (122), a kind of epiphany in which “the novel reader senses that every thing is working together” (122). Eminent critic Frank Kermode, in his investigations of closure, “likens kairos to eros or erotic love . . . ‘the erotic consciousness which makes divinely satisfactory sense.’ . . . In such a reading moment, one recognises the potential of time temporarily opening up, of something outside what one knows as factual reality but also stemming from within that reality” (Hinojosa 122; Kermode, Sense 46). Similar to Teilhard de Chardin, for whom “the infinitely complex . . . afects the interstructuring of all things” (King 15), interpretative principles appear in ways of reading that dramatize diferent discursive interactions. It could be contended that to perceive closure is also, in a certain sense, to practice a given version of religion. To read with diligence is to immerse oneself in experiences that are, by turns, salvific and conflictual, sacredly and secularly so: “a process

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of divinization, a journey into God, not through separation from the world but through its development and transformation” (52). Greene facilitates such an interpretative space, in which diferent dimensions of a reading experience acquire their own vitality, transcendence, and poetics. Bosco presents helpful insight into Greene’s poetics in his recent comments on the reign of Pope Francis. He draws attention to the language of “the Argentine Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s favourite metaphor for the Church” (“Rock”). Pope Francis sees “it as a field hospital after battle. . . . You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about every thing else. Heal the wounds . . . start from the ground up” (“Rock”). For Bosco, hospitable, capacious metaphors, applied to religious contexts, are powerfully capacitating: “The Church as field hospital: it’s a metaphor that resonates with Greene’s sense of the place of the Catholic Church in the middle of the upheavals of late modernity” (“Rock”). Greene and Pope Francis are interested in the healing properties of language as an intercommunicative construct. One of those properties concerns the areas of interest that originate in and through the very act, journey, even voyage, of reading. In assuming their places in the hopes and fears of individual readers, Greene’s writings intersect in every respect with those of the process theologian, Teilhard de Chardin. In his letter of July 14, 1961, to Father André Blanchet, Greene commented on Teilhard de Chardin’s seminal work The Phenomenon of Man (1955, 1959), in which the Omega Point is defined. Greene writes that the study “impressed me more than any other book for many years. In a curious way the Omega Point has more attraction for us today perhaps even than the Son.” In Greene’s terms, to read in awareness of the conception of literature is to comprehend aspects of how a version of religion is formed. Greene’s notion of an Omega Point is therefore an element of Catholic practice that is indivisible from religious and secular interpretation. Greene reaches out to individual readers themselves, whatever their dreams, ambitions, hope, and fears. Invested in how a text is informed by contextually heightened concerns, Greene posits his own definition of what context is: an interrogative aspect of critical investigation that is situated in time, while remaining open to inflections of potential across developments in apprehensions of linear time and space. Insofar as these subject-positionings are narrow and wide-ranging in their reaches of possibility, context is the very subject matter with which Greene is concerned at every stage. In questioning exactly how Brighton Rock can be conceived within a specifically Catholic critical approach, Greene presents interpretative anx ieties which are to a greater or lesser extent religious in orientation. Inasmuch as those anxieties are implicated in the conceptual framework

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of Greene’s novel, the individual and society serve as key figures within which to understand Greene’s version of religion. Greene alludes to the imaginative concerns particular to his texts when reflecting on his own Roman Catholic instruction in A Sort of Life (1971). He writes that, “I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God.6 If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of a dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival” (120). Similar to how the religious and the secular are not mutually distinguishable aspects of Brighton Rock, so Greene’s own conversion is characterized by anxieties which are both individual and collective in nature. Neither the product of a given body of belief nor a rejection of its critical approaches, for Greene, fiction upsets any form of absolutist doctrine. Neil Nehring’s explorations of “an approach to literature based on cultural studies” may be expanded above and beyond a concern for “the social uses of texts” (222). For Nehring, “Greene’s savaging of high culture completes a triple-faceted allegory in Brighton Rock, with conflicts of cultural levels (in both style and content) accompanying the clashes between theologies and between social classes” (228). Whatever the value of these observations, they do not address how Greene explores interpretative issues specific not only to the “larger social experience” of a given reader (233). His text also presents insights into particular aspects of the immediate experiences of that same reader. Having explored how Brighton Rock is less the conceptualization of a singular religious or secular belief than the product of multiple critical and creative decisions, let us turn to its technical features. If Greene’s novel implicates the individual within society in ways which are more or less religious, that form of society is also subject to the imaginative framework of the text itself. Insofar as Greene presents how Brighton Rock interrogates itself as fiction, he also explores why it invites a particular interpretation. Valentine Cunningham’s approach to the core thematics represented within the text exhibits the degree to which its religious and secular dimensions have been conceived in subjective terms. For Cunningham, “Graham Greene’s Catholic sense of evil . . . is too nearly Manichean and too sectarian (it’s manifestly dotty of Brighton Rock to discount totally Ida Arnold’s ordinary-person discriminations ‘right and wrong’ in favour of Pinkie’s Catholicized ‘good and evil’)” (466). If Cunningham fails to perceive how diferent notions of the religious and the secular converge in Greene’s text, he nonetheless draws attention to its creative contexts. On this basis, it is

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helpful to consider Bergonzi’s suggestion that Greene’s work should be read before the interpretative procedures that are specific to fiction: “If texts are placed in their contexts, it is also suggested that the contexts, or other texts, can become important constituents of the texts themselves” (Reading 3). Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s opinions on “the ethical premise on which the novel seems to revolve” present one key to an understanding of the fictional dimensions of Greene’s novel (19–20). According to Erdinast-Vulcan, “Pinkie Brown, a murderer, is a believing Catholic for whom ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are metaphysical entities, as opposed to the value system so vigorously upheld by Ida Arnold, where ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are merely the derivative products of a social code of conventions and ethics” (20). Pinkie’s characterization proceeds less from interpretative anxieties that reside apart from the novel than from ways of reading that are specific to this particular text. By exploring Greene’s own range of thematic concerns, attention is drawn to some of the technical features of his novel. The text is rendered reflexive in nature, by which I mean its status as a fiction is clearly presented at precise moments. Erdinast-Vulcan writes that “the spiritual significance of Pinkie’s rebellion is foregrounded by heavy religious overtones and allusions: Pinkie is thoroughly versed in the Catholic idiom and often resorts to theological argumentation and terminology at the most seemingly incongruous moments” (20). Erdinast-Vulcan’s observations about Pinkie in turn point back to Richard Hoggart’s earlier comments on Greene’s uses of language. For Hoggart, “Greene’s similes are almost always short and sharply juxtapose the concrete, actual or temporal with the abstract, subjective or eternal. They can therefore have a genuine and important function in an allegory” (47–48). Except, against Erdinast-Vulcan and Hoggart, I suggest that Greene’s tendency to use religious and allegorical forms of language does not in turn display corresponding thematic preoccupations. Rather, Greene’s uses of language exhibit notions of meaning that are particular to his novel as a dynamically imaginative fiction. Peter Mudford’s opinion about the conception of God exhibited in Greene’s novel acts to conceptualize how Brighton Rock is not exclusively religious or secular in genre. Mudford writes that the “secular narrative is fused with the metaphysical detective story in which God will be both sleuth and judge” (23).7 Greene’s text is neither a narrowly thematic account of the religious nor singularly secular in technique. Rather, in this novel, God is presented as a figure who is Himself subject to Greene’s diverse conceptual framework. Inasmuch as Pinkie presents his own narrow range of concerns, his characterization serves as one key to an understanding of Greene’s

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approaches to religion. Pinkie dwells on “Spicer’s stupidity, the photograph on the pier, that woman—who the hell was she?—asking questions” (108–109). Of his plans to prevent Rose giving evidence, he thinks: “If he married her, of course, it wouldn’t be for long: only as a last resort to close her mouth and give him time. He didn’t want that relationship with anyone” (109). Pinkie is uninterested in pursuing any relationship that is not centered on his own need to protect himself from the law. His Catholic beliefs proceed less from those which are common to many believers than from his own ways of understanding his religion. Running from the track, Pinkie thinks: “Now, of course, was the time . . . for him to make his peace. Between the stirrup and the ground there wasn’t time: you couldn’t break in a moment the habit of thought: habit held you closely while you died, and he remembered Kite” (116). Pinkie’s very vocabulary means that he is confined to the activities that proceed from his own behaviors and ways of thinking. Presenting themselves on occasions when he is otherwise unaware of their distinctively religious implications, Pinkie unsettles the degree to which Greene’s text is Catholic. Pinkie is, from this perspective, isolated from the broad patterns of experience represented by Ida and, in specifically religious sense, Rose. Pinkie’s exclamation to Rose, “The stirrup and the ground. That doesn’t work” (121), suggests that the Catholicism adopted by Rose makes the theological the very subject of Greene’s novel. As Ida’s “laugh, dispelled the dark theology between them” (122), so the version of religion Pinkie holds is in turn subject to a diverse range of social beliefs. Pinkie rejects Cubitt’s image of him on the basis that it resembles representations of Christ which are too personalized in nature: “The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality” (201). The approach to the figure of Christ adopted by Pinkie is, as such, a product of his own feelings and emotions, rather than the more or less conventional form of Roman Catholicism assumed by Rose. If may be inferred, then, that the figure of God presented by Greene in his novel is the product of concerns particular to this specific text. From this perspective, Pinkie’s thoughts about Rose’s likely salvation proceed from his understanding that she lives and behaves in ways that are irrevocably diferent from his own: “This was not one of the damned: he watched with horrified fascination: this was one of the saved” (204). On the basis of its intersection with diferent notions of the religious and the secular, on thematic, linguistic, and technical levels, Greene’s text exhibits a broad range of social and religious meanings, of which none is dominant in a given reading. On the one hand, the text should be read in terms of religious and secular binaries

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which frame Pinkie and Rose as either religious or irreligious in behavior. On the other hand, Greene’s novel is in and of itself implicated in ways of reading which are neither specifically religious nor secular in character. Rather, Greene questions how any form of the absolute is conceptualized in his text. In doing so, he explores how its representation of society as a figure that is at least in part distinctively religious in nature impacts on the interpretative procedures that are particular to a given individual. In directing attention to Rose as a central figure in the interpretation of his novel, Greene also anticipates the insufficient ways in which the text has been conceived. Rose is consistent in her responses to Ida’s insistence on “the diference between Right and Wrong. . . . The woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her. Their taste was extinguished by stronger foods—Good and Evil. The woman could tell her nothing she didn’t know about these—she knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evil—what did it matter in that case whether he was right or wrong?” (217). Ida’s pursuit of Pinkie should, then, be framed by way of an emphasis on Rose’s religious sensibility, as distinct from that of Pinkie. It is, after all, Pinkie who insists on considering their appearance in Brighton’s newspapers, despite his loathing of the town: “We got to do things right. This is a pact. You read about them in the newspapers” (251). Rose replies, “Do lots of people—do it?” Pinkie responds, “‘It’s always happening’ . . . an awful and airy confidence momentarily possessed him” (251). Pinkie’s anxiety about the act itself may thus be framed as a mark of Rose’s capacity to dominate his imagination, and, moreover, the imaginative dimensions of the text itself: “An enormous emotion beat on him; it was like something trying to get in; the pressure of gigantic wings against the glass. Dona nobis pacem. He withstood it, with all the bitter force of the school bench, the cement playground, the St Pancras waitingroom, Dallow’s and Judy’s secret lust, and the cold unhappy moment on the pier. If the glass broke, if the beast—whatever it was—got in, God knows what it would do” (261). It is the strength of Rose’s religious belief, and Pinkie’s concomitant rejection of the events and memories represented by that belief, which finally frame his pursuit. The utterances by the priest at the conclusion characterize Pinkie’s pursuit in its total form, suggesting that any interpretative act is context-dependent: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God” (268). The rapid walk by Rose “in the thin June sunlight towards the worst horror of all” may (269), on this basis, be considered in two ways. In one sense, Rose will become enlightened about Pinkie’s feelings for her when she listens to his recording. In another sense, that very act also points to

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Rose’s capacity to interpret the priest’s words according to her own version of religion. This includes its reinterpretation within a wholly alternative set of interpretative concerns, including those whereby the secular can manifest itself in a manner concomitant to the nature of her present belief system. Against any reductive way of conceiving Greene’s approaches to characterization, it is these acts of conceptualization and reconceptualization presented by Rose which render the subjectivities of his characters in concrete and specific terms. Inasmuch as Pinkie is characterized against Rose and Ida by way of their opposing religious and secular sensibilities, Greene rejects any singular form of critical enquiry. This includes that displayed in Brennan’s recent opinions on the conclusion of Greene’s novel. Brennan writes, “While Greene is careful to suggest through the priest’s words that no human mind can rationalize the workings of Divine Mercy, it is important to remember that Brighton Rock was composed as a literary ‘entertainment’ and potential film-script rather than as a strictly conformist tract of Catholic theology” (Fictions 55). This critical position is largely inadequate because it seems to depend on a narrowly religious range of interpretative concerns. Brennan assumes that Greene’s diverse readers necessarily share in innumerable diferent anxieties about salvation or damnation which are particular to Roman Catholic believers. For Brennan, “it is possible to see the novel’s ending as dramatically polarized between the redemption of Rose and the confirmation of Pinkie’s eternal damnation” (55). Greene’s text is conceived as singularly religious in conception, rather than as the very troubling of his diferent critical and creative positions. Brennan continues: “Their possible child, of course, remains entirely innocent of the sins of his father and the priest suggests that Rose and her infant might well ‘pray for his father.’ But the likelihood of such prayers ultimately making Pinkie a ‘saint’ is negated by the looming significance of the gramophone recording of Pinkie’s voice” (55). It is precisely this form of interpretation that Greene’s text is written against.8 To contend that “the reader already knows Pinkie’s recorded words of absolute malevolence” (55) is to presume that any given reader necessarily believes that Pinkie’s message is of eternal consequence. Such a presumption not only totalizes the religious sensibilities of Greene’s diverse readers, but it also presupposes that they necessarily hold a particular version of religion.9 Rather than adopt any singular range of critical concerns, Greene’s novel is best considered within the terms of his work. Malamet presents a useful way of understanding the conclusion of Brighton Rock. He writes, “At best, Pinkie’s pursuers, God included, are only able to partially de-

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tect him. . . . Rose walks of to the horror of Pinkie’s recording, as though with all the goodwill in heaven, Pinkie has the last word on knowability here on earth” (26). Greene’s novel is neither a narrow representation of the religious nor necessarily a counterrepresentation of the secular. Instead, it presents a broad range of religious and secular forms of representation and, on this basis, Greene explores the precise relationships between multiple bodies of knowledge. But, in opposition to Malamet, I suggest that that exploration may nevertheless assume a distinctively religious or secular set of connotations. Greene challenges specifically Catholic notions of dogma within the context of this narrative framework. Particular aspects of Brighton Rock are meaningful by virtue of their capacity to question the absolutist ways in which the individual and society have been conceived. Similarly, those aspects of the text are meaningful because this very questioning is also a means of engendering multiple relationships between any given range of readers. Jae-Suck Choi’s observations about Greene’s labeling of his novel point to the larger framework within which to conceive his work: “When it was first published, it was listed in the Greene bibliography as a novel, then as an entertainment, and later it was redefined as a novel. The wavering is undeniable; the book fused the melodramatic form, the characteristic form of the entertainments, and a serious spiritual contest, the central plot of his religious novels” (Greene and Unamuno 36).10 It is Greene’s disturbance of the innumerable ways in which his novels have assumed a par ticu lar notion of genre to which I shall now turn in relation to The Heart of the Matter. In particular, I shall contend that if Brighton Rock centers on exploring diverse conceptions of society, in this text, a counterfocus on the individual is Greene’s principal preoccupation.

The Heart of the Matter Scobie, the protagonist, an English policeman and Catholic, has been posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War. He is a workaholic, married to Louise in a union based less on love than pity. He has an affair with a young refugee named Helen Rolt, which is premised on pity, too; such is Scobie’s habitual response to the people whom he encounters. Scobie even comes to pity his version of the figure of God, which is of his own making. Scobie is caught and exposed through a rogue tradesman called Yusef, with whom he took out a loan to pay for a holiday for Louise. He decides to commit suicide, believing that he is a burden to everyone in his life, even his Creator. Scobie hears a voice from within his body while in a state of prayer, urging him to continue living. He nevertheless

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goes ahead with his decision, against both his own reasoning and that of the voice. Framed in multiple ways as a “Catholic novel” (Bosco, Catholic Imagination 9),11 the very possibility of considering The Heart of the Matter as distinctively Catholic in genre is highly problematic nonetheless. This is because Greene’s specifically Catholic preoccupations in the text have been conceived in a variety of reductive terms. In his sustained analysis of the theological dimensions of Greene’s work, Brennan seems not to locate the novel in the conceptual range that its criticality could merit. Of Greene’s conclusion to the novel, he writes: “it is clear that he went to considerable lengths in the final scenes to ensure that the fate of Scobie’s soul, in accordance with Catholic teaching, was not a matter upon which any reader could pass ultimate judgement” (Fictions 90). Brennan frames the text according to a series of moral standards. For this critic, “the novel concludes with Father Rank’s reminder to Louise that the workings of Divine Mercy are inefable to human reason” (90). In Brennan’s terms, Scobie is both a character who has no life independent of the text and someone with whose eternal fate specific readers are necessarily preoccupied. The validity of these observations depends on the very opposition between the religious and secular, which Greene upsets throughout his work. This includes the capacity of diverse individuals to influence the critical frameworks within which this opposition is conceived. Other critics have conceived Greene’s novel in less dogmatic terms than Brennan. Nevertheless, they still tend to pass over the relationships between the individual and society which I suggest are crucial to an understanding Greene’s fiction. Robert J. Baker writes that Scobie presents a “tragic process. . . . That tragic process includes a tension between his conscious motivation and his unconscious desire, between his pity for Louise and his wish for peace, his concern for Helen and his awareness of duty, his feelings of disappointment and the demands of his conscience” (43– 44). For Baker, Scobie is a character in whom multiple forms of self-interest dramatically converge. Baker writes, “That tension with its contradictory, implacable, and irreconcilable demands leads Scobie to see himself as a source of contamination and destruction; his sense of responsibility is so great that he finds himself corrupted” (44). According to Baker, Greene’s novel exhibits the exploration of Scobie’s feelings and emotions by way of his professional habits and behaviors. Baker continues, “however monstrous, usurping, or ridiculous, Scobie’s pity is fundamentally a sorrow felt at the suferings and misfortunes of others” (44). For Baker, Scobie should be conceived within the terms of the lives of the other characters in the novel. This way of reading the novel needs to be expanded beyond

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any range of critical or creative preoccupations that are specific to Greene’s methods of characterization. Judith Wilt advances Baker’s interpretation in her view that the “narrative returns steadily, even grotesquely, from the outlying districts of projections historical, theological, cosmic, to the heart of the matter, the human body, its sweats and bruises, its veins, nerves and tongue, finally, in a brilliant conceit, to its inmost cave, science’s tube within a tube, scripture’s ‘sepulchre,’ the muscles of the heart, where we find the body’s utopian dream, its divinely counterfactual wish” (73–74). According to Wilt, Greene’s novel unsettles any notion of character that proceeds from a single notion of the religious. Instead, Greene’s specifically Catholic concerns depend on a complex range of metaphorical associations. Lisa Crumley Bierman develops Wilt’s reading by suggesting that aspects of the metaphorical associations invoked by the text should be considered by way of the conceptual terms within which they originate. Specifically, she points to the complex interests of Greene’s diverse readers: “Scobie is constantly presented with problems that (in his mind) have no clear, distinctively right or wrong answers. Although the Catholic Church, to which he looks for guidance and structure, outlines for him which actions are sinful, his religion ultimately fails to save him” (65). For Bierman, Scobie should be considered in terms of his own needs and motivations as a Catholic believer. She continues: “Initially, the reader might sympathize with Scobie because it seems that he commits his sins with good intentions” (65). Bierman’s opinions have two implications for my enquiry. Greene’s text should be considered within the innumerable critical and creative concerns Greene pursues. Attention is then drawn to the diverse interpretative procedures which his work assumes, as distinct from any singular religious or secular way of reading. Greene’s texts, including their multiple contexts, should, nevertheless, also be considered before their diferent capacities to interrogate one another. However broad the dynamics of any given way of approaching Greene’s fiction, that approach needs to direct attention to a sense of his critical and creative preoccupations which is as complete as possible. Bosco alludes to such an interpretation, though his study is notable for its brevity of comment on this particular text.12 Responding to the “dialectical ‘encounters’ . . . of Greene’s novels” (Catholic Imagination 37), he writes, “The space between the fallen nature of Greene’s characters and the mysterious, inscrutable grace of God was feared to be too wide a theological gap for many of his religious compatriots” (19). Expanding the tenor of these opinions, Bergonzi suggests that the thematic preoccupations of Greene’s novel correspond to the anxieties which he experienced prior to its writing.

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A key aspect of them is how he “lays on thick local colour” (Study 119): “one sign of authorial uncertainty may be the excessively elaborate organization of a fairly short novel: it is divided into books, parts, and chapters, with numbered subdivisions within the chapters. It is as though Greene felt he could not sustain the scenic method without these formal props” (119). For Bergonzi, Greene’s organizational principles direct attention to how this novel marks a change in his style: “Unlike his previous fiction, The Heart of the Matter lacks a poetic dimension, despite a scatter of rather mechanical similes” (119). To the extent that Bosco and Bergonzi each upset the numerous reductive forms of criticism exhibited by many of Greene’s commentators, their observations are useful. The Heart of the Matter is less singular in its representations of the religious and the secular than dynamically reflective of their diferent conceptual frameworks. It is the capacity of Greene’s novel to question its very nature as a fictional text which I shall explore in this section. If Brighton Rock is a novel which proceeds from its own diverse forms of critical and creative enquiry, the total significances of those concerns are expanded in The Heart of the Matter. In particular, Greene explores the extent to which the text must, in its final analysis, be framed within the experience of individual readers themselves. Greene’s approaches toward the relationship between the individual and society in this novel proceed from how Scobie and Louise are characterized against each other. Centered on exploring the diverse relationships between the religious and the secular, this novel, like Brighton Rock, serves as its own critical text. Except whereas the previous novel was written against any given interpretative procedure, in this text the very nature of the interpretative itself is Greene’s principal subject. The literary interests of Wilson, amorous admirer of Louise, point to their fuller expansion in the context of Greene’s novel: “A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel—or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug” (4). Similar to the way in which Greene challenges the precise nature of any given critical act, so Wilson’s very reading habits influence Greene’s own creative decisions. Inasmuch as Wilson’s reading may, in a sense, itself direct the very manner in which Greene’s novel is received and composed, Wilson points to the diverse sensibilities of Greene’s protagonists. Scobie contrasts with other individuals in his conception of what constitutes home: “Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation—a new picture, more

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and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his home by a process of reduction” (7). Focused on his own immediate needs, Scobie also perceives Louise to be someone whom he can in some sense control: “His wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. . . . The danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcufs on the nail” (7). Louise is, then, someone for whom Scobie feels entirely responsible. To the extent that he understands her to be a person whom he must in every way support, he believes he has afected every aspect of her character and appearance: “Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face” (7–8). In this sense, all aspects of Greene’s novel proceed primarily from Scobie’s perspective. Insofar as there is a dominant form of responsibility in this novel, it is primarily the product of Scobie’s relationship with Louise. In one sense, the character of Scobie occupies the main imaginative framework of the novel. The interpretative concerns of this form of critique are, nonetheless, complicated by Louise’s character. Scobie observes, “When he found her in the bedroom under the mosquito-net she reminded him of a dog or a cat, she was so completely ‘out.’ Her hair was matted, her eyes closed. He stood very still like a spy in foreign territory, and indeed he was in foreign territory now” (13). Scobie is in diferent ways himself the subject of his perceptions of Louise. This is because “if home for him meant the reduction of things to a friendly unchanging minimum, home to her was accumulation” (13). Louise’s capacity to afect Scobie’s perceptions of his society has implications within and without the conceptual parameters of the text. Louise presents another challenge to Scobie in terms of his inclination to control what happens in the town which he polices. This challenge is nonetheless also something whose personal and social impact on Scobie afects him in ways far beyond his professional capacities. Scobie thinks how: “It was as if she were accumulating evidence that she had friends like other people. . . . These were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion. It was pity that told him to go: he wouldn’t have woken his worst enemy from sleep, leave alone Louise” (13).13 Louise’s accusation to Scobie about his Catholicism, “It doesn’t mean a thing to you” (16), marks the limitations of reading Greene’s text by way of a singular range of interpretative concerns. Scobie is characterized as somebody who is challenged in the most fundamental way by Louise’s ability to afect his social perceptions: “Like a

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wireless operator with a novel open in front of him, he could disregard every signal except the ship’s symbol and the S O S. . . . It was silence that stopped him working—silence in which he might look up and see tears waiting in the eyes for his attention” (17–18). His thought, “This is what I’ve made of her. She wasn’t always like this” is (23), in this sense, both a description of his marriage with Louise, and a mark of the critical framework within which to conceive the text. The fictional status of Greene’s text proceeds from the diverse characterizations of its protagonists, including the ways in which they are subject to each other’s diferent concerns and preoccupations. From one perspective, Greene’s novel should be read according to a distinctively religious collection of interpretative concerns. Scobie’s sympathy for the captain of the Esperança, who has hidden a contraband letter to his daughter, is, then, a mark of his own Roman Catholic religion: “He had discovered suddenly how much they had in common: the plaster statues with the swords in the bleeding heart: the whisper behind the confessional curtains: the holy coats and the liquefaction of blood: the dark side chapels and the intricate movements, and somewhere behind it all the love of God” (42). But from another, Scobie’s desire for peace nonetheless points beyond his version of religion toward the very questioning of that religion. Scobie thinks, “Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in” (50). Scobie’s promise to help Louise leave the country may, in this way, be conceived in the context of a range of preoccupations which are wholly separate from their shared religion. If, as Scobie reflects, “despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim” (50), that aim does not necessarily concern his inability to fulfil his promise. Rather, his anxieties proceed from his need to understand his version of religion in terms that are both religious and secular. Insofar as Scobie is characterized as someone who disturbs how the religious and the secular relate to each other within and without the text itself, Greene directs attention to collectivist and individualist critical approaches. Joshua Phillips’s recent investigation into the nature of collectivist forms of literature ofers a helpful means of theorizing Greene’s approaches to genre. Focusing on how any particular individuals, groups, and communities within a society afect each other’s ways of reading, for Phillips, literature and religion may not invoke mutually distinguishable bodies of knowledge: “what is at stake is not simply a proper sociological analysis (how we define the term ‘community’ or what we consider the

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basic elements of social organizations, etc.), but a larger epistemological issue” (8). Within the terms of this critic, diverse notions of society should be considered in terms of their capacity to subvert the interests of a specific individual. Greene’s text may be conceived less by way of its distinctively religious implications than its assumption of multiple imaginative frameworks, including those which challenge any given form of the conceptual. Phillips writes that in the process of challenging “the idea that the individual is the basic (or best) unit of knowing and acting” (8), critics are less likely to overlook the critical impact of collective selves. Attention is turned, instead, to a specifically “collective sense of our identity, fictions that form us yet” (229). From this perspective, The Heart of the Matter should not be read by way of a singularly religious form of interpretation, however broad its critical terms. Rather, the text should be considered in terms of its capacity to assume multiple religious and secular notions of meaning, including those that point to the specific nature of its genre. Phillips’s approaches to the role of society in any conception of a literary text display several significant weaknesses. First, while the critical reading of a text may proceed in some contexts from a collective sense of identity, that form of interpretation is nevertheless subject to an individual’s own critical and creative capacities. This includes the ability to choose or reject the tenets and principles which direct a particular way of reading. Second, if an individual is subject to diferent collective forms of identity, the critical assumptions implicated within her interpretative acts are, in turn, subject to diverse conditions and circumstances. In this sense, The Heart of the Matter needs to be understood as an exploration of how any given text assumes a particular interpretation. Greene’s breadth of approach to diferent forms of critical interpretation and the religious dogma sometimes implicated within them is explored, in part, by Irma Maini. For her, his distinctively Catholic approach to grace constitutes his principal concern. She writes that “the theme of grace—a typically religious and Christian theme—has to be viewed in the light of Greene’s Catholic conversion and persuasions if only because it has a highly restricted and theological flavour. It is also important to remember that this theme forms part of the constellation of themes and motifs which animate the Greene world” (51). For Maini, the concept of grace, including that which is distinctively Catholic, is central to any group of people, whether religious or secular in orientation. Maini continues that “to reach ‘the heart of the matter’ in regard to the doctrine of grace, we are obliged to examine briefly the conditions and categories that lead to that blessed state” (52). It is precisely this state of blessedness that

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is at issue throughout the text. Pointing to the preoccupations of many diferent individuals and groups, whether religious or secular in orientation, Greene’s novel is conceived in a radically critical sense. The conceptual reach of Maini’s insights into the religious and secular dimensions of Greene’s novel is, nonetheless, limited by way of her own religious biases. She continues: “Greene is not interested in imposing any particular belief upon us. His greatest quality is that he can talk about the religious and theological problems without being didactic about their solution. . . . There is a complete coalescence of his thought, ethic and aesthetic” (59). These opinions lack an interrogative sense of Greene’s version of religion. Inasmuch as Greene presents a broad-ranging interrogation of the religious or secular sensibility of any given reader, he also engenders a sense of unease in any given critical act. For Greene, literary texts are subject to a range of individual and collective forms of identity, of which none acquires dominance in a particular reading. Greene’s intersection with any specific critical act is shown by his characters’ diferent versions of religion. Father Rank’s complaint about the gossip he knows may, from this perspective, point to Greene’s own conceptually diverse framework: “‘My head is a hive of rumours,’ Father Rank said, making a humorous hopeless gesture. ‘If a man tells me anything I assume he wants me to pass it on. It’s a useful function, you know, at a time like this, when every thing is an official secret, to remind people that their tongues were made to talk with and that the truth is meant to be spoken about’ ” (Greene, Heart 58). Father Rank is, as an individual, subject to a broad range of collective notions of identity. Insofar as he is anxious about his role in a distinctively Catholic context, his character frames Scobie’s relationship with Louise. Elements of Father Rank’s characterization as someone who, is to a greater or lesser degree, compromised in his religious sensibility point to Scobie’s inability to satisfy Louise’s intellectual needs. Scobie’s invitation to Wilson to discuss books with Louise constitutes an acknowledgment that his perceptions of his wife are in many ways inadequate. Wilson “brought his mind sharply back, aware that Scobie was watching him: the slightly protruding, slightly reddened eyes dwelt on him with a kind of speculation” (62). To the degree that Wilson is not interested in taking full responsibility for Louise, Scobie’s perceptions are correct. During Wilson’s walk with Louise, “there was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned” (66). On kissing her, therefore, “it seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world” (66). Any change in their relationship is, nevertheless, confined strictly to Wilson’s perceptions, as shown by Louise’s

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rejection of his advance: “‘Oh, for God’s sake, Wilson,’ she said, ‘don’t let’s have a petting party’ ” (68). On the basis of Louise’s strength of character, Scobie’s conclusion about his care of her is also an acknowledgment that he must somehow change his perceptions about their relationship: “If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness” (74–75). By way of Scobie’s compulsion to understand Louise in both a religious and secular sense, Greene complicates how their diferent versions of religion may themselves be understood. The narrative force of the scene in which Louise chastises Wilson is in itself valuable to my enquiry. This is because Scobie’s perspective, which determines much of the novel’s presentation of religion, is broken apart. Scene 1.2.2.1, within which the moment at issue takes place, was added to the Collected Edition of the novel (1971), because, as Greene writes, in the text, in the main: “Louise . . . is mainly seen through the eyes of Scobie” (Ways 94). For David Leon Higdon, in this scene, “we see an entirely different Louise” (255). She is no longer “a mousy, bland object of pity” (255). The insertion of the scene is significant in a narratological sense, presented as Louise is in this instance as having personal integrity and an especially strong sense of morality. In a text that Greene revised heavily, it is the case that the “many . . . deletions, like the numerous changes, less afect the presentation of character than they tighten phrasing and correct imagery” (256). I suggest that the addition of the scene has a specific meaning. This is that Louise acts to reify diferent kinds of moral standards and approaches that some readers might themselves bring to Greene’s novel. In embodying a perspective that runs counter to the prevailing narrative voice, that being Scobie’s, the character of Louise is impor tant ideologically. Her characterization serves, in large or small part, to interpolate the very voice of Greene himself. Scobie’s observations of Pemberton’s room show how his understanding of Louise is incomplete: “imposed on all this were the traces of Pemberton—a gaudy leather pouf of so-called native work, the marks of cigarette-ends on the chairs, a stack of the books Father Clay had disliked” (77). For Scobie, Pemberton’s lifestyle shows that any given person must be understood in terms of both her individual and collective identities. Scobie’s fitful dream following his journey to Bamba indicates how his conceptions of those who are close to him must develop: “He called out, ‘Louise, every thing’s all right. I’ve booked your passage,’ but there was no answer. [. . .] [H]e saw [. . .] Father Clay, who said to him, ‘The teaching of the Church. . . .’ Then he woke again to the small stone room

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like a tomb” (83). In patterning Scobie’s feelings for Louise after the resurrection of Christ, Greene interrogates any reductive understanding of a specifically Catholic conception of grace. When at last Louise has left for South Africa, it is then to a state of sleep that Scobie returns: “The sadness was peeling of his mind, leaving contentment. He had done his duty: Louise was happy. He closed his eyes” (92). Inasmuch as Scobie acknowledges that his feelings of responsibility for others are beyond his control, Greene provokes a range of interpretative anx ieties that reside without the conceptual parameters of his novel. The need to consider the text in ways that acknowledge the limitations of any narrowly religious interpretative approach is exhibited by Greene’s choice of setting. Centered on Scobie’s compulsion to help Louise temporarily leave their town, its West African setting is, contrary to George Orwell, far from arbitrary. Orwell writes that “except that one of the characters is a Syrian trader, the whole thing might as well be happening in a London suburb. The Africans exist only as an occasionally mentioned background, and the thing that would actually be in Scobie’s mind the whole time—the hostility between black and white, and the struggle against the local nationalist movement—is not mentioned at all” (“Sanctified” 106). However valid these opinions, I suggest that they reflect Orwell’s sense of how Greene’s novel should be conceived, as distinct from that which is actually presented by Greene. Commenting on Scobie, Orwell continues, “although we are shown his thoughts in considerable detail, he seldom appears to think about his work, and then only of trivial aspects of it, and never about the war, although the date is 1942” (106). According to Orwell, Greene’s characterization of Scobie lacks key detail. He writes, “The improbability of this shows up against the colonial setting, but it is an improbability that is present in Brighton Rock as well, and that is bound to result from foisting theological preoccupations upon simple people anywhere” (106–107). In opposition to Orwell, I suggest that Greene’s conceptualization of the theological is not specific to particular persons or characters. Instead, the diferent versions of religion presented throughout his novel are subject to the intersection between religious and secular forms of interpretation. Greene’s novel assumes critical approaches whose principles and presumptions are both collective and individual in nature. James Wood points to this conception of the text in his reading of its sense of place: “the novel presents, in efect, two imprisoned communities, the colonyprison and the theology-prison, the city of man and the city of God, and finds them both to be awful places, sites of torture and pain” (vii). Scobie is characterized as somebody against whom the text acquires a particu-

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lar meaning, and someone in whom that meaning is challenged. Wood’s opinions may, nonetheless, be questioned by way of his own critical terms. Wood writes, “It is never clear if the colony ofers an ironic shadow-world to the religious world, or if the religious community ofers an ironic shadow-world to the secular community” (viii). However valid these comments, they fail to account for Greene’s dynamic interrogation of the diferent forms of interpretation the text invokes. Scobie is, in this sense, far from a character who is “only monochromatically vivid” (xi). If he is, in fact, a “knowable type” (xi), it is in order to challenge any given range of expectations about how Greene’s novel should be conceived as distinctively Catholic in genre. Scobie’s characterization intersects with multiple religious and secular forms of enquiry. This includes those implicated in its sense of place. Scobie contemplates his role as a police officer by way of his unease in his individual and collective capacities: “When he thought about it all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, the member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules” (Greene, Heart 103). One consequence of his anxiety in both a religious and professional context is his sense of feeling burdened by his responsibilities to the temporary hospital: “It was as if he had shed one responsibility only to take on another. This was a responsibility he shared with all human beings, but that was no comfort, for it sometimes seemed to him that he was the only one who recognized his responsibility. In the Cities of the Plain a single soul might have changed the mind of God” (109).14 Scobie is, then, an individual who assumes roles which are specific to his identity as a Roman Catholic policeman. Except those roles provoke anxieties within him whose impact extends beyond his characterization in the novel. Scobie’s version of religion is premised on its capacity to unsettle any singular conception of the novel as a genre. His utterance of the absolution following his confession to Father Rank, “I feel—tired of my religion” (140), indicates how Greene’s novel is a text whose genre proceeds from a diverse range of secular and religious capacities: “The trouble is, Scobie thought, there’s nothing to absolve. The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together—a hocus pocus. . . . Looking up at the cross he thought, He even sufers in public” (140–141). Inasmuch as Scobie questions any sense of religious authority by which he has lived, he acts as a figure in whom Greene himself questions the premises of any given way of reading. Scobie and Greene each, in their diferent ways, present an awareness of how any particular aspect of Catholicism afects a specific imaginative context. Scobie’s disappointment that he has begun an afair with Helen

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is, then, to be perceived within the context of his own version of religion: “He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. . . . Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen” (149).15 Helen’s anger at Scobie’s religious hy pocrisy presents Greene’s diverse conceptualizations of religion in terms of their counterrepresentation in a secular context: “ ‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me—it only stops you marrying me. . . . Go on,’ Helen said, ‘justify yourself’ ” (164). Scobie’s reply, “It would take too long. . . . One would have to begin with the arguments for a God” (164), points to how his death should be framed. Inasmuch as Scobie doubts his ability to act in a religious capacity, his suicide marks the rejection of any single notion of authority. His belief that Christ rejected His divine role suggests that for Scobie, as for Greene, any given act of critical interpretation presents a counter act of reinterpretation: “Christ had not been murdered—you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail” (174). If the text is conceived by way of a distinctively collective range of critical concerns, they are nonetheless subject to their reconceptualization within their own critical frameworks. To the degree that Greene’s novel centers on questioning the value of any form of critique, its sense of place proceeds from diverse acts of conceptual interpretation. This way of reading is conveyed in Journey Without Maps (1936), Greene’s account of his travels through Liberia and Sierra Leone. The fears which he experiences throughout this time impact on his very capacity to assume a given belief: “I had never got used to mice in the wainscot, I was afraid of moths. It was an inherited fear, I shared my mother’s terror of birds, couldn’t touch them, couldn’t bear the feel of their hearts beating in my palm. I avoided them as I avoided ideas I didn’t like, the idea of eternal life and damnation” (84). Similar to the way in which particular aspects of his environment cause him to question his version of religion, so that religion is also subject to its own multiple notions of critical context: “But in Africa one couldn’t avoid them any more than one could avoid the supernatural. The method of psychoanalysis is to bring the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue here and a clue there” (84– 85). For Greene, Africa is a continent of innumerable complexities whose diverse environments provoke diferent individuals to question how they conceive a particular range of circumstances. Inasmuch as those acts of

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questioning manifest multiple forms of critical conception, Africa is also a place that is central to Greene’s novel. As Greene’s version of religion is subject to multiple forms of interrogation, so his representation of West Africa in The Heart of the Matter directs his approaches to genre. Tamas Dobozy alludes to this way of reading in his comments that Greene’s “idea of the human remains in flux, never answered but always interrogated, according to circumstance and inclination. . . . Greene underscores the church as maintained by community rather than isolated individuals spouting dogma” (“Africa” 434, 443). However valid his opinions, Dobozy does not perceive how the text proceeds from both collective and individual notions of critical context. Greene’s representation of place in this novel exhibits both Scobie’s roles in a range of specifically collective capacities, and his ability to act over and above their particular preoccupations and concerns. Dobozy’s suggestion that “Scobie moves ‘inevitably’ towards death, a fatalistic, not Catholic, quest” (444) fails to acknowledge the numerous diferent kinds of authority assumed by the character. They include those premised on countering any form of belief that is narrowly religious or secular in orientation. On these terms, the places in which Greene’s novels are set affect the issues of genre within and between them in several key respects. To the extent that his forms of characterization present the rejection of any single notion of the religious or the secular, Greene theorizes how the individual and society are conceived, premised as they are on their relationships within and without collectivist forms of literature. Insofar as such acts of conception are premised on the interpretation and reinterpretation of any given text, Greene questions how fiction itself is apprehended. The approaches to genre adopted by Greene, then, should be conceived in the context of his dynamic interrogation of individual and collective forms of interpretation. Inasmuch as Greene questions the nature of the innumerable conditions and circumstances to which Scobie is subject, Scobie himself directs how Greene’s novel should be understood. On the one hand, Greene’s novel proceeds from Scobie’s capacity to oppose his own version of religion, as presented during his last conversation with Yusef. This character instructs him not to “ask questions” about Ali (Greene, Heart 228), but instead to “talk about important things[:] . . . God. The family. Poetry. . . . I should like to hear the philosophy of your life” (228). On the other hand, Scobie’s version of religion constitutes, in fact, the beliefs, principles, and convictions by which he should live. Aggrieved at Ali’s murder, “Scobie thought . . . Oh God . . . I’ve killed you: you’ve served me

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all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You saved me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you” (231). To the degree that Ali provides for Scobie in his way of living, it is his own specifically Catholic beliefs against which his circumstances should be apprehended. On the basis of his grief for Ali, Scobie’s suicide should be framed by way of his religious convictions, and their disturbance by his decision to act over and above them. In this way, Greene’s wish to explore “the problem of suicide for a Catholic” converges with that “to show that pity is a corrupting force” (Jouve and Moré 21). Scobie prays: “O God, I am the only guilty one because I’ve known the answers all the time. I’ve preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can’t observe your sufering. . . . I am going to damn myself, whatever that means. I’ve longed for peace and I’m never going to know peace again. But you’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach” (Greene, Heart 241). The voice that answers Scobie’s pleading, centered on the questioning of his religion, is a representation of Greene’s interrogation of any single way of reading: “No one can speak a monologue for long alone—another voice will always make itself heard” (242). That voice, in this instance, speaks within and apart from Scobie, since “every monologue sooner or later becomes a discussion. So now he couldn’t keep the other voice silent. . . . You say you love me, and yet you’ll do this to me—rob me of you for ever. I made you with love. I’ve wept your tears. I’ve saved you from more than you will ever know” (242). For Scobie, as for Greene’s novel, God is both a figure who assumes responsibility for an individual’s diverse needs, and someone in whom any act of responsibility itself is in question. On the basis of Scobie’s questioning of every aspect of his version of religion, his reply to the voice is both a refutation of his religion and a mark of his capacity to act in terms of his own values and principles: “No. I don’t trust you. I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks. I’m not a policeman for nothing—responsible for order, for seeing justice is done. There was no other profession for a man of my kind” (242). Scobie makes his own conscious decisions which are, moreover, specific only to his character and contexts. He continues, “I can’t shift my responsibility to you. If I could, I would be someone else. I can’t make one of them sufer so as to save myself. I’m responsible and I’ll see it through the only way I can. . . . We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to” (242). It is Scobie himself who chooses death over life, as distinct from the influence of any narrowly conceived religious or secular imperative.

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The insistence of his reply to the voice points to the interpretative conflicts at the core of the text: “I won’t go on insulting you at your own altar. You see it’s an impasse, God, an impasse” (242–243). As Scobie attempts to understand both his religious and secular dispositions as a Catholic, so he rejects both the figure of God and the many forms of the collective to which he has previously felt committed. Greene’s novel is composed within multiple collective and individual notions of meaning. To the degree that they center on the character of Scobie, Greene rejects any singular conception of the novel genre. In his reflections on his protagonist in Ways of Escape (1980), Greene points to the extent to which his protagonist complicates his approaches to genre. Insofar as Scobie himself directs how The Heart of the Matter must be read, his characterization also presents its main interpretative issues. Greene writes, “The character of Scobie was intended to show that pity can be the expression of an almost monstrous pride. But I found the efect on readers was quite diferent. . . . Scobie was exonerated, Scobie was a ‘good man,’ he was hunted to his doom by the harshness of his wife” (93–94). Scobie is subject to a range of interpretative concerns that Greene himself admits he did not mean to engender in his writing of his novel. Inasmuch as those concerns arise within the context of Scobie’s many collective selves, Greene invokes forms of interpretation that stem from innumerable notions of the individual. Greene continues, “Suicide was Scobie’s inevitable end; the particular motive of his suicide, to save even God from himself, was the final twist of the screw of his inordinate pride. Perhaps Scobie should have been a subject for a cruel comedy rather than for tragedy” (94). On Greene’s own terms, Scobie is a character in whom all aspects of the text are in question. Scobie needs to be understood within the terms specific to Greene’s own approaches to his novel, as distinct from those imposed on the text. Bergonzi comments, “Greene’s analysis is sound but it was written after the event; if readers were misguided enough to sympathize and identify with Scobie it was because the narrative encouraged them to; he is presented without detachment or distance” (Study 124). It is Greene’s capability to disturb any conceptually limited act of critical interpretation that forms the imaginative center of The Heart of the Matter. Insofar as Scobie is a character by whom Greene questions any singular critical approach, he also acts to interrogate Greene’s diverse approaches to genre. To conclude this section, Greene questions how his novels have assumed particular issues of genres in three key respects. First, by way of his interrogation of the precise relationships between diferent individuals and collectives, Greene interrogates the manner in which any given

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aspect of his work is conceived. Second, implicated within this act of critical conceptualization are counter acts of reconceptualization that have the capacity to conceive Greene’s work in radically alternative terms. Third, those terms may in and of themselves assume a role of central importance in a given critique. It is the innumerable relationships between forms of interpretation that are more or less collective or individual in nature to which I shall now turn.

Individuals, Society, and Greene Greene’s opposition between the individual and society proceeds from his interrogation of any reductive conceptualization of the novel genre. Focused on the intersections and oppositions within and between innumerable diferent forms of reading, his work explores how and why his fiction acquires a particular meaning. If Brighton Rock exhibits the rejection of any singular act of interpretation, in The Heart of the Matter, the interpretative itself is the very subject of his novel. Greene’s work is premised, then, on the ways in which meaning is created in and through any given act of reading. His capacity to theorize any notion of an absolute, whether specifically Catholic or secular in origin, is itself helpfully theorized in the context of diverse approaches to the origins of the novel as a literary form. In “the most successful attempt to explain the origins of the English novel” (McKeon 1), Ian Watt writes that “it surely attempts to portray all the va rieties of human experience, and not merely those suited to one particular literary perspective: the novel’s realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents, but in the way it presents it” (11). By virtue of its broad-ranging exploration of how experience as a critical construct may itself be conceptualized, individuals themselves are the principal subjects of the novel genre. Focusing on “philosophical realism” (12), Watt comments, “its method has been the study of the particulars of experience by the individual investigator, who, ideally at least, is free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs” (12). Whatever the value of Watt’s thesis, it is, nonetheless, marked by the capacity of diferent forms of the interpretative to assume individual and collectivist dimensions. In his interpretation of the novel’s origins, Michael McKeon explores at length Watt’s opposition of the relationships between individuals and the par ticu lar notions of meaning that counter their preoccupations. However helpful McKeon’s study, he appears to misunderstand Watt in key respects, which are themselves in diferent ways anticipated by Greene. Investigating the role played by “developments of the early modern pe-

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riod that extend beyond the realm of literary form” (2), especially “romance,” which “continues to sufuse the period itself” (3), for McKeon “what is required is a theory not just of the rise of the novel but of how categories, whether ‘literary’ or ‘social,’ exist in history: how they first coalesce by being understood in terms of—as transformations of—other forms that have thus far been taken to define the field of possibility” (4). Neither a reductive conception of the critical nor a form of the creative without precise points of imaginative conception, the novel is a genre of broad contextual reach. For Greene, by contrast, and in keeping with the critical tenor of Watt’s study, the genre of the novel serves to direct attention to specific features of the broad range of interpretative contexts implicated within its very critique. Greene’s capacity to assume multiple approaches to the act of critical interpretation means that his novels in themselves interrogate any single form of the contextual. It is by way of Greene’s challenges to diferent forms of the contextual that his distinctively Catholic preoccupations should be conceived. Mikhail Bakhtin ofers a helpful means of conceptualizing Greene’s approaches to fiction in that he calls into question forms of interpretation that exhibit a limited capacity to question their own particular critical premises. For Bakhtin, “verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract ‘formal’ approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’ approach” (259). Bakhtin argues against any approach to a text which does not question the precise nature of its specific role and function. He continues: “Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (259). According to Bakhtin, any fictional text should be subjected to the diverse ways in which it acquires a given interpretation. For him, it is in these terms that a novel receives comprehensive critical attention on all aspects of its composition. Focusing on the relationship between individual and collective forms of critique, Bakhtin writes that “in all areas of life and ideological activity, our speech is filled to overflowing with other people’s words, which are transmitted with highly varied degrees of accuracy and impartiality” (337). Any verbal utterance, including a novel, is important precisely on account of its capacity to engender diverse forms of relationship between critical acts which are otherwise opposed, whatever the nature of the religious or secular sensibilities implicated within them. Bakhtin continues: “The more intensive, diferentiated and highly developed the social life of a speaking collective, the greater is the importance attaching, among other possible subjects of talk, to another’s word, another’s utterance,

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since another’s word will be the subject of passionate communication, an object of interpretation, discussion, evaluation, rebuttal, support, further development and so on” (337). It is on these terms that Greene’s work serves to unsettle, challenge, and expand any approach to his work that lacks conceptual rigor. In keeping with McKeon’s response to Watt in terms of the possible role played by romance in the novel’s origins, Greene’s novels assume diverse interpretative acts in their diferent critiques. Those very forms of approach nonetheless are themselves subject to the critical terms within which they are presented. For Greene, all forms of critical interpretation are in question, including those premised on challenging the very contexts by which context itself is apprehended. Greene’s explorations of both any act of interpretation and the nature the interpretative itself present themselves in the two novels by way of of their plots. The apathy of Rose’s parents when Pinkie asks their permission to marry their daughter points to how Greene’s assumption of particu lar forms of critique should be understood. Rose’s parents remain silent during his questions: “They wouldn’t answer him. They treasured their mood as if it was a bright piece of china only they possessed: something they could show to neighbours as ‘mine’ ” (Greene, Brighton 155). Pinkie’s bargaining with Rose’s father exhibits forms of greed that are not necessarily the products of wholly selfish gain. Rather, their conversation points to the characters’ own diverse situations and backgrounds. This is conveyed by Pinkie’s contemplation of their living room: “He looked with horror round the room: nobody could say he hadn’t done right to get away from this, to commit any crime. . . . When the man opened his mouth he heard his father speaking, that figure in the corner was his mother: he bargained for his sister and felt no desire” (156). The context in which Pinkie’s manipulation of Rose should be interpreted must, in part, point to the society that has engendered their living conditions. Pinkie and Rose should not be interpreted in ways that are more or less individual or collective in approach. Instead, they should be considered in terms of how they lead their lives as complex social individuals. If Brighton Rock points to the dynamically social manner in which Pinkie and Rose should be conceptualized, in The Heart of the Matter, Greene dramatizes the act of critical conceptualization itself. This is displayed by way of the imagery of blood in the novel. Scobie’s retelling of the book A Bishop among the Bantus, whereby his character, Arthur Bishop, is “about to meet the . . . blood-thirsty lieutenant” (117), exhibits the degree to which Greene’s own fiction is subject to narrow forms of interpretation. This is conveyed in particular by way of Scobie’s challenge

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to the religious intentions of the nuns’ Catholic library, focused on the rejection of obviously secular literatures. As Mrs Bowles comments: “We are not teaching the children here to read in order that they shall read— well, novels” (114). It is in these terms that Scobie’s imagination needs to be understood, manifesting itself in other aspects of the text. For example, even as Louise “couldn’t bear the sight of blood” (30), she nevertheless draws blood from Wilson. This “stained the Downhamian page” (200), ruining his own fiction, the poem that he passes of as his work in the journal of the school he attended. Blood, in this novel, acts as a means of fictionalizing the very fictions that are otherwise of religiously prosaic connotations. In so doing, Greene points to the relationships between literature and Catholicism as figures of potentially significant force in any conceptual act. When Scobie complains to the figure of God about his own corrupt self, he demonstrates an awareness of his capacity to make a fiction of his own life: “I’ve preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because I can’t observe your sufering . . . but I can die and remove myself from their blood stream” (241). His final prayer, “And you too, God. . . . I can’t face . . . taking your body and blood for the sake of a lie” (241), serves to demonstrate that the text acquires its status as a fiction on two counts: Greene’s novel serves to question how par ticular aspects of its plot proceed from a distinctively religious range of associations and connotations. Inasmuch as none of those aspects of the text dominates its critical conception, Greene rejects a given religious or secular agenda. Similar notions of the religious and the secular nevertheless present diferent individual and collective notions of meaning that, paradoxically, represent the very agendas that they oppose. If The Heart of the Matter is distinctively Catholic, then, its Catholic dimensions are premised on the reformulation of numerous conventional notions about who and what God is. Greene’s examination of the very possibility of assuming any absolutist notion of meaning in the interpretation of his novels is presented in his reasons for giving most of his books epigraphs. His comments present an insight into the specifically Catholic aspects of his work: “an author’s work changes, as his ideas change, with the years, and the epigraphs he uses, like his books, form a sort of autobiography, beginning with the innocent disclosures of immaturity and ending with the uncertainties and fears of old age” (Why the Epigraph? [1989] 7–8). In Greene’s terms, his fiction presents the rejection of any given range of preoccupations. Instead, his work assumes notions of meaning which are in themselves subject to radical forms of critical development.

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Greene does, nonetheless, suggest that he has found: an epigraph which I think I can apply to all my books in Robert Browning’s Bishop Blougram’s Apology. . . . Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demi-rep That loves and saves her soul in new French books— We watch while these in equilibrium keep The giddy line midway. [ll. 395–400] (8) On the basis of the innumerable ways in which his novels both acquire particular meanings and call into question the value of those very meanings, Greene’s “interest’s on the dangerous edge of things” in several important respects. First, his fiction exhibits the capacity to interrogate the religious and secular sensibilities of multiple individuals, groups, and communities within or composing a society. Inasmuch as their ways of reading proceed in turn from corresponding individual and collective forms of critique, Greene explores the diverse ways in which those diferent social subjects relate to each other. Second, inasmuch as the nature of those relationships is characterized by specifically Catholic notions of meaning, Greene both rejects and is loyal to a distinctively Catholic conception of his fiction. By way of these interrelationships in their total forms, Greene’s version of religion is understood in a comprehensively interrogative sense. The relationship between the individual and society in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter is presented by Greene in both critical and creative forms. On the one hand, the novels are interpreted by way of their mutual interrogations of individual and collective notions of meaning. If the former text is premised on its rejection of a given mode of critique, in the latter the very nature of the text itself is in question. In this sense, the novels act as their own critical texts, exploring, in their separate capacities, the degree to which they are also fictional constructs. On the other hand, the diferent forms of dogma against which the novels are composed nonetheless provide the conceptual and imaginative frameworks within which their critiques may be understood. The individual and society are, in this sense, subject to the very procedures by which any form of interpretation is conceived. It is in this sense that Greene represents diferent aspects of the Roman Catholic religion in ways that are to a greater or lesser extent unconventional in character. Neither singularly Catholic in their representations of the religious nor narrow in their conceptualiza-

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tions of the secular, both texts exhibit Greene’s distinctively Catholic preoccupations in a dynamically interrogative manner. Greene’s novels are Catholic in genre only to the degree that they exhibit a counter-concern for a distinctively secular range of imperatives. The religious anxieties presented in the texts proceed less from a particular version of religion than from the exploration of the critical concerns by which that religion is apprehended.

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Creator of Heaven and Earth: Catholicism and the “Catholic” in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair

In Graham Greene there is a contest between “dogma” and “experience.” This focuses on aspects of genre, and these features serve as keys to exploring The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair.1 They are widely acknowledged to be “ ‘Catholic’ novels” (Power i)—but what is understood by the term “Catholic novel” is nevertheless highly contested, as demonstrated in studies by Michael P. Murphy (2008) and Marian E. Crowe (2007). On the one hand, the genre is conceived to be the product of Roman Catholic belief and religious practice. In this vein, Murphy describes a “Catholic imagination” that “functions at this time as a deeply felt intuition about the nature of an organic connection among theological insights, cultural background, and literary expression” (5). On the other hand, the genre is subject to the import of many Christian and secular paradigms. Crowe considers the Catholic novel as “Christian fiction [that] brings to life doctrines rendered insipid and prosaic due to long familiarity and frequent repetition in creeds and liturgy” (Aiming 5). Greene’s novels are the product of the imperative that “a Christian novel must somehow project a Christian worldview” (15), and derivative of a specifically “Catholic imagination, [which] as a category of aesthetics lacks specific thematic and theological coherence” (M. Murphy 5). In those novels, form,2 content, and context interact with one another. As Murphy states, “interdisciplinary ‘border-crossings’ ” between literature, theology and criticism constitute aspects of the “serious examination of the theological aesthetic upon which . . . other ‘aesthetics’ might hinge” (5). In Crowe’s terms, critical attention is directed to ethically urgent aspects of human experience: “Allied with the fact that salvation and

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redemption are not meaningful categories to contemporary people is the fact that they have lost a language for talking about evil, and in having lost that language, they have also largely lost belief in the reality of evil” (Aiming 8). I want here to expand Michael P. Murphy’s perspectives on how “the ‘Word’ has historically been at home in the warm environs of literary and narrative form” (4). In this way, I aim to explore Greene’s work by way of a series of stylistically comprehensive terms of reference. The two novels in question point to the contradictory responses that Greene’s work has often received. The habit of reading the novels in religious terms has resulted in an oft-repeated tendency to polarize Greene’s thematic and formal interests. In turn, this has resulted in unconvincing accounts of their critical contexts. Mark Bosco explores at length the thematic framework of Greene’s fiction. For him, Greene is “faithful to the totality of human experience,” which means that “the presence of God emerges as a major thematic thread in his novels” (“Seeing” 35). Reading The Power and the Glory using the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, according to Bosco, “the novel ofers the reader a look into the life and death of a Mexican ‘whisky priest,’ probing how the form of Christ shapes his sense of self, his relationship to his world, and his ultimate destiny. Throughout the novel Greene posits the question of how form shapes a human being’s heart and mind” (35). Bosco’s critique is helpful in placing a rationale on a text which Greene himself admitted was “the only novel” which he wrote according “to a thesis: . . . the idealistic police officer who stifled life from the best possible motives: the drunken priest who continued to pass life on” (Ways 66). Nevertheless, by interpreting the text in ways which are largely specific to religious principles, Bosco narrows the concerns of Greene’s diverse readers. This is because Bosco invites them to consider a belief system which is hermetic in some contexts. An especially limited conception of Greene’s critical reception is, it seems, evident in the critique by Andrei Gotia. He writes that “the priest . . . keeps on discovering Christ’s image among the people he meets and tries to help others see the same reality; simultaneously, as an alter Christus, the priest is reflected and contrasted partially, in subtle ways, in some of the secondary characters of the novel” (107). For Gotia, the Catholic Church itself provides the context within which to read the novel. He concludes, “it is the Church who is the heroine of the novel. It is to her that both the priest and the half-caste belong, and it is her victory that is invisibly hailed in the martyrdom of the protagonist” (115). This reading is problematic, dependent as it is on a collection of critical perspectives that is narrowly religious in faith orientation. Gotia points to the

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dangers of appropriating Bosco’s formal critique by way of a reductively ideological emphasis. If Gotia presents a narrowly focused reading, J.C. Whitehouse displays a contrary tendency, framing Greene’s version of religion with undue emphasis on its specifically Catholic context. Whitehouse appears to read Greene by way of a stylistically rigorous approach: “Many critics have taken a guilty pleasure in reading the novels, suspecting that in doing so they are being manipulated by an inbuilt ideology” (“Men” 55). For Whitehouse, Greene needs to be understood in ways which consider his capacity to challenge a particular form of ideology. The failure to do so means that those same critics “have then exorcised their guilt by exposing that ideology for the unsatisfactory and unconvincing thing they want it to be, stressing that the religious element in his fiction is contrived, unconvincing, paradoxical and, worst of all, out of touch with an intelligent humanistic scepticism” (55). Whitehouse seems not to read Greene’s fiction in the form of religious context particular to his novel. He writes, “Greene’s characters (including Bendrix) sometimes suggest that it’s precisely because we can’t understand each other that we’ve invented a God who can understand us” (65). In totalizing how the figure of God may be identified, he does not acknowledge Greene’s questioning of any form of an absolute. He continues: “Bendrix talks of ‘getting to the end of human beings’ [Greene, End 119] and presumably means either abandoning the attempt to understand them in simplistic terms or tiring of their general messiness and unsatisfactoriness and moving on to a belief in God as the next tactical move in a strategy for coping with life” (65). Given the variety of ways in which Greene’s work may be read as Catholic, Whitehouse’s reading could be conducted in a more sinuous way. At the same time, his suggestion that The End of the Affair “is reflective fiction” (57), a genre that gives “a true, meaningful, and illuminating expression to the events, thoughts, and feelings of our lives” (59), does facilitate a reconsideration of form over content. Notably, Whitehouse observes Iris Murdoch’s contention that “literature is our best school, for it an education in how to picture and understand human situations” (59; Murdoch 34). Whitehouse comments “that, it seems to me, is as valuable a discipline for theologians as for anyone else” (“Men” 59). Acts of reading that acknowledge the worth of diferent religious and secular moral paradigms begin with confronting the advantages and disadvantages of adopting those very paradigms. They engender critical perspectives that do not frame the novels in reductively critical, even anachronistic terms.

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The Power and the Glory The Power and the Glory should be read in terms of its capacity to comment on Roman Catholicism as a dogmatic religion.3 We also need to look beyond any such subject toward secular discourses on novelistic form. My objective in doing so is to explore how form and content in Greene’s work can be placed within contexts that are helpful to their reconsideration. I find it particularly useful to read The Power and the Glory by using the theological aesthetics outlined by Bosco. While his work is valuable, I will challenge aspects of his critical premises. This is because Bosco explores the text in a comprehensive religious context, while nevertheless inviting critical expansion. Bosco begins his approach to the text with the premise that, “Roman Catholicism, more so than other Christian denominations, has deeply embedded in its tradition the understanding that an aesthetic apprehension of reality can open up a person to religious faith and conversion. It is an aesthetic drama because an individual is grasped by the form of Christ and thus shaped by that form” (Catholic Imagination 50). Bosco’s approach is useful in apprehending this text and Greene’s work as a whole in terms of their own religious dynamics, as distinct from those which do not serve the designs of the texts themselves. According to Bosco, “Catholicism for Greene is central to the political landscape of the text not because it ofers a superior ideological platform from which to live or govern society but rather because it ofers a vision that criticizes any ideology that reduces humanity to a materialist construct” (56). However valid this observation, I suggest that Bosco’s theological aesthetics may be expanded on the basis of Greene’s capacity to facilitate both Catholic and secular ways of reading. By reconsidering the theological aesthetics in Greene’s work, the premises of numerous critical positions on the author are shown as wanting. They include that of Elliott Malamet, for whom The Power and the Glory engenders a variety of anxieties on account of its inconsequential religious comment. Malamet writes that the core “situation in The Power and the Glory is . . . one that revolves around . . . problems of signification; the central question that plagues the text is how can the name of God be reintroduced in a world where all references to the divine have been systematically excised?” (34). By considering how Greene makes a substantive comment on the relationships between Catholic and secular notions of theme, this text, and Greene’s work in general have the efect of ironically focusing fresh attention on their irreligious terms of reference. This means that critical emphasis is diverted away from personalized concerns with ideology

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and character: “The traditional attacks on Greene assert that either he is too doctrinal or (conversely) depicts bad Catholics; in other words, damned if he does (incorporate a certain religious ideology into a fictional enterprise), or damned if he doesn’t (present in the safest possible light those Catholic characters)” (32). On the basis of my reconsideration of Greene, Malamet’s opinion that The Power and the Glory exhibits “a winding quest towards an unspecified, and never fully confirmed, future redemption” may assume numerous kinds of critical value (32). They include Judith Adamson’s assertion that for the whisky priest, “each life” within the Mexican state “is equally important” (Graham Greene 62), and Bernard Bergonzi’s emphasis on “ultimate values” (Study 112). For Bergonzi, what is at stake between the priest and the lieutenant is “in effect a Platonic dialogue between opposing views of the world” (112). The opposition between the Catholic Church and the Mexican state in The Power and the Glory is one way of considering the text according to a critically sophisticated range of investigative terms. Catholicism as a collectivist religion ironically assumes individualist value. This assumption of value subverts Cates Baldridge’s opinion that Greene conceives of “a diminished and humanized God” (70). Greene’s conception of the figure of God is of wide importance precisely because its representation in the Mexican state provides the lieutenant with divine validation. Also, Greene’s version of religion challenges S.K. Sharma’s suggestion that Greene “can scarcely disguise his contempt for the moral and theological perversions of institutional religion” (19). Against Sharma, the text exhibits less “a latent yearning for the transcendent vision that an authentic religious experience might nourish” (19), than the representation of the contingent nature of that experience. The Power and the Glory is about a “whisky priest,” an alcoholic “who is agonized by his weakness” (Longenecker), in a socialist Mexico of brutal religious intolerance. On finding himself stranded following an invitation from a boy to cure his sick mother, he must escape the pernicious attempt of a police lieutenant to find and execute him. In the course of his travels, he meets his child, whom he fathered illegitimately. He is dogged by a mestizo, a persistent Judas figure, who is instrumental in luring him away from the comfort of the home of a couple of Lutherans, the Lehrs. The priest is led from the safe state, in which they live, in the belief that he is to give last rites to a dying American criminal. His parabolic journey resembles a child’s story about a fabled fictional priest called Juan, which is read to an imaginative young boy called Luis. The novel concludes with the greeting of a new priest to Luis, whose religious countenance resembles that of Coral Fellowes, a young girl who gave the whisky

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priest shelter. The ending serves to reject the state’s violent atheism, to which the former priest, Padre José, has fallen victim, at the expense of his very dignity. Greene is interested in the religious apprehension of experience, as distinct from the experiential apprehension of religion. Despite living a life of relative ease, in being defrocked from the priesthood, Padre José is a lesser person. Whatever his pleasures now, “there remained something unmistakably clerical in his manner. Forty years of the priesthood had branded him” (Greene, Power 28). Consequently, he remembers nostalgically the years before taking up his first parish: “Twenty-eight years – that immeasurable period between his birth and his first parish: all childhood and youth and the seminary lay there” (29). Padre José’s nostalgic remembrance of the past resonates with the experience of the lieutenant, who, after warning Coral Fellowes and her family against harboring a whisky priest, “suddenly turned on his heel as if he could no longer bear the sight of them and strode away along the path which led to the village” (35). The lieutenant’s attitude toward any form of religion is directly opposed to that of the Fellowes: “When he had gone some way they could see him pause and spit; he had not been discourteous, he had waited till he supposed that they no longer watched him before he got rid of his hatred and contempt for a diferent way of life, for ease, safety, toleration, and complacency” (36). Such qualities of life are precisely what the socialist state cannot ofer, however promising its political ideals. These qualities set the whisky priest apart from the lieutenant. The religious beliefs of the former cannot be exorcised from the socialist state by political means. This tension constitutes the drama of the text. Padre José and the lieutenant serve as foils to the whisky priest. Despite the state’s persecution, the whisky priest ironically leads a more fulfilling life. Reflecting on his sacramental responsibilities, he contemplates how “he was probably liable to suspension, but penalties of the ecclesiastical kind began to seem unreal in a state where the only penalty was the civil one of death” (60). While the priest’s work is made difficult by the state, his reluctant approach to the priesthood suggests it also enables him to experience aspects of his daily life with a pressing sense of urgency. Over against Padre José, he is ever conscious of the religious importance of his work. The whisky priest’s administration of the sacraments points to the futility of the lieutenant’s socialism. Consequently, when the lieutenant confronts the people of the village who receive Mass, his utterances reflect his own anxieties, rather than those of the people. He is aware that Catholicism is a core component of the state’s cultural sensibility: “You’re

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fools if you still believe what the priests tell you. All they want is your money. What has God ever done for you? . . . This child is worth more than the Pope in Rome” (74–75). While his ex-lover might ridicule the priest’s belief, his commitment to his own responsibilities constitutes a vision above and beyond any functional focus on the individual. This is because it “had never occurred to him – that anybody would consider him a martyr” (79). The priest’s own belief that “a man’s first duty is to himself – even the Church taught that, in a way” (155), is a comment upon the falsity of the lieutenant’s ideology. When the lieutenant exclaims, “Well, we have ideas too” (194), as based on attending to the safety and welfare of the state’s people, he does not recognize that such ambitions are fulfilled more systematically in the context of the Catholicism that is already established in the state. As the priest explains to the lieutenant, “The fact is, a man isn’t presented suddenly with two courses to follow: one good and one bad. He gets caught up” (195). Being “caught up,” in the context of this text, points to the relative strengths and weaknesses of the characters of the priest and the lieutenant. The specifically religious thematic represented by the whisky priest and the lieutenant is emphasized at the novel’s conclusion, when the anonymous priest arrives at the young boy’s doorstep. The incident serves to frame the socialist content of the text in terms of the whisky priest’s version of religion, since the boy invites the new priest to remain anonymous. The priest says, “ ‘My name is Father – ’ But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name” (222). To the extent that the people’s safety and welfare are best apprehended in the context of the dogma of the Catholic Church, as distinct from a socialist concern for the individual, this scene frames the novel in a religious, even spiritually Catholic manner. Greene opposes the individual and society in this text to the extent that he conceives the former within the diferent thematic terms associated with the latter. If thematic analysis is one key to comprehending the religious dimensions of The Power and the Glory, it is also a limitation to any such act. This is because the religious themes in the text are subject to a range of formalizations that undermine any such thematic analysis. There is a convergence between the theological aesthetics I have outlined and several paradigms which are “other.” They center on Greene’s approaches to beauty,4 since their range of meaning upsets an overemphasis on theme or form. Francesca Aran Murphy ofers a helpful context within which to conceptualize Greene’s perspectives on beauty. She focuses on the theological aesthetics of Balthasar.5 Exploring how any given individual is

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influenced by that which she calls “the otherness of the Persons of the Trinity,” Murphy writes that “it is thus ‘the “selflessness” of the divine persons, as of pure relations in the love within the Godhead’ which is ‘the basis of every thing,’ in Balthasar’s ‘aesthetic’ theology” (17; Balthasar, Glory 7:213–214). On these terms, beauty can be theorized in two ways. On the one hand, it is something that precedes any specific collection of theological dogmas, such as may characterize the theological system of Aquinas. Drawing on Aquinas’s belief that “it is not only that something appears to us, but at the same time self-appearance itself appears to us” (Pöltner 55), for Günther Pöltner “beauty comes with the being of what is and depends on what and how something is. . . . And because the instantiation of a being arises out of its form, the beautiful afects us in the manner of a causa formalis” (52, 56). On the other hand, and problematically so, beauty is one aspect of an epistemologically diverse framework. By such terms, Paul Ricoeur centers his biblical hermeneutics on the idea that “what is at issue when dealing with the parables is not ‘a unique story dramatically expanded in[to] a long discourse, but . . . a full range of short Parables [. . .] gathered together in the Unifying form of the Gospel’ ” (Fodor 197; Ricoeur, “Listening” 242). For James Fodor, this means that “understanding the parables aright . . . means making sense of them together, in one overarching ‘network of intersignification.’ . . . For the Christian, to be schooled in the art of the parables is to be trained through the word how to see” (197; Ricoeur, Figuring 161). From this perspective, innumerable notions of theological aesthetics that are dogmatically Catholic in framework should be expanded in their conceptual range. Religious notions of form encompass formal notions of religion. The exploration of elements of the formal dimensions of religion is crucial to my reconsideration of Greene, casting emphasis, as he does, on both collectivist and individualist modes of theological enquiry. They include the capacity to engender in many and diferent contexts “a most ‘alien beauty’—alien not in the sense that it is entirely foreign to who we truly are, who we are meant, to be but in the sense that it exposes just how far removed we yet are, without Christ, from our true selves” (Fodor 200). This is exhibited in Greene’s novel in the prison scene, when any of the prisoners could give up the priest. Instead of condemning the sinfulness of the couple having sex in the cell, he considers the beauty of the act.6 This is because it points to the divine grace that any person needs in order to attain justification. On this basis, the priest condemns the pride of the Catholic woman, who wishes to confess, even while she furiously declares the couple to be “brutes, the animals!” (Greene, Power 130). For the priest, this response is worryingly hypocritical. He replies, “Don’t

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believe that. It’s dangerous. Because suddenly we discover that our sins have so much beauty” (130). According to the priest, the couple point to paradoxical notions of sameness-in-diference that are core to particularly Catholic conceptions of sinfulness. The two present qualities of virtue even as they sin, inviting the priest and the woman to contemplate what they themselves understand to be sin. The woman replies angrily: “ ‘Beauty,’ she said with disgust. ‘Here. In this cell. With strangers all round’ ” (130). To which the priest responds, “Such a lot of beauty. Saints talk about the beauty of sufering. Well, we are not saints, you and I. Sufering to us is just ugly. Stench and crowding and pain. That is beautiful in that corner – to them” (130). Beauty, for the priest, is a quality which proceeds from the precise nature of specific circumstances. He continues: “It needs a lot of learning to see things with a saint’s eye: a saint gets a subtle taste for beauty and can look down on poor ignorant palates like theirs. But we can’t aford to” (130). The priest sees beauty in the scene because he perceives in it aspects of the desperation and urgency of his own situation. In changing his outlook, the spirituality of the priest’s Catholicism develops from a highly individual perception of diferent aspects of his religion, to one which is more social in principle: “The priest stood not far from his own portrait on the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and ner vously up at the old crumpled newspaper cutting and thought, It’s not very like me now” (139). Confronting his image behind the jefe, unbeknownst to the latter, he thinks, “What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days – and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins – impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity – cut you of from grace more completely than the worst sins of all” (139). It is within his capacity to recognize what his sin might mean, that he conceives the significance of his present role and function: “Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt . . .” (139). In learning to be less judgmental of others, the priest’s version of religion develops so as to include an awareness and understanding of those who are in and of themselves other. The ethical consequences of reading this text in ways that invoke a conceptually diverse framework are vital to my reconsideration of Greene. As Sigurd Bergmann points out, “The challenge today is to widen the vision of autonomy so as to embrace the formerly subordinated and subjugated subjects, and to develop an understanding of autonomy which conceptualizes human self-determination within a web of relations among diferent strangers rather than as a collection of attributes of an isolated

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subject” (209). By way of the whisky priest’s changing perceptions of himself, The Power and the Glory engenders a shift in theological emphasis that also marks a change in literary-critical focus. Against narrow preoccupations with theme, for Greene, an interest in diverse ways of reading is a way of comprehending in the broadest possible context the circumstances and situations of individuals who are other wise marginalized. Bergmann describes such a change of focus in the following terms: “Aesthetical justice is a process whereby all parties are perceiving each other in a cultural encounter as at once similar and strange, and where each allows the other to retreat to and maintain their own unique domain to selfhood” (209). The developments in emphasis among Francesca Aran Murphy, Pöltner, Fodor, and Bergmann from theme through to form are impor tant because The Power and the Glory in itself exhibits preoccupations with form and theme that are significant both critically and theologically. Greene’s perspectives on theme and form are exhibited in Journey Without Maps (1936), his account of his travels through the interior of Liberia. After a near-fatal fever, Greene writes that he “had discovered . . . a passionate interest in living” (201). He elaborates, “It seemed that night an important discovery. It was like a conversion, and I had never experienced a conversion before. (I had not been converted to a religious faith. I had been convinced by specific arguments in the probability of its creed.)” (201). For Greene, an interest in Catholic doctrine had until then been more important than an emotional interest in Catholicism. This is because, like the priest, he had not himself been able to perceive his experience within a totality of meaning over and above a narrow collection of religious concerns. Greene continues, “If the experience had not been so new to me, it would have seemed less important, I should have known that conversions don’t last, or if they last at all it is only as a little sediment at the bottom of the brain” (201). By framing his experiences according to his own critical terms, Greene invokes a series of metaphorical associations. He continues: “Perhaps the sediment has value, the memory of a conversion may have some force in an emergency; I may be able to strengthen myself with the intellectual idea that once in Zigi’s Town I had been completely convinced of the beauty and desirability of the mere act of living” (201–202). As conversions are stigmatized within Catholicism as temporary and reversible, so Greene considers how his own version of religion has been overly reliant on a narrowly defined notion of the Catholic. His change of outlook toward the contemplation of what really being a Catholic might mean is nevertheless of small consequence, resembling as it does a kind of alcoholic intoxication, whose pleasures are

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particular to specific times and circumstances. Greene realizes that his religious sensibility is intellectually limited, important to extreme forms of experience, such as emergencies, rather than routine experience as well.7 By way of his experiences of traveling through Sierra Leone, Greene’s version of religion resembles that which he fictionalizes in his account of the whisky priest. But in Journey Without Maps Greene points to a fuller religious context still within which to read his work. For Greene, religious and secular contexts can exhibit equally forceful forms of beauty. If The Power and the Glory displays the critical limitations of both a thematic account of form and a formal account of theme, Greene himself suggests that his work should also be read using critical tools which unsettle conventional notions of the Catholic. This means shifting emphasis away from a distinctively Catholic theological paradigm to one which is more Protestant, even secular in its critical significance. Exploring aspects of the relationship between Catholic and Protestant theological aesthetics is one key to this shift. This facilitates an awareness of how the thematic import of Greene’s work is subverted by its form. As they stand, Protestant theological aesthetics are problematically defined. Lee Barrett observes that “most Protestants have been notoriously deficient in developing a theologically informed Christian aesthetics” (97). A specifically Protestant theological aesthetics requires a Catholic context since the modes of critical conception implicated within them are closely related. Barrett continues: “Balthasar’s work intersects with crucial Protestant themes at several points. Balthasar makes the exposition of Biblical narrative central to his theological method, thereby exhibiting a family resemblance to the Protestant enthusiasm for the principle of sola scriptura” (97). The Protestant emphasis on the form of scripture means that the application of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics to Protestant systems of knowledge invites considerable caution. Barrett writes that “in spite of the corrective potential of his proposals, there are liabilities to using Balthasar as a source of guidance for the construction of a Protestant aesthetic. He himself may be guilty of an excessive concentration on one particular dimension of Christianity, and may promote a theology that is too architectonic, resting on a foundation that is too narrow” (98). Too heavy an emphasis on theme, as conceived within a distinctively religious context, invites a corrective emphasis on form, which challenges the diferent interpretative terms of that very context, centered on a wide spectrum of meaning.8 This spectrum, however, must in itself assume diverse qualities of conceptual rigor if it is not to fall subject to a parallel fate. On this basis, Barrett writes,

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“Unfortunately, according to Balthasar, Protestantism, particularly in its Lutheran manifestation, has ignored the sheer attractiveness of Christ’s beauty and adopted a soteriological perspective emphasizing our need for justification and the utility of the benefits of Christ” (99).9 Balthasar’s position on theology has two implications for my argument. On the one hand, any critique of the form of Greene’s work, like some Protestant explorations of biblical scripture, should be conducted by way of a religiously Catholic thematic. On the other hand, that thematic needs to be applied in full awareness of the capacities of Greene’s texts to resist a given thematic reading. The capacity of Greene’s work to be read apart from an appreciation of the critical implications of his own version of religion means that the formal dimensions of his work may actually assume a more individualist focus than they would within the contexts of numerous Protestant models of meaning. For Barrett, “a foregrounding of the gratuity of justification” has negative consequences for an apprehension of the theological inasmuch as “Jesus’ significance is reduced to his capacity to satisfy antecedently felt needs” (99). Too wide an investigative spectrum reduces the theological significance of the figure of Christ to a system of human needs and desires rather than a focal point for expansive conceptualization. By conceiving of Christianity apart from its soteriological value, Catholicism as a dogmatic religion assumes qualities relevant to other wise irreligious individuals. On the basis of such a soteriological bias, “the life, death, and resurrection of Christ have instrumental value only. Against this tendency to treat God as an instrumental good, Balthasar argues that the intrinsic beauty of Christ’s self-giving love, a love that awakens in us an unexpected joy and delight, must be at the core of all Christian faith” (99). For Barrett, it is within the context of a religious practice that a perception of Catholic approaches to beauty may be apprehended. Barrett continues: “Such a recovery of a sense of the sheer beauty of Christ’s love and its attractive power could serve as a necessary corrective to the unfortunate Protestant proclivity to reduce Christianity to a program for the satisfaction of individual or corporate desires” (99). Over against such an individualist focus, Balthasar’s theological aesthetics are part of a diverse range of human relationships, whether religious or secular in nature. This focuses attention on the dynamic critical range of Greene’s writing, rather than a collection of concerns which are specifically religious in focus. On this basis, Barrett writes that “Balthasar rightly detects an over-investment in agency in much of Protestantism, a myopia that often prevents it from being able to answer the question of why anyone should desire to be

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righteous in the first place” (100). Greene’s formal appropriation of theology should be contextualized within a broad range of human needs and emotions. Interpreting Greene within a broad spectrum of meaning addresses various reductive Protestant ways of thinking. They include the tendency to minimize the overall importance of the Christian Godhead in his writing.10 This means that at any point the field of inquiry of Greene’s Catholic thematic may shift its focus from one that is less religious than secular in critical formation. For Balthasar, “some Protestants, including Luther himself,11 have minimized the beauty of Christ by construing his life as the expression of a dialectical tension between mercy and justice, or power and powerlessness, within God” (103). By framing numerous Protestant notions of mercy, justice, power, and powerlessness within various models of meaning that are dynamically Catholic in religious orientation, Greene’s fiction is both radically religious and innovatively secular in conception. His work assumes a diverse spectrum of critical contexts. They include those which lend themselves less to a religious preoccupation with theme than to a secular emphasis on the text itself. My theorization of Greene’s wide-ranging theological aesthetics is an attempt to advance Baldridge’s observation that The Power and the Glory should be read by way of a distinctively Protestant framework. He writes that, “if one were in a mischievous mood, one could make the argument that The Power and the Glory is one of the century’s great Protestant documents. After all, when the priest was loaded down with his full regalia he was corpulent and spiritually inefectual” (55). According to Baldridge, Greene’s priest is a figure in whom multiple representations of religion converge. He continues: “It is only after his hierarchy is swept away, his priestly gear discarded, and his liturgical calendar forgotten that he begins to grow into a genuine spiritual office” (55). For Baldridge, the priest fulfills his vocation as a priest when he is completely free of any dogmatic influence. This viewpoint does not address how Catholicism and Protestantism are less opposing themes in Greene’s work than constituent members of an expansive framework within which to conceive his thematic and formal concerns. The significance within and between diferent Catholic, Protestant, and secular models of meaning in The Power and the Glory are conveyed by way of the structure of its plot. The novel’s four parts represent the priest’s commitment to the priesthood in contrasting ways. Part One focuses on the nature of the priest’s vocational duties. Part Two centers on the dynamically experiential qualities of those duties, while Part Three concerns itself with the idea that they essentially proceed from narrow preoccupa-

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tions with the self. Part Four underscores the contingent nature of the representation of Catholicism within the text itself, pointing to a reading that is concerned with form rather than theme. Each of the four chapters in Part One is titled so as to describe the nature of the priest’s duties. For example, “Chapter 1: The Port,” marks the priest’s desire to escape Mexico, and the people’s desire that he take up his priestly responsibilities afresh. When invited by the child to attend her sick mother, to Mr Tench’s warning, “You’ll have a job not to miss the boat,” the priest replies, “I am meant to miss it” (17). Part Two, by contrast, has no named chapters because the context for the plot, as based on the extreme testing of the priest’s vocational commitment, has been set by the specificity and structure of Part One. The focal point of this part is the scene in the prison cell, where the priest’s self-perceptions are challenged. The priest does not consider himself worthy of his role: “He prayed silently: Oh God, send them someone more worthwhile to sufer for. It seemed to him a damnable mockery that they should sacrifice themselves for a whisky priest with a bastard child” (135). The priest is wholly reliant for his safety upon the religious sensibilities of the prisoners. If Part Two focuses on the experience of the priest, Part Three centers on his character. When he stays with the Lehrs, he realizes that he is subject to the diverse fears of Mexico’s general population as much as its religious needs and sensibilities. He discovers that his own version of religion is characterized by an unhelpful and distinctive individualism. He considers the guide notes of a Gideon Bible: “On the flyleaf there was a label which stated that the book was furnished by the Gideons. It went on: ‘A Bible in every Hotel Guest Room. Winning Commercial Men for Christ. Good news.’ There was a list of ten texts. The priest read with some astonishment” (165). The priest begins to apprehend how diferent qualities of religion can proceed from a range of self-indulgent concerns. Reacting to such wide forms of complacency, he recommits himself to his priestly responsibilities and follows the half-caste to the American criminal, “The Yankee” (178), who, according to the half-caste, requires last rites: “The oddest thing of all was that he felt quite cheerful; he had never really believed in this peace” (180). Before his recommitment to the Mexican people, he views his execution as a victory, serving as it does to seal his newfound connection with them: “He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint” (210). Determined not to die in a state of sinfulness, he decides to fulfill his obligations over against the militant atheistic secularism, which he faces in Parts One and Two, and the self-interested Protestantism, which he encounters in Part Three.

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Part Four concludes the contest between dogma and experience, and that which shadows this between Catholicism, Protestantism and secularism. At the time of the priest’s execution, the boy finishes his story of Juan: “Juan turned and began to pray—not for himself, but for his enemies, for the squad of poor innocent Indian soldiers who faced him and even for the Chief of Police himself” (218). As Juan’s story concludes on his hopes of a redeemed world, so The Power and the Glory closes with the arrival of a new priest. From one perspective, the whisky priest has fulfilled his role to proclaim the message of the church. From another, the close parallels between the fiction of Juan and the fate of the whisky priest suggest that he was committed less to the specifically sacramental duties of his vocation than to the innumerable and far-reaching religious, political, and social fears among Mexico’s people. It is well documented that The Power and the Glory is based in large measure upon Greene’s own travels through Mexico shortly after the rule of the Calles regime.12 In this account, The Lawless Roads (1939), Greene observes a variety of Catholic, atheistic, and secular notions of belief. He concludes that whatever the political, social, and cultural conditions of Mexico, “religion will out, and when it is suppressed it breaks its way through in strange and sometimes poisonous forms” (192). For Greene, religious traditions provide the fabric for any given ideology or doctrine, whatever its capacity to inhibit those traditions. This idea points to the tenor of my own argument, exploring as it does how Catholicism and secularism converge in Greene’s work on the basis of his ethical imperative to address the individual as much as society. I develop the view of Adamson, for whom the text, “while bemoaning the lieutenant’s violence . . . also acknowledges the need for social change and, more readily than The Lawless Roads, the excesses of the Church” (Graham Greene 62). Greene’s work may in a way be positioned against that of Adamson, whose argument is premised in part on the harmful and sometimes toxic efects invoked between diferent forms of religion and secularism. For Greene, the Catholic Church is an institution capable of fostering innumerable kinds of positive creativity. The extent of this viewpoint is displayed in his interview with Alex Hamilton in The Guardian on September 11, 1971, when he comments on “The Lawless Roads. Yes, he said, it was one of two watersheds in one’s writing, the other being Journey Without Maps. They both gave one a kind of switch, and rivers ran a diferent way afterwards” (2). Greene’s “switch,” in my opinion, constitutes a decision to concentrate on representing his version of religion in terms of its formal, as distinct from thematic import.

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The End of the Affair The End of the Affair takes as its central subject matter the version of religion of Sarah Miles, wife of Henry Miles and mistress to the novelist Maurice Bendrix. The afair ends during an air raid when Bendrix appears dead, and Sarah prays that she will give him up if he lives. This begins two years of emotional agony on her part, and the narrative itself, written by Bendrix. The afair is briefly rekindled when Bendrix confronts Sarah after reading her diary. During a course of atheistic instruction, she has implored God to cause her to sufer, and to relieve Bendrix of hurt. Shortly afterward she dies from a bronchial illness, not before assuming a version of religion that is Catholic and clearing the skin condition of the atheistic preacher. She also heals the fever of Parkis’s boy, who attained the diary as a detective hired by Bendrix. This occurred, oddly, at the initiative of Henry, who sought Bendrix’s help, “worried” Sarah was having an afair (6). In the Collected Edition of The End of the Affair from 1974 (Wise and Hill 27), Greene made a number of significant changes to the conclusion of the novel. For him, “every so-called miracle, like the curing of Parkis’s boy, ought to have had a completely natural explanation” (Introduction, 1974, ix; Ways 107). Smythe’s strawberry birthmark became a ner vous disease, capable of being cured by medical means or faith-healing. The effect of these coincidences was twofold. On the one hand, they reinforced Bendrix’s irreligion. On the other hand, “The coincidences should have continued over the years, battering the mind of Bendrix, forcing on him a reluctant doubt of his own atheism” (Introduction, 1974, ix–x; Ways 107). On both grounds, the text acts as the antithesis of a passage of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, which Greene underlined prior to the novel’s first writing: “The purification and slow constitution of the Individual into a Person, by means of the Thing-element, the apparently blind Determinism of Natural Law and Natural Happenings. . . . [N]othing can be more certain than that we must admit and place this undeniable, increasingly obtrusive, element and power somewhere in our lives: if we will not own it as a means, it will grip us as our end” (Introduction, 1974, viii–ix; Ways 106–107; Hügel 375–376). If Greene was right in his reflection that he had in fact been “cheating Baron von Hügel” (Introduction, 1974, ix; Ways 107), he nonetheless broadened the context within which to read his novel. The breadth of the critical context that Greene invokes is presented by way of Sarah’s secret baptism: “It seems to the agnostic reader – with whom I increasingly sympathize – to introduce the notion of magic. But if we are to believe in some power infinitely above us in capacity and

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knowledge, magic does inevitably form part of our belief – or rather magic is the term we use for the mysterious and the inexplicable” (Introduction, 1974, x; Ways 108). For Monica Ali, the relationship between the transcendent, the immanent, and the contingent are key to this text. In particular, Ali stresses “the fate–free will axis, with which we are no less concerned now than we were half a century ago” (xii). According to Ali, Greene asks at a fundamental level the question of “what it is to be human” (xiv). I contend that this perspective lacks precision, since it homogenizes Greene’s religious and secular interests, concentrating them on a singular theological concern. Taking as my core focus Greene’s capacity to affect narrow oppositions between religion and irreligion, I will focus on the form of the text. By this, I mean the ways in which Greene’s novel directs attention to itself as a work of fiction, as distinct from the representation of a particular notion of religious belief. In particular, I am interested in how the text represents diferent forms of limit-experience,13 and how it engenders multiple perspectives on the role and function of story. If, according to Ali, “the novel opens by posing a pointed but singlestranded question concerning the freedom of the narrator to choose his images ‘or did they choose me?’ ” (xii), the exact reasons for Bendrix’s question are highly problematic. The relationship between Bendrix’s capacity to reason apart from any religious influence, and the extent to which he “had believed then in a God” (End 1), means that the text’s representation of a particular version of religion is disturbed by issues of representation that are core to the novel genre. Sarah’s prayer following the V1 attack, “To anything that might exist,” itself thematizes Greene’s version of religion (57). Bendrix’s account is specific to his characterization, as distinct from being in some sense a representation of Greene’s own religious interests and concerns. The narrative is Bendrix’s “record of hate” (1), specific to the character’s technical abilities, as distinct from any religious concerns which lie outside the parameters of the text. Bendrix begins his account with the declaration that a “story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead” (1). Any such choice is nevertheless particular to the emotions felt by Bendrix. They constitute the fictional details of the text, including various notions of authorial bias which Bendrix believes ironically engender the text with truthfulness. In debating whether or not to approach Henry, he thinks: “For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days

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we were lucky enough not to believe” (1). Bendrix’s hatred serves, in part, as a means of understanding his position on Sarah’s version of religion. He continues: “So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate” (1). The text is written according to Bendrix’s professional standards of faithfulness to a particular course of events, as distinct from any attempt to embellish them with superfluous concepts and ideas, including diferent forms of religious and irreligious belief. Bendrix believes that he represents his present situation in terms which are objective, rather than those which are preoccupied with his own feelings of betrayal. Bendrix’s defensive attitude regarding his feelings for Sarah is nonetheless afected by his developing sense of religious belief. As he finds “it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air” (5), so he seeks to prevent his narrative from being influenced by Sarah’s Catholicism. This because Bendrix believes that “if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it” (7). Bendrix’s own version of religion is agnostic, even heterodox in orientation, if also close in conception to a Catholic religious framework. This is exhibited in his statement: “Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?” (19). To the degree that Bendrix is irreligious because of Sarah, he is nevertheless ready to adopt a conventional version of religion. On this note, he declares: “Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God,’ and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man” (31). For Greene, the fierce sense of irreligion represented in Bendrix’s characterization is a way of controlling the pace of the narrative. As Bendrix comes to sympathize with Sarah’s Catholicism during the course of the novel, so the text marks a resistance within Greene’s body of work between faithfulness toward a particular representation of events and the broad influence of ideological and religious agendas other wise external to them. The understanding Bendrix shows of Sarah’s Catholicism demonstrates how this text serves to represent diferent forms of limit-experience, including Sarah’s capacity to work miracles and to actually commit herself to that figure which she believes to be God. Bendrix’s understanding also acts to challenge the terms of their representation. This opposition

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is helpfully described by Crowe, for whom the novel as a genre both intersects and conflicts with the religious practices of Christianity itself: “Philosopher Jacques Maritain reminds that although ‘grace heals the wounds of nature,’ Christian art, although not impossible, ‘is difficult, doubly difficult—difficulty squared, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the whole difficulty is not merely the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another, for it is a question of reconciling two absolutes’ ” (Aiming 2; Maritain 69). The potentially irreconcilable diferences between notions of meaning which are Christian and those against which they are opposed, converging for Crowe in “the Fall that has tarnished the work of the Creator” (Aiming 2), are considered in less doctrinaire terms by Michael P. Murphy. He advances a “theological imagination,” which, he claims, “boils down to faith, which, in turn, is largely a matter of grammar” (9). For him, theology as a specifically religious body of knowledge intersects with a number of contemporary models of meaning, upsetting the oppositions between novelistic form and content that are core to an understanding of Greene’s novels. As Catholicism and secularism are not necessarily opposed in The Power and the Glory, so they intersect in this text, albeit with an emphasis on the latter. Paul Giles emphasizes “the idea that Catholicism is one textuality among many others, that ‘theology itself might be seen to function as a fluctuating signifier, a series of fictional constructions’” (23; Giles 31). Furthermore, a specifically religious theological aesthetics, which emphasizes “a full, perennially self-replenishing mystery” (Balthasar, Truth 138), and the diverse models of meaning that could challenge their conceptual premises are “closely approximated: what is present is an absence, an unseen reality whose power is perhaps beyond verbal expression. Paul Fiddes refers to this analogical dynamic as nothing less than the grace of God: Only the gift of divine grace can create an analogy between human speech signs and the reality of God, between the Word and the words’ ” (M. Murphy 24; Fiddes, Promised 254). For me, Greene’s oppositions between religion and irreligion, as presented in his Catholic and atheist protagonists, are subject to continual reconceptualization within and between the individual terms of his novels themselves. In contrast with The Power and the Glory, in The End of the Affair Greene stresses the latter in order to disturb the multiple factors implicated in a given critical paradigm. Between the two texts Greene anticipates Jacques Derrida’s “‘law’ of supplementation, whereby an inexhaustible supply of mediating supplements ‘produce the sense of the very thing [that] they defer’ ” (Malamet 33; Derrida, Grammatology 157). Fiction that

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is Catholic in theme and form is a means of focusing attention on those same dimensions from a perspective that is secular, even irreligious in its critical framework. The specifically irreligious terms of The End of the Affair are in essence a concern with novelistic forms. Bendrix imposes his own version of religion on the course of events between himself and Sarah. If at first their “love had turned into a love-afair with a beginning and an end” (Greene, End 25), it is nevertheless subject to Bendrix’s capacity to impose diferent patterns of meaning on their relationship. He declares, “a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in my life now ever seems to end” (121). Bendrix is caught between a desire to represent feelings and emotions that are contrary to form and aware that his technique must expand in its formal range to account for his experiences with Sarah. This means that the future itself is personified as “an unwanted and premature guest” (44), in turn challenging his motives for writing his narrative: “When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love” (44). Bendrix is learning to love and hate in ways that are new and diferent from anything with which he has been accustomed previously. Over against Smythe’s teaching, “the root of things . . . the philosophical arguments and the historical evidence” are neither atheistic nor Catholic (86), but specific to a form of religious belief that began with Sarah’s initial prayer. For Bendrix, discovering more about Sarah constitutes a conflicting emotional state, which he terms “despair” (117), his attention centered on a notion of God that resides with her. Bendrix’s final words are a prayer to a God whose existence and benevolence he paradoxically rejects and accepts: “I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever” (160). Inasmuch as the totality of Bendrix’s understanding of Sarah’s Catholicism develops in its theological range, it also afects his stylistic decisions about where to begin his account, how to focus its content, and when to conclude its thematic detail. In extended terms, Bendrix’s narrative is both Sarah’s and his own prayer. Whatever his personal beliefs, his writing is a response to Sarah’s acting out of her religion and a focal point for his own religious orientation. The distinction between the two notions of prayer points to the role and function of Greene himself in the writing of the text. Bendrix feels a

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sense of peace that could be a response to Sarah’s prayers following their split. He writes: “What do I know of phrases like ‘the dark night’ or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream. . . . And yet there was this peace” (36). On the same grounds, Sarah longs for Bendrix to be at peace. She writes in her diary: “When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more” (71). Bendrix’s conflation of Sarah with the collection of divine attributes he believes to be God points to his own status as a figure controlled and constructed by language. Sarah’s prayer is important to him: “it was the last couple of pages I read first, and I read them again at the end to make sure. It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love” (70). Inasmuch as Bendrix tangibly senses the efects of Sarah’s Catholicism, the real subject of this text is authorship, first Bendrix’s and second Greene’s. Greene points to the collection of contexts that frame his texts as fictions, as distinct from dogmatic depictions of Catholic belief. In this sense, Sarah’s question about the contingency of the truth is as much a question about the role and function of a fictional text as it is an expression of her religious anxieties: “Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another?” (87). Greene suggests through her utterances that the emotions and feelings evoked within the parameters of a fiction are a means of apprehending those same qualities outside of that fiction. To the extent that The End of the Affair explores its own status as a fiction, Greene both challenges and agrees with E.M. Forster’s denigration of the novel as a genre whose principal premise is telling a story, “this low atavistic form” (Aspects 40). For Sinyard, Greene’s insistence during an interview that “I’m a storyteller” (Parini 444, qtd. in Wendorf 621), as made in opposition to “the interests of the Modernist novelist who was not noted for the ability to provide a mesmerising plot” (Sinyard 114), was one way in which he distanced himself from a variety of modernist experimental forms. In this way, he positioned himself against a “disdain for an element of fiction which [he] both valued and at which he excelled” (Sinyard 115). Against Sinyard, I suggest that the reasons for Greene’s preoccupation with story were not necessarily conceived in opposition to Forster’s opinion that “the highest factor common to all novels . . . could be something diferent—melody, or perception of the truth” (Aspects 40). For Greene, the imbrications between novelistic form as a particularly

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secular notion of perception and novelistic content as its religious context call into question Forster’s wish. Greene’s stress on the role of narrative in his fiction is therefore as much a reappropriation of specifically secularist notions of story as it is an opposition to allegedly atavistic literary forms. Greene’s capacity to disturb notions of story that are either narrowly thematic or reductively formal in conception is conveyed in his early poem “Fears” (21), collected in his first book and poetry collection, Babbling April (1925).14 The poem is a monologue of five couplets, composed in iambic pentameters. Its formal regularity is nevertheless held against a series of rhetorical statements and questions in which the speaker considers in the same utterances his fears and hopes of Heaven. To the degree that the poem is itself a comment on Greene’s fiction, I understand the voice of the speaker to be that of Greene. Greene begins: “If when I die my body leaves the grave, / Can God return me all I need to have?” (ll. 1–2). Contrary to obvious expectations, for Greene, Heaven is a lesser place than earth since he might not find there the pleasures which he has known while alive. At the same time, the question is rhetorical in its implication that Greene may well lead a much fuller life there. In the next couplet, he writes: “He’ll give me Songs, for which I do not care, / Music and Love, yet I’ll be homesick there” (3–4). On the one hand, he wants the company he enjoyed on earth. On the other hand, the capitalization of “Songs,” “Music,” and “Love” suggests that, in keeping with the first couplet, homesickness, indeed any form of sickness, will be absent from Heaven. The third couplet focuses on his immediate physical needs: “He’ll fetch me Bowls, brimming with Heaven’s wine. / Is there no quiet inn where I may dine?” (5–6). From one perspective, Greene does not want to encounter corpulence. But from another, he may actually be glad to no longer visit those places characterized by their lack of grandeur. According to Greene, Heaven is marked by pleasures of both endless and limited appeal. If the first three couplets center on Greene’s common experience, the fourth and penultimate couplet marks a change in tone in the poem: “For Lips and Laughter, of He’ll find a place. / But can He give fatigue, a dusty face?” (ll. 7–8). At this point, Greene focuses his attention on those aspects of Heaven which are other to his expectations. As Heaven is a place without need, care, or scarcity, so the absence of those qualities will deprive him of the very satisfactions which are the basis for this text. Both lines are, as such, marked by chiasmi, whose inverted syntax also inverts the sentiment of the poem, while line 8 assumes the syntax of a list. Heaven thereby acquires qualities of commonplace experience. On this basis, Greene pities those who follow him, since Heaven is a place of stifled

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rather than confounded expectations: “My friends will meet me haloed in white glory. / I shall not tell them my new doubtful story” (ll. 9–10). Broadly speaking, the phrase “doubtful story” can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, Greene’s utterances reflect a doubtful image of Heaven. It is a place whose potential joys are incomprehensible because of his experiences as a human being. On the other hand, the poetic regularity of the text renders ironic its patterns of emotion, syntax, and form. Heaven is a place whose pleasures are greater than anything imaginable. On this second basis, all notions of form are contingent upon the agendas and knowledge an individual or group imposes on a given utterance or situation. In “Fears,” Greene anticipates his Catholic appropriation of narrative in The End of the Affair. This is because he focuses his attention on the diferent values that characterize a given religious, irreligious, or secular context. His fiction is an exploration of what, exactly, renders a particular context meaningful. Even while The End of the Affair is in some sense a rejection of a Catholic thematic, often its formal dimensions are significant only insofar as they are read within their Catholic framework. On the one hand, Bendrix’s prayer may be interpreted in distinctively secular terms. His story, including its formal and thematic coherence, is the product of his characterization as a novelist. On the other hand, his story resonates with the wide body of beliefs, hopes, and religious practices that characterize innumerable notions of the Catholic. In this sense, Greene’s text is about the intersection between narrative as a secular mode of critical formation, and narrative as a tool for the conceiving of a distinctively religious range of conceptual phenomena. On the basis of “Fears,” the opposition between the corporeal and the ethereal is one key to Greene’s exploration of any particular aspect of the Catholic. Sarah writes about Bendrix by emphasizing what she considers to be his corporeal dimensions: “Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing” (End 87). For Sarah, Bendrix’s ability to write constitutes the core of his character. This is because for her it is a means of comprehending the full extent of their love for each another, taking its lead from her own religious belief. She contemplates a scar which he received on protecting “another man’s body from a falling wall. . . . That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity” (87–88). In laying stress on her feelings for Bendrix, as distinct from the practice of

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her emerging religion, Sarah’s diary marks the religious thematic of Greene’s text, not Bendrix’s technical ability: “But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve” (88). Sarah’s narrative assumes a diverse variety of religious contexts, of which none are dominant, including those which are primarily ethereal in nature. In rejecting a religion that is less ethereal than corporeal, Sarah comes to accept some of Smythe’s atheistic beliefs: “Richard’s right, I thought, we have invented the resurrection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy-tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues” (88). According to Sarah, the manner in which a particular notion of the religious is conveyed is subject to its rejection by the very objects which convey its meaning, such as the statues in a church. She continues: “They were like bad colour pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness” (88). By conceiving of the Catholic effigies in a manner that stresses the needs and beliefs of both Catholic and secular individuals, Sarah ironically sympathizes with various specifically religious dimensions of the Catholic. This is because she associates them with Bendrix’s character, marked with her own version of religion: “And of course on the altar there was a body too—such a familiar body, more familiar than Maurice’s, that it had never struck me as a body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loin-cloth concealed” (88). Sarah is prompted to remember her feelings on seeing a body of Christ while with Henry: “I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands. It had sickened me” (88). For Sarah, the effigies of Christ in Catholic churches represent exactly the kind of belief which she struggles to accept. Of her experience with Henry in the Spanish church, Sarah writes: “Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth-century pillars, but I was sick and I wanted to get out into the open air. I thought, these people love cruelty. A vapour couldn’t shock you with blood and cries” (88). As Sarah values Bendrix for his corporeality, as distinct from his ethereality, so she conceives of Christ’s spirit in a manner that is in keeping with a particularly stable notion of His divinity, albeit one of her own making. In Sarah’s

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eyes, Christ and Bendrix are similar in terms of their radically humane effects on her spiritual sensibility. The End of the Affair, then, invites a range of religious contexts, even as its overall construction centers on Bendrix’s and by extension Greene’s concerns with novelistic form. Inasmuch as Sarah’s concern with the body is especially theological in its appropriation of Bendrix’s narrative, The End of the Affair demands a broad contextual reading. As the narrative composed by Bendrix is the context for Sarah’s diary, so the diary is both the context for Bendrix’s characterization and Greene’s novel itself. From one perspective, Sarah’s views on the body are in keeping with the theological aesthetics outlined by Bosco, for whom “an impersonal, vaporous, disembodied spirit seems less believable to Sarah in this world of flesh. Sarah submits to a person— the person on the cross—even if this person is never addressed directly, only observed” (Catholic Imagination 63–64). According to Bosco, Greene’s novel proceeds from Sarah’s version of religion, even as this is without stable critical premises. He continues: “The theological aesthetic is most pronounced here, for in discovering what is at stake in believing in this incarnated God, she becomes a more willing participant in that Christform, of identifying herself with the sufering Christ” (64). While Bosco’s reading is valuable because of its emphasis on Sarah’s role within the overall novel, his interpretation can be advanced by considering the capacity of the text to be read in dynamically formal terms. Recently, John C. Waldmeir has considered a range of representations of the human body among contemporary Catholic writers and texts. For him, it is important to “recognize and value the Catholic understanding of the term ‘body of Christ’ because of the relationships the term both connotes and stimulates” (2). But “it is crucial to recognize that, amid all these relationships, one point persists: each author imagines those relationships primarily in terms of fleshly existence” (2). According to Waldmeir, specifically Catholic representations of Christ are also distinctively secular in their religious connotations. He continues: “Moreover, in each case, these authors find Catholic liturgy to be the source and summit of their faith, because it is in liturgy that the sacred is called forth from the mere proximity of flesh to flesh” (2). By these terms, I suggest that Sarah’s preoccupation with the flesh is a displaced concern with narrative form. Greene’s novel centers on raising the status of a variety of religious and secular critical paradigms to a level equal in overall importance to their Catholic context, such that Greene is interested in the role and function of literature itself, as distinct from Catholicism. Recent criticism of this novel has continued to stress the distinctions between form and content which this chapter has sought to challenge.

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Darren J. N. Middleton states in an endnote that “in the novel as in life we are not privy to God’s view of the world, only to what takes place within ourselves, and Greene makes this point about theological and epistemic ambiguity very clear” (Theology 223).15 Any such notion of clarity is subject nevertheless to the capacity of fiction to assume meaning of a wholly secular persuasion. Middleton states: “I wish I had the space to problematize this apparent tension between reason and experience; in my view, a rationally defensible God need not be at odds with religious experience” (223). For Middleton, core to Greene’s text, and to fiction itself, is the separation of rationality from experience, marked as they are by an apparent disparity between secularist and religious agency. Contrary to Middleton, I suggest that “Greene’s own stress” is not “on their apparent incompatibility” (223) but their susceptibility to radical intersection. Sarah’s reflection about Smythe, “Could anyone be so serious, so argumentative about a legend?” (Greene, End 91), means that her sense of “inverted belief” reflects her frustration at trying to comprehend a belief system marked by its own hermetic version of religion (91): “When I understood anything at all, it was some strange fact I didn’t know that hardly seemed to me to help his case” (91). Bendrix’s anger with Sarah is a displaced reaction to her own inability to believe in any body of doctrine, religious or secular. He exclaims, “Are you there? I said to Sarah. Are you watching me? See how I can get on without you. It isn’t so difficult, I said to her. My hatred could believe in her survival: it was only my love that knew she existed no more than a dead bird” (131). This reaction refutes almost any reading that polarizes reason and experience, whatever the persuasiveness of an investigative focus which rests on “sympathy’s official range” (Middleton, Theology 42). As Bendrix’s narrative is an attempt to impose form on a situation that seems to resist the imposition of form, so Greene’s novel marks the limitations of employing theme as a guiding principle in the structuring of a fiction. On the basis of Greene’s radical appropriation of the relationship between content and form, Bendrix’s questioning of his motives is instructive to any that Greene himself might have adopted in the act of writing: “If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate?” (151). Bendrix’s hatred of “the books I write with their trivial unimportant skill” (151) is, then, less a mark of his failure, as is consistent with Middleton’s distinction between reason and experience, than an ironical comment on Greene’s own craft. It is the diverse contexts that engender this irony to which I shall now turn.

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Theme, Form, and Context As the forms and themes of The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair intersect, so Greene emphasizes the precise contexts, as established by the author, that engender such acts of reading. Distinguishing between novelistic form, theme, and context, and placing attention on any one, to the exclusion of the other two, has been viewed as a tenuous, even misguided critical endeavor by some critics. T.R. Wright makes a number of points in this regard, each of which I wish to challenge. First, he argues that “one of the few principles on which all critics agree, is the inseparability of form from content, a belief staunchly defended against the heresy of paraphrase. ‘A literary work is its meaning’ ” (4). Wright positions himself against any form of reading that is not rigorous in its approach to a text’s stylistic features. Wright suggests, “The whole point of reading literature, its importance as a humane discipline, beyond that of giving pleasure (which is by no means unimportant), is that it says something about life which cannot be said in any other way” (4). I should like to make several points which question the validity and status of this proposition as a de facto statement, beginning with the fact, however obvious, that Wright’s opinions are themselves subject to critical contexts of their own, several of which, particularly in regard to Greene, are highly questionable. For Wright, “literary devices, in other words, are not just ornamental, imparting additional eloquence to an otherwise bald and unconvincing statement or narrative. They have the capacity to generate new meaning by stretching language beyond its ordinary uses” (4). While form and theme are not subject to mutual distinction, Wright’s views on the total efect of a particular text are highly problematic. The ideological oppositions between form and theme in Greene mean language usage cannot be subject to a value that is of a more or less purely functional approximation. My criticism of Wright’s opinions on language usage, moreover, renders problematic his reading of The End of the Affair, focusing attention in turn on a range of critical assumptions that persist among Greene’s commentators. Wright comments on this text, “Greene ofers his most powerful challenge to rational liberal humanism and its exclusion of God both from the real world and from the ‘realistic’ world of fiction” (123). According to Wright, “the narrator . . . begins as an agnostic but comes, grudgingly, to accept the existence of a God whom he continues to hate and to whom he pleads, at the end of the novel, to be left alone” (123). For Wright, Greene’s narrator constitutes the primary subject of his novel. He continues: “He has learnt in the meantime that grace is irresistible, that

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God’s mysterious plot, like those of his own novels, is moving inexorably to a predestined end” (123). It is precisely such a notion of an “end” that my reading of this novel questions. The possibility that the text centers on Bendrix’s character over against his experience of Sarah and, furthermore, on Sarah’s appropriation of both Bendrix’s and Greene’s crafts, means that, in its totality, the text raises its own sense of critical urgency on the tenuous relationship between diferent forms of creativity and authorship. Greene’s novel is neither an exclusively secularist document, however dynamic the terms of its secularism, nor an ironic statement on the exclusion of the figure of God from fiction. This challenges the validity of Wright’s distinctions between theological and literary scholars, “hedgehogs, who are drawn towards holistic systems of belief, wanting to fit the universe into a single all-embracing pattern, and foxes, who prefer to take experience as it comes, in all its bewildering variety. The first type, the theory goes, is drawn towards theology, the second towards literature” (5; Berlin 1–2, 39–40). The contingent nature of both religious and secular forms of critical practice means that Wright overstates his case on “the decline of belief in Christianity and the rise of literature as the provider of a new canon, a new set of scriptures enshrining an alternative set of liberal-humanist values” (5). Wright’s liberal humanism, in efect, constitutes a bias concomitant to that of the very position on the relationship between form and content which he argues against. Wright’s theory, then, little advances Michael Edwards’s argument that “we do not understand literature without a theory of language, and we do not understand either without a theory of life” (1). Founded on Pascal’s binary between grandeur and misère (2),16 it is this kind of totalizing notion of literature that I suggest Greene opposes. Moreover, contrary to Luke Ferretter, who himself questions Wright and Edwards on the basis of the overemphasis on a “poetics of faith” over “a theology of poetry” in the case of the former (159), and the concern with “theological reflection upon ‘all turns of our experience’ ” in the latter (165; Edwards 7), Greene places limits on the extent to which his texts challenge a particular theological or theoretical paradigm. For Ferretter, “we understand literary texts on the basis of our experience as a whole, but, insofar as the text constitutes a new experience, it leads us to understand our experience as a whole in a new way” (187–188). For Greene, by contrast, any such novel way of conceiving of a literary text is subject to the terms of that text, not a collection of doctrines and belief systems uninvited by its theme or form. Novelistic context is, then, less an unconditional given within a particular critical reading than a specific and analyzable element of the text itself. Wright’s

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opinion that “it has become a kind of parlour-game among modern schools of criticism to invent new contexts which produce ludic meanings” (15) is disingenuous, at least in Greene’s case. If those meanings are “clearly unintended by their authors,” created, as they happen to be, “as part of a campaign against lucidity, the belief that language is, or should be, transparent” (15), they nonetheless raise the need to explore the very factors which engender their particular meaningfulness. The exploration of novelistic context is, then, a worthy, plausible, and necessary endeavor as distinct from one that should be overlooked. To read The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair in terms of their novelistic contexts shows that while each text can be considered individually on a thematic or formal basis, those same elements are nevertheless subject to radical convergence. This has the efect of framing those dimensions of the texts in terms of the intersections between critical paradigms which are other wise unrelated. The two novels, then, can be read within their own forms of interpretation, and in terms of the diferent notions of meaning that those same readings engender. This means that theme and form, when read in the context of the diferent interpretative terms invoked by the texts themselves, are interdependent features of the novels. The whisky priest’s tendency to conceive of Mexico’s people in terms of their religious identities means that while the atheism of the Mexican state might challenge the priest’s version of religion, and, in turn, that connoted by the text itself, the priest’s Catholicism is nevertheless specific to his character. Thus, when the priest ofers Mass, his thoughts on Heaven retain their distinctively Catholic significance: “[I]t was as if he had been permitted to look in from the outside at the population of heaven. Heaven must contain just such scared and dutiful and hungerlined faces” (Greene, Power 71). Moreover, when the mestizo confesses to the priest, his reaction, while pointing to the limitations of his version of religion, also exhibits his commitment to the priesthood: “It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good and beautiful, for home or children or civilization—it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt” (97). The priest’s mixed perspectives on his vocation, then, mark the capacity of this text to be read for its singularly Catholic significance. Whatever the subversive potential of a secular concern with form, the text’s sense of the Catholic marks its resilience against a narrowly formal reading. The End of the Affair may be read on a similar basis, if from a contrasting perspective. Whatever the capacity of its Catholic thematic to undermine its secular concerns with form, those same formal dimensions also

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oppose a narrowly Catholic reading. When Bendrix meets Sarah two years after their afair, he comments on his occupation as an author in ways that retain elements of his own character, even as he alludes to her religious influence: “How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations” (11). Wishing to convey Sarah as he believes she would be first noticed by any other person, Bendrix is faithful to his beliefs in the objectivity of an author, even as this is subject to an undetermined influence: “Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying, ‘Yes, Henry?’ and then ‘You?’” (11). According to Bendrix, Sarah’s way of addressing him in itself serves as a means of understanding the tone of her utterance. He continues: “She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me” (11). Bendrix’s strength of character means that he describes his own person over and above the many secular and Catholic paradigms to which he is subject. The text retains its secular dynamics, however forceful its opposing religious influences. As the thematic and formal dimensions of The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair can be read within their own interpretative terms, they can also be read apart from a range of subsequent notions of critical value they might assume. This means that Greene’s texts may assume paradigmatic frameworks that are wholly other from any sense of the Catholic commonly associated with them. Greene’s work is, then, dependent on the Christian master narrative17 for its specifically thematic notions of meaning and their appropriations of form. At the same time, that dependence itself engenders a variety of diferent concepts, which point beyond the Christian master narrative. On the one hand, Greene’s fiction may be read before the early observations of Charles I. Glicksberg, for whom “Greene’s work illustrates the fact that there is no such thing as a ‘religious’ (or for that matter a ‘political’) novel” (129). Proceeding as his opinion does from a Nietzschean form of existentialist belief, particularly “the growing realization in the twentieth century that God is dead” (3), Glicksberg suggests that literature is divorced from any sense of religious commitment. For Glicksberg, the novel as a genre is not

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founded on any religious or political agenda: “Other wise the novel turns into a religious tract in which the dogma is theologically sound but artistically useless” (130). However reductive Glicksberg’s opposition between fiction and dogma, he does nevertheless point to Greene’s capacity to engender the convergence between innumerable forms of critical value, even as those same forms can exist in and for themselves. In this sense, Greene’s fiction points to the temporal as its most distinguished feature. On the other hand, Greene nevertheless implicates a sense of the eternal which invites to his texts a diferent collection of critical paradigms again. If, as David Karnath believes, “the philosophical prestige of literature in our era has brought divergent world views to seek expression through the novel” (429), elements of those worldviews are nonetheless subject to “an acute intuition of the mutual exclusion of forms” (445). The End of Affair is thus a text whose sense of context is dynamically expansive as much as a narrative whose events are relevant to a specific collection of circumstances. Robert Murray Davis’s statement concerning the text’s conceptual value, on these terms, retains its validity: “Recent critics of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair have begun to realize that the novel is more than a tract to be saved from itself, its author, and Catholic theology” (“Struggle” 397). The diferent forms of interpretation invoked by Greene’s text means that he need not be confined to a given critical school. Except, in opposition with Davis, for whom “Bendrix is . . . more interested in people than in characters because he is activated by passion” (403), this text, along with The Power and the Glory, also resists readings centered on a singular paradigm, whether emotional, intellectual, or conceptual. If The End of the Affair lends itself to “the very newest kind of—open-ended—analysis” (410), it does so on the basis of Greene’s capacity to intersect multiple critical frameworks. As Richard Johnstone points out, Greene himself does not distinguish between emotional and intellectual models of meaning in any clear and obvious sense: “Emotional belief . . . emphasizes the personal need for faith, the willingness to accept belief without a rigorous understanding of premises or dogma. It carries implications of weakness or immaturity” (63). Greene’s fictions assume their critical and creative terms precisely on account of their numerous premises, and their rigorous interrogation of theological or theoretical dogmas. The relationship between the temporal and the eternal in the two texts is shown in several key ways. During the final conversation between the whisky priest and the lieutenant, the priest suggests that his motives for persisting with his work are divided: “We’ve always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why

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should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry—hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power?” (Greene, Power 199). According to the priest, any power assumed by the state is challenged by that which is invoked within the terms of his religion. He continues: “It’s better to let him die in the dirt and wake in heaven—so long as we don’t push his face in the dirt” (199). For the priest, earth and Heaven are not mutually exclusive places but carefully imbricated aspects of reality. The social and political circumstances of Mexico’s people are, contrary to the lieutenant’s opinion, not ways of distinguishing between the rich and the poor, but measures of a person’s moral character. To the priest’s words the lieutenant responds by asserting his belief in letting his “heart speak” (199): “You never talk straight. You say one thing to me—but to another man, or a woman, you say, ‘God is love.’ But you think that stuf won’t go down with me, so you say diferent things. Things you think I’ll agree with” (199). For the lieutenant, the priest’s reasoning is flawed by what he perceives to be double standards. The priest replies to the lieutenant by clarifying his position on theology: “Oh . . . that’s another thing altogether—God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognise that love. It might even look like hate” (199–200). According to the priest, love is an emotion whose implications in a secular context assume greater levels of significance in those which are religious. He continues, “It would be enough to scare us—God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn’t it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around” (200). For the priest, God is the main and sole figure through which to perceive Mexico’s oppressive socialism. Over against a secularist focus on the temporal, Greene suggests that the priest’s theological perspective on a Catholic sense of eternal life is equally valid to the reading of this novel. The End of the Affair, in contrast with The Power and the Glory, centers on the material circumstances of the protagonists. Bendrix personifies war, not God, as the cause of his split with Sarah: “War had helped us in a good many ways, and that was how I had almost come to regard war as a rather disreputable and unreliable accomplice in my afair” (45). Furthermore, Bendrix conceives of Sarah as a figure central to the precision of his narrative, not someone with whom he can achieve a relationship with God: “I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record

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of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself” (107). While this novel may well be read in terms of its religious thematic, it also invites critical value that subverts any sense whatsoever of that same thematic. Greene’s work exhibits diverse relationships between religious and secular paradigms, including their mutual dependence and interdependence. Implicated within those same relationships are far-reaching notions of the temporal and the eternal. To guide the conceptual application of Greene’s work, any such grand notion of theorization itself needs theorizing. One means of doing this is to consider how Greene appropriates the discourses of intentionalism and anti-intentionalism. Of particular interest to me are the emphasis and counteremphasis between W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley and Roland Barthes on the author and the writer. This is because the former deliver “the most forceful defence of” the critical position that the latter revises (Juhl 45–46) and, moreover, is contemporaneous with Greene’s novels. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, “intention is design or plan in the author’s mind” (334). To the degree that a “poem does not come into existence by accident” (334), its value as a literary composition resides within the multiple forms of interpretation engendered by a particular notion of language: “The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge” (335). A literary text, on this basis, serves the linguistic prerogatives of a given culture. This position on the poem and language contrasts with that of Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1968). In contrast to Wimsatt and Beardsley, for whom “what is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology” (335), for Barthes, the critical language used to interpret a text is never in any sense necessarily a separate element of that very text, no matter what form its genre may take: “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (“Death” 142). From this perspective, a literary text is framed by the very concepts that would otherwise point to its public ownership. To the degree that a text is the predicate of language itself, it is best perceived in terms of a system of spatial meta-

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phors: “We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). It is in and through Barthes’s capacity to question particular ways of reading that Greene can both acquire and challenge numerous conceptually limited notions of interpretative critique. If, as Barbara K. Olson suggests, “Barthes’ experience as a reader was what he called a ‘revolutionary act’ ” (341; Barthes, “Death” 147), it is also nevertheless the case that the proximity of theology and meaning in his essay suggests that his own acts of reading and writing may themselves assume diferent aspects of the religious. Furthermore, in characterizing himself as a “scriptor” (147), Barthes points to how any form of writing, religious or secular, is itself subject to numerous forms of interpretation. “Scriptor” derives from the Old French terms “escriptor” and “scripteur,” which are themselves close to those for “scripture,” escriture and escripture, from which derives the modern French écriture (OED). Barthes writes: “Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt” (147). Barthes’s critical position has, in relation to literature and theology, attracted a range of counterpositions. Insofar as Barthes’s preoccupation with the scriptor “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity,” whose focus is, “in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (147), the act of reading is independent of any critical influence.18 In his attempt to address aspects of the religious implications of Barthes’s interpretative framework, specifically those which suggest “he is not writing about anything, but merely writing (intransitively), not drawing our attention to any thing beyond the writing” David Jasper argues that “the reading of a text may itself be a moral training” (Study 46). He concludes, “Let the literature speak for itself” (46). For Michael P. Murphy, writing nearly twenty years later, literary critique is currently at “the point at which deconstruction becomes destruction . . . resulting in . . . the demise of both the receiver and sender of signs, that is, in the demise of the human person” (67). Greene’s texts advance any such moralistic imperatives by virtue of their capacity to sustain both absolutist and radically open-ended forms of analysis. This far-reaching act of critical framing constitutes Greene’s moral awareness. The conclusions of The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair each point to such a form of moral awareness. The whisky priest comments on his spirituality, even as he is physically weak before the lieutenant:

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“ ‘Listen,’ the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, ‘I’m not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they’re in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I’m not telling them fairy stories I don’t believe myself’ ” (Greene, Power 200) According to Greene’s priest, a Catholic believer’s faith in God is of significance precisely on account of the secular approaches to religion against which its terms are opposed. He continues: “‘I don’t know a thing about the mercy of God: I don’t know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this—that if there’s ever been a single man in this state damned, then I’ll be damned too.’ He said slowly, ‘I wouldn’t want it to be any diferent. I just want justice, that’s all’ ” (200). The priest’s religious sense of justice means that even miracles can assume diferent notions of meaning: “[I]t happens again and again perhaps—because God’s about on earth—and they say: these aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is” (201). While the text’s secular dimensions have the capacity to subvert the import of its Catholic context, within the totality of the text itself, the Catholic reasserts itself as its dominant framework. Bendrix’s approaches to religious belief are not dissimilar to those of the whisky priest. Even as Bendrix struggles to create believable characters, those characters, including Sarah, are figures of his own personal sense of religious belief, as distinct from that which is dogmatically Catholic: “Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive. There is nothing psychologically false about him, but he sticks, he has to be pushed around, words have to be found for him, all the technical skill I have acquired through the laborious years has to be employed in making him appear alive to my readers” (Greene, End 154). In keeping with Barthes’s challenge to any way of reading that proceeds from a single source of authority, Bendrix expands interpretative frameworks that are singular in their critical focus. This can include any series of conceptually limited oppositions between forms of critique that are principally Catholic or Protestant in orientation. The End of the Affair is a text whose dynamically formal features retain their secularist connotations, even as they may in themselves assume a Catholic thematic. The religious and secular contexts of both texts can exist in and for themselves, even as one is subject to the radically subversive context of the other. In his letter of April 24, 1952, to Denis Cannan, who collaborated with Pierre Bost on the stage adaptation of The Power and the Glory (R. Greene, Letters 195), Greene makes especially insightful remarks. Commenting on the script for the stage, he suggests that his novel was conceived, princi-

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pally, as dialectic. Greene focuses on a particular scene between the priest and the lieutenant, which, in the novel, appears to be the conversation when the former is finally caught by the latter. Greene writes: “In the book one used the device of the two men first being held up by rain before going back to the city, and afterwards of the night’s lodging on the way to the city. This was a reasonable setting for what is really a dialogue between two mystics” (195). For Greene, the two characters each present opportunities within which to express points of view that are contrasting in content, if nonetheless necessarily mutually singular in meaning. Greene continues: “What I feel about your draft is that the dialectic has become a little too plain . . . and explanatory, and therefore not very dramatic, while at the same time most of the space is given to dramatic incident. The drama of this last scene surely from the moment of the lieutenant’s arrival must be only the drama of dialectic” (195–196). For Greene, the beliefs of the characters are visible in ways that are deliberately provocative at the level of their ideological content. If the lieutenant’s belief system is one of hard-minded opposition to that of the priest, the version of religion presented by the priest can nonetheless itself resemble an antireligious politics. The close affinities between the characters in terms of their contrasting approaches to religion constitute a kind of critical impulse. This serves in part to still any uneven dramatic emphases that either character could have upon Greene’s novel. John Cottingham provides a helpful description of the opposing mindsets that are held by “religious and non-religious people. . . . For the theist, the very universality of spiritual impulses and experiences of the sacred may be adduced as evidence of a sensus divinitatis, a capacity to apprehend the divine that in some form or other is shared by all humankind, even though it may not necessarily be recognised under that description” (135). In this vein, Greene’s whisky priest represents a solid set of personal and social values, the evidence of which, whether acknowledged or not, is vitally significant. The whisky priest embodies, in a sense, the moral capacities that diferent readers will bring to their interpretations of Greene’s novel, however loose or focused their critical methods are. It is the embodiment of diverse levels of being in such interpretative practices that, in a sense, defines religion and secularism in Greene’s novel. As Cottingham writes, “The secularist . . . is likely to favour a ‘naturalistic’ interpretation—perhaps that these impulses and experiences derive from biologically explicable capacities and dispositions inherited from our evolutionary past” (135). While Greene’s lieutenant might reject diferent kinds of religious meaning, he is acutely aware of their efects. Within Cottingham’s frame of reference, both the lieutenant and the priest can

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potentially apprehend their opposing forms of belief in similar terms. For Cottingham: “It is perhaps not obvious how a capacity for so-called ‘spiritual experience’ might confer a selective advantage, but there is great detail of speculation in the contemporary literature on how religious and quasi-religious impulses might have played a useful role (e.g. in promoting social solidarity)” (135). Such a role, in Greene’s novel, is one of enabling the narrative to continue its critical momentum concerning the representation of the very idea of belief itself. The religious impulse, in this sense, is a quality of writing that confers in a readership both empowerment and disempowerment in terms of intellectual interrogation. An element of the critical awareness of a reader, and a feature pertaining to her character, even personality, the religious impulse is key to the exploration of Greene. This is because its application facilitates an investigative engagement that is both balanced and measured, and open to the development of interpretative contingencies. Such a range of qualities, at the level of the events of the narrative of The Power and the Glory, means that the religious meaning of the text is its own “by-product” (135). This is because the text is, in a narratological capacity, part “of other traits whose presence was beneficial in evolutionary terms” (135). Richard Kearney suggests that conceiving of religion in terms of its impact upon a direction of travel, however apprehended, is a useful line of enquiry. This is precisely how an individual of many beliefs or none can map her own physical and metaphysical intentions. He writes: “I didn’t know then—and I still don’t know—but I do know that not knowing where you are is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if you are still trying to go somewhere. I am very suspicious of those who know exactly where they are, whether they be dogmatic theists or atheists” (26). To read Greene’s narratives for their religious meaning is also in some sense a way of comprehending diferent forms of spirituality. The critical impulses that occur within and across Greene’s writings are also forms of critical and creative potential that can have their own religious and secular dimensions. Diferent aspects of Greene’s work can become sources of critical support in an interpretation when inflected by his own proclivity for doubt. Greene’s inclinations toward religious doubt are voiced in his account of how he was initially received into the Church. Greene writes of his “first Confession” that (Sort 121): “a convert really believes in his own promises. I carried mine . . . like heavy stones . . . and the only witness of my baptism was a woman who had been dusting the chairs” (121). For Greene, entering into some kinds of Catholic belief was also a means of commencing a course of systematic internal change. This was one whose capacity

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for personal transformation could be both comprehensive and, sometimes, conceptually inadequate. Greene continues: “I took the name of Thomas—after St Thomas the doubter and not Thomas Aquinas—and then I went on to the Nottingham Journal office and the football results and the evening of potato chips” (121). Doubt is intrinsic to a version of religion in a way that is similar to how a professional working life is influenced by its own series of contingencies. Doubt, in Greene’s use of the term, itself facilitates the elucidation of belief. This renders its interpretative terms as important in a way beyond those that are sometimes first presented. It is Greene’s capacity to be read in both religiously absolutist and theoretically open-ended contexts that exhibits the extent of his Catholic and secular concerns. To the extent that The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair are texts centered on no particular aspect of those concerns, they oppose any attempt to impose on Greene a singular model of meaning. In this sense, Greene’s work cannot be limited to any central imperative, such that his texts exhibit innumerable diferent paradigms. For me, it is the tension between those diverse paradigms which constitutes the core of Greene’s fiction. The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair exhibit Greene’s version of religion in similar yet altogether contrasting ways. If the Catholic thematic of the former assumes secularist notions of meaning normally associated with novelistic form, the form of the latter can itself assume religious connotations, whether conventionally Catholic or wholly other in faith orientation. The degree to which Greene appropriates and reappropriates the religious and secular dimensions of his texts depends on the context in which they are conceived. This aspect of Greene’s work in turn focuses attention on the need to theorize novelistic context as a separate and distinguishable element of his fiction. Greene’s work is implicated in critical paradigms that are not only singularly Catholic in framework, but Protestant, secular, and even atheistic. In part, Greene’s fiction centers on laying fresh emphasis on seemingly anachronistic elements of Christianity. But it also brings about the convergence between religious and irreligious critical values, in turn focusing attention on various perspectives that have themselves become static in their practical application. The total efect of this dynamic is to explore aesthetics that are undeveloped or limited in their conceptual or ethical rigor. Greene is therefore far from anachronistic in his own Catholic sensibility. If he does retain an ideological agenda, it is one founded on challenging various notions of belief, ideology, and aesthetic sensibility that need critical expansion. Catholic dogma and the “catholic” as a notion of

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commonplace experience converge so as to take their focus in Greene’s unwillingness to separate secular and religious aspects of experience. If Greene were to image himself on the liturgical “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” he would stress in equal measure the secular and religious connotations of that utterance.

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Entertaining the Second Vatican Council: Creative Theologies in The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote

Graham Greene’s later work,1 including the novels The Honorary Consul (1973) and Monsignor Quixote (1982), has been conceived in a variety of ways, and it takes as its focus his formal dimensions, by which I mean how and why his stylistic efects are arranged. For Brian Thomas, “romance constitutes the dominant genre in Graham Greene’s later fiction. . . . The novels published between 1950 and 1973 constitute a new and distinct phase in the development of Greene’s conception of narrative, and . . . the structural basis of this phase is romance” (xi). If Thomas comments on how Greene develops in technical ability, the critical tenor of his analysis, unlike my own, is still largely thematic in focus, principally concerned with explaining why as distinct from how Greene has been received critically. Characterizing Greene as a “romancer” (xi), he does not consider at length Greene’s theory and practice. On this basis, he responds to the criticism that equates Greene with the fictional characters depicted in his fiction: “the chronicler of fable and despair, of a modern reality so peculiarly bleak, mean, and squalid as to suggest the very antithesis of romance” (xi). Thomas does not perceive the full extent to which Greene may comment ironically on his work, including its diverse religious and secular notions of meaning, within the interpretative terms particular to that work: “The characteristic narrative voice has become, if not always more playful, certainly less darkly obsessive; and he has apparently discovered and adapted to his own purposes a radically diferent type of fictional structure” (xi). I suggest that any such notion of the radical is founded less on a collection of principles that point to the author himself, as conceived apart from his texts, than those which treat of Greene

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as a dynamically creative figure. As Thomas concludes, “the ultimate way of escape in the last phase of Greene’s fiction is the making of fiction itself” (199). Thomas’s contention that Greene is not a writer whose work is singular in its critical premises rests on Thomas’s own interpretative agenda, specifically, his argument for his belief that Greene “did not entirely abandon the narrative paradigm of romance” (xii). Responding to the kind of conceptually limited interpretation presented by Thomas, Elliott Malamet considers Greene’s approaches to authorship by way of Jorge Luis Borges’s concerns with a specifically self-reflexive form of intertextuality, by which he means the abilities of diferent writers to both anticipate and respond to each other’s work: “‘The fact is,’ writes Borges in an essay on Kafka, ‘that every writer creates his own precursors’ [236].2 Borges intends this as a comment on how previous texts are recreated in the light of a later writer; one consequence of such a thought is that one of the precursors any author creates is himself” (124). According to Malamet, the critical implications of a writer’s work are presented within the very terms by which she understands her creative practice. He continues: “What this leads us to is the fact that in its obsessive retelling, each new Greene novel chiefly invokes his own oeuvre;3 ultimately, the author has become his own textual father” (124). If Greene may be read primarily as a writer who recreates within each of his texts the imaginative patterns of both past and future work, I suggest that special attention should be paid to their conceptual frameworks. It is the critical potential of Greene’s novels to propose the terms within which they can and should be read, whether theoretical or theological in nature, which forms the methodological basis for this chapter. Greene is not confined to a particular agenda that is external to his texts, however wide their critical range. Nor is he preoccupied with a given notion of the novelist. It is the tension in and through Greene’s texts between dogmatic and empiricist models of meaning which constitutes the drama of his fiction. If Pinkie, the whisky priest, Scobie, and Sarah Miles each present his or her own diferent versions of religion, they also dramatize how they converge within and between the texts themselves. Inasmuch as that drama centers on Greene’s exploration of his own version of religion, I shall focus on his later work by way of its religious and secular dynamics. I focus on The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote for two reasons. First, the former concerns itself with the radically social role of the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II.4 In this sense, Greene responds to the Catholic dogmatism that characterized some of his fiction prior to this event. Noting that “Catholic theology before Vatican II was primarily a hermetic, scholastic endeavour” (“Post–Vatican II” 210), Mark Bosco

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observes that it subsequently gave way to a counteremphasis on diverse forms of dialogue: “the revival of Thomism in the early 20th century began a conscious dialogue between the Church and modernity, arguing that the Church’s philosophical and theological synthesis had an important role to play in all aspects of society” (210). Greene responds to this change in theological focus by looking beyond distinctively Catholic frames of reference. The Honorary Consul is set in a fictional Argentinean state in the 1970s, and follows the involvement of a rogue Anglo-Paraguayan doctor, Eduardo Plarr, with a revolutionary Paraguayan gang. This is headed by El Tigre, who does not appear in person, and includes Aquino Ribera, who was imprisoned with Plarr’s idealistic father, Henry. He remained in Paraguay to oppose “Stroessner’s brutal regime” (Brennan, Political Writer 145, 147), while Eduardo, as a child, left for Argentina with his mother. Henry was imprisoned, then killed during an attempt at escape that was successful for Aquino. The gang keep Henry Plarr’s fate from Eduardo for the most part, in order to have him help them. Plarr was close to the operational leader of the gang, a former priest named Leόn Rivas, who took issue with the display of wealth of the church in poor communities, and is now married to Marta. Plarr treats a British honorary consul, Charley Fortnum, with whose fiancée, a prostitute named Clara, he has a love afair. The gang mistakenly kidnaps Fortnum, believing him to be the American ambassador, with whom they wished to bargain for the release of prisoners in Paraguay. They take Fortnum hostage in a remote village, where all in the situation die except for him when the police, headed by a duplicitous colonel named Perez, encircle them. Murray Roston explores Greene’s breadth of insight apart from matters Catholic. He comments, “In The Honorary Consul the Catholic theme slips into the background . . . but it does not disappear,” making way, instead, for “a far more serious theme . . . the pervasive problem of children deprived of their parents” (125, 134). Roston overstates his case in two important respects. First, his suggestion that Greene expanded his literary focus because he “was becoming tired of being referred to so frequently as a Catholic novelist” (125)5 overlooks how the theme of parenthood, particularly fatherhood, itself problematizes the extent to which Greene’s fiction may be considered within a specifically Catholic collection of critical terms. Because Greene’s novels are related in a complex range of ways, such that “there is no creation ex-nihilo” (Malamet 124), they present issues particular to Greene himself and not those implicated within the conceptual parameters of the Catholic Church. This, in turn, challenges Roston’s views about the broader significance of

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Greene’s text, which, he suggests, “is . . . seen to echo the problem of humankind deprived of its God, the current depiction in the modern era of an orphaned world, a civilisation in which God the Father seems either to have disappeared or to be so cruel in the treatment of His children that no thinking person can now believe in Him” (134). The post–Vatican II concern with “a shift in ecclesiology more basic than any single passage or image” (O’Malley 27), means that this text is anything but centered on the disappearance of God the Father from the modern world. This leads into my second reason for focusing on the two novels. For Roston, the consequence of “the Catholic theme” in The Honorary Consul “is to produce retrospective reverberations, revealing religious aspects of a work that had seemed entirely secular” (134). In a similar way, Monsignor Quixote is a text that both stills and amplifies those efects. While the former novel dramatically opposes the religious and the secular, this text frames them in ways that direct fresh attention on Greene’s work overall. Robert Hoskins writes that “Monsignor Quixote tempts one to think of it as Greene’s valedictory work even though it is not. The most serene of his novels, it seems almost calculated to lay to rest demons from the past” (257). For Roston, conversely, “from the first, the priest emerges as admirable, an extraordinary achievement after Greene’s careful development in his previous novels of methods designed to overcome the potential disapproval of Protestant readers” (141). I contend that The Honorary Consul is less a novel designed to serve a particular purpose within Greene’s fiction as a whole, than a means of emphasizing the role of the author himself in the creation of his texts. In rejecting any totalizing notion of either the reader or the writer, Greene’s fiction cannot assume a given religious or secular agenda as its central point of critical reference. The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote are texts that in their separate ways complicate any critical framework which is singularly dogmatic or empiricist in its core principles. It is the first text to which I shall now turn, a text centered on disturbing a pre– Vatican II critical paradigm.

The Honorary Consul Recent critics argue that The Honorary Consul challenges the representation of Catholicism in literature as a singular conception of reality. Darren J. N. Middleton investigates the text’s appropriation of process theology,6 especially that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, for whom, according to Middleton, “women and men are the dynamic bearers of an adventurous faith in an unfinished God and an unfinished universe”

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(“Redeeming” 538). The novel’s theological content notwithstanding, Middleton states that, “I also consider it important to recognize that Greene affirms the self-sufficiency of fiction. This is to say, Greene believes that a novel should not be seen as an artfully contrived theological tract, at least not in the first instance, for this would evacuate it of its fictionality. For Greene, novels should be read and appreciated on their own terms” (537). Middleton needs to go further in distinguishing the role of Greene from that of the critic in the creation of meaning. Middleton’s distinction between a text’s fictional and nonfictional characteristics reveals anxieties on the part of the critic which undermine his attempt to appraise Greene’s novel as a fiction. Greene’s novel is less the utterance or echo of a particular theology than a work of far-reaching imaginative range. Bosco is less emphatic than Middleton in his suggestion that Greene’s literary and theological concerns are mutually distinguishable elements of the text. Bosco points to Greene’s capacity to engender multiple ways of conceptualizing his Catholic and secular concerns: “The Honorary Consul is a subtle and accomplished variation of Greene’s continuing theme, the pursuit of personal salvation, but enacted in a more sophisticated landscape through the many points of view that the novel tries to engage” (Catholic Imagination 107). Nevertheless, Bosco still advocates a totalizing conceptualization of the reader as someone who is subject to a particu lar collection of literary efects created by Greene. Comparing this novel to that which he calls “the geography of Greeneland” (107), Bosco writes, “The status of religious faith and the many nuances of belief, disbelief, and unbelief characterize much of the novel’s concern, but here the religious matrix has a decidedly diferent feel. It is more difuse and tentative, less explicit and monolithic, a religious journey set in a mutual dialogue with the social and political realities of the time” (107). Focusing on the novel’s conception of orthopraxis, that is, the liberation theological position “that God is first contemplated and practised, and only then thought about” (Gutiérrez 28), Bosco considers this to be “a noble response, the distinguishing characteristic between the religious and the non-religious person” (Catholic Imagination 112). However helpful Bosco’s expansion of a distinctively Catholic conception of fiction, his critique still rests on the polarization of diferent ways of reading. To counter any reductive appropriation of the intersections and oppositions within and between diferent Catholic and secular positions on theology, it is wise to observe Bernard Bergonzi’s comment on the novel’s epigraph by Thomas Hardy: “All things merge into one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics” (Greene, Honorary iii). Bergonzi writes, “In ordinary experience opposites may indeed

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merge into one another, but drama requires them to remain opposed. . . . This is true, and not only about ideas. . . . In the Catholic novels of 1938– 48 [Greene] presents characters who are very conscious of the diference between salvation and damnation: Pinkie, the whisky priest, Scobie” (Study 161). According to Bergonzi, it is by way of his exploration of the religious natures of his characters that Greene’s own religious perspectives are conveyed. Bergonzi continues: “Readers may not have believed in the religion and the dilemmas it imposed, but they recognized it as a powerful source of drama” (161–162). Aside from Bergonzi’s own totalizing approach to genre and the roles of readers in a text’s interpretation, his refusal to polarize Greene’s religious and irreligious concerns proceeds from a worthwhile critical standpoint. While The Honorary Consul may be interpreted in particular contexts as the interrogation of the convergence between diferent forms of politics and theology, it also dramatizes the very relationship between those diferent conceptual components. Whereas my last chapter concluded that The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951) assume detailed accounts of novelistic context, in this chapter my focus is on exploring what the consideration of context might mean for any specific act of interpretation. I suggest that in The Honorary Consul, Greene makes the contextual his text’s defining characteristic. The kinds of context that Greene invokes within and across his writings arguably find one of their most defined and solid forms in process theory, theologically or philosophically. The concept of the Omega Point in the theology of Teilhard de Chardin is instructive to an appreciation of Greene’s particular processes. This concept, “in its ultimate principle” is “a distinct Centre radiating at the core of a system of centres” (262). Process philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne complement helpfully the work of Teilhard de Chardin. If his work is one of exploring how “elements reach their maximum, simultaneously and without merging” (263), Whitehead’s thinking is radically speculative. He offers perspectives on the forms of thinking that stem from “the absolute standard of such intensity . . . that of the primordial nature of God” (47). It is by way of diferent “standards of comparison” within this absolutization that a totalizing kind of completion is envisaged (47). For Whitehead, human approaches to the physical and psychical worlds are composed of layers of insight that lead to decisive steps forward, culminating in the finality of a concluding destination: “the final accumulation of all such decisions—the decisions of God’s nature and the decisions of all occasions” (47). Whitehead’s conception of progress finishes in the development of a singular critical sensibility, one of an integrative consti-

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tution that is central to an engagement with the contemporary world: “that special element in the flux of forms in history, which is ‘given’ and incapable of rationalization beyond the fact that within it every component which is determinable is internally determined” (47). Within terms that theorize both critical conceptualization and artistic appreciation, reading novels in which closure is continually created and re-created is both liberating and anxiety-provoking. Charles Hartshorne, who was taught by Whitehead (Hare 361), could add that the future perfection of past, present, and forthcoming intercritical work resides, essentially, in a reader’s unique interpretative constitution: “Memory and perception . . . are alike in being intuition of previous actualities” (Hartshorne 15). Critical immersion is therefore not simply a static emotional and psychological experience. The nature of its experience is also an act of interrogation whose precise terms are defined in the very moment of initial engagement. Greene’s convergences within diferent notions of context, inclusive of how their terms are received and conceived, means that reading him is in part an act of reflective confrontation. Hartshorne describes the series of steps involved in reflecting constructively, and then substantially acting on moments of investigative reflection. In Hartshorne, the making of guided insights into a course of events is best done in the company of critical companions, including novelists, in and through their imaginative works: “Our past overlaps with that of our contemporaries; to this extent, and so far as there is casual order, we may be able to know what is going on now around us and is likely to occur in the future” (16). It is by way of reflection-inflected foci on what is and is not critical context that my interpretation of Greene proceeds. In A Burnt-Out Case (1960), a religious novel that is heavy with emotion, Greene describes some of the evolutionary thinking that is particular to process thought. Dr. Colin, an atheist doctor who practices in a Catholic leprosarium in the Congo, is questioned by Querry, an architect who specializes in churches. Querry is searchingly inquisitive—as his name suggests—about the Catholic religion. In his letter to Father André Blanchet, of July 14, 1961, Greene writes that his reading of Teilhard de Chardin exerted “certain influences . . . in the attitude of the atheist doctor.” Querry questions Dr. Colin about his understanding of Christianity: “Is the Christian myth that you talked about enough for you?” (Greene, Burnt-Out 116). Dr. Colin responds, “I want to be on the side of change” (116). He proceeds to explain that: “Evolution, as far as we can tell, has lodged itself finally in the brains of man” (116). Querry replies, “Is change so good?” (116). Dr. Colin uses a series of philosophical terms that could also describe aspects of the narrative directions presented

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across the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, and Hartshorne: “We can’t avoid it. We are riding a great ninth evolutionary wave. Even the Christian myth is part of the wave, and perhaps, who knows, it may be the most valuable part” (116). According to Dr. Colin, evidences of evolution, as found in the scientific languages of natural selection, are the fulcrum points from which human progress proceeds. Dr. Colin suggests Christ is an example of evolution in its prime sense: “Suppose love were to evolve as rapidly in our brains as technical skill has done. In isolated cases it may have done, in the saints . . . in Christ, if the man really existed” (116). In Dr. Colin’s terms, finding meaning in places of despair is akin to seeking spiritual solace in unforgiving relationships. They include those of the diferent spaces he inhibits. To achieve salvation, however conceived, in such whereabouts means taking measures that are sometimes positioned against the behavioral codes of the surrounding culture. This is so while all the time remaining open to the intentions of the core actors of a society. A paradox in Greene is that redemption of harms done appears to be possible only in the extremes of the human experiences that elicit those very harms. As Joseph Darlington points out in his investigation into the relationships between British literature and terrorism: “The human quality of Greene’s characters can be found in their flaws” (40). Dr.  Colin voices the investigative tenor of this observation, in inverse and converse terms, in his thought, “Evolution today can produce Hitlers as well as St John of the Cross. I have a small hope, that’s all, a very small hope, that someone they call Christ was the fertile element, looking for a crack in the wall to plant its seed. I think of Christ as an amoeba who took the right turning” (Greene, Burnt-Out 116). For Dr Colin, scientific thinking is as much an expression of emotive insight as it is the embodiment of objective kinds of perspective. Forms of speculation into human endeavor cannot occur without the combined application of thinking that is vertical and horizontal in authority. Dr. Colin concludes, with wry humor, “I want to be on the side of the progress which survives. I’m no friend of the pterodactyls” (116–117). To enjoy the fruits of a particular way of life is to consider every aspect of its individual strengths and weakness. Wellbeing, for Greene, is therefore engendered in a measured outlook that appraises fully the checks and balances necessary to the pursuit of a particular path. Dr. Colin’s observations, in presenting a dualist outlook of hope and despair, appear to arise in part from the Gnostic doctrine of Manichaeism: “the third-century Christian heresy . . . founded by the Persian prophet Mani or Manichaeus” (Brennan, Fictions 2). This doctrine “envisaged a materialistic duality and primordial conflict between two eternal princi-

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ples of good (or spirit and light) and evil (or matter and darkness)” (2). Manichaeism had interested Greene from the time that he read Steven Runciman’s study on the subject in the late 1940s.7 Of the growth of this religion in the middle ages, Runciman suggests that: “there was a steady spiritual teaching, a definite religion, that developed and declined as most religions do, but that embodied a constant Tradition” (171). That “there is no room for Christ in a truly Dualist religion” (175), means Manichaeism “was a religion without hope, and such a religion cannot survive. . . . For Hope is a necessary part of religion. Faith and Charity alone are not enough” (179–180). The tripartite combination of “faith, hope, and love” (NIV, 1 Cor 13:13), which thematizes numerous versions of Christianity (Holy Bible: Life 1823), characterizes many of Greene’s own thematics. Its application is expressed primarily in the notion that reading requires a sensitive application of the contextuality specific to religion, inclusive of its antitheses. For Greene, a radical openness to the possibility of the creation of meaning on every level is paramount. The Honorary Consul presents its diverse notions of the contextual within the parameters of the text itself. Contemplating the role in a novel by Saavedra of a distinctively masculine notion of character, Doctor Humphries, reflecting on Saavedra’s broader political comment, asks Plarr, “You can really believe that stuf? You believe in all that machismo?” (13). Plarr replies, “While I read it . . . I can suspend my disbelief” (13). Relating Saavedra’s specifically Argentinean notion of the machismo to Fortnum’s involvement with Clara, Humphries inquires who the real father to her child is: “An old man and a drunk? You’re her doctor, Plarr. Tell me a little bit of the truth. I don’t ask for a very big bit” (13). Within aspects of the interpretative terms of this text, and contrary to my argument, truth is a quality that is afected by a given collection of national stereotypes and characteristics. But inasmuch as truth is also influenced by the imaginative range of a fiction, Greene describes the radically contingent relationships between his characters. The ways in which Greene’s characters communicate are dependent on the innumerable factors that afect the creative and critical capacities of a par ticu lar culture. When Plarr inquires of Humphries, “If you really wanted the truth I would have to examine you, take an X-ray” (14), he points to the necessity of communicating core issues and principles in ways that are irrevocably clear. Those issues and principles include the wide variety of secular and religious forms of authority implicated in the kidnapping of Fortnum. Plarr’s insistence to Leόn, “You can’t murder Charley Fortnum” (25), is met with a remark which insists on the importance of this act to El Tigre. Leόn’s comment, “I try not to think in those terms, Eduardo,” suggests that by way of the kidnapping (25), the gang is attempting

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to efect far-reaching national and international change, questioning what, exactly, constitutes appropriate political action. Plarr thus asks, “Is killing a matter of semantics to you now, Leόn? I remember you were always good at semantics. You used to explain the Trinity to me in the old days, but your explanation was more complicated than the catechism” (25). For Plarr, fictional, political, and religious texts do not influence a society’s character in mutually independent ways, but within the very efects through which their functions are rendered intelligible. By way of those efects in their collective form, it may be inferred that The Honorary Consul is a text whose writing occurs at the intersection within and between multiple ideological agendas, secular and otherwise, as constructed and identified in and through any act of critical interpretation. Inasmuch as The Honorary Consul explores a specific collection of secular and religious issues, it also engenders comment on itself as a novel. Leόn’s defense of his gang’s mistaken kidnapping that unlike Che, it did not leave traces of their crime, is, in extended terms, a remark on Greene’s own role in the writing of his text: “At least no one here has a camera. Or keeps a journal. We learn from our mistakes” (30). To the extent that Greene’s novel does not proceed from a specific notion of its status as a fiction, its conception and reception proceed from the contextual factors that afect his own characters. The limited change among Plarr and Doctor Humphries, voiced in the narrator’s comment, “Inanimate objects change at a faster rate than human beings” (32), indicates Greene’s status as someone who is himself in some sense implicated within his characters’ multiple problems and circumstances. Fortnum’s instruction to Plarr about the need to engage in healthy relationships is as much a comment about Greene’s function as a writer as it is an exchange about the nature of love and friendship among those individual characters: “You analyse too much. . . . It’s a young man’s fault. Don’t turn up too many stones is what I always say. You never know what you’ll find underneath” (43). The narrator’s comment on the presence of sufering among Argentina’s poor positions Greene as someone who wishes to create a language that serves the many needs of this country: “It was only in the barrio of the poor that he ever encountered sufering in silence, sufering which had no vocabulary to explain a degree of pain, its position or its nature” (45). Greene is, then, a figure at the center of his exploration of the diverse afairs of the Argentinean and South American peoples. Saavedra’s thoughts on his anxieties and difficulties during the act of writing frame the critical and creative decisions at the core of Greene’s own theory and practice: “You cannot conceive how much I sufer when I write. I have to force myself day after day to sit down pen in hand and I

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struggle for expression” (45). According to Saavedra, a fictional character proceeds from the very creative anxieties to which its author is herself subject. He comments: “You will remember in my last book, that character, Castillo, the fisherman, who wages an endless war with the sea for a small reward. In a way you might say that Castillo is a portrait of the artist. Such daily agony and the result – five hundred words. A very small catch” (45–46). As Castillo aspires to rise economically within his society, so Greene, who himself, for most of his career, wrote a strict five hundred words daily (Sinyard 34), bears a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the peoples and nations that form his subject matters. Greene’s novel proceeds from his urgent involvement with Latin American politics, and this in turn engenders a range of subject matter that is to a greater or lesser extent religious in aspect and principle, premised, as the text is, on Greene’s own role in its interpretation. As Stephen Benz points out, “by the time of his death . . . Greene’s long-standing, everdeepening interest in Latin America had developed from the touristic to the analytical to the polemical” (113). Nevertheless, against Benz, I suggest that Greene does not represent the worlds within and without his fiction in an oppositional sense, whatever the precise relationships between its religious and secular dimensions. Benz’s suggestion that Greene contested the idea that his fictional “landscape (sometimes referred to as ‘Greeneland’) . . . is more imaginary than real” (113), rests on an uncritical acceptance of Greene’s insistence that “the world he wrote about was ‘carefully and accurately described’ ” (113; Greene, Introduction, 1975, x; Ways 60). It is the strength of Greene’s insistence on this matter that lies at the center of The Honorary Consul. To the degree that Greene’s novel is in part subject to its own interpretative terms, it engenders forms of belief over and above those which have generally been employed in the critiques of its author. As Greene writes: “I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. . . . But I know that argument is useless. They won’t believe the world they haven’t noticed is like that” (x; Ways 60). Writing in the Daily Telegraph on October 9, 1973, in a letter titled “Kidnapped,” Greene indicates the extent of his frustration with his critics. In this instance, he corrects a reader who points out the parallels between the plot of his novel and Geofrey Jackson’s People’s Prison (1973), which, he states, “I look forward to reading. / Just for the sake of the record – my novel was more than three years in writing and I began it some fifteen months before Sir Geofrey was kidnapped” (168). Greene’s letter is nonetheless ironic in that Jackson’s kidnapping in fact occurred approximately two years and nine months before the publication of Greene’s novel in September  1973 (Wise and

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Hill 41). This means that his novel would have taken approximately four years to reach its full term. Writing to the Evening Standard on November 4, 1980, Jackson comments, “May I dot a ‘small i’ regarding the Londoner’s Diary [18 November] on the prophetic quality of Graham Greene’s novels. / It was stated I was kidnapped in Uruguay shortly after the publication of Greene’s The Honorary Consul. I was, in fact, kidnapped in 1971 [on January 8], while Greene’s admirable novel appeared in 1973, at the same time as my own People’s Prison” (Greene, Yours Etc., 168; Nelson). While Greene’s fiction is the product of numerous factors and circumstances, its formal detail may fi nally rest beyond the separate visions of both the author and the critic. Insofar as The Honorary Consul resists the imposition of any specific form of critical investigation, any act of critiquing the text must occur within its own fictional parameters. As Greene is in some sense embodied by Saavedra, so this character serves as a key figure from which to conduct the interpretation of his work. Plarr comments further on the novel about Castillo, “I seem to remember Castillo died from a revolver shot in a bar defending his one-eyed daughter from rape” (46). Saavedra is pleased that Plarr has noticed the symbolism of this act: “ ‘Ah yes, I am glad you noticed the Cyclops symbol,’ Doctor Saavedra said. ‘A symbol of the novelist’s art. A one-eyed art because one eye concentrates the vision. The difuse writer is always two-eyed’ ” (46). For Saavedra, and, by extension, Greene, novels should be read within the context of their own technical details, as distinct from polarized models of meaning. Saavedra’s belief in the palliative efects of writing literature over the deductive methods of medical treatment points to the need to conceive of Greene’s text in ways that can sustain a variety of frames of reference. To Plarr’s comment, “I hope you find my tablets give you some help” (46), Saavedra responds by way of his critically interrogative perspective: “Yes, yes, they help a little, of course, but sometimes I think it is only the daily discipline which saves me from suicide” (46). In this text, the act of writing is a means of resisting feelings that threaten to overwhelm the emotional, physical, and even spiritual well-being of the author. The oppositions between the characterizations of Plarr and Saavedra are detailed further in their respective attitudes toward literature and language. To Plarr’s question, “Oh, come, surely your faith wouldn’t allow you . . . ?” Saavedra responds, “ ‘In those black moments, doctor, I have no faith, no faith at all. . . . You laugh at me,’ the novelist said, ‘ because you have so little idea of how a writer’s imagination works. He has to transform reality. . . . I am not planning a story for a woman’s magazine. My characters must symbolize more than themselves’ ” (46, 48). Saave-

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dra’s writing is a means of understanding the relationship between the abstract and the concrete, with a view to investigating their separate capacities mutually to intersect with each other. In particular, Saavedra aims to address the particularly destructive social issues which sometimes accompany prostitution: “ ‘There is no violation in my story. . . . For the first time,’ Doctor Saavedra said, ‘I am proposing to write a political novel’ ” (48–49). Saavedra’s ambition is unexpected by Plarr, preoccupied, as he is, with his own machismo: “‘Political?’ Doctor Plarr asked with some surprise” (49). In contrast to Saavedra, who uses language as a means of directing attention to other wise overlooked situations, Plarr seeks to know how any given aspect of his experience may be of use to his daily life. Plarr responds to Fortnum’s questions about his understanding of love in strictly abstract terms: “I like to know the meaning which people put on the words they use. So much is a question of semantics.8 That’s why in medicine we often prefer to use a dead language. There’s no room for misunderstanding with a dead language” (65). Displaced in Plarr’s observations is an acknowledgment that contrary to his critics, Saavedra’s notion of machismo is founded on a misguided opinion of the figure of the author. This assumes critical elements akin to the common conception of Greene described by Benz, for whom a distinctive “sensibility—diferent from what critics sometimes call ‘Greeneland’ . . . permeates all of Greene’s work” (127). Saavedra and Greene articulate in dynamically shifting terms the anxieties that characterize their wider religious and secular contexts. Inasmuch as Greene’s critical and creative anxieties are characterized by diverse notions of the religious and the secular, they take as their focus the various theological paradigms of Vatican II. Observing the false separation of Greene’s work into “Catholic and post-Catholic,” and the fact that “nowhere does the literary criticism question the relevance to Greene’s artistic imagination of the Second Vatican Council” (Bosco, Catholic Imagination 21), Bosco details Greene’s relationship with Vatican II. However seminal Bosco’s thesis, it can be challenged in several fundamental respects. For Bosco, the key changes of Vatican II consisted of “a shift in theological emphasis that afected the practice and attitudes toward Catholic belief in a number of important ways. First, the Council texts emphasized a theological ‘perspective from below’ which stressed God’s manifestation on the horizontal plane of human relationships” (“Post–Vatican II” 210). In Bosco’s terms, a central theme of Vatican II was its capacity to engender multiple forms of dialogue. He continues: “Second, the Council refocused the sacramentality of Catholicism, affirming that grace intervenes not only in the mediating priest but in the difusion of all the baptized members of the community. Finally, there was a

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reorientation of the Church’s self-understanding as the ‘people of God,’ holy and sinful, needing to be constantly renewed” (210). The Council was, then, an event by which diferent kinds of Catholic spirituality acquired meaning. Bosco states, “The documents called for a critical reading of the ‘signs of the times’ in which the Church might more fully enter into the political and social struggles of peoples” (210). By way of its engendering of numerous acts of dialogue, Vatican II engendered a broad range of literary implications, some of which Greene explores. Bosco observes the efects of Vatican II on The Honorary Consul, and, in extended terms, literature itself, as follows: “The novel’s religious landscape has undergone a subtle transformation that resonates with postVatican II concerns, grounding political belief in the personal commitment to others and in an evolutionary union of humanity with God” (214). According to Bosco, the Council’s insights into the particular issues that presented themselves within specific groups of people were Greene’s central subject. In this sense, Greene’s text is a novel “emphasizing the pilgrim nature of the Church, the humanity of Christ, the priesthood of all people, and love as the transcendent signifier that keeps human action focussed on correct practice. Greene shows a nuanced and complex Catholic imagination at work that extends any static notion of the word ‘Catholic’ in literature” (215). I suggest that Bosco’s analysis of Greene’s relationship with the Second Vatican Council does not go far enough. Bosco discusses “the Catholic novel—a categorization of many of Graham Greene’s works” (Catholic Imagination 15). It is precisely this label that is at issue in the criticism on Greene, centered, as this tends to be, on abstract conceptualizations of experience, as distinct from its shifting and diverse forms. In focusing on diferent kinds of religious expression and perception apart from their various concrete expressions, Bosco ironically overlooks the reach of the interpretative framework engendered by Vatican II. For Bosco, Greene’s “political and postcolonial concerns [act] as the moral barometer of his later novels” (20). This observation underplays the innumerable ways in which the secular and the religious are less opposing categorizations of experience than carefully imbricated aspects of Greene’s version of religion. Greene employs the outward-looking theological focus of Vatican II in ways which both adopt and challenge its alternative theological paradigm. On the one hand, as explored at length by Bosco, Greene’s fiction takes its form, theme, and context from the many theological strands that characterize the Council. If Saavedra is a character who in some sense embodies Greene’s own religious anxieties, he is also a figure in whom they are contested. On the other hand, as Bosco himself observes, Greene

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“embodied what the theologian Paul Tillich called the ‘[P]rotestant principle,’ ” which “protest[s] against the tragic-demonic self-elevation of religion [and] . . . liberates religion from itself for the other functions of the human spirit” (28; Tillich 260). If Greene was true to his proclamation, “I fear that I’m a Protestant in the bosom of the Church” (Allain 158), it was not necessarily in order to “enact this tension between the dialectical and analogical language of religious faith” (Bosco, Catholic Imagination 28). Against Bosco, as well as the “many critics [who are led] to argue that his conversion never carried the full engagement of his heart or head” (28),9 Greene employs in equal measure the language of the Church both before and within the Council. John Christian Waldmeir has examined how the language of the Council includes that “of the Church Fathers and later of Renaissance Humanism. . . . The language is marked by its attention to the interior life and by the way it links a plurality of human experiences to the persistent presence of the divine” (5). If, as Waldmeir suggests, contemporary Catholic writers and artists have employed this language because “of the resources it provides to a pilgrim faith” (5), it is used by Greene to challenge any interpretation that is centered on the opposition between singular religious and secular binaries. William Joseph Goetz’s concern with “the attractiveness of Catholicism as ‘story’ ” articulates (184), to some extent, the drama of Greene’s own work. For Goetz, “many remain in the church because they love the story, presumably the story of Jesus, his mother, and the saints. That, coupled with the innate power of the liturgy, what might be called the sacramentality of the story, is Catholicism’s great attraction. The question . . . is . . . can the gospel be proclaimed in all its simplicity without the impedimenta imposed by ecclesial authority?” (184). Before the ever-shifting appropriation of the Roman Catholic religion at the center of Greene’s fiction, Goetz’s question applies to Greene as much as the critics, authors, and theologians whom Goetz reviews. Greene’s adoption of the complex, sometimes fragmentary theological paradigm of Vatican II is, then, a means of critiquing any par ticu lar version of the Roman Catholic religion from within its own liturgical parameters. Inasmuch as Greene considers the precise role played by Vatican II in his fiction, he focuses on the representation of the figure of God. In particular, Greene explores how language as a potentially subversive medium can represent a subject who, to a greater or lesser extent, resists any such act of conceptualization. Greene’s text in itself conforms to M.M. Bakhtin’s definition of a novel: “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). On the one hand, Clara, the subject of the text’s diferent

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senses of machismo, exhibits forms of speech which question any straightforward opposition between the religious and the secular. As she talks, “[t]he tenses, present and past, swung to and fro like the arrow of a barometer moving irregularly between settled and unsettled weather” (86). Clara’s technically advanced speech in turn questions Greene’s own approaches to the theological, centered in many respects on his characters’ perceptions into diverse aspects of each other’s various experiences. Similar to the capacity of Clara to comment on the relationships between the characters relative to a distinctively stable verbal utterance, Plarr does not enjoy listening to how Aquino was treated in the Paraguayan prison: “He felt sickness at this narrative in the past tense, just as years ago, when he was a young student, he had been upset by the dissection of a cadaver for educational purposes” (99). As Plarr is unable to relate to every character in a way that is not biased toward a particular aspect of his own experience, so Greene’s text acquires no singular collection of perspectives, values, or principles. On the other hand, the diverse preoccupations and concerns presented in and through Greene’s characters mean that no single voice can dominate a given collection of utterances. In this sense, Greene both adopts and contradicts Bakhtin’s examination of “languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour” (263). Fortnum’s comment to Leόn about the destructive influence of the Roman Catholic Church is, then, a displaced comment against any individual, group, or community who would claim to represent the afairs of God: “I don’t see how you can be angry with Mother Church. I could never get angry with a fucking institution” (111). Whatever the force of Leόn’s reply, “She is a sort of person too” (111), his displeasure at preaching to Argentina’s poor betrays his distrust of the role of the Church in Latin America: “Someone like you – un Inglés – you are not able to understand how ashamed I felt of the things they made me read to people. I was a priest in the poor part of Asunciόn near the river. Have you noticed how the poor always cling close to the river?” (111). According to Leόn, it is by way of their unique challenge to his religious knowledge that his parishioners also afect his own religion. He continues: “They do it here too, as though they plan one day to swim away, but they have no idea how to swim and there is nowhere to swim to for any of them. On Sunday I had to read to them out of the Gospels” (111). For Leόn, the Roman Catholic Church as an institution should first and foremost engage in a theology of works—or praxis—rather than works of theology, however radical their agenda and purpose. Leόn’s interpretation of the Church’s priorities presents diferent notions of the textual in multiple ways, whether religious or secular in ori-

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entation. On this basis, Greene comments on how, precisely, the novel may serve as a means of understanding any given identity. Aquino’s reflections on why he writes poetry articulate Greene’s appropriation of the novel as a dynamically social, political, and theological genre: “I admire the eagle which drops on its victims like a rock out of the sky, but not the vulture which flaps slowly down, looking as it goes to see if the carrion moves. That is why I took to poetry. Prose moves too slowly, poetry drops like an eagle and stabs before you know” (116–117). As poetry sometimes assumes a central objective in the act of its writing, so prose and, in Greene’s case, the novel, might be characterized by their capacity to interrogate their particular subjects in a sustained manner. Inasmuch as that same genre of writing can intersect with the poetic, the act of writing may, on occasion, in itself assume numerous diferent objectives and purposes. Saavedra’s statements about the relationship between critical and creative forms of writing constitute, thereby, Greene’s own perspectives on prose and poetry: “As a poet I have been helped better by a whore than by any critic – or professor of literature. . . . In Spanish we do not confine the term poet to those who write metrically” (151). For Greene, the written text is less a document that divides particular forms of authority than a space in which their separate concerns can converge at the most fundamental level. Greene’s approaches to the diferent kinds of authority implicated within any act of writing are usefully conceptualized by Roland Barthes’s opposition between the “readerly” and the “writerly.” As Greene’s work assumes no single perspective on what it means to write a particular text, so, for Barthes, the act of writing in itself acquires a diverse critical and creative framework: “The primary evaluation of all texts can come neither from science, for science does not evaluate, nor from ideology, for the ideological value of a text (moral, aesthetic, political, alethiological) is a value of representation, not of production (ideology “reflects,” it does not do work)” (S/Z 3–4). In the same way as, for Greene, writing presents multiple contexts, so, for Barthes, its critical implications intersect with innumerable aspects of those par ticu lar contexts: “Evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing. . . . The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4). On the one hand, literature is the product of a complex collection of material circumstances and exchanges, characterized “by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user” (4).10 On the other hand, insofar as those same circumstances are dynamically social in their range of meaning, literature is also a site of “access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing” (4). For me, it is the

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opposition between these two very diferent ways of conceiving literature, “the writerly,” and the “its countervalue, its negative, reactive value . . . the readerly” (4), which is at issue in Greene’s engagement with Vatican II. Before its broad spectrum of meaning, Greene explores the intersection between other wise oppositional perspectives and agendas. One means of understanding the intersection in The Honorary Consul between seemingly opposed notions of meaning is to explore its characterization of the figure of God Himself. Reflecting on his disillusionment with the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America, Leόn states “I thought the Church and I wanted the same thing. . . . You learn the rules and find they don’t apply to any human case” (215). For Leόn, the diferences in sensibility between his own version of religion and that taught by the Roman Catholic Church are too great for him to continue serving as a priest. Leόn’s questioning of his priestly vocation has influenced his understanding of the humanity of God: “ ‘Christ was a man,’ Father Rivas said, ‘even if some of us believe that he was a God as well. It was not the God the Romans killed, but a man. A carpenter from Nazareth. Some of the rules He laid down were only the rules of a good man’ ” (216). Leόn’s conception of God, centered on the human person of Christ as distinct from any particular notion of God the Father, means that his theology is, like Greene’s approaches to the written text, radically subjective in form and theme: “There is no room in our packs for books of theology. Only Marta has kept a missal. I have lost mine. Sometimes I have been able to find a paperback novel – like the one I have been reading. A detective story. That sort of life leaves a lot of time to think and perhaps Marta may be right and my thoughts are turning wild” (224). According to Leόn, the practice of his religion is afected by influences that are both conventional and unconventional in Catholic terms. He continues: “But I can see no other way to believe in God. The God I believe in must be responsible for all the evil as well as for all the saints. He has to be a God made in our image with a night-side as well as a day-side” (224). For León, the act of thinking is also a means of understanding a diverse range of conceptual phenomena, characterized by shifting religious and secular binaries. As Greene conceives of the textual as a way of framing multiple notions of meaning, so God Himself is, in this text, figured by a fundamentally subjective model of belief.11 Neither wholly secular nor, in any stable sense, dogmatically religious, Leόn’s version of religion is in extended terms a comment on Greene’s role as the author of this novel.12 To the degree that this role is as creative as

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it is critically investigative in character, Greene engenders insight into his vision for his fiction overall, that being to subject matters which seem dogmatically stable in nature to an interpretation which renders them context specific. As Leόn says, “When you speak of the horror, Eduardo, you are speaking of the night-side of God. I believe the time will come when the night-side will wither away, like your communist state, Aquino, and we shall see only the simple daylight of the good God. You believe in evolution, Eduardo, even though sometimes whole generations of men slip backwards to the beasts” (224). Leόn conceives of God as a figure in whom the subjective is itself subject to its own critical terms. He continues: “It is a long struggle and a long sufering, evolution, and I believe God is suffering the same evolution we are, but perhaps with more pain” (224). The model of evolution presented in this text is less a means of understanding how a specific collection of circumstances and material conditions came into existence than a way of relating to another individual or group without the restriction of particular dogmas, whatever their specific conceptual orientation. On this basis, if The Honorary Consul does exhibit a core theme, it is that of provoking far-reaching anxieties about how and why Greene’s texts are written and evaluated. For his long-time friend and traveling companion and sometime priest Father Leopoldo Durán, Greene’s notion of a God who evolves with humankind was ironically stable in its doctrinal orthodoxy: “According to Greene’s priest [Leόn Rivas], there is a continual evolution with God himself, so that ‘with our help’ the dark side of God or Christ overcomes the darkness” (111). In Durán’s terms, Leόn’s theology is wholly orthodox in orientation. He continues, “Is there a better way of expressing the doctrine of Christ’s mystical body? This is what I told Graham and he was very surprised. . . . Graham Greene is so orthodox that he wishes to invent a ‘slightly’ heretical doctrine for his guerrilla priest, and he doesn’t succeed!” (111). Stemming from Durán’s notion that “Graham did not study any systematic theology, but he was an intuitive theologian” (111), it is precisely this kind of comment that is at issue in the interpretation of Greene. For Durán, Greene wrote novels that proceeded from his own personal characteristics rather than texts whose formal and thematic dimensions are the product of his novelistic theory and practice. Durán even goes so far as to suggest that “it is quite impossible to study Graham Greene’s major works in any depth without a substantial knowledge of theology, both vocational and intuitive” (111). Given his capacity to be interpreted in opposition to single forms of interpretation, it is more helpful to conceive Greene in opposition to a specifically religious terminology.

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His fiction may be considered as literature that does not present a specific interpretative framework, especially that premised on the conversations between a priest and his penitent. The Honorary Consul is distinctive of Greene’s later work in the following ways. First and foremost, Greene rejects any form of interpretation which is narrow in its conception of how his work might be applied in theological or theoretical terms. Implicated within that rejection is the reconceptualization of the relationship within and between any aspects of his texts, however their character might best be understood, including those which are more formal than thematic in their critical orientation. The former are premised less on conventional distinctions between novelistic form and content than on the many acts of dialogue which Greene engenders between religious and secular critics. This includes those who would both conform to and oppose the kinds of dialogue implicated within the interpretative frameworks engendered by Vatican II, acts that, in Bakhtin’s terms, constitute “a multiplicity of social voices” (263). The formal dimensions that characterize Greene’s later work, thereby, include the following. First, there is a conception of narrative that is radically broad-ranging in its conceptual framework. Second, Greene presents forms of character that both depart from and converge with the critical tenor of that framework, as manifested in the contrasting approaches of Plarr, Aquino, and Leόn to the role of any central conception of authority, whether religious or secular in nature. Third, inasmuch as that framework also constitutes the dominant thematic of the text, theme itself serves as an aspect of form. Greene invites an interpretation which conceives of his work as literature in the broadest sense of the term. That The Honorary Consul invites an evaluation that represents the critical framework of literature, as distinct from any other kind of interpretative approach, is suggested in several key passages in the text. While Durán reads Greene’s novel in his various personal capacities, it is also the case that the text should be evaluated in ways that question the extent of its interpretative reach as a creative form. Leόn comments, “I believe that the day-side of God, in one moment of happy creation, produces perfect goodness, as a man might paint one perfect picture” (225). To Marta’s comment “Father, you frighten me. All this is not in the catechism, is it?” Leόn replies, “No, not in the catechism, but the catechism is not the faith, Marta. It is a sort of two times table. There is nothing I have said which your catechism denies” (225). As Greene writes without a particular creative or critical agenda, so Leόn’s version of religion is both individual to him and part of a wide spectrum of meaning beyond his personal knowledge. In the same way, Plarr practices his vocation as a doctor by

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way of the individual needs of his many patients, using his medical texts in ways that are particular to their ways of receiving information: “He put back on the shelf a medical book he had been consulting in front of a patient – for some reason patients gained confidence if they could see a coloured picture, an aspect of human psychology which American publishers knew well” (95). Within the terms of Greene’s novel, then, the visual characteristics of a text are not the product of a narrowly conceived system of belief but a means of engendering innumerable kinds of perception between any range of readers. That Greene’s novel proceeds from diferent acts of interpretation is indicated in Leόn’s own learning: “Doctor Plarr remembered how first there had been the law books Leόn studied – he had once explained to him the meaning of tort. Then there had been all the works of theology – Leόn was able to make even the Trinity seem plausible by a sort of higher mathematics. He supposed that there must be other primers to read in the new life. Perhaps he was quoting Marx” (98). Just as Leόn learned his theology less by way of a personalized habit than a complex series of interpretative procedures, so those same procedures are themselves implicated within the act of interpreting Greene’s novel. If the notion of the author professed by Durán and to a lesser degree by Bosco is a figure whose fate is limited to a narrow interpretative framework, Greene also focuses radically new attention on how his fiction may be evaluated. It is this dimension of Greene’s work to which I shall now turn in regard to Monsignor Quixote, reflective, as the text is, of Greene’s work overall.

Monsignor Quixote Quixote is the naïve if well-meaning priest of El Toboso in the province of La Mancha, Spain. He provides help and hospitality to the Bishop of Motopo when his car seems to fail and is subsequently made a monsignor at the bishop’s recommendation. Quixote is friends with Enrique Zancas, a Communist and ex-mayor of El Toboso, whom Quixote calls Sancho. Quixote and Sancho journey across the region in Quixote’s car, a 600 Seat, that Quixote has named Rocinante. They spend an evening at a brothel, whose business Quixote is at first unaware of, and view a pornographic film, which, again, Quixote encounters in complete naivety. Quixote is forcibly returned to his parish by way of sedation, partly at the initiation of Father Herrera, who is Quixote’s shrewd-minded replacement. Sancho intervenes by helping Quixote leave Father Herrera. On their journey back out into the country, they encounter an exploitative Catholic procession that is organized around benefiting local profiteers.

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Quixote interrupts the procession, after which he and Sancho leave hurriedly for Osera Monastery. Two Guardia Civil officers pursue them. Quixote is injured in the process and is taken into the care of the monastery. There, appearing to be semiconscious, he seems to give communion, calling Sancho “Compañero” (242) before dying. The novel is heavi ly indebted to aspects of Greene’s own experiences, having himself made numerous journeys across the Iberian peninsula with Father Leopoldo Durán. Recent critics have conceived Monsignor Quixote as a text that invites a distinctively Catholic interpretative approach. The text is framed as part of a system of belief that, to a greater or lesser extent, must be wider than its own fictional parameters. Inasmuch as such interpretative procedures are specifically religious in character, both Greene and his critics are considered to be sympathetic to a given means of evaluation. For example, Graham Holderness, considering the nature of Greene’s identity as an author, observes his capacity to be evaluated in a broad range of ways: “open-minded rather than dogmatic, questing rather than certain, puzzled rather than assured . . . against traditional Catholic beliefs such as Judgement, Greene opposes not secular human justice, but the concept of Grace” (269, 270). On the basis of such an approach, the act of reading Greene’s text is also a means of confronting the possibility of assuming a given critical position. The manner in which Greene both presents and contradicts a particu lar interpretative procedure is considered by Holderness: “Monsignor Quixote’s innocent trust in human love merges imperceptibly into his innocent trust in a loving God. To choose faith is ultimately no more difficult than to ‘believe’ in the truth of a novel” (280). According to Holderness, it is within the multiple contexts engendered by particular forms of belief that an interpretation of Greene’s text is rendered significant. He continues: “In a novel, where in the reader’s surrender to the truth of fantasy fact and fiction become indistinguishable, there lies the possibility of imaginative conviction. In faith, where doubt and anxiety become subsumed into a voluntary, willed resignation to trust, there lies the possibility of salvation” (280). Notwithstanding the helpfulness of Holderness’s range of critical perspective, his comments are nonetheless reductive in two important respects. First, his understanding of Greene’s version of religion proceeds from the idea that Greene’s fiction as a whole is premised on the opposition between religious and secular ways of reading. As he concludes, “the evidence of this novel alone seems sufficiently indicative at least to raise the possibility, despite the critical consensus, that Catholicism may run

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right through the heart of Greene’s fiction, as the title of his first ‘Catholic’ novel runs right through the eponymous stick of Brighton Rock” (280–281).13 The consequences of such a narrow schematization are exemplified by Bosco, whose interpretation of Monsignor Quixote concludes with the above passage by Holderness, and the remark that “in Greene’s last great work, his Catholic imagination is fully engaged, making a case for faith over belief, hope over despair, love over hatred, and mystery over doubt” (Catholic Imagination 154). However productive it might be to consider this text, and Greene’s work in general, by way of a distinctively religious terminology, that very terminology should itself assume an interrogation of the secularism against which its breadth of meaning is posed or risk acquiring a dogma of its own. The second reason that Holderness’s alternative perspectives on Greene’s fiction are reductive concerns its status as fiction, as distinct from a work that challenges particular forms of ideology or, however directly or indirectly, a specifically Roman Catholic religious practice. Comparing Greene’s later work with The Power and the Glory, a text that parallels Monsignor Quixote in numerous respects,14 Roston comments, “The condemnation of communism . . . with the Lieutenant driven by bitterness and hatred, was gradually replaced in later novels by a recognition that, whatever cruelties communism may have perpetrated under such dictators as Stalin, its aim of improving the lot of the poor was in itself not only noble but in some respects close to that of Christianity” (148). However valuable this observation, including its framing of Christianity in religious and secular terms, and its resistance against “those accusing Greene of [religious] unorthodoxy” (151), Greene is nonetheless figured as an author committed to a particular objective. While for some critics, including Roston, “it is rationalised dogma to which Quixote objects, not faith itself” (151), to suggest that Quixote’s version of religion serves within Greene’s work as “a leitmotif throughout the major novels” (155) is to place limitations on his fiction concomitant to those which limit its meaning to the person of Greene himself. If Greene’s work does proceed from his own version of religion, it is in order to direct attention to the many ways in which its form and content may be framed by any given system of belief. Greene himself points to the kind of attention he should in fact receive in his remarks in “Malaya, the Forgotten War,” in Life on July 30, 1951: “Christianity too is a form of patriotism. These Viet Namese belonged to the City of God and were proud of their city that lay behind the no man’s land of rice. ‘You see,’ I wanted to say to my friends in Malaya, ‘it can be done.’ An idea was fighting an idea” (65). Notwithstanding Greene’s allusion to a specifically Augustinian model of theology, including its diverse

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theological precedents,15 this passage exhibits how for Greene, Christianity and by implication Roman Catholicism were less religious practices of narrow conceptual range than belief systems subject to the dynamic interrogation of a fiction. Greene rejects the figure of the author as an advocate of a particular religion and concomitantly rejects any form of dogma within his texts themselves. Monsignor Quixote upsets the oft-repeated tendency to consider Greene’s fiction as either the product of a religious doctrine or, in however wide or narrow a sense, the doctrine of a par ticular religion. To the degree that Quixote and Sancho mature in their friendship, Greene directs helpful attention to the Catholic orientation of his work overall. In particular, he suggests that its religious and secular dynamics are less opposed categorizations of experience than a means by which the diferent material conditions necessary for many kinds of relationships may be conceived. Inasmuch as this approach invites a central notion of authority, Greene chooses to explore how the figure of God may be variously conceptualized. To Quixote’s comment that for his bishop Don Quixote “was a fiction . . . in the mind of a writer,” the visiting Monsignor replies: “Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God” (16). For the visiting Monsignor, God is a figure who is Himself subject to the interpretative terms of a fiction. On this basis, the model of authority at the center of Greene’s text is neither Greene nor the text itself but the friendship between Quixote and Sancho. As the narrator observes of Quixote, “In the company of the Mayor, he ceased to feel himself a kind of official superior; they had the equality of a common interest in the progress through space of the cosmonauts, and they were tactful with each other” (17–18). Quixote and Sancho are characters who share a radically shifting and resilient friendship. To the extent that their many diferent theological and political opinions necessitate its context, for Greene, friendship and by extension the concept of relationship itself serve as important models of meaning within which to frame his work. The close relationship between Greene’s text and the friendship between Quixote and Sancho is exhibited in the characters’ diferent perspectives on the Trinity and the story of the Prodigal Son. To Sancho’s enquiry about whether Quixote can “believe all that nonsense. God, the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception,” Quixote replies, “I want to believe. And I want others to believe” (24). For Sancho, by contrast, a Roman Catholic believer’s need for meaning is best met in the context of physical pleasure: “Let them drink a little vodka then. That’s better than makebelieve” (24). It is therefore ironic that Quixote’s explanation of the Trinity fails the test of doctrinal orthodoxy on the grounds that the bottle

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of wine representing the Holy Ghost is half-full, unlike the two representing the Father and the Son, which are unopened. To alleviate Quixote’s grief over his sin, Sancho promises him, “I will remember only the full three bottles, friend” (46). The friendship between the two characters is, then, a way of conceptualizing the text’s diferent forms of religious and secular belief within the terms by which those beliefs are presented. Insofar as the very friendship between Quixote and Sancho engenders their conversations, its qualities of reciprocal understanding act as a means of conceiving the critical core of Greene’s own imagination. On this basis, Sancho’s reading of the story of the Prodigal Son describes a specifically Marxist system of belief by way of the pattern of friendship established between the two characters. For Sancho, the Prodigal Son is subject to “the father as a rich Russian kulak who regards his peasants as so many souls whom he owns” (51). On account of the nature of the son’s actions within his social context, Sancho suggests to Quixote: “The story in your version is cut short rather abruptly, isn’t it?” (52). To Quixote’s accusation that Sancho’s version parallels the original in a way as “to sound almost as dull as my breviary” (54), Sancho points out its convergence with a range of diferent political ideas: “Dull? Do you call that dull. I’m quoting Lenin himself. Don’t you see that the first idea of the class struggle is being lodged by that old peasant (I see him with a beard and whiskers like Karl Marx’s) in the mind of the Prodigal Son?” (54). According to Sancho, the story of the Prodigal Son has been understood in falsely religious ways. He continues: “After a week of disillusion he leaves home at dawn (a red dawn) to find again the pig farm and the old bearded peasant, determined now to play his part in the proletarian struggle” (54). Quixote is less ofended by Sancho’s militantly Marxist reading of a sacred text than pleased at the manner in which he includes a range of different perspectives. As such, he replies humorously, “I’m glad you left in the pigs” (54). In all, Quixote’s response parallels Sancho’s reply to his explanation of the Trinity: “You have a wonderful imagination, Sancho, even when you are sober” (53). If Quixote’s capacity to help Sancho understand the principles of his Roman Catholic religion proceeds from the quality of their friendship, Sancho’s Marxist ideology is premised on that same quality in equal measure. The exchanges between Quixote and Sancho on the Trinity and the Prodigal Son are vital to an understanding of Greene’s fiction in several key respects. Insofar as both characters respect each other’s diferent beliefs, they also respect each other’s ways of thinking. In this text, the quality of imagination is a means of conceptualizing a given range of ideas, however aggressive or otherwise their religious or secular content. To the

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degree that this act of conceptualization may occur between any persons or groups who are willing to consider how each other’s ideas are, in part, the product of a particular imaginative framework, Greene focuses attention on his work as a whole. Any one of his novels may, in specific contexts, acquire meanings that are less dogmatic utterances of a given belief than expressions of a broad-ranging faith position of no par ticu lar persuasion. On the grounds of Greene’s capacity to present a series of diferent interpretations, his fiction is, in part, a means of engendering its own critical evaluation. To the degree that any such act is premised on Greene’s relationship with diferent aspects of his personal, social, and political worlds, it is those dimensions of his work to which I shall now turn. It is particularly helpful to consider how Greene stands apart from methods of evaluation that figure his work as the product of a central evaluative agenda. Exploring how “Greene’s work . . . sustains a large but limited variety of interpretations” (Thomson, Politics 11), Brian Lindsay Thomson has recently considered “how critical responses to Greene have . . . communicated very particular schemes of value” (15). Thomson therefore aims at “grasping the readers’ significance in the production of meaning visá-vis both Greene’s work and the productive institutions of literature at large” (15). Thomson’s approach has several fundamental weaknesses, despite its attention to the specific roles and functions of Greene’s readers, not the least of which is Thomson’s tendency to limit the significance of literature to a singular preposition, namely, its importance as an object of cultural value. Thomson writes, “Neither the great authors of the twentieth century nor the great authors of any other century ever sat down and wrote ‘literature.’ They wrote texts that became books. . . . People read them for pleasure and enlightenment” (19). One consequence of this premise is that Greene is not necessarily conceived as a novelist capable of sustained and dynamic imaginative writing. Rather, he is labeled “a literary auteur” (119), that is, someone whose text appropriates a given set of generic “conventions . . . and mystically makes them his own” (124). Against Thomson, I argue that Greene’s fiction proceeds less from a particular range of cultural conditions and expectations than from its capacity to assume a broad and conceptually diverse role and function in whatever social contexts it may happen to be interpreted within. Greene’s correspondence during the spring of 1948 with V.S. Pritchett and Elizabeth Bowen about the role and function of novelists in society presents several useful insights into the critical dimensions of his work.16 Greene observes that his characters are in many ways the product of his social status as an individual caring for the needs of his family: “our char-

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acters must earn a living: if they don’t, what is called a social significance seems to attach itself to their not-earning” (Why Do I Write? [1948] 27). On the basis of their imperatives to sustain themselves and those they care for, according to Greene, novelists fall into two categories. On the one hand, there is “the artist” (28), who, on account of his sustained critique of society in its widest sense, “is . . . difficult to define: in most cases only time defines him” (29). On the other hand, there is: “the novelist like ourselves. . . . The word artist is too inclusive: it is impossible to make generalisations which will be true for Van Gogh, Burke, Henry James, Yeats and Beethoven. If a man sets up to be a teacher, he has duties and responsibilities to those he teaches, whether he is a novelist, a political writer or a philosopher, and I would like to exclude the teacher from the discussion” (29). According to Greene, a novelist is someone who understands his society by way of its many forms of social and political order. An artist, on the other hand, is somebody whose work acquires its critical significance after a period of prolonged reflection. It is precisely this distinction that Greene challenges in his own fiction. Insofar as his work is centered on examining its characters’ diverse social identities, Greene explores in the widest possible sense their statuses as representations of particular religious and secular systems of belief. As Greene himself observes: “In the long run we are forced back to the egotistical ‘I’: we can’t shelter behind the great dead. What in my opinion, can society demand of me? What have I got to render to Caesar?” (29). The novel genre, is then, for Greene, a model for exploring how, exactly, its particular contexts are rendered meaningful. Greene’s conception of the novelist as someone who evaluates his role as the representative of a particular group or individual, in turn, points to the function of the diferent evaluations to which he has been subject. On account of their need to stand apart from their society, for Greene, writers have a “duty, to accept no privileges. . . . One thinks of the literary knights, and then one turns to the plain tombstones with their bare hic jacets of Mr. Hardy, Mr. James, and Mr. Yeats. Yes, the more I think of it, that is a duty the artist unmistakably owes to society—to accept no favours” (30, 31). The novelist, for Greene, is someone whose work should be interpreted in ways which, as far as possible, extend beyond the immediate imperatives which impel her to write. By Greene’s terms, then, the act of evaluating his own work is premised on its intersection with the multiple factors implicated in its very reading. Tamas Dobozy ofers a number of helpful observations on such a critical position. According to this critic, Greene is a creator of “texts adequate to the way in which faith is tested and galvanized and undone by daily life—texts, in other

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words, very aware of the way in which the stability of the written word is frequently inadequate to a decidedly unstable, and ever-shifting, reality” (“Devout” 223). For Dobozy, Greene is an author who challenges at the most fundamental level any conception of the many factors afecting his subjects’ actions and behav iors. Dobozy goes so far as to suggest that “spiritual faith, for Greene, is never a settled matter” (224). For me, Greene is less an author of work that lacks a stable critical center than someone whose texts are subject to models of meaning that are themselves subject to diverse evaluative agendas. Greene’s status as a novelist who in himself dramatizes both the writing of his work and the critical evaluation to which it is subject is presented in Quixote’s dream about Christ stepping down from the cross. This scene serves as a means of understanding the relationship between Greene and his work within the context of this novel and Greene’s fiction as a whole. Quixote’s reaction to the dream points to Greene’s conception of himself as a novelist who is his own principal subject. Quixote “dreamt that Christ had been saved from the Cross by the legion of angels to which on an earlier occasion the Devil had told Him that He could appeal. So there was no final agony, no heavy stone which had to be rolled away, no discovery of an empty tomb. . . . There was no ambiguity, no room for doubt and no room for faith at all” (68–69). In the same way as Greene examines how any distinctively religious way of critiquing his work is subject to his texts, rather than their subject, Quixote’s dream is reflective of the status of the novel genre itself. The scene exhibits how, for Greene, novelistic writing resists the imposition of any given set of interpretative procedures. Quixote’s supposition that the “whole world knew with certainty that Christ was the Son of God” (69) frames Christ’s crucifixion as an event specific to its immediate audience. To the degree that this audience has its own diverse needs as social subjects, their identities are indicative of those conceived by Greene in his reflections upon his novelistic practice. But the scene also serves to disturb all binaries, fictional and nonfictional, representing the convergence between good and evil in the context of a single imaginative act. According to Greene, the worlds within and without a fiction are the products of no stable notion of authority, whether ethereal, corporeal, or incorporeal in nature. Quixote’s reaction on waking from the dream presents how Greene is subject to his own texts, as distinct from a collection of expectations about his role as an author: “It was only a dream, of course it was only a dream, but none the less Father Quixote had felt on waking the chill of despair felt by a man who realizes suddenly that he has taken up a profession which is of use to no one, who must continue to live in a kind of Saharan

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desert without doubt or faith, where everyone is certain that the same belief is true” (69). On account of his new self-understanding, Quixote examines the nature of his belief in God: “God save me from such a belief” (69). For Quixote, God is now a figure whose authority should be questioned rather than complacently followed. By this principle, he utters a similar prayer for Sancho: “he added without thought, ‘Save him too from belief,’ and only then he fell asleep again” (69). On the grounds of his new religious perspective, Quixote conceives of doctrines that are otherwise opposed in form and aspect by way of a radically diferent set of terms. Debating with Sancho the relative merits of Roman Catholic and Marxist beliefs, Quixote contends, “It was humanism, not Communism, which turned the pauper into the bourgeois and behind humanism there’s always the shadow of religion – the religion of Christ as well as the religion of Marx. . . . If the whole world becomes bourgeois, will it be so bad – except for dreamers like Marx and my ancestor?” (117). Inasmuch as Quixote’s conception of religious, atheistic, and fictional figures proceeds from the anxieties created by his dream, the creative and critical parameters of his world are increasingly unstable. For Quixote, his dream of Christ’s crucifixion serves as a helpful thought experiment,17 inviting him to contemplate the character of his friendship with Sancho. This is indicated in his recommendation to Sancho that he reads the New Testament in the same way as Quixote has read Karl Marx: “If only you would try the experiment, Sancho, with one of what you call my books of chivalry” (119). Quixote insists nonetheless to Sancho that his identity stands apart from the written texts that have influenced his religious beliefs: “Why are you always saddling me with my ancestor? . . . I am Father Quixote, and not Don Quixote. I tell you, I exist. . . . I have free will. . . . You think my God is an illusion like the windmills. But he exists, I tell you, I don’t just believe in Him. I touch Him” (152–153). On the basis of Quixote’s frustration with Sancho’s narrow ways of thinking, Greene implies that his novel serves as its own critical commentary. Greene engenders a variety of relationships between diferent figures, belief systems, and subject matters, even as those same elements of his text are subject to its very writing. That Monsignor Quixote is a text written at the intersection between worldviews which are potentially oppositional is exhibited by Quixote and Sancho’s capacity to forgive each other. To relieve the tension of their conversation, Sancho invites Quixote to remember the context of their conversations, that being their separate capacities to influence each other’s diferent ideas within the terms of their friendship. Sancho alludes to the occasion when he chose not to overlook Quixote’s mistake in presenting

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a model of the Trinity: “Father, we’ve had a good time together. This is the third bottled. I raise my glass in honour of the Trinity. You can’t refuse to drink that toast with me” (153). Insofar as both characters find pleasure in their drinking, Quixote understands their friendship to be based on principles over and above the religious and secular texts that direct their beliefs. To Sancho’s urge that Quixote should not be sad, Quixote wishes for “the right words. . . . And the learning too. . . . There was so much that I was supposed to teach in El Toboso that I didn’t understand. I didn’t think twice about it. The Trinity. Natural Law. Mortal sin” (153–154). According to Quixote, any kind of religious belief should proceed from principles and convictions that reside apart from any unquestioned collection of proscriptions or prescriptions which are acquired outside of the context of a specific relationship. He continues, “I taught them words out of textbooks. I never said to myself, do I believe these things? I went home and read my saints. They wrote of love. I could understand that. The other things didn’t seem important” (154). Quixote remembers, in particular, Heribert Jone’s Moral Theology (1956): “Father Heribert Jone found drunkenness a more serious sin than gluttony. I don’t understand that. A little drunkenness has brought us together, Sancho. It helps friendship” (155). On account of his friendship with Sancho, Quixote rejects at a fundamental level the importance of dogma to his daily experience: “Father Quixote said, ‘You are my moral theologian, Sancho,’ and a moment later a light snore took the place of the laugh” (155). As Quixote’s dream prompts him to contemplate the mutual positions between himself and Sancho on religion and politics, so the text itself centers on the characters’ capacities to compromise on any matter that is singularly dogmatic in character. Insofar as Quixote’s imaginative development stems from his theological learning, the texts which efect that learning are themselves key to an understanding of Greene’s novel. Observing the role of intertexts in Greene’s fiction, Robert Murray Davis writes that “Greene often referred to books in various genres to show the diference between received opinion and the texture of lived experience” (“Figures,” Address; “Figures,” Studies 30). To the degree that Greene’s fiction exhibits the convergence between diferent conceptualizations of experience, this is a useful observation. Jone’s Moral Theology in itself ofers insight into this aspect of Greene’s work.18 Jone stresses “how important it is that one in the care of souls be able to judge correctly the sinful character of certain actions” (v). That very notion of the care of souls may nevertheless extend above and beyond Jone’s Roman Catholic framework. Jone’s clarification of his proposition that “every action must be weighed subjectively” points to

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Greene’s appropriation of the act of writing as subject to the broad range of factors that influence Quixote and Sancho’s friendship: “By saying that every action must be weighed subjectively, I mean that one must investigate in the first place whether there is a perfectly responsible human act present. Then, as far as merely human laws are concerned, he should inquire if there be an excuse for their observance, and whether or not one might use epikeia.”19 In the context of Greene’s capacity to unsettle any static form of the text as narrowly religious or secular in nature, Jone’s examination of sin is far from dogmatic in its theological implications. If Jone’s position on theology is focused less on “what is forbidden” than on “a science of perfection” (vi), any such aspiration resides far beyond the parameters of his text as a theological document. In this sense, Greene considers in a fundamental way the relationship between versions of religion that are not, in some sense, founded on an unquestioned sense of dogma but empiricist in their principles, beliefs, and values. To the extent that such diferences reside in diverse oppositions between collectivist and individualist ways of managing human behavior,20 Greene’s text is in large part written at the intersection between the two largest branches of Christianity itself, Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Exploring their interrelationships on the most elementary level, Richard P. McBrien writes that, “Protestantism tends to emphasize the dialectical. Affirmation is set against negation, ‘Yes’ against ‘No,’ the divine against the human, the Church against the world. Catholicism, on the other hand, emphasizes the analogical. Realities are more similar than dissimilar. The Church and the world are more alike than diferent” (78). By way of the convergence in Greene’s text between otherwise opposing religious and secular models of meaning, he presents “the distinctive social dialogue among languages that is present in the novel” (Bakhtin 263). On this basis, it may be inferred that Greene is “analogical” in theological terms in several key respects.21 First, Greene implies that the figure of the author herself is central to his fiction, implicated as she is, in the very least sense, in her choice of genre. Second, Greene suggests that the development of his theory and practice proceeds by way of his chosen themes and ideas in their totality, as distinct from their singularity. Third, Greene infers that innumerable models of authority are complicit and unavoidable in the act of writing. This is particularly so in the case of the novel, centered on dramatizing the relationship among form, content, and context. Greene’s approaches to the Catholic concept of the analogical are especially apparent at the conclusion of Monsignor Quixote, when Quixote, in a state of delirium, administers communion to Sancho, as witnessed by Father Leopoldo and Professor Philbeam. For Bosco, the three

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characters are representatives of the “diferent philosophical positions that Greene has portrayed throughout his work” (Catholic Imagination 152). Against Bosco, I suggest that this scene, and Greene’s novel itself, form less summative remarks by Greene on his fiction than a means of unsettling any kind of typologizing interpretation. Whatever the truth of Bosco’s remark that Greene seeks “to underscore not so much the fiction of truth but the truth of fiction” (153), it is also the case that the interpretative terms invoked by Greene’s novel are in themselves implicated within their own critical parameters.22 In the same way as Greene engenders particular critical and creative contexts, he also examines the specific uses to which his work may be applied. Aspects of the critical implications of Greene’s work are exhibited by Quixote, who is in a hurry to conduct the Mass: “The Mass went rapidly on – no epistle, no gospel: it was as though Father Quixote were racing towards the consecration” (Monsignor 240). This means that Quixote has little time for the correct decorum in which such an event should be held: “As long as he was speaking the Latin words he was at least happy in his dream” (241). The Mass is, nevertheless, irrevocably real to Quixote, affecting him physically: “he raised the invisible chalice and seemed to drink from it. The Mayor could see the movement of his throat as he swallowed” (242). Sancho acknowledges in kind Quixote’s belief that he is actually administering the Eucharist: “He came forward three steps with two fingers extended, and the Mayor knelt. Anything which will give him peace, he thought, anything at all. The fingers came closer. The Mayor opened his mouth and felt the fingers, like a host on his tongue” (242). By the terms of the friendship between Quixote and Sancho, the event is symbolic of their separate beliefs about the role of any particular dogma in their daily lives. For both characters, dogma, whether religious or secular in nature, is of lesser importance than the diferent forms of experience to which that same dogma actually applies. As Quixote and Sancho engage with each other’s experiences in a wide variety of ways, so, within the text itself, the acts of writing and the evaluation that this engenders converge in a dynamically reflective sense. Father Leopoldo’s reflections on the evident bond of friendship between Quixote and Sancho present a helpful insight into the creative and critical context of Greene’s novel. Leopoldo challenges Philbeam’s reductively empiricist reading of the events: “Monsignor Quixote quite obviously believed in the presence of the bread and wine. Which of us was right?” (245). For the priest, Quixote’s very character was implicated in his administering of the sacraments. Sancho’s belief that he is “a very unworthy recipient” (246) indicates Greene’s reframing of a distinctively

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deductive notion of theology by a concomitantly inductive set of terms. To Sancho’s statement, “What I’ve done in those thirty years – well, you wouldn’t like me to go into details” (246), Leopoldo points to the obvious bond between the characters: “Perhaps Monsignor Quixote knew your state of mind better than you do yourself. You have been friends. You have travelled together. He encouraged you to take the Host. He showed no hesitation. I distinctly heard him say, ‘Kneel, compañero’ ” (246). Leopoldo identifies between the two characters by pointing to the changes which they have undergone, which extend without the conceptual implications of their contrasting positions on religious and secular matters. Insofar as those matters are fundamental to the imaginative framework of this particular novel, Greene questions the worth of any critical approach that narrows his fiction to specific interpretative procedures. As Leopoldo utters to Sancho: “Do you think it’s more difficult to turn empty air than wine into blood? Can our limited senses decide a thing like that? We are faced by an infinite mystery” (246). Leopoldo’s opposition between the efable and the inefable points to the drama in Greene’s fiction between multiple forms of religious and secular meaning. If Greene’s work is marked by a terminology that is religious, as distinct from secular in its critical application, that terminology is also engendered in the very act of writing itself. Greene is a novelist who questions in the most fundamental sense how the act of writing and the evaluation that this prompts converge in my critique of his work. That critique is itself dynamic in its range of meaning, taking as its focus Greene’s disturbance of the relationship between diverse deductive and inductive notions of theology. Characterized, as the theological nature of Monsignor Quixote is, by the ironical exchanges between its protagonists, the text playfully reflects on Greene’s work overall, serving to upset any religious or secular form of interpretation that is conceptually thin in its critical premises. Patrick Querry and Thomson make several helpful points in this regard. Querry infers that Greene’s fiction is written at the intersection between his own diverse critical and creative agendas: “If behaviour is also belief, then surely writing is behaviour and betrays at least as much of the substance of a writer’s belief as whatever he might publicly ‘formulate and subscribe to’ ” (176). Thomson also observes Greene’s capacity to upset any critique which is singular in its interpretative application: “Like all good fictions . . . Monsignor Quixote has the capacity not merely to satisfy the expectations a reader brings to it, but to transform those expectations as the narrative unfolds. Not because Greene commands it, but because we, as readers, desire to engage the story he tells, wherever it may lead us and however it may end”

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(“Blue” 71). Against Querry and Thomson, for me, Greene’s work is not necessarily the product of specific aims and objectives on the part of the author, however valid or dynamic his motives for writing. Neither a figure of dogmatic intention nor somebody whose work proceeds from a narrowly empiricist model of knowledge, Greene focuses attention on his precise identity as a novelist. It is the many ways in which this status manifests and questions itself to which I shall now turn.

Writing, Evaluation, and Authorship Similar to how numerous critical and creative notions of meaning converge in Greene’s novels, so Greene himself, as located within his own interpretative terms, serves as a core figure by which to read his texts. In particular, Greene questions the value of the multiple kinds of authority implicated in any fictional text and the par ticu lar forms of evaluation used to interpret that very text. David Lodge alludes to this kind of methodological approach in his remark that “reading a literary text is a process of continuous interpretation and evaluation” (“Literary” 92).23 For Lodge, “academic criticism . . . has its own hidden agenda. . . . Inasmuch as it aspires to a scientific, or at least systematic, knowledge of its subject, criticism can be seen as hostile to creativity itself” (98). Greene’s capacity to assume multiple frames of reference means that academic criticism, by which I mean the diverse methodological and interpretative procedures proposed by Lodge,24 is not set apart from the religious and secular preoccupations presented within his work. Rather, such a mode of conceiving literature is integral to his fiction’s broad conceptual terms. In his interrogation of the relationships between critical and creative literature, The Critic as Artist (1890), Oscar Wilde considers the temperaments and sensibilities of critics, including those whose breadth of insight pertains to that defined by Lodge. Wilde states that “criticism is, in fact, both creative and independent. . . . The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticizes as the artist does to the visible world of form and color, or the unseen world of passion and of thought” (1754). By way of his appropriation of the outward-looking focus of Vatican II and his concomitant expansion of Jone’s approaches to morality, Greene does not polarize inductive and deductive notions of theology. Rather, those very theologies are subject to the radical convergence between the formal and thematic dimensions of Greene’s texts. In this way, Greene’s work is both wide-ranging in its diverse applications while also pointing to the need to expand a variety of approaches to literature.

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One key to conceptualizing the dynamically broad-ranging implications of Greene is to apply to him the various ways of reading proposed by Barthes. In keeping with Greene’s insights into the relationships between deductive and inductive theologies, as exhibited in and through his novels, Barthes distinguishes between two approaches to literary texts. On the one hand, he considers “a purely inductive method” whereby “one starts by studying all the narratives within a genre, a period, a society” (“Introduction” 81). Given the variety of narratives within these categories, he also suggests the “deductive procedure,” in which the critic is “obliged first to devise a hy pothetical model of description . . . and then gradually to work down from this model towards the diferent narrative species which at once conform to and depart from the model” (81). On the basis of the relatively narrow range of approaches presently adopted in the interpretation of Greene, this conception of literary texts still marks many approaches to his work. Against Barthes’s opposition between inductive and deductive evaluative procedures, it is useful to consider his later approaches to the relationship between literary texts and the societies within which they are interpreted. By exploring how Greene implicates diferent notions of the social within his writing, by which I mean the intersections and oppositions within and between his texts’ diferent interpretations, it is possible to conceptualize the role of theology in its critical and creative processes. Barthes’s exploration of the diferences between the writer, the intellectual, and the teacher is especially helpful in this regard: “Over against the teacher, who is on the side of speech, let us call a writer every operator of language on the side of writing; between the two, the intellectual, the person who prints and publishes his speech” (“Writers” 190). In the same way as Barthes understands the center of his interpretative model to be the writer, so, for Greene, the hierarchical relationships implicit in any society are subject to no singular model of conception. Barthes continues: “Between the language of the teacher and that of the intellectual there is hardly any incompatibility (they often co-exist in a single individual); but the writer stands apart, separate. Writing begins at the point where speech becomes impossible (a word that can be understood in the sense it has when applied to a child)” (190). Barthes’s suggestion that the teacher, the intellectual, and the writer engage with each other in both hierarchical and nonhierarchical ways points to the drama at the center of Greene’s work. As Greene rejects any given evaluative agenda, so, for Barthes, the classroom and society itself are subject to a complex variety of relationships. To the extent that they rest on the imaginative capacity of the writer, Barthes’s model of social interaction presents a useful means of conceiving how

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Greene himself engenders particular ways of reading his work, even as those same ways are refuted by his texts. It is in the context of the convergence between his approaches to creative and critical acts of writing that Greene challenges many contemporary ways of reading literary texts.25 Lodge’s exploration of the relationships between diferent forms of criticism advances little Barthes’s early opposition between inductive and deductive models of meaning. Observing Barthes’s early essay on the notion of “critical proof” in a text, as founded on “the ability . . . to cover it as completely as possible with one’s own language” (“Criticism” 650), Lodge writes: “Criticism must face the fact that it can only be ‘true’ by being tautological—that is, by repeating what the text says in the text’s own words;26 and it can only escape from tautology by representing the text in other words, and therefore misrepresenting it” (“Literary” 106). While criticism may well serve in some contexts as “a useful, as well as a merely playful, activity” (106), any such notion of use or play should nevertheless observe Greene’s ironic appropriation of the relationship between diferent kinds of theology, especially those which pertain to empiricist or dogmatic versions of religion. It is by this sense, rather than that of position and counterposition, as advocated by Lodge, that Greene’s fiction paradoxically serves as its own critical text, thereby “defamiliarising it, enabling us to see its beauty and value afresh” (106). On these grounds, Greene is true to his proclamation that “an author of talent is his own best critic – the ability to criticize his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent: it is his talent” (Adamson, Introduction xii; Greene, “Some Notes” 153). For Greene, a novel is a conceptually diverse text, whose critical dimensions are conceived by way of its diverse engagements with the very fabric of the society within which it is critiqued. However broad its religious or secular application, fiction is, thereby, a means of challenging and negotiating the relationships between innumerably diferent individuals and collectives. The numerous ways in which Greene’s fiction intersects with the society in which it is evaluated means that his work subscribes in part to the tenets and principles of the Catholic Church in dynamically broad ways. This aspect of Greene’s work is presented through some of the behaviors of his characters. To Plarr’s question in The Honorary Consul, “You still talk like a priest, Leόn. What made you marry?” Leόn replies, “I married when I lost faith. A man must have something to guard” (98). For Leόn, his religion is less a part of the conceptual fabric of his society than a source of values which its subjects can follow. Plarr replies, “I can’t imagine you without your faith,” to which Leόn responds, “I only mean my faith in the Church. Or in what they have made of it. Of course I know

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one day things may be better. But I was ordained when John was Pope. I am not patient enough to wait for another John” (98). Leόn’s hopes for the arrival of a Pope similar in outlook to John XXIII, the inaugurator of Vatican II, are a displaced expression of Greene’s own position on the relationship between literature and theology themselves. In the same way as both disciplines are systems of knowledge subject to radical intersection, so, in the context of Greene’s fiction, neither should be approached in mutually independent ways. The Archbishop’s decision to dismiss Leόn from the role of preaching should, in itself, be seen in the context of Greene’s capacity to assume a wide range of religious and secular contexts: “I spoke in a sermon once about Father Torres who was shot with the guerrillas in Colombia. I only said that unlike Sodom the Church did sometimes produce one just man, so perhaps she would not be destroyed like Sodom. The police reported me to the Archbishop and the Archbishop forbade me to preach any more” (112). Leόn’s capacity to challenge any particular form of social authority, as distinct from that which is singularly religious or secular in form is also a means of communicating his own religious beliefs. He continues, “Oh well, poor man, he was very old and the General liked him, and he thought he was doing right, rendering to Caesar” (112). For Leόn, as for Greene, theology is not an exclusively religious discipline but one among innumerable diferent frameworks within which to understand a complex range of conceptual phenomena. On this basis, Greene’s narrator describes Leόn in abstract terms: “The priest muttered a cliché absent-mindedly, ‘They say one man has to die for the people’ ” (112). Fortnum replies, “But that was what the crucifiers said, not the Christians.” (113) “The priest looked up. ‘Yes, you are right,’ he said, ‘I was not thinking when I spoke. You know your Testament’ ” (113). Fortnum rejects this suggestion by pointing to an illustrated series of moral tales for children that describes, among other issues, diferent kinds of violence, and also explores a “constraint from giving in to violent impulses” (Savelsberg 184): “I have not read it since I was a boy. But that’s the kind of scene which sticks in the mind. Like Struwwelpeter” (Greene, Honorary 113). As Leόn is implicated in a strictly Vatican II theological context, so Fortnum is able to question the relationship between its dogmatic and empiricist meanings. Within the totality of Greene’s work, religious and secular genres of writing invite equal consideration in terms of how each is subject to the fictional and nonfictional dimensions of the other. Quixote’s interest in world afairs implies Greene’s questioning of the relationship between the deductive and inductive notions of theology implicit within his novels.27 Quixote reads his breviary and newspapers

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with equal attention, even as the former is considered of lesser religious importance than it used to be: “He read very little now except his breviary and the newspaper, which had never informed him that the breviary was no longer required reading; he was interested particularly in the accounts of the cosmonauts since he had never quite been able to abandon the idea that somewhere in the immensity of space existed the realm of God” (Greene, Monsignor 17). For Quixote, his vocation as a priest is characterized by an imperative that parallels his ministerial duties, that being to contemplate contemporary world events. Their excitement influences his work in key ways. Amid his contemplations of outer space, “occasionally he would open one of his old theological textbooks to make sure that the short homily which he would be making in the church on Sunday was properly in accordance with the teaching of the Church” (17). To the extent that Quixote himself is distracted from his priestly observances, Greene’s text has two implications for the evaluation of his fiction. First, Greene’s novels should be considered by way of their capacities to lay equal stress on any aspect of the relationships and conflicts within and between their religious and secular dimensions. This includes the possibility that the latter may assume contexts in some circumstances that subvert the significance of the former. Second, in the same way as Quixote considers the figure of God within a scientific and technological context, as distinct from a singularly religious one, so Greene’s fiction should be read by way of its intersection with a variety of sometimes conflicting spectrums of meaning. Monsignor Quixote engenders insight into how Greene’s fiction assumes models of meaning that proceed from both religiously dogmatic and secularly empiricist frames of reference. Quixote’s contemplations on outer space, like his later delirious administering of the other wise invisible sacraments, point to Greene’s own appropriation of the relationship between inductive and deductive theologies. If Greene’s fiction is written and evaluated by and through a particular society, those interpretative contexts also direct attention to why his work is written and evaluated. In one sense, the conceptual frameworks engendered within the context of the Roman Catholic Church are presented as the core means by way to read Greene’s novels. For Kathryn McClymond, “elements of the Church— its theology, hierarchy, and especially rituals—become . . . the grammar with which Greene formulates his questions about human nature, sin, piety, faith, and saintliness” (11). Aside from McClymond’s generalized approach to the thematic dimensions of Greene’s fiction, her critique is also subject to the very oppositions that undermine the evaluation of his work. Even as she observes Greene’s own troubling of the opposition between

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the religious and the secular, McClymond is committed to a dualistic method of evaluation: “While there is considerable disagreement about what the dualistic tension centers on, there seems to be remarkable agreement that such a dualism exists” (11). Such a dualistic focus contradicts Greene’s own rejection of the novel as a genre that can sustain a series of totalizing interpretative procedures. However valid McClymond’s approaches to Greene’s novels, they can also be read by way of their assumption of binaries that do not necessarily proceed from a Roman Catholic context. On this basis, McClymond’s theorization of ritual ofers a useful way of understanding some aspects of Greene’s version of religion. Of Quixote’s delirious Eucharist, McClymond writes: “Greene separates the ritual from the institution that claims to have authority over it, and he suggests that the ritual’s efficacy is based on Quixote’s personal faith rather than on any institutional investiture” (13). As Quixote, like Leόn, is subject to a particular approach to theology, so for McClymond, in concurrence with Catherine Bell, “ritual . . . is situational; that is, human activity ‘cannot be grasped outside of the specific context in which it occurs’ ” (14; Bell 81). McClymond concludes that “the situationality of ritual draws attention to Greene’s own preference for specific lived experiences over abstract theology” (15). Insofar as this alternative form of attention is indicative of Greene’s appropriation of the novel as its own critical text, McClymond points to the critical and creative drama at the center of Greene’s work. In Barthes’s terms, Greene is understood to be an author in the broadest possible sense of the term, composing texts which employ “the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem . . . structuration without structure” (S/Z 5). Except, against Barthes, for whom the act of interpreting a text is “to appreciate what plural constitutes it” (5), Greene is also an author of texts whose distinctively religious characteristics are not necessarily mutually distinguishable from those which are secular. On account of their intersection with aspects of the multiple interpretative procedures by which they are conceived, Greene’s texts point beyond their own interpretative frameworks. In par ticu lar, they present insights into the very religious and political forms of authority by which they acquire meaning. Plarr’s private reflection outside the barrio, “God help you, father, wherever you are” (Greene, Honorary 162), is followed by the narrator’s comment, “It was easier to believe in a god with a human sense of hearing than in some omniscient force which could read his unuttered thoughts” (162). Neither a source of specifically paternal authority nor something on which he can depend for a sense of emotional well-being, for Plarr, as for Greene, religion does not provide a stable

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means by which to comprehend his society’s fragmented sensibility. Equally, against Philbeam, who believes that in a monastery, “strange ideas get nourished like mushrooms in a dark cellar” (Greene, Monsignor 247), Sancho’s final memory of Quixote is that of a figure who can question the very basis of a given political or religious framework: “[A]n idea quite strange to him had lodged in his brain. Why is it that the hate of man – even of a man like Franco – dies with his death, and yet love, the love which he had begun to feel for Father Quixote, seemed now to live and grow in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long, he wondered with a kind of fear, was it possible for that love of his to continue? And to what end?” (248). The end, for Sancho, is based on challenging any given form of authority that he has taken for granted until this point. As Quixote could think apart from his dogmatic theological training, so Sancho is empowered to reflect on the role of religion both within and outside of his narrowly secularist beliefs. Consistent with Henry Shukman’s opinion of Monsignor Quixote that “like all great fiction, the novel winds up being a celebration of what it means to be human” (xiv), for Greene, fiction itself has the capacity to question any model of human relationships that does not subscribe to a central notion of authority. Shukman writes of Greene’s work: “The greatest of his themes is religion. As a converted Catholic, he has a passionate interest in his adopted faith’s doctrine and theology, and in how these play out in human life” (vii). If Monsignor Quixote and The Honorary Consul do exhibit spectrums of meaning that are, to a greater or lesser degree, characterized by diverse forms of conflict, they also present resolutions to those very conflicts by way of their specific contextual details. In the same way that Greene suggests that literature “has nothing to do with edification” (Why Do I Write? 32), he also suggests that it is not without forms of reflection that present solutions to the very interpretative problems it creates: “I am not arguing that literature is amoral, but that it presents a personal moral, and the personal morality of an individual is seldom identical with the morality of the group to which he belongs” (32). For Greene, literary texts, like Quixote’s reflections on outer space, are not imbued with particular notions of meaning. Rather, in the same way as any aspect of Greene’s texts is not necessarily the manifestation of his own personality, so this aspect of his character is implicated nevertheless, however directly or indirectly, in their writing. As he remarks of his characters, “I give myself a certain space around which I draw a pencil line; inside this space I leave them alone” (Jouve and Moré 25). Greene’s novels proceed from a complex range of individualist and collectivist concerns, of which none should assume dominance in the act

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of evaluation. While diferent individuals and groups may understand his texts to be the products of particular agendas, according to Greene, those agendas in themselves point back to his role as a creative and critical figure. Insofar as it is possible to speculate why Greene’s texts are written, it may be posited that Greene explores both the collectivist ideologies of particular religious or political groups and the ways in which those same groups engender individualistic models of meaning. In keeping with his assumption of both inductive and deductive notions of theology, Greene’s work is evaluated in and by his society in order to celebrate its identity as a context within which diferent groups and individuals may find meaning in each other’s many notions of belief. This means that as a novelist, Greene is both an author of fictions that are collectively owned and a writer of texts that engender meanings specific to any given individual. Greene’s status as an author of critically advanced novels is marked nonetheless by anxieties about their precise role and function. “But what do you think of the Catholic novel?” Greene was asked. He replied, “I can hardly understand such a question because what is there in common between writing a novel and writing apologetics? . . . The apologist writes for a certain type of reader; the novelist addresses all. Don’t you see that it’s the worst thing in the world for an author to write with the intention of converting men?” (Jouve and Moré 26). If the novelist does write with particular motives and intentions, they are nonetheless subject to the creative and critical contexts that engender the act of writing itself. Greene continues: “If one is Catholic, he doesn’t have to try to be ‘Catholic.’ Everything that he says or writes inevitably breathes Catholicism. When I sit down to write, my only ambition is to tell stories that are as fascinating as possible” (26). It is, then, within the act of telling stories that Greene’s identity is positioned. Writing, for Greene, is a way of understanding the many contexts within which his fictions acquire meaning. As he prefaces his second autobiography, Ways of Escape (1980): “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation” (9). Greene is neither a figure who resides apart from his society nor a subject loyal to its many diferent forms of authority. His occupation as an author is imbued with both a secularist sensibility and a religious fervor. The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote are texts characterized by their many appropriations of the relationship between the religious and the secular. In the former, Greene concerns himself with the theological

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context of Vatican II in ways which question his very status as the author of his novel. In the latter, Jone’s theological textbook acts as a central critical context by directing attention to the relationship between deductive and inductive notions of theology. This, in turn, engenders wider comment on the relationship between any critical and creative act, particularly from the perspective that the evaluation of a literary text is irrevocably related to its writing. In this sense, Greene’s novels conform to many of the models of authorship proposed by Barthes in his diferent critical texts, especially the idea that the readerly relates to the writerly in a range of social, religious and political contexts. Similar to how Greene’s work directs attention to aspects of the evaluative terms within which its interpretations are conceived, so Greene also questions the overall significance of those very interpretations. He might in many respects concur with Barthes’s statements in his eponymous essay “The Death of the Author” (1968) that “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text” (145) and that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (148). But he would also not wholly accept Barthes’s derision of the author as the representative of “the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society” (148). In the same way as the acts of writing and evaluating literary texts are in themselves subject to a range of collectivist and individualist models of meaning, so, for Greene, “the sway of the Author remains power ful” (143). Just as Greene guards against too wide a focus on the individual, so he does not reject the import of many distinctively religious forms of agency. In some sense, then, for Greene, “The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, sufers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child” (145). Equally, Greene would concur that while “the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic” (147), critics should not themselves be subject to negative kinds of attention. To suggest “that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author” is (147), by the terms of Greene’s texts, overly pessimistic. Deductive and inductive notions of theology relate to each other in the two novels only insofar as they are in themselves each subject to creative forms of appropriation and reappropriation. On this basis, Greene entertains the Second Vatican Council both as a Catholic believer who agrees in many ways with its outward-looking focus and as somebody who concomitantly rejects its alternative theological paradigm.

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Theory and Theology: Graham Greene’s Remapping of Common Ground

There is a relationship in Graham Greene’s work between “theory” and theology, by which I mean conceptual frameworks that are specifically secular or religious in nature. I focus on this relationship here because it acts to disturb singular ways of conceiving Greene’s approaches both to matters Catholic and to those against which they are opposed. In keeping with Greene’s status as “an uninstructed Catholic,” critical attention is directed to the interpretative terms of Greene’s texts, as distinct from their relationships and conflicts with any particular version of religion, no matter what form that version might take, including its sense of doctrine, dogma, or other religious form. In this way, it is possible to make culminating assessments about each of the novels considered in this enquiry and, in and through those assessments, to arrive at a definition of the Catholic novel that is to a greater or lesser extent thorough in its approximation to Greene. Since the chapter is premised on the arguments of each of the preceding chapters, I shall revisit each of the novels explored within them in the order of their appearance in the book. The first part of this chapter will consider Brighton Rock (1938) and The Heart of the Matter (1948) by way of an approach that is intentionalist in character, by which I mean a form of investigation which proceeds from “the view that the meaning of a literary work is determined by the author’s intention” (Juhl 9). The second part will explore The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951) from an anti-intentionalist perspective.1 The third part will examine The Honorary Consul (1973) and Monsignor Quixote (1982) in terms of their capacities to question the value of distinctively religious or secular ways of reading. My objective is to

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discern how and why theoretical and theological notions of meaning, as conceived within and without Greene’s secular and religious concerns and preoccupations, conflict and converge in his fiction. This is in order to identify its social implications in both wide and specific terms, stemming from the dynamic conceptual range of Greene’s specifically religious and secular forms of critical conception. Relative to each section, my principal questions are: What forms of dialogue does Greene’s work encourage between religious and secular readers? In what ways might Greene’s readers be both subjects of and subject to his narratives? And why is the act of reading never value-free? One key to conceiving Greene’s capacity to adopt contrasting ways of reading is his assumption of forms of critique that are more or less religious in focus. John R. Searle is especially helpful to my consideration of this aspect of Greene’s work. This is because he points to the uses and limitations of adopting particular notions of religious or secular belief in the act of interpreting fiction. Commenting on the purposes of any verbal utterance, Searle writes that “the speech act is more than just the expression of an intention or the expression of a belief. It is above all a public performance. I am telling something to someone else. But I am not just telling him that I have a belief or that I have an intention; I am telling him something about the world represented by those beliefs and intentions” (39). Searle directs attention to the ability of any form of language to question how a religious or secular belief is dependent for its meaning upon the context within which it is framed. For Searle, any linguistic act is subject to the material circumstances and conditions that proceed from that very act: “By committing myself to the conditions of satisfaction of the belief I am telling him that this is how the world is; by telling him about the conditions of satisfaction of my intention I am telling him what I am actually going to do” (39). It is Greene’s capacity both to question and to exhibit diferent notions of critical context that forms the methodological basis of this chapter. Similar to the way in which any act of critical interpretation is subject to its own interpretative premises, so Greene’s novels explore within themselves their own particular meanings. This includes the possibility that, in some contexts, his fiction exhibits the rejection of a range of critical premises. Whereas my previous chapters focus on specific aspects of the thematic and formal concerns of Greene’s novels, including their implication within diverse forms of the contextual, this chapter will attempt to explore elements of those concerns in their totality. In response to Searle’s perspectives on the extent to which any verbal utterance and, moreover, particular literary forms can acquire their own

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series of diferent intentions, Christopher Gauker points to the specific purposes implicated in any speech act. Inasmuch as literary texts intersect with diferent aspects of those purposes, Gauker’s insights extend to those of Greene: “One could say that an utterance has conditions of satisfaction as a consequence of its conventional meaning and the context in which it is uttered and that it is knowing that the utterance has these conditions of satisfaction that enables an audience to recognize the belief or other intrinsically intentional state that underlies and motivates the act of speech” (129). Greene’s work assumes numerous kinds of critical context and upsets any single notion of the contextual. The very possibility of defining the precise nature of a speech act in relation to his texts is problematic. Gauker places limitations on the extent to which a specific conclusion or inference can be drawn from a particular verbal utterance: “A person can make a promise without intending to do so, for we consider people to have made a promise if they give every appearance of having made one. Similarly, a person can make an assertion without intending to do so” (133). Nonetheless, however wide the critical or creative capacities of an individual’s verbal utterances, those utterances are premised on the specific nature of any situation. It is this notion of context within which Greene’s work is best conceived, examining, as he does, within his own critical terms, how language necessarily relates to the interpretative frameworks by which his novels are apprehended and understood. It is Greene’s capacity to be interpreted apart from single forms of interpretation, within and without his novels themselves, and hence to be received in dynamically social terms, which invites this way of thinking to my argument. Insofar as his work does assume particular notions of meaning, I will focus on those that center on the efects of his texts in their entirety.

Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter In his observations on the ways in which Pinkie and Ida contrast with each other within their separate characterizations, Neil McEwan suggests that Brighton Rock should be considered according to particular forms of religious and secular belief. He writes: “Brighton Rock asserts that human justice is inadequate and irrelevant to the real struggle against evil” (49). For McEwan, one efect of Greene’s novel is “his power to stir interest, even in readers who do not believe in the peace of God when they set the book down” (51). Greene himself suggests that the text exhibits “a discussion, far too obvious and open for a novel, of the distinction between good-and-evil and right-and-wrong and the mystery of ‘the appalling

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strangeness of the mercy of God’” (Introduction, 1975, x; Ways 60). I suggest that McEwan’s and Greene’s opinions should both be understood in terms of the text’s capacity to question its representations of the role and function of evil. In one sense, the efects of evil proceed from multiple kinds of intentions and self-interest. In his recent sustained psychological analysis of evil, Philip Zimbardo defines the concept as follows: “Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others—or using one’s authority and systematic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf. In short, it is ‘knowing better but doing worse’ ” (5). For those who wish to “avoid using ‘valued language,’ ” Zimbardo’s framing of evil “as . . . something we all understand and agree about” (Newson 253), is conceptually inadequate. Nonetheless, “his use of the word needs to be seen in the context of the social environment which exists outside academia, the social environment that Zimbardo is trying to change” (253). Contrary to the opposition between specific notions of critical context, Greene’s work exhibits the capacity to contradict any stable approach toward context itself. His work is in a broad range of ways premised on its very challenge to stable forms of reading, invoking conceptual implications of shifting consequence. Haim Gordon argues that “Greene repeatedly shows . . . in relation to evil, there is no middle way. Either you fight it or you support it” (61). This opinion is confined to Gordon’s own interpretative premise, namely, his belief that “the illustrious academics who condemn Ida are, in a word, supporters of evil” (61). Gordon’s position against the critical procedures of particular academics means that he does not conceive evil in terms that attempt to convey its conceptual meaning. Gordon notes Terry Eagleton’s early opinion that “Pinkie regards human involvement as despicable weakness, and is damned for it; yet the novel’s major image of such involvement is the despicable Ida” (61; Eagleton, Exiles 134). Gordon writes, “make no mistake. Eagleton agrees with Pinkie that Ida is despicable” (61). Insofar as Gordon’s investigative terms are limited in their imaginative range, his study is subject to the very lack of critical context that he condemns in other critics. Greene’s version of religion appears to be considered according to a thinly conceived critical approach, as distinct from one that approximates the extent of its religious and secular meaning. In opposition to those critics for whom evil is distinctively subjective as a critical concept, in his recent study, Eagleton explores its meanings within a range of investigative contexts. Eagleton argues against Gordon’s reductive critical focus by exploring how any notion of evil has acquired a complex range of interpretative premises. They include those which per-

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sonify the concept as “a kind of fifth columnist, yet one installed at the very core of your identity” (Evil 6). For Eagleton, evil is less something that proceeds from a wholly personalized series of intentions than a notion of meaning implicated in the very interpretation of those intentions. Commenting on the diferent influences that afect an individual’s behavior, Eagleton writes: “There is . . . no absolute distinction between being influenced and being free. A good many of the influences we undergo have to be interpreted in order to afect our behaviour; and interpretation is a creative afair. It is not so much the past that shapes us as the past as we (consciously or unconsciously) interpret it. And we can always come to decipher it diferently” (11). According to Eagleton, the meaning and consequence of evil depend upon the very interpretative frameworks within which they are normally perceived and challenged. Greene’s capacity to oppose those frameworks and the diferent forms of interpretation that they prompt directs how his perspectives on evil should be understood. By this approach, evil as a critical notion of meaning presents how Greene’s work can be comprehended as a means of apprehending its own multiple interpretations, including those which are intentionalist in form and aspect. In framing Brighton Rock within terms that acknowledge its capacity to subvert any form of the absolute, the very notion of the intentional itself is in question. Aside from his questioning of what might constitute evil, Eagleton nevertheless concedes that some approaches to a literary text rest, finally, with the critic. He writes: “God does not damn anyone to hell. You land yourself there by turning down his love, if such a rebuf is conceivable” (54). It is the critic who presents the ways in which evil is to be conceived and used in a reading, even as her critical framework is subject to the terms of the text itself. Greene’s capacity to oppose any single form of critical interpretation is presented by way of Slavoj Žižek’s approaches to evil.2 They are instructive to my argument in that they direct attention to how diferent conceptualizations of evil intersect. For Žižek, “evil is something which threatens to return for ever, a spectral dimension which magically survives its physical annihilation and continues to haunt us” (Violence 56). Inasmuch as Greene’s novel provokes a diverse range of interpretations, attention is drawn to the conceptual terms of the critic herself as much as to those of the text which she examines. The interpretative gestures that should frame Greene’s fiction proceed from a moral framework of dynamic imaginative reach. Inasmuch as the consideration of evil invokes diferent kinds of critical approach, it also presents its own series of limitations. This is exhibited in a range of ways in Brighton Rock. From one perspective, Pinkie is

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described as someone who embodies a distinctively religious conceptualization of evil, even as he himself might not recognize the notion. This is because his fate is likened to the suferings of Hell, as conceived within a specifically Catholic context. His “slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went” (20). Pinkie’s capacity to act in evil ways is exhibited by his ruthless decision to leave no clues to his crimes. On walking away from rival gang leader Colleoni and then the inspector, who have both received complaints from Brewer, following Pinkie’s intimidation of him: “[h]e was going to show the world. . . . [H]e jerked his narrow shoulders back at the memory that he’d killed his man, and these bogies who thought they were clever weren’t clever enough to discover that. He trailed the clouds of his own glory after him: hell lay about him in his infancy” (70). But from another perspective, Pinkie’s criminal way of life is implicated in a series of critical and creative decisions that question the possibility that he is wholly evil. Greene’s allusion to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (1807)3 suggests that Pinkie’s criminal actions proceed not just from notions of evil premised on specific forms of religious belief, including the Roman Catholic doctrine of original sin. Rather, Pinkie also embodies interpretative approaches that question those very forms. Those approaches include the need to consider a collection of secular kinds of evil, including those which point to his implication in the beliefs of the other characters in the text. Evil, in this sense, is less something that rests on notions of meaning which are to a greater or lesser degree stable than a means by which Greene may question the capacity of his text to acquire the critical implications of any single religious or secular belief. Rose and Pinkie’s Catholicism should be conceived within the terms of Greene’s text, as distinct from a specific version of religion. The contrasting approaches to diferent aspects of the Roman Catholic religion presented within Greene’s characterizations of Rose and Pinkie are exhibited in their conversation about their pasts. When Rose points out their common religion, she alludes to their shared upbringing and, consequently, how their perspectives on Brighton contrast with Ida’s: “ ‘You’re a Roman too. We were all Romans in Nelson Place. You believe in things. Like Hell. But you can see she don’t believe a thing.’ She said bitterly, ‘You can tell the world’s all dandy with her’” (96). Pinkie responds by turning away from any association with his childhood home: “He defended himself from any connection with Paradise Piece: ‘I don’t take any stock in religion. Hell—it’s just there. You don’t need to think of it—not before you die’ ” (96). In contrast to Rose, for Pinkie, the beliefs and religious traditions of Roman Catholicism provide the context within which

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to reject a particular collection of religious beliefs. This includes that associated with any absolutist doctrine, including a range of distinctively Catholic notions of evil. The perspectives presented within Pinkie and Rose’s separate characterizations of the relationship between their diferent versions of religion and the society within which they live have two implications for my argument. Any conceptualization of evil as a critical notion of meaning rests within the interpretative terms specific to the material circumstances and conditions of a particular individual. In contrast to Rose, for whom the numerous beliefs of the Roman Catholic religion provide a series of principles by which to live, Pinkie presents his own needs as a Catholic believer. Consequently, his version of religion is premised on his own religious practice. This way of life is also the rejection of that very practice. Pinkie “knew every thing in theory, nothing in practice; he was only old with the knowledge of other people’s lusts, those of strangers who wrote their desires on the walls in public lavatories” (124). The material conditions and circumstances of an individual are, before a par ticular notion of the religious, afected in ways which point beyond their specific contexts nonetheless. Pinkie’s rejection of the version of religion assumed by Rose can, in this sense, afect him in ways that are helpful to his way of life. His incapacity to empathize with the experiences of others serves as a means of protecting himself from their resistance to his criminal behaviors. When Dallow asks Pinkie, “You’re a Roman aren’t you? You believe . . .” Pinkie replies, “Credo in unum Satanum,” to which Dallow responds: “I don’t know Latin” (182). Pinkie responds to Dallow in a language that only he himself understands in order to describe his world according to his own personal circumstances. Pinkie, in efect, imbues the text with a kind of fault line in which Greene’s own invocation of diferent aspects and notions of the Roman Catholic religion renders itself visible. Evil, in this text, acts in two ways. It is an absolutist doctrine that points to the conceptual limitations of a collection of religious beliefs. It also serves as a means of directing attention to the precise natures of the particular individuals who hold those beliefs. Insofar as evil is conceptualized in terms of the text’s own critical framework, Greene theorizes its interpretation in both wide and specific terms. If the consideration of evil in this text invites attention on its capacity to guide a critical interpretation, in The Heart of the Matter, any form of interpretation is in question. Greene explores less a theorization of the interpretative, by which I mean how a specific opinion is advanced, than an interpretation of the act of theorization itself, by which I mean the

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ways in which a particular opinion is framed. This approach to Greene’s novel is presented by its conceptualization of diferent forms of pity.4 Similar to the ways in which Pinkie rejects any absolutist doctrine, in this novel, the very notion of absolutism is itself subject to the interpretative preoccupations exhibited by the text. In opposition to Pinkie, who “felt no pity at all; he wasn’t old enough for pity” (100), Scobie’s state of mind proceeds from a broad-ranging form of interpretation. Scobie and Pinkie are, in this sense, characterized against one another in terms of both the versions of religion that they adopt and how those religions are practiced. Gerald Vann’s specifically Catholic approach to pity is especially relevant to my consideration of The Heart of the Matter, premised both on aspects of the relationships between individuals and the societies in which they live and on concerns that act to frame elements of the critical terms of those relationships. Vann gestures toward numerous reductive approaches to Greene, especially those which conceive his work according to a critically limited range of religious perspectives. Writing within the context of the notion of pity engendered among Christian believers by Christ’s fifth beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful, / For they shall obtain mercy” (NKJV, Mt 5:7), Vann comments, “as with material possessions of every sort, so with all that we have and are, the gift of pity enables us to be humbly and royally lavish, and above all with the gift of pity itself” (122). Consistent with Christ’s injunction to act in unselfish ways, for Vann, the capacity to feel pity points to any form of critique that lacks investigative rigor. Vann continues: “You must have pity for all, and the greatest pity for those who have greatest need of it. But humbly, reverently, not conferring a gift but asking to be given one; otherwise you will have not pity but the terrifying vulgarity of condescension and all the ugliness of pride” (122). It is precisely this form of pride that is at issue in how The Heart of the Matter has been received. Recent critics who interpret Greene’s novel according to a series of distinctively Catholic critical terms include Gordon Leah. Suggesting that Scobie is “trapped in the sins of adultery and deceit, and tortured by his over-active conscience” (“Bad Catholic?” 778), he attempts to draw lessons from the character’s sinful actions: “While the believer should not trifle with sin, a believer who knows no sin or is so bound by conformity to ecclesiastical doctrine that (s)he has lost all awareness of personal failure or need of grace, is far from the Kingdom of God” (778). Leah does not explore the numerous specifically secular contexts within which Scobie may be characterized. In another interpretation, R.H. Miller acknowledges the ways in which Scobie may be conceived as someone whose

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actions have diverse critical implications. For Miller, Scobie exhibits an “inability to realize a concept of self out of the cultural void he inhabits and thus is tortured by the fiery cloak of his Catholicism, from which suicide comes as a release from sufering” (“Graham Greene’s ‘Saddest Story’ ” 141). However valid Miller’s views, they nonetheless frame Scobie’s death according to the critic’s own values, rather than those implicated within the terms of the text itself. Miller, in efect, is subject to his characterization of Scobie elsewhere as someone who may be judged by way of a series of moral concerns. He writes that Scobie pursues “his chosen faith, alien, joyless, and austere, and the self-possessiveness it abets is his undoing” (“Scobie’s Faith” 250). These observations are in keeping with the early opinions of Connor Cruise O’Brien, for whom “pity is an equivocal and often impure disposition” (57). Against any reductive conception of Scobie’s sense of sin, the character should be understood by way of a diverse range of investigative contexts. In opposition to the recent religious approaches to Scobie, William Boyd conceives the character within a distinctively secular context, although his approach is also limited in its presuppositions. For Boyd, “the warped theology of the novel’s final pages is a symptom and a symbol of the madness into which he has descended.” Critical readings of Greene’s novel have advanced little, in efect, since the initial review of Greene’s novel by Evelyn Waugh, who wrote, “There are loyal Catholics here and in America who think it the function of the Catholic writer to produce only advertising brochures setting out in attractive terms the advantages of Church membership” (96). Waugh’s totalizations of writers and readers aside, his comments draw attention to interpretations of Greene’s novel that limit its critical implications to singular forms of evaluation. It is perhaps wise to consider Robert Murray Davis’s characterization of Scobie as a Catholic of dynamic religious and secular concerns. Davis remarks that “Scobie is consistently motivated in his acts—especially the distasteful and apparently uncharacteristic ones, including his intentional separation from God by suicide—by the desire to be absolutely alone” (Rev. 914). Insofar as Scobie does exhibit a need for solitude, he also gestures toward the conflicting opinions that mark the critical reception of Greene’s novel. As Vann himself remarks in his injunction to Catholic believers to adopt a religious attitude of pity: “Think for a moment of whether you are ever ‘shocked’ in the colloquial sense of the word: if you are it is a lack of wisdom, for you ought to know more about human nature, including your own; it is a lack of humility, for you are presupposing that the thing that shocks you is something far below your own moral level” (122–123). For me, it is precisely the attempt to limit Greene’s capacity

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to unsettle a distinctively Catholic notion of pity that marks many of the interpretations of his novel. The usefulness of Vann’s comments on pity as a critical concept is nonetheless limited by his singularly religious perspective. Perhaps a better approach to the role and function of pity in Greene’s novel is Robert H. Kimball’s, for whom the emotion is implicated in diverse forms of experience. Kimball’s approach in itself points to the ways in which Greene both opposes and facilitates the convergence between diferent notions of dogma and experience throughout his work: “Experiencing the emotion of pity is never a valid justification for action. I believe this rigid reason/emotion distinction has little basis in our actual belief-forming and decision-making practices. Nor do I believe that emotion should be excluded from reasoning, since our emotions are often informative and are sometimes more reliable guides to action than argument” (302). Kimball’s comments have two implications for my interpretation of Greene’s novel. The text should be critiqued by way of the specific forms of belief it may present, however their precise natures may be conceptualized. Greene’s novel exhibits the kinds of religious forms of pity explored by Vann and those which are in themselves premised on challenging them. Kimball’s approach nonetheless must also acknowledge Greene’s concomitant capacity to question and even reject those beliefs as interpretative guides in the reading of his novel. Any interpretation of Greene’s novel should be conceived both by way of its presentation of and challenge to diferent conceptual frameworks. On this basis, Scobie himself, in The Heart of the Matter, serves as a key figure within which to apprehend those frameworks. His capacity to feel pity for many of the novel’s characters points to Greene’s own ability to engender multiple forms of dialogue between religious and secular readers. Scobie’s marriage to Louise is marked by his inability to feel anything for her but pity, an emotion that on the grounds of its diverse interpretative premises, including those which stem from the relationship between the individual and society, acts both as a central critical guide in Greene and a barrier to understanding his work. Before leaving the house, he observes Louise “sitting up under the mosquito-net, and for a moment he had the impression of a joint under a meat-cover. But pity trod on the heels of the cruel image and hustled it away” (14). Scobie’s perceptions of Louise are inflected by a state of emotion that serves to reinforce their inhuman imagery rather than address the reasons for its usage. To the extent that Scobie’s very language is subject to his feelings of pity for Louise, the emotion also frames all aspects of his perceptions. While pausing for a brief moment outside in the course of his policing

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duties, he contemplates the relationship between the activity of the shelter that houses the survivors and the stillness of the night sky: “Outside the rest-house he stopped again. The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? [I]f one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” (111). Scobie’s pity is, then, the product of his feelings of responsibility for those whom he serves in and through his job as a policeman. To the extent that his feelings of pity are an expression of his official role, they place critical emphasis on his practice of that role. It is in the context of Scobie’s sense of responsibility that his adultery and suicide should be understood. Scobie’s incapacity to relate to his wife and his society in any way other than through his feelings of pity afects every aspect of his character. This includes those aspects associated with his perceptions of God. Inasmuch as Scobie’s pity is an absolute that influences all of his actions, he conceives of God as a figure who is Himself subject to that absolute. Rebufed by Helen, who exclaims to Scobie, “furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ . . . Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed” (163). For Scobie, pity is not an emotion conceived within the context of his Roman Catholic religion. Instead, it is an aspect of his character that is subject to his own ways of perceiving others. On the basis of his perceptions of others, God is, in Scobie’s terms, less someone in whom pity is understood by way of a Roman Catholic’s beliefs and religious practices than a figure who is Himself subject to the terms of an individual believer’s version of religion. For Scobie, “[n]othing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself” (163). In contemplating his sense of pity, Scobie learns that his daily actions proceed not necessarily from the terms of his religion, but also from his own feelings and emotions: “[H]e had no love of evil or hate of God. How was he to hate this God who of His own accord was surrendering Himself into his power? He was desecrating God because he loved a woman—was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility?” (207). Shortly before Scobie’s death, his last thoughts are framed in terms of the functional premises by which he has conceived the other individuals in his life: “He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone

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wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of him” (249). For Scobie, God is a figure who is subject to his own interpretation of what constitutes an individual person’s diverse needs. Scobie’s final words, “Dear God, I love . . .” (249), indicate someone who recognizes not only his own sense of responsibility for the diverse needs of others but also that he recognizes, if too late, their capacities to afect and influence him in ways that extend beyond his own sense of pity. To the extent that Scobie’s forms of perception are dominated by the emotion of pity, his characterization is important to an understanding of Greene’s novel in several key respects. Similar to how Scobie understands others according to his own limited perspective, so he acquires his own interpretative frames of reference. The interpretative, in this text, is theorized according to a dynamic range of feelings and emotions rather than a single notion of meaning. This troubling of a single notion of the interpretative also, nonetheless, gestures toward Greene’s own exploration of the relationship between diferent ways of interpreting his text. If Brighton Rock should be understood before both the interpretative terms of the critic and those of the text which she critiques, this novel presents an alternative notion of the interpretative in that Greene draws attention to the diferent aspects of the ways in which any opinion of his text is both advanced and contradicted. Consistent with Father Rank’s angry opinion that the Church “doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart” (254), for Greene, any form of the interpretative should be conceived by way of the principles within which the act of theorization itself is apprehended. Any specific act of theorization is, for Greene, interpreted as a means within which multiple critical approaches may converge. The forms of dialogue encouraged by Greene’s work between religious and secular readers are several. First, any act of critical conceptualization must take account of the circumstances and conditions by which diverse counter acts of critical conceptualization may be presented. Second, those counter acts of critical conceptualization should, in particular contexts, serve as a means within which to understand the precise natures of their specific investigative premises. Third, in considering what, exactly, might constitute the composition of any collection of investigative premises, attention should also fall on the critic’s own investigative presuppositions. For Greene, it is within the context of the exploration of context itself that the interests of his diverse readers converge and, in relation to my central argument that Greene rejects stable ways of conceiving his version of religion, the means by which his secular and religious preoccupations present their main critical value. It is this aspect of Greene’s work to which I shall now turn in relation to The Power

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and the Glory and The End of the Affair, premised on challenging ways of reading that conceive elements of them within a single range of interpretative terms.

The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair In the imaginative contexts of Greene, specifically secular forms of critical approach point to the dynamically social implications of his novels. To the degree that his assumption of numerous critical premises questions aspects of what it means to investigate his work, he also points to elements of the dynamic range of his critical and creative concerns, which may be termed the “quality of the imaginative.” By this, I mean a conceptual figure in which an author both reflects upon and anticipates the multiple interpretative responses engendered by her work. Associated with diferent forms of creative and critical influence, it is instructive to consider Harold Bloom’s seminal study on the role of poetic influences.5 Bloom writes, “the only humane virtue we can hope to teach through a more advanced study of literature than we have now is the social virtue of detachment from one’s own imagination, recognizing always that such detachment made absolute destroys any individual imagination” (Anxiety 86). Framed within the capacity of context itself to be conceived in diferent ways, Bloom presents an insight into Greene’s own theory and practice. For Bloom, as for Greene, the role and function of any imaginative act should not be limited to a particular critical context. Instead, the implications of an imaginative act need to be considered in terms of its significance and importance to the specific purposes by which it was conceived. Literature and criticism are, in this sense, not opposed in form and principle. Rather, they each present their own mutual capacities to serve each other’s conceptual premises. This includes those associated with par ticu lar forms of the imaginative, whether in terms of specific forms of influence or a particular notion of the literary itself. Responding to Bloom’s arguments in relation to some of Greene’s own literary influences, David Lodge considers the diferences between “the modern novelist” and “the modern poet” (“Graham Greene” 205). Against any conception of literature that adopts a conceptually limited notion of the imaginative, the novelist is someone in whom multiple forms of influence converge. Lodge writes: “Most modern poetry is lyric, the expression of the poet’s own thoughts and experiences; and since every individual is unique, with a unique personal history, the poet can be confident of achieving a measure of originality through self-expression. But the novelist works in narrative; he undertakes to tell a story involving more

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than one person, and a story that is new every time” (205). Lodge points to the imaginative forms on which Greene himself focuses. Greene is subject to neither a conception of the literary that is of reductive imaginative scope nor to a particular notion of the imaginative itself. Rather, for Lodge, Greene’s core influence was “the efect of books encountered in childhood and adolescence . . . which he believed was impor tant for everybody, not just for future writers. He writes in A Sort of Life [1971]: ‘The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching’” (206; Greene, A Sort 40).6 For Lodge, it is within Greene’s earliest imaginative influences that his theory and practice must be conceived. Lodge’s views are marked by several fundamental weaknesses. By attributing principal importance to Greene’s early reading, he assumes that Greene adopts a par ticu lar range of imaginative concerns. This places conceptual limitations on Greene’s own imaginative practices, inasmuch as they are conceived within Lodge’s own critical framework rather than Greene’s. Greene perceived the creative influences of other writers, including those read during his childhood, to be in themselves subject to the interpretative terms of his texts. Commenting on his earliest literary influences in “The Lost Childhood” (1947), he writes, “as in a love afair it is our own features that we see reflected flatteringly back” (13). Furthermore, in conceiving Greene’s imagination within the context of a single range of imaginative preoccupations, Lodge totalizes the ways in which his work may be conceived by other readers. Greene is less someone for whom the figure of the imaginative constitutes a more or less stable notion of the conceptual. Rather, for him, a novelist’s work points to the innumerable contexts within which diferent forms of the conceptual may converge. Greene explores the precise nature of the imaginative as a conceptual figure in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair. He conveys the diferent notions of meaning associated with the concept by way of their diverse forms of representation. In his interpretation of the first text, Thomas Woodman suggests that Greene’s practice as a Catholic believer influenced his writing to a large degree: “The Power and the Glory . . . has a certain rigidity in its clericalism . . . with the whole main plot after all depending on the necessity for salvation of the physical ministrations of a priest” (“Graham Greene” 141–142). It is this very notion that Greene’s texts were inflected by a particular version of religion against which his forms of the imaginative were opposed. Of the second text, Robert Hoskins suggests that Bendrix’s “entire account . . . is a record of flawed perception. . . . Bendrix’s mirror—the one the writer holds up to his

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world—is a distorting one far more harmful than that which Smythe accuses Christian believers of using to distort reality” (149). In opposition to the authorial biases exhibited by Bendrix, it is better to conceive his account by way of how those biases are presented. If the first novel is premised on a specific notion of the religious, in the second, the very terms within which any form of the religious is conceived are Greene’s principal subject. Greene’s consideration of the precise terms of his exploration of the religious is presented in multiple diferent ways in The Power and the Glory. Against the whisky priest’s more or less committed approach to his vocation, the lieutenant’s beliefs in the socialism of the Calles regime inflect every aspect of his life: “The lieutenant walked home through the shuttered town. . . . The whole town was changed. . . . The new children would have new memories: nothing would ever be as it was. There was something of a priest in his intent observant walk – a theologian going back over the errors of the past to destroy them again” (24). The lieutenant’s faith in the state’s socialist doctrine is influenced nonetheless by notions of the religious that assume the imaginative core of Greene’s novel. One key to understanding this aspect of the text is presented by the story of Juan. The mother reads: “We must not think that young Juan did not laugh and play like other children, though there were times when he would creep away with a holy picture-book to his father’s cow-house from a circle of his merry playmates” (26). In keeping with aspects of the Catholic readership to which Juan’s story may in part be addressed, the version of religion assumed by the character should be conceived within a distinctively religious context. For Juan, the diverse beliefs and religious traditions of Roman Catholicism have the capacity to stir not only his imagination but also the imaginations of those who encounter his story. His characterization is therefore opposed to the representation of the secular conveyed by the lieutenant when he shows of his gun to the children: “They were breathless with interest. He stood with his hand on his holster and watched the brown intent patient eyes: it was for these he was fighting. He would eliminate from their childhood every thing which had made him miserable, all that was poor, superstitious, and corrupt” (58). The lieutenant’s merciless capacity to pursue his secularist vision points to Greene’s own capacity to present insights into the relationships between diferent versions of religion. In one sense, the religious as a conceptual figure should be apprehended by way of a more or less stable body of doctrine. In another sense, the capacity of any individual to provoke a par ticular imaginative response points to an opposing body of doctrine. Any form of religious

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doctrine, then, should be understood by way of its counterinvocation of a specifically secular notion of belief. Greene explores less the representation of diferent aspects of the Roman Catholic religion than how they themselves are represented apart from its numerous contexts. The imaginative as a critical notion of meaning serves in Greene’s novel to frame its diferent representations of belief and as a means of challenging their particular contexts. The moment when the lieutenant passes the boy who has listened to Juan’s story points to how the text is marked by its diverse assumptions of the imaginative: “The lieutenant came along the pavement; there was something brisk and stubborn about his walk, as if he were saying at every step, ‘I have done what I have done.’ He looked in at the boy holding the candle with a look of indecisive recognition” (220). To the extent that any range of beliefs, whether religious or secular, conflict and converge in any imaginative act, Greene draws attention not only to diferent forms of representation, but also gestures toward the models of meaning within which they are implicated, including those which are religious and antireligious in conceptual orientation. It is by way of the models of meaning implicated in The Power and the Glory that the imaginative concerns exhibited by The End of the Affair should be conceived. In this novel, Greene’s central concern is with how the quality of the imaginative as a conceptual figure is also a means of conceiving any notion of the figurative, by which I mean the capacities of notions of meaning that are distinctively religious or secular in critical orientation to intersect within their own respective conceptual parameters. Inasmuch as this aspect of Greene’s work proceeds from the opposition between religious and secular forms of belief, William Spanos’s approaches to poststructuralist forms of criticism are especially useful. Spanos distinguishes between theological and theoretical models of meaning. He begins: “The word ‘theory’ that has been pervasively used to refer to post-structuralist thinking is a misnomer” (14). For Spanos, recent forms of contemporary theory are in themselves questionable in terms of their critical application. He continues: “It derives from the Greek, theoria (‘contemplation, speculation, sight’), which itself derives from theoros (‘spectator’), thea (‘sight’), and theasthai (‘look upon’), and ultimately from theos, the omniscient deity, who from his distanced vantage point looks down on his creation—the totality of being—and sees it all at once, i.e., as a spatial phenomenon” (14). In keeping with Greene’s own explorations of the imaginative as a figure of multiple conceptual concerns, for Spanos, theological and theoretical forms of criticism are closely related. The theological may be defined as a conceptual framework associated with a distinctively religious notion of belief. The theoretical

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exhibits a range of beliefs that counter those particular to any notion of the religious. Greene’s only allusion to “theory” is found in a letter to Roger Sharrock, collected by the British Library, in which he thanks Sharrock for his poem “Reflections on Post Structurialism” (as Greene spells it), which, he states, he “liked very much” (February 8, 1988). I have been unable to find a copy of the poem. In the same collection of correspondence, Greene indicates a skepticism for ways of reading that might be characterized as theoretical. He states on July 7, 1988, that Maria Couto’s monograph on his work “was a bit academic but good.” In her book, Couto’s “discussion of . . . Graham Greene proceeds from an interpretation of Catholicism as a structure of signification in which fiction mediates . . . to reveal that life cannot be . . . compartmentalised if it is to be lived morally” (1). For Ronald C. Walker, what is most important in Couto’s study “stems from the critic’s fresh point of view” (164). I agree with this opinion to the degree that it alludes to what I understand to be the imaginative and figurative dimensions of Greene’s novels. Shirley Hazzard notes that during her conversations with Greene on Capri, “Some comments were made, far from favourable, about Deconstruction . . . and about the modern obsession with explication and analysis that blighted the singular experience of literature” (76). She does not attempt, though, to interpret what Greene’s remarks might mean, except to note his concern that deconstructionist reading practices posed “implication of the larger vacancy” (76). I suggest Greene’s thoughts can be rendered intelligible by considering some of the tools which critics who consider themselves to be “theorists” sometimes employ in their critical practices.7 At issue in the relationship between “theory” and Greene is the application of the diferent meanings that may be derived from his work. For the cultural materialist Jonathan Dollimore, an impor tant function of literature is the invention and consequent negotiation of imaginative literary afect. Commenting on Ewan Fernie’s work on the role and function of the demonic in literature, Dollimore points out that in the contemplation of diferent forms of experience: “we experience a selfevident yet still astonishing truth: almost everything that is done, including what we ourselves do, be it at the macro or the micro level, could and should be done more authentically, more honestly, more meaningfully, more truthfully” (xxi–xxii). Investigative critical reading is, thereby, a concern of both professional and lay theorists, playing an impor tant role in conveying ethical imperatives throughout the consumption of fiction.

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William Franke, a critic of literature and theology, develops Dollimore’s enquiry into ethics in the context of concerns that Greene’s critics sometimes invoke. One of these is the place of literature in understanding biblical revelation. Franke writes: “Reading is a process of projection, of finding oneself and one’s human concerns in the world projected by the text, as well as of mapping the text’s concerns onto one’s world of experience” (6–7). To engage with any work of literature, including canonical works such as the Bible, is to subject oneself to immediate and continuous transformation. The digestion of literary texts ofers opportunities that can be situated in multiple contexts, whose main role is to engender new, innovative kinds of relationships. Those manners of relation, forms of interrogative consumption whose diferent literary connotations are unending, could constitute an acceptance or rejection of the other. Such intentions, developed into actions, form “a vocation to the cult of letters” that (96), for Franke, is “this striving and aspiring toward a transcendent ideal understood as a God who grants and graces this very impulse itself” (96). To read is to write, and vice versa, intercritical and intracritical acts that directly afect how readers perceive themselves. These critical interactions amount to a manner of being which, in the terms of Martin Heidegger, could constitute a “secure horizon for question and answer” (487). In conceiving a mode of identity in terms of both content and con-text, the realization of aspirations that were previously elusive becomes possible. A reader can discover her best self, situating her lived experience in a web of others that is othering, while remaining synchronous with the other. In the course of such interpretative acts, she confronts “the fundamental question of ontology, and this is the way one must go. Whether this is the only way or even the right one at all, can be decided only after one has gone along it” (487). In a religious sense, particular to Greene, to immerse oneself in the experience of reading his novels is to travel in a direction whose touchpoints are Catholic cornerstones. In Greene, positively oriented critical encounters are, to a significant degree, confessional and theological acts of investment. They serve to typify some of the finest essences of the Roman Catholic religion. In the words of Father Andrew Greeley, the late American Catholic priest and academic: “The kernel is the belief that God is love, and in Catholicism, God’s love is present in the world. . . . God lurks everywhere. That’s the fundamental Catholic instinct on the imaginative and poetic level. Right down the street, right around the corner—there’s God” (217). Greene’s fictions, like aspects of the body of theoretical writings that Spanos explores, concern the finding of spaces in which to savor and ap-

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ply visionary forms of critical imagination. To enjoy Greene’s work by way of theory is also to pursue a particular theological aesthetic: the application of religious concepts and forms within specifically Catholic notions of the conceptual. They serve to provide spectral illumination on one’s situatedness while also protecting fragile beliefs from damaging kinds of secularism. Applying theological modes of meaning when reconsidering Greene in an aesthetic sense is to confront the actualization of belief and doubt in the very moments of their formation. Inasmuch as both theological and theoretical critical approaches are implicated within the conceptual terms specific to each other, they form a critical perspective that is anti-intentionalist. By this, I mean that they exhibit a range of values, beliefs, and principles that are engendered by the very terms within which they are presented. In opposition to Spanos, though, I suggest that those terms are focused not only on their assumption of any particular notion of the spatial. Rather, the spatial as a phenomenon of diverse critical implications needs to be understood in terms of its own implication in diferent forms and representations of the figurative itself. By this, I mean the ways in which specific notions of meaning may, in particular conditions and circumstances, assume their own means of interpreting their conceptual terms. Spanos’s own definition of representation is especially helpful in understanding the diferent approaches to the figurative assumed by Greene’s work: “It is a wilful bringing back to presence (visibility), that which has been annulled by the temporal process: re-present-ation is a bringing back before us some thing that has passed into the past in order to be seen” (16). Greene’s approaches to any range of imaginative concerns should be understood by way of his invocation of the figurative as a critical form of dynamic conceptual implications. Greene writes in opposition to any conceptual approach that limits his forms of representation to a specific notion of the critical. Instead, Greene directs attention to the numerous kinds of representation by which his own invocation of the representational may be conceived. He thereby places emphasis in equal measure on the many forms of belief represented by his novel, including those which are specifically Catholic in nature. In The End of the Affair Greene’s approaches to representation are conveyed in several terms, but particularly by way of Bendrix’s reflections on his occupation as a novelist. Considering how he should represent his own role in his afair with Sarah, he writes: “There it goes again—the I, I, I, as though this were my story, and not the story of Sarah, Henry, and of course, that third, whom I hated without yet knowing him, or even believing in him” (26). For Bendrix, the events that occur apart from his

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practice as a writer are closely related to those events which are part of its professional terms. Inflected by his confused understanding of what, exactly, constitutes them, he struggles to discern how he should represent any course of events: “If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because I am lost in a strange region: I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true” (39). Bendrix’s uncertainty about how to write in ways which conform to any particular notion of the novelistic afects every aspect of his character. Looking at himself in a mirror, his reflection itself assumes the character of a fiction, evoking, as it does, aspects of experience which are strictly imaginary in form: “I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright unobtainable objects within” (44). Before Sarah’s absence, Bendrix is a figure who lacks any stable conception of what principles and values he should live by. Bendrix’s reflections on any state of belief, whether Catholic or secular, are shaped by its capacity to influence his character in ways which he cannot personally accept. The authorial biases exhibited by his account, then, should be understood by way of his own understanding of what might constitute a more or less objective presentation of his emotions. Insofar as his life apart from Sarah is marked by his confusion concerning how he should now live, Bendrix’s character itself assumes diferent aspects of the figurative. Converging in his inability to adopt any stable notion of the representational, Greene dramatizes the diverse notions of belief by which his novel is framed. The representational, in this text, is a means of implicating any notion of belief within a particular model of meaning, whether theoretical or theological in nature. Sarah exhibits a marked contrast of perspective from Bendrix in terms of her own values and principles. Against Bendrix’s lack of religious belief, she believes that they may live together in ways that are not necessarily opposed to each other. Following her prayer after the V1 blast, “Let him be alive, and I will believe” (76), she suggests that any form of belief can assume a diverse range of material aspects: “that wasn’t enough. It doesn’t hurt to believe. So I said, I love him and I’ll do anything if you’ll make him alive, I said very slowly, I’ll give him up for ever, only let him be alive with a chance” (76). For Sarah, a belief in God, whether Catholic in orientation or not, should present a changed way of life. Except, against any reductive conception of what it means to be religious, this way of life does not necessarily mean rejecting a particular form of behavior. Sarah also prays, “People can love without seeing each other, can’t they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door,

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and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door” (76). It is within Sarah’s approach to the anxious relationship between her new religious beliefs and how they should be practiced that her religious orientation is best conceived. In one sense, Sarah’s version of religion is, of course, opposed to the secular beliefs adopted by Bendrix. Sarah contemplates Smythe’s beliefs in similar terms to those that Bendrix uses in his understanding of Sarah’s absence: “He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn’t hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn’t hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of heaven” (89). Sarah’s dedication to her new version of religion is marked nonetheless with the same notions of the figurative by which Bendrix understands the course of their afair. As she admits to him in her last letter: “I believe there’s a God—I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe” (121). Greene’s representation of Sarah’s Catholicism should be understood according to his own examination of how any notion of the figurative itself is presented in a novel. For Greene, the terms within which the religious is conceived are implicated in all aspects of his text. This includes those aspects which are premised on any particular form of the secular. Greene’s exploration of the convergence between multiple models of meaning is presented in “The Grass,” collected in his second volume of poetry, A Quick Look Behind: Footnotes to an Autobiography (1983).8 Observing how grass is found in almost any environment, even the cement floors of derelict buildings, Greene imposes his own meaning on its growth: “And the grass pushed its way / . . . through the doomed & yielding ground / with the humility of violence” (ll. 1, 7–8). If grass is the subject of the poem, its capacity to grow almost anywhere means that its growth spots should in themselves receive critical attention. This means attending to how an inanimate object acquires anthropomorphic meaning and serves to characterize a particular location. In the second stanza, Greene conceives the acts of characterization associated with his consideration of grass in the context of the human emotion of love: “And the blind love pushes its way, / like grass through cement, / up through how many pounds of the past, / faces & failures & success” (ll. 9–12). For Greene, love is an emotion that is conceived in the context of specific notions of time and place. Those notions are still subject to the exact conceptual terms by which they acquire a specific meaning. Greene concludes, “the grass so certainly pushes its way, / and the love, towards what event?” (ll. 17–18). In this poem, Greene anticipates the relationships between his

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two novels. If they direct attention to how any notion of meaning is engendered, they also point to their individual capacities to undermine that particular meaning. Greene invokes critical attention on how his fiction assumes diferent forms of value, including those associated with any act of love. Inasmuch as this invocation is implicated in numerous diferent forms of belief, the novels assume a dynamic range of social implications. If The Power and the Glory exhibits a diverse collection of imaginative contexts, in The End of the Affair, Greene draws attention to how they may be apprehended. The figurative in itself serves as a critical form by which to conceive Greene’s questioning of any notion of the contextual, both within and apart from the terms of his novels. This includes those aspects of them which proceed from models of meaning that are specifically theoretical or theological in their conceptual orientations. Greene’s capacity to comment on the very means by which his own novels acquire meaning presents the need to focus on their assumption of any notion of context itself. The distinctively cultural approach to any notion of critical thinking recently proposed by Eagleton is especially helpful in directing attention to this aspect of Greene’s novels. Eagleton writes, “cultural ideas change with the world they reflect upon. If they insist, as they do, on the need to see things in their historical context, then this must also apply to themselves” (After 23). Similar to the ways in which any notion of culture changes according to the development of its society, so for Greene, the contextual serves as its own critical tool. The contextual may be defined as a critical form that both engenders and undermines the multiple conceptual premises exhibited by any text. On the basis of Greene’s dynamic assumption and rejection of diferent notions of context, both within and without the par ticular interpretative terms of his work itself, several conclusions about his texts can be drawn. First, both novels are marked by their individual capacities to assume critical approaches that are anti-intentionalist. By this, I mean that the texts can acquire in equal measure any par ticu lar range of critical premises, given their implication in diferent models of meaning. Second, inasmuch as those models of meaning themselves invoke specific critical approaches, Greene’s texts nevertheless engender their own critical premises. This includes those associated with multiple forms of religious and secular belief. Third, any conception of Greene’s approaches to the relationships between those beliefs must be conducted before their mutual capacities to remain separate from each other. Greene’s readers are subjects of his narratives by way of their implication in his assumption of multiple critical concerns. This includes those which they might them-

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selves have adopted in the course of a reading. They are subject to his narratives insofar as those concerns are nevertheless in themselves subject to the range of ways in which Greene explores his own range of conceptual premises. If his novels are implicated in particular imaginative contexts, the figurative forms invoked by them nonetheless point beyond the parameters of the texts themselves. It is this aspect of Greene’s work to which I shall now turn in relation to The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote.

The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote Inasmuch as Greene’s novels exhibit critical concerns that are specific to each of them, they also explore issues which reside apart from their individual terms. Slavoj Žižek’s perspectives on the nature of any form of the investigative are especially useful to an understanding of this aspect of Greene’s novels. This is because he explores how any act of critical conceptualization is engendered by the intellectual frameworks implicated within its very terms. Žižek focuses on the figure of the parallax, which he defines as “the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight” (Parallax 17). Similar to the ways in which Greene’s texts proceed from specific notions of context, so, for Žižek, the contextual itself is a critical form that is subject to its own range of investigative premises. Žižek continues, “the philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed diference is not simply ‘subjective,’ due to the fact that the same object which exists ‘out there’ is seen from two diferent stances, or points of view” (17). Žižek writes in opposition to any notion of context that is conceived within a conceptually limited range of critical terms. For him, the act of interpreting a fiction proceeds from its own individual forms of the contextual. Inasmuch as any notion of context is implicated within multiple critical approaches, its interpretation points beyond their conceptual terms. Implicated in no specific form of the interpretative, they serve, in themselves, as a means of framing the total experience of any act of reading. According to Žižek, “every field of ‘reality’ (every ‘world’) is always-already enframed, seen through an invisible frame. The parallax is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on the same X: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist” (29). It is precisely Greene’s capacity to reflect on and in turn subvert any act of critical framing that is at issue in the texts considered in this section. Similar to how any collection of interpretative principles

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is subject to its own conceptual premises, so Greene challenges ways of reading that are limited in their critical implications. Against Žižek, however, I suggest that those premises do not proceed only from the critical parameters specific to an individual text. Rather, for Greene, his novels are in themselves subject to a wide range of critical notions within which their forms of the conceptual may be apprehended. As Žižek himself concludes, “we do not have two perspectives, we have a perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective” (29). If the assumption of any notion of critical perspective also points to its concomitant rejection, this act may gesture nevertheless toward its assumption in an alternative context. Of particular issue in my consideration of the diferent notions of critical perspective assumed by any reader is the definition of Catholic literature recently proposed by Mary R. Reichardt. She writes that “a work of Catholic literature is that which employs the history, traditions, culture, theology, and/or spirituality of Catholicism in a substantial and informed manner” (3). Reichardt contends that literature and Catholicism are in many ways closely related in terms of their multiple forms and expressions. Nevertheless, within this perspective, she also questions the extent to which the beliefs and religious traditions of the Roman Catholic religion necessarily proceed from any stable notion of the Catholic. In her questioning of any series of totalizing assumptions, Reichardt assumes a position on religion and secularism that is itself inflected by the interrelationships within and between diferent religious and secular critical positions. Concomitantly, she is also at risk of totalizing the very conceptual frameworks that are at issue in any discussion of the relationships between theoretical and theological models of meaning. Reichardt continues: “Whether it involves Catholic subject matter or not, and whether its author is a Catholic or not, such literature is substantially grounded in a deep and realistic understanding of at least some aspects of the Catholic faith, Catholic life, or the Catholic tradition” (3). Contrary to certain aspects of Reichardt’s interpretative framework, literature and Catholicism intersect at nearly every level of their specific forms of conception, imaginative or otherwise. In this sense, they do not necessarily constitute opposed bodies of knowledge. Rather, the critical approaches specific to each are subject to the investigative presuppositions implicated in any critical act. Greene’s position on the relationships between diferent critical acts is presented in The Honorary Consul. His investigative presuppositions focus on the text’s capacity to explore how its characters relate to one another in a range of distinctively religious and secular political contexts. For Thomas Phillips, “The Honorary Consul abounds with father-figures,

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all of which are in some way connected to the question of dictatorship. . . . The novel is structured [by] a trinity of key father-figures: Plarr’s father; Father Rivas and Stroessner” (22). From one perspective, the novel’s representation of the political relationships between Argentina and Paraguay proceeds by way of a conventionally religious notion of the conceptual. But from another, this notion is in itself imbued with its own dramatic representation of how its characters relate to each other. Phillips also writes that “Paraguay is both present and absent as the novel is set in Argentina, but the country’s brooding influence underpins all of the action” (23). Greene’s novel presents a diverse range of dramatic efects, including those which proceed from the very countries within which its specifically Catholic contexts may be framed. For Greene, literature and Catholicism are not opposed in form and aspect. Instead, they each represent bodies of knowledge whose critical implications are conveyed within the contexts of their own conceptual forms. Greene’s exploration of the diferent kinds of interpretation engendered by his novel is exhibited in the editions which he made to its final typescript (1972).9 They are helpful insofar as they direct attention to the precise relationships between critical frameworks that are specifically religious or secular in conceptual orientation. This aspect of Greene’s text is presented by way of the conversation between Marta and Leόn about their marriage. Believing that their relationship with each other should be conceived in broader terms than those which proceed from their marriage vows, Marta exclaims, “I know very well now I am only your woman. No priest would marry us. They all refused you. Even your friend, Father Antonio” (195).10 Leόn replies by pointing out the lack of need for a priest in the act of marrying. The text which is struck through is that which was deleted from the typescript: “I have explained a dozen times to you. A [a] priest is not necessary for a marriage. A priest is only a witness. He marries no one. People marry each other. In an emergency anyone may marry without a witness. [O]ur vow is all that counts. Our intention” (195). For Leόn, a marriage ceremony should be conducted according to a couple’s commitment to each other, as distinct from any promises made before a series of religious observances. The deleted passages suggest that Leόn’s assertions are uttered within the context of a range of beliefs, values and principles that reside apart from his status as a defrocked priest. His utterances, as presented within the published text, point to his acceptance of the very notions of belief that he is rejecting. Greene directs emphasis away from Leόn’s belief in the lack of a need for a priest in a marriage ceremony, placing critical focus instead on a couple’s individual promises to each other. In this way, his novel assumes

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notions of belief that are not confined to an opposition between distinctively religious or secular critical frameworks. On the basis of Leόn’s rejection of any conventional notion of the religious, Marta points out her inability to understand his intentions in any range of circumstances: “But [H]ow can I tell what your intention was? I am not a mind-reader. Perhaps you just wanted a woman to sleep with. Perhaps I am your whore. You treat me like a whore, when you tell me to go away and leave you” (195–196). The deletions in this passage shift attention from Marta’s incredulity about Leόn’s understanding of their relationship. Marta replies in a less adversarial manner than is presented within the deleted sections. This, in turn, questions any series of intentions Leόn himself might present within and without the context of their marriage. Greene concerns himself less with Marta’s aggressive tone than on why a priest might be significant in any context, whether religious or secular. In this way, Greene questions the validity of imposing on his novel a notion of the Catholic that proceeds from a conceptually limited range of critical terms. By placing the emphasis on how this novel may expand diferent notions of the Catholic, Greene comments on his own status as its author. It is by way of this act of reflection that his very preoccupations with any specific notion of the Catholic are rendered critically significant. In this sense, when Plarr confronts Leόn about the unorthodoxy of his theology, his utterances point to Greene’s own position on the diferent versions of religion represented by the characters. To Leόn’s declaration that they should kill Fortnum in order to serve the political opposition of reactionaries who follow his gang, Plarr comments on the state of his conscience. His comments are made especially in the context of Leόn’s earlier comments that his version of God is a dynamically human figure who is subject to his own sense of pity. In contrast to Scobie, for whom God is a figure whose capacity to present a sense of pity is questioned, Plarr’s comments are premised on Leόn’s false conceptions of what pity is: “ ‘You have a very complicated conscience,’ Doctor Plarr said. ‘Will you pity God for those murders too?’ ” (220). If Plarr’s utterances are rendered in less personalized terms than those in the novel itself, Plarr’s reply is framed according to the political commitments engendered by his theology: “You have no idea, have you, of what I mean[t] when I said I pitied Him?” (220). Plarr responds by alluding to his religious upbringing: “No. As far as I remember I was never taught anything like that about pitying God by the Jesuits in Asunciόn. Not that I remember” (220). For Plarr, Leόn’s theology is incorrect on the basis that its political connotations are not conceived within the diverse needs of the people he claims to represent. Greene’s editions gesture toward the characters’ individual capacities to under-

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stand each other on the basis of their actual political and religious commitments. For Greene, his novel is premised on the rejection of any notion of the theological that does not proceed from the terms of a par ticular friendship or relationship. In keeping with this interpretation of Greene’s novel, Leόn’s reply to Plarr is rendered in a less aggressive tone than that presented in the novel itself: “Is there much of value you have remembered? Perhaps you would have more faith now if you had remembered a little more” (220). The argument between the two is conducted before the trust they developed in the course of their friendship. This, in turn, points to Greene’s own opposition to any form of criticism that represents his version of religion in ways which lack conceptual rigor. His novel should be conceived on the basis of his own approach to the relationships between any range of critical concerns. Greene’s diverse approaches to any critical act take as their focus his explorations of genre, particularly what has been labeled “the Catholic novel.”11 It is within these very explorations that his value and importance as a novelist rest because they present the critical center of each of his novels. Bernard Bergonzi ofers a useful way of understanding this aspect of Greene’s work. For this critic, the characteristics of what many understand to be a Catholic novel are marked by a sense of “general agreement. . . . The novelist whose Catholic beliefs were explicit in his work was working against the grain of the novel form, with whatever advantages and disadvantages that could bring” (“The Decline” 173). On the one hand, Bergonzi totalizes the very genre at issue in his approaches to the novelistic. On the other hand, his opinions nonetheless point beyond his totalization of the novel as a genre that presents a particular belief to an investigation of its dynamic conceptual reach as a literary form. Bergonzi anticipates the perspectives of Mark Bosco on the role played by the Second Vatican Council in expanding what is understood by the term Catholic in any critical or creative capacity. For Bosco, the efect of this event “was to place Catholicism at the center of a constellation of philosophical, political, and social movements of the mid–twentieth century in a manner that eschewed its previous triumphal, premodern, and often fortress mentality” (Catholic Imagination 78). Bosco’s opinions are premised nevertheless on his own notion of the religious, namely, the belief that literature is in itself implicated within a specific notion of the Catholic. In this sense, he does not advance Bergonzi’s questioning of how any conception of the Catholic novel is imbued in its own sense of interpretative conflict. Bernard C. Swift expands upon the critical implications of Bergonzi’s presupposition that a novel may be labeled Catholic on the basis of a

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specific notion of the religious: “there is no such being as a ‘Catholic novelist,’ if by that is meant a novelist whose ideas and attitudes may be safely predicted according to absolute norms of belief” (111). Swift’s questioning of the ways in which fiction should not be considered in absolutist terms is premised all the same on his own notion of an absolute. For him, the very notion of a Catholic novel is characterized by a sharp and acute sense of critical conflict. If fiction presents the rejection of any form of absolutist belief, this includes the manner in which any belief is framed. According to Swift, any critic’s definition of the Catholic novel is far from stable in its conceptual implications. Eamon Maher has recently asked, “What is a Catholic novel?” (“An Irish” 72). But, like Swift, he assumes his own critical terminology rather than question the value of adopting any series of critical terms that are not engendered within those of a particular text: “It is a term that is sometimes used in a loose manner to cover any novelist who explores issues pertaining to the Catholic faith in his or her work” (72). Maher acknowledges that “there is no specifically Catholic way of reading and critically assessing literature, which makes the task of defining the phrase ‘Catholic literature’ particularly difficult” (72). Nevertheless, his explorations of genre are premised on the precise opposition between the literary and the Catholic that is at issue in the discussion of Greene. Against any approach to Greene’s novels that is conceived apart from the individual terms, it is important to examine his own approaches to genre. Greene’s consideration of any specific range of critical concerns is presented in his final novel, Monsignor Quixote. For Joanna Maciulewicz, the core interpretative principle exhibited by the text consists of its play on issues of genre. She comments, “nowadays most scholars agree that it is next to impossible to draw fixed generic boundaries, since genres enter in relationships one with another in all sorts of unexpected ways” (261). Greene’s characterization of Quixote as a descendent of Don Quixote is, on this basis, a means of commenting on the ways in which any work of fiction acquires a particular meaning.12 Maciulewicz writes: “In Monsignor Quixote the theme of the fictitiousness of a design or purposefulness of the world is signalled by the motif of the protagonist’s ancestry” (263). Framing Greene’s play on the nonfictional status of his protagonist, Michael G. Brennan conceives the text according to a series of theological implications: “The novel steadily gnaws away at the supposed potency of human rationality and scepticism in favour of a more resigned acceptance of the mysteries of divine authority and compassion” (“Pilgrimage” 157). Whatever the value of Maciulewicz’s and Brennan’s interpretations, they should be considered before Greene’s own approaches to how any

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aspect of Catholicism might itself be framed in relation to his novel. The text is less a work implicated within a series of diferent notions of the Catholic than an examination of what might constitute a Catholic novel. Greene’s approaches to the genre of his novel are presented by way of Quixote’s friendship with the bishop who recommends that he receive promotion. Referring to Miguel de Cervantes’s novel, the bishop remarks, “It is an honour for me to be a guest in the house of Don Quixote” (Greene, Monsignor 7). Quixote’s response is indicative of the numerous diferent critical approaches that present the capacity to conceptualize Greene’s novel as a text that exhibits its own approaches to genre. He replies, “My bishop does not approve of the book” (7), to which the bishop responds, “Holiness and literary appreciation don’t always go together” (7). Greene’s novel is neither a conventional conceptualization of what might constitute a fiction nor the invocation of a religious framework by which to conceive its own interpretative terms. Instead, the text presents a challenge to any way of reading that assumes a specifically religious or secular collection of interpretative principles. In this manner, Greene’s novel is implicated in a diverse range of dynamically social interpretative gestures. If The Honorary Consul acquires as its central focus the diferent ways in which human relationships are engendered, in Monsignor Quixote, Greene explores aspects of their intellectual frameworks. Quixote’s decision to mend the bishop’s car is based on his desire to learn about his superior’s frame of mind on matters that are not principally ministerial in nature: “If the bishop had not noticed the gauge it would surely be easy to pretend a mechanical knowledge which he didn’t possess. In any case it would be as well to get some oil on his hands” (13). Quixote’s willingness to assume responsibilities which are not necessarily part of his role as a priest exhibits the issues of genre at the core of the text. If Greene’s novel may be defined as distinctively Catholic in nature, this is not because it presents a strictly religious approach to any act of interpretative critique. Rather, Greene’s examination of diferent forms of the Catholic proceeds according to his individual capacity to question the relationships between the Catholic and the literary themselves. For Greene, the Catholic may be defined as a notion of meaning that proceeds from the multiple contexts by which a Catholic believer assumes her religious beliefs. The literary may be defined as one means by which a series of beliefs, whether religious or secular, is presented and, within the terms of its contexts, challenged. It is in the context of the relationships between the Catholic and the literary as individual conceptual forms that Greene’s approaches to genre may be defined. Quixote’s ruminations on the relationships between

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diferent forms of belief and doubt ofer one key to understanding how his novel is Catholic in nature. Quixote thinks, “The believer will fight another believer over a shade of diference: the doubter fights only with himself” (51). Insofar as any form of doubt questions a particular notion of belief, it also serves as a means of directing attention to the reasons for adopting a specific belief. For Quixote, as for Greene’s novel, the figures of the doubter and the believer each act as ways of understanding how any representation of the Catholic may be understood best. Quixote seeks to live in a manner that is not founded on a stable notion of belief nor necessarily by way of the rejection of that belief. The character points to Greene’s own version of religion, as presented within the interpretative terms of his novel. Those terms are exhibited in the context of Quixote’s thoughts after listening to the undertaker’s confession: “I didn’t say the right words. Why do I never find the right words? The man needed help and I recited a formula. God forgive me. Will someone only give me a formula too when I come to die?” (126–127). Quixote’s belief in the necessity of adopting an attitude of doubt in any religious matter presents Greene’s own unwillingness to ofer a stable perspective on any religious concern. The Catholic, for Greene, is less a conceptual form opposed to the literary than a means by which to understand how any critical issue is presented within literature itself.13 The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote each question the value of distinctively religious or secular ways of reading. In the former, Greene places critical emphasis on the means by which any aspect of the relationships between individuals who are Catholic or secular in faith orientation is engendered. His focus is on a range of distinctively Catholic approaches to friendship and marriage. In the latter, he directs attention to how any approach between the Catholic and the secular as conceptual forms may be presented. Quixote’s understanding of his fictional ancestor serves, then, as a way of exploring the relationships between diferent conceptualizations of the Catholic and the literary themselves. A religious way of reading may be defined as any critical approach to a text that both upsets and assumes a specific notion of religious or secular belief as its central interpretative guide, conceptualizing the critical terms of both the belief and the interpretation, and, within this conceptualization, rendering a particular act of reading less an interpretation as such, than a religious act in itself. This is consistent with Sally McFague’s distinction between Protestant and Catholic reading practices: “The Protestant tradition is, I would suggest, ‘metaphorical’; the Catholic, ‘symbolical’ (or, ‘analogical’ for contemporary Catholicism)” (13). The diferences between the two are nevertheless of shifting significance within the multiple forms

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of interpretative approach that Greene invokes. Just as “a religious metaphorical statement” can seem “more power ful than a symbolical statement” (McFague 15), it is also the case that any “emotional efect” which either might have on a reader is subject to Karl Barth’s suggestion that “the task of Christian theology is ‘the self-examination of the Christian Church in respect of the content of its distinctive talk about God’” (Ward, Theology 8, 9; Barth, Doctrine 11). The validity of a religious way of reading, in this sense, rests on the capacities of particular groups or individuals to communicate their beliefs in ways that other groups or individuals will both question and understand. On the grounds that any religious utterance is subject to its rejection within the very contexts through which it is spoken or written, a secular way of reading is that which disturbs any form of critical approach conceived within the terms of a specifically religious notion of belief. This is because just as “metaphorical thinking constitutes the basis of human thought and language . . . religious metaphorical statements [sometimes seem] . . . so powerful” because they are in themselves “in continuity with the way we think ordinarily” (McFague 15, 16). Religious or secular ways of reading are valuable only insofar as their approaches to any act of critical investigation proceed according to their own conceptual limitations as investigative forms. Inasmuch as those forms are associated with specific approaches to genre, including what has been labeled the Catholic novel, they direct attention to the status of genre itself. On this basis, a Catholic novel, for Greene, may be defined as follows. First, it is a narrative whose critical and creative capacities as a work of prose fiction gesture toward its relationship with a specifically Catholic notion of the literary. The Catholic and the literary should, then, never be conceived in isolation of each other, but in terms of their intersection at nearly every level of almost any interpretative act. Second, inasmuch as this notion of the literary proceeds from the ways in which individuals relate to one another, whatever particular contexts they might assume, a Catholic novel questions any stable conceptualization of the Catholic. The Catholic, in this sense, is continuously subject to a variety of religious and secular concerns, preoccupations, and agendas. Third, this act of questioning pertains to any approach to literary form itself. If the Catholic novel is defined by its questioning of any notion of the absolute, it is also a means of questioning what is communicated and understood by and within any approach to literary form. Implicit within my definition of the Catholic novel is the need to account for the diferent kinds of impulsivity by which a critical interpretation is conceived. The impulse, even compulsion, to read a novel in terms

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of its religious dynamics means that interpretative emphasis is placed on novelistic content, not form. This way of reading might be characterized as a “reaching forward” that is “not merely a matter of intellectual inquiry, but involves deep emotional and imaginative sensibility, together with what can only be described as moral yearnings, for self-improvement and for deeper awareness of the demands and mysteries of love and compassion” (Cottingham 135). A concomitant impulse, one that counters a religious approach, appraises novels less in terms of the commonalities they may share with a belief system. Rather, critical emphasis is placed on what the formal dimensions of a text suggest about its meaning beyond a specific interpretative context. Such kinds of approach might be defined as “ ‘aesthetic’ yearnings (for want of a better term)—impulses to struggle upwards and attune ourselves to what is beautiful, not just passively but also actively, by creating shapes, words, colours and sounds that resonate with our sensibilities and give expression to our longings” (135). The interpretative relationship between form, content, and context will, of course, change, depending on how critical subjectivity is conceived. Placing emphasis on any one element of the text at the expense of another will naturally constitute the formation or rejection of a particular kind of poetics. One of the shadow aims of my inquiry has been to place in the foreground elements of the conflicts, contrasts, oppositions, and harmonies of diferent approaches to Greene. I hope that in the course of my narrative, characterized as it is by my own sense of investigative compulsion, you have been able to discern for yourself where the current and crosscurrents in the criticism are. This is inclusive of all their potential risks, dangers, and pleasures. The poetics central to readings of and through Greene could be one, finally, whose terms find meaning ironically, that is, by way of the very sense of doubt by which belief first arises. Hoskins comments on how Quixote’s version of religion is puzzling and unconventional, yet also bold and efficacious. Hoskins writes: “The priest’s journey—also an intellectual journey through the process of extensive debate—is proof of his faith. That is, he confesses doubt, confronts it, yet retains unshaken faith and demonstrates the courage of a Christian soldier” (275). In Greene’s novel, the impulses that can commit an individual to a system of beliefs, whether religious or secular, are twofold. They give form to the appearance of a belief system, thereby challenging the doubt against which this system is opposed. Moreover, they determine the particular means by which Greene’s terms of characterization acquire critical focus. Doubt and belief are therefore central to literary form, in this case one that is, largely, Catholic.

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For Patrick Sherry, literary form is implicit in the diverse ways in which the Catholic novel is conceived. He argues “that the ‘Catholic Novel’ still flourishes, but that it has changed its nature and geographical location, and widened its scope” (“End” 165). Jae-Suck Choi largely concurs with Sherry. According to him, Greene’s novels each exhibit a moral message: “Commitment, a dominant theme in Greene’s fictional world, is linked with hope. When the committed strive to ameliorate the deplorable aspects of society, hope becomes the motivation of their involvement” (“A Reconsideration” 1108). For me, the imaginative scope of Greene’s theory and practice does not assume any stable notion of genre. Greene’s wideranging exploration of how his work acquires meaning in specific contexts means that the act of reading is never value free. Any form of hope that might be conveyed in and through his novels is found less within their assumption of particular kinds of critical approach than within their capacities to question how and why a specific approach is important. The relationships in Greene’s work between “theory” and theology are several. In Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter, Greene explores the degree to which his texts may acquire forms of interpretation premised on absolutist notions of meaning. If the former assumes as its central focus the questioning of a range of religious approaches to evil, in the latter, Greene considers how they are implicated in diferent forms of pity. In The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, the investigative terms particular to the emotion are themselves subject to how the texts are implicated in a diverse series of conceptual concerns. The forms of the imaginative, the figurative, and the contextual point to how the texts exhibit a dynamically social range of critical connotations. They in turn gesture toward Greene’s investigation of the diferent ways in which the Catholic and the literary may themselves be conceived. Insofar as they proceed from the individual terms of Greene’s novels, they present his capacity to question what may be understood by any notion of form itself. In the context of Greene’s examination of the diferent notions of the theoretical and the theoretical implicit in his work, “theory” and theology may be defined as follows. The former consists of any collection of critical perspectives whose investigative presuppositions are premised on challenging those of a particular religion or a specific notion of the religious. Theology, on the other hand, consists of any notion of the critical whose investigative presuppositions are engendered by the individual terms of the religion within which they originate. Insofar as the two ways of approaching Greene’s texts proceed from his own theory and practice, he engenders his own notion of the critical. Namely, this may be defined

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as any notion of meaning in whose conceptual terms occur a series of diverse and sometimes conflicting acts of investigative interpretation. In answer to the central objective of the chapter, theoretical and theological notions of meaning conflict and converge in Greene’s fiction in the following ways. First, critical acts whose investigative premises are secular in conceptual orientation relate to those which are religious only insofar as their interpretative assumptions arise within their own critical contexts. Inasmuch as those contexts are to a greater or lesser degree opposed in aspect and principle, their convergence is, in fact, a form of critical opposition. Second, to the extent that form itself is implicated and questioned within any critical act, the notions of meaning implicit to its contexts are specific only to their individual representations of the contextual. Theoretical and theological notions of meaning conflict and converge because any representation of the contextual itself directs attention to the very means by which its critical terms are engendered. Their acts of conflict and convergence, then, are a way of examining the precise relationships between critical frameworks that are religious or secular in conceptual orientation. Whereas the former are distinguished by their assumption of a series of diferent notions of belief, the latter critique the very means within which a specific belief is framed. The social implications of Greene’s fiction may be identified therefore in both wide and specific terms. First, his novels intersect with the ways in which individuals themselves actually relate to one another. Quixote’s friendship with the bishop who recommends that he receive promotion may be conceived as a displaced observation of Scobie’s opposition to the religious absolutism exhibited by Pinkie. Second, the novels represent the many notions of belief by which a particular version of religion is apprehended. If Plarr’s opposition to Leόn’s religious beliefs are expressed within the terms of their friendship, they also assume the imaginative and figurative contexts presented in Greene’s earlier texts. The whisky priest’s opposition to the lieutenant’s secularism is directly related, in this sense, to Sarah’s commitment to her Catholicism over Bendrix. Greene remaps the common ground between critics whose approaches are more or less theoretical or theological in nature insofar as those approaches are implicated in each other’s conceptual parameters. If Greene’s work does present diferent notions of “theory” and theology, it is because the critics who advance them are themselves religious or secular in disposition.

Conclusion: Where Now?

Within the terms of his fiction, Graham Greene defines what the literary and the Catholic are as individual conceptual forms. In doing so, he positions himself against any form of absolutist belief, whether religious or secular in nature, and so questions what may be understood by form itself. The Catholic novel is, on this basis, premised on its capacity to question stable conceptions of genre. My definition of the Catholic novel is presented in an incipient form by Greene in and through his correspondence with Elizabeth Bowen and V.S. Pritchett in Why Do I Write? (1948). Greene agrees with Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman’s opinions that any form of literature should be premised on conveying a broadly secular conception of human nature, as distinct from one that is singularly religious: “Catholic novelists (I would rather say novelists who are Catholic) should take Newman as their patron . . . ‘if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than [any] Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all’ ” (32; Newman 229). Any attempt to conceive a literary text apart from its relationship with diverse groups and individuals is misguided, since this fails to address the diferent critical capacities of that text. John Milbank might agree, pointing to the roots of the “ ‘secular’ . . . in the medieval era . . . where coercive justice, private property and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed efects of sinful humanity. The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both

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in theory and in practice” (Theology [1991] 9). In this sense, God is framed as a figure in whom opposing conceptual phenomena both conflict and converge: “No longer is God the ultimate arbitrary power behind human arbitrary power; instead he is a God regularly and immediately present to human society, holding it together, just like the Newtonian God among the planetary bodies in Newtonian space” (Theology [1991] 29). Greene’s conception of what a Catholic novel might be is, in its most basic sense then, at the very least a questioning of how the diferent subjects composing humanity express themselves in written forms. Greene’s awareness of the role and function of the secular nonetheless presents the need to address the religious with an equal degree of attention. Responding to Newman’s argument, which includes the notion that “a University . . . is a place to fit men of the world for the world” (232), Greene continues: “And to those who, accepting that view, argued that we could do without Literature, Newman went on: ‘Proscribe (I do not merely say particular authors, particular works, particular passages) but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your class books all broad manifestations of the natural man’ ” (Why Do I Write? 32; Newman 232). For Greene, as for Newman, literature should be never be understood in ways that oppose its capacities to prepare its readers for the potentially complex, unstable, and shifting phenomena that they might encounter. If literature is not taught to a student in this way, “You have refused him the masters of human thought, who would in some sense have educated him[,] because of their incidental corruption” (33; Newman 233). One consequence of framing literature solely in terms of a monolithic range of secular perspective is voiced by Milbank, for whom: “the absolute Christian vision of ontological peace now provides the only alternative to a nihilistic outlook. Even today, in the midst of the self-torturing circle of secular reason, there can open to view again a series with which it is in no continuity: the emanation of harmonious diference, the exodus of new generations, the path of peaceful flight” (Theology [1991] 434). That flight, while considered here to be the result of the kind of religious perspective with which Newman is principally concerned, is also, within and without the parameters of his own argument, the mark of the fragmented secularist critical perspective that Greene in himself opposes.1 Rather than understanding the role and function of the religious and the secular within Greene in single terms, they may instead be conceived within diferent forms of tension. Paul Fiddes alludes to precisely this kind of approach in his investigation into the relationship between Christian doctrine and creative literature. On the basis of Greene’s own rejection and acceptance of aspects of Newman’s insights into diverse religious and

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secular literary forms, Fiddes explores how Greene’s work may be usefully read: “Doctrine tends to hedge meaning around with more limits than creative literature does, unifying the Story and reducing it to a set of concepts. But, regarded from a Christian perspective, when the exponents of either art ignore the other and pretend to self-sufficiency, they exalt their freedom above their finitude” (Freedom 234). For both Fiddes and Greene, literature and its specific religious contexts should never be opposed in their interpretation. Fiddes concludes: “It is only by recognising their boundaries through each other that they can approach that freedom which is the image of God” (234). Within the terms of Greene’s own work, then, any absolutist figure, form, or critical approach, especially that premised on a particular conception of God, is to be understood by recognizing its own limitations as a means of investigation. Greene alludes to ways of reading his work which employ a series of tensions, religious and secular, in “The Trial of Pan” (1923). By playing “on his pipes,” Pan reduces to tears “old white-bearded God, sitting alone in the empty hall, on a high judgement seat, under a bright blue canopy, playing noughts and crosses with himself on his blotting paper” (50). Consistent with John Schad, for whom “what has not yet happened to Christianity will never be a book” (132), Greene’s approaches to his own interpretation stem from both its broad critical range and its relationship with par ticu lar investigative procedures. Elements of those approaches are themselves considered in the encyclical “Realism in the Catholic Novel” (1956) by the German Bishops, for whom “so far as our faithful are concerned, we should like to urge them to discriminate in the choice of reading matter, to select what is suitable and what may help them to make their faith more mature, more alive and pure” (181). Similar to how Greene positions himself against too heavy a critical emphasis on any specific aspect of his work, so he invites his innumerable readers to consider how and why, exactly, his fiction is important to them. The final utterances of Satan, the masked version of God in “The Improbable Tale of the Archbishop of Canterbridge” (1924), present precisely this kind of perspective: “Such miracles I’ve done. You wouldn’t believe. Woods, and wars, and sheep paths, and—and you, my dear Canterbridge” (191). Against Michael G. Brennan, for whom this story exhibits Greene’s “fascination with the concept of deistic dualism” (Fictions 1), Greene, in fact, rejects any kind of dualistic doctrine. Instead, he presents forms of creative and critical practice that are founded on the diverse relationships within and between those very forms. By considering Greene within multiple forms of creative and critical conception, it is possible to address elements of Robert Murray Davis’s

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prediction concerning the future of Greene criticism: “Though one should not expect the discovery of whole new continents, there is a great deal of room for thorough exploration and development of territory already surveyed” (“Criticism” 198). That exploration and development are carried out most productively and engagingly by way of the numerous diferent preoccupations, concerns, and interests which Greene’s novels assume in and through their consideration as literary texts. Stemming primarily from Greene’s version of religion, my interpretation of his work is one of a specifically theological aesthetics: “an attempt to arrive at, or to show how one arrives at, some fundamental principles by aesthetic means— by demonstrating the fundamental unity, or at the very least an analogy between aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical principles” (Bychkov xiii). Greene is “an uninstructed Catholic” because at every level of his work he declares the continual reconsideration of the conceptual terms in and through which it becomes significant. The relationship between mainline theology and contemporary literary theory within Greene’s work is both beguiling and perplexing. Similar to how theology is sometimes conceived of as the Queen of the Sciences, so Greene can be considered a prominent figure of imaginative afect. The investigative convergences that are found in and through his work are therefore those that present theology as subject to precisely the same questions, considerations, and reconsiderations, as “theory.” Greene’s work is of vital significance on numerous diferent levels because its core contributions to knowledge are of contrasting methodological premises. By negotiating the relationships and divergences within and between them, the intersection between theological and theoretical models of meaning is also the act of critically combining them comprehensively. Its means of engendering investigative discussion facilitates the use of principles that enable acutely efective kinds of critical perception. Neither bound to a single means of creativity nor concerned with singular conceptual points of view, Greene is a writer of incisive relevance. It is this quality that enables his work to speak powerfully to diferent individuals and communities across societies and generations. Religious impulses in the intersection between literature and theology are of several diferent kinds. On the one hand, readers of Greene’s fiction can potentially feel stirred into a kind of religious, even spiritual awareness through their encounters with elements of his Catholic themes. John Cottingham suggests that such a feeling could be similar to how “Believers and non-believers alike may be moved to tears by the beauties of nature, or by a masterwork such as Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or by those moments in our relations with others when we lay aside our de-

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manding and egoistical selves and feel filled with outgoing impulses of tenderness and love” (134). Religious interpretation is, in this sense, at once enabling and disabling as a means by which to critically evaluate fiction. The terms of such a reading, weighted as they are in favor of a particular community, facilitate a solid engagement with a writer’s work on a particular hermeneutical level. Concomitantly, this manner of reading negates the very premises by which its methods of investigation are constructed. For Colby Dickinson, a search for “foundations of faith” can actually be counterproductive (72). Dickinson writes that while “we drift toward that which is beautiful or organized and systematic . . . these impulses, quite often, can actually lead us down the wrong path” (72). An acceptance of the demands of embracing possibility, probability, and risk in all their variety is in order. In the case of reading fiction, such an approach arguably serves to enable a fitting appreciation of the skill and technique of an author. To find pleasure in the imaginative creativity of her practice, whatever the profit or cost, can act as a powerful critical endeavor. Its terms form the means by which to demonstrate the vital critical value that the highest kind of creative artistry merits. The specific critical engagements that are invoked during a reading will depend, in small or large part, on the ideology that is brought to bear on a text. Feelings and emotions that are prompted during a critical encounter can determine the terms of the interpretation that ensues. Literature has the potential to bring about comprehensive transformation. Elements of “the religious encounters with the sacred described in many of the texts of classical theism” serve (Cottingham 137), for some, as the gold standard. A text’s overall critical and creative efectiveness will rest on “those intensely personal encounters, infused with awe and charged with moral significance, where the individual feels him- or herself to be checked, to be scrutinised, and to be called upon to respond and to change” (137). Giving oneself to the experience of reading is, in a sense, to allow oneself “in psychological or phenomenological terms” to feel “overwhelmed . . . in a way that is somehow intertwined with awareness of one’s own weakness and imperfection” (138). When such a feeling meets on an equal footing with “a sense of confrontation with the inexorable demands of justice and righteousness” (138), a reader has invested her time wisely. Greene points to the wide diferences in values that his readers bring to his work in his thoughts on beauty in creative art work such as fiction. Responding to Charles Morgan, who considers the nature of telling stories by way of a “power to communicate universals” (399), Greene concerns himself with novelistic form and technique. For Greene, they are made most visible by way of the cultural pressures and social specifics

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that inform a novelist’s approach to her craft: “The consciousness of one’s time is the shaping and restraining element in creation” (“Seed” 517). Greene believes that the act of writing is, in part, founded on the negotiation of diferent kinds of creativeness and criticism. He therefore looks to the range of opinions and subjectivities within his readership when locating its specifically critical value. Greene writes, “In the discussion of any art it is better to exclude the word beauty. It does not describe. It is a quality not of the object but of the spectator’s emotion” (518). For Greene, critical reading proper is first and foremost an interpretative act that demands a spectrum of informed views. This act is never best conducted in isolation, nor by way of the words of the author alone. Rather, its terms of engagement demand the company of a guide. Greene comments insightfully on the necessity of conducting acts of reading as part of a communal endeavor, one that needs an informed critical voice. He writes: “When I say that such and such a statue is beautiful, I only mean that it has aroused in me a particular emotional feeling. It is more valuable for the critic to analyse the technical quality of the statue than the subjective response of the spectator which will vary with his mood” (518). It is my opinion that Greene himself is the best companion that a reader could wish for. Greene’s critical humility appears to be in some ways self-efacing, resting as it does on the possibility of his own capacity to make interpretative errors. For me, such a sense of humility is, actually, Greene’s greatest strength. This is because he instills within his readership the interpretative authority that is required of them to consume his fiction with the necessary thought and skill. Greene’s concern about authorial intervention is also an invitation to pick up one of his works and to find meaning in places whereby its imaginative significance is otherwise elusive. Greene writes, “The danger to the novelist is that he should write with his mind on the subjective response of his readers instead of being concerned only to express his idea with the greatest accuracy and the greatest economy” (518). Greene’s economy of creativity and critique is one that is placed in the hands of others, even the other, and is also therefore that quality which best defines literature: meaning can be sought only insofar as it will be found. In choosing how to respond to a novel, we contemplate who and how we are. In enacting the work of that response, we decide how best to live.

Acknowl edgments

First, my thanks to Peter Rawlings and William Greenslade of the Department of English of the University of the West of England. To both Peter and Bill, and, indeed, to all of my colleagues in the department and its wider support team, I owe a huge debt of thanks, especially Peter, one of the individuals to whom this book is dedicated, who helped see this book through from the genesis of my ideas to its completion. I could ask for no better mentors. This book is also dedicated to my wife, Claire, who has proofread the manuscript numerous times with alacrity and expert precision, and whose insight, encouragement, care, and support have been unending and reach to the depths of my spirit. She is the light of my life and the reason that this book has found its final form. It is through our relationship with God, as nurtured in the congregations of our home churches, that we celebrate this volume as both an answer to prayer, and a prayer in and of itself: a blessing that we give back to God in thanks, mediated through a celebration of the imagination of the startlingly brilliant writer that Graham Greene was, and of the critical and creative heart and soul of all that makes us, as human beings, what we are, privileged with the gift of this short, amazing life, that is to be experienced and enjoyed in all its vitality. With regard to practicalities, I thank the following individuals who, in diferent ways and means, have provided help, advice, references, resources, and supportive kindnesses in numerous forms, across the time of writing and production and beyond: the late Julia Black, Mariadele Boccardi, Elizabeth Haylett Clark, Giles Clark, Robert Murray Davis, Nick Dennys, Nick Freeman, Alyson Hallett, Peter Hampson, Colin

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Garrett, Dermot Gilvary, David Greenham, the late Lucy Hill, Jean and Mike Hill, Rebekah Humphreys, David Jasper, Frances McCormack, Darren J. N. Middleton, Gerry Moorey, Alastair Niven, Christopher Norris, Kerry Sinanan, Neil Sinyard, Paul Spencer, Molly Thompson, Sally Thompson, Brigitte Timmermann, and Hazel Ward. I especially thank my friends and colleagues Mark Bosco, SJ, and Richard Greene, as well as an anonymous reviewer at Fordham University Press. Their studied feedback on drafts of the manuscript helped me to improve its finish immeasurably. Can I also thank another anonymous reviewer for their comments and assessment. I have benefited from the use of a typescript that was under preparation by Neil Brennan and A.R. Redway, and I thank Robert Murray Davis and Maxine Brennan for facilitating access to this. My thanks, too, to the convenors of conferences in Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, the University of Glasgow, and UWE, where I was able to voice and debate some of my ideas. I am indebted to the organizers, attendees and supporters of the Graham Greene International Festival in Greene’s hometown of Berkhamsted, near London. My presentation of a short paper there in 2012 and my directorships of the 2018 and 2019 festivals—as well and the long-standing nurturing of the hospitality of solid thought about all things Greene by all involved—have engendered the development of the imaginative core of my methodological approach. Last, I remember and thank the late Caroline Bourget. Her friendship, encouragement, and stalwart support of the festival were invaluable in advancing knowledge and insight into the life and work of Graham Greene. I am thankful for the usages of archival deposits in the British Library in St. Pancras, the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, The Dacorum Heritage Trust in Berkhamsted, the John J. Burns Library at Boston College, the Georgetown University Library Booth Family Center for Special Collections, and the first-rate library collections of UWE, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and the Universities of Bristol and Exeter. I thank, too, the staf and wider teams of Bristol Central Library, who have assisted me in arranging interlibrary loans. I owe particular thanks to my parents and my parents-in-law for their kind and generous support in many diferent ways across the gestation and completion of this project. Finally, I especially mention and thank Fredric Nachbaur, William Cerbone, Eric Newman, and Gregory McNamee at Fordham University Press, who have been so very generous in their time, advice, and guidance, by way of their thoughtful, thorough replies to my many emails and enquiries. Fred, Will, Eric, and Greg, I feel

Acknowled gments / 203

fortunate to have benefited from your expertise, and to count among the prestigious cata logue of Fordham University Press. I thank the following for granting me permission to reproduce published and unpublished materials in my book: Fr. Bosco and The American Academy of Religion for permission to cite Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2005); regarding permission to quote from Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar, edited by Oleg V. Bychkov and James Fodor (Ashgate, 2008). Eforts have been made to obtain permission to reproduce this material, inclusive of the consulting of Taylor and Francis; David Higham Associates Limited for permission to quote the writings and words of Graham Greene; for permission to quote from the letter from Graham Greene to Father André Blanchet, I thank David Higham Associates Limited and the John J. Burns Library of Boston College; for permission to quote letters from Graham Greene to Professor Roger Sharrock, I thank David Higham Associates Limited, and the British Library; for permission to quote from the letter from Graham Greene to Catherine Walston I thank David Higham Associates Limited and Georgetown University Library Booth Family Center for Special Collections. The letter is held in its Graham Greene–Catherine Walston Collection. For permission to quote from the “Typescript of The Honorary Consul” by Graham Greene, I thank David Higham Associates Limited and The Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds. The citations are reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library. Last, I thank Fr. Bosco and Robert Murray Davis for permission to cite their papers given at the Graham Greene International Festival, and I thank Kelly Noelle Fitch for permission to quote from her PhD dissertation from the Department of English in the University of Exeter.

Notes

Introduction: The Uninstructed Catholic 1. I use the terms “religion” and “religious” rather than “faith” and “faithful.” This is because the latter are, for me, too subjective to support the ideological commitment that I believe Graham Greene invested in his work. Greene himself stated as much in comments that were typically loaded with paradox: “My books only reflect faith or lack of faith, with every possible nuance in between. I don’t see why people insist on labelling me a Catholic writer. I’m simply a Catholic who happens to write” (Allain 159). The acts of writing and thinking were, for Greene, central to those of believing and imagining. 2. I have chosen not to dwell upon Greene’s many biographies for two reasons. First, as William Atkinson states in his early review, “they look for explanations and origins within his personal life rather than in the literary and social life of his times” (117). Second, as Richard Greene suggests of Norman Sherry’s official three-volume biography, “it might prove impossible, ultimately, to correct the misguided emphases of the work. . . . Alas, that way madness lies” (969). One recent exception to aspects of such biographical approaches to Greene is Bernard Diederich’s “political biography” (17), Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene’s Adventures in Haiti and Central America, 1954–1983. Richard Greene writes that this “is one of the most impor tant accounts ever written about this author” (17). Moreover, Tim Butcher comments on the vital importance of framing Greene’s life and work in ways that are in keeping with the author’s imagination. Butcher writes: “as a reader who knew Graham Greene only through his novels, my view of him as a literary untouchable was also transformed. I came to see him as more of a mortal” (305). Chris Hull has explored the critical contexts of Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana (1958) in Our Man down in Havana: The Story behind Graham Greene’s Cold War Spy Novel (2019). In response, one reviewer commented that “Greene’s life was a gift to biographers” (“Spies”). In his landmark, authorized biography Russian Roulette: The Life and Times of Graham Greene (2020), Richard Greene states, “There is no understanding Graham Greene except in the political and cultural contexts of dozens of countries. And in an odd

206 / Notes to pages 11–17 sense the reverse is also true: we fail to understand something about modern times if we ignore Greene” (xv). By virtue of Greene’s innervating involvements across a broad span of geopolitically significant times and places, it is impor tant that an account of his life “swings the balance away from obscure details . . . to an account of his engagement with the political, literary, intellectual, and religious currents” (xvi). Biographically, Greene is to be framed less as a construct of limited critical proportions, and more as the kind of figure who could be potentially recognizable to a passerby. 3. Greene’s first literary review was in the Oxford Outlook in January 1924 (Brennan and Redway; Wise and Hill 82), in which he reviewed the January 1924 issue of The Education Outlook. He reviewed regularly in the journal, progressing onto The Education Outlook itself and the Glasgow Herald, and then, as well as other periodicals, The Spectator and the New Statesman, in which he wrote regularly about book releases and film, and placed numerous letters. It is impor tant to note Christopher Hawtree’s observation, in the introduction to his edition of Graham Greene’s letters, Yours Etc. Letters to the Press 1945–1989, that “a novelist’s approach would be a night-editor’s despair” (xii), since Greene chose to leave his early job as copyeditor at The Times in order to concentrate on writing fiction. Greene commented in his interview with V.S. Naipaul, “I’ve always liked reading newspapers. My enemies might say I get my ideas from theological works and newspapers” (ix; Naipaul 65). Aspects of those ideas and their sources, including their many and potentially complex interrelationships, may be regarded as the basis for his own imaginative development.

1 / The Ache of Modernism: Theological Aesthetics in Greene’s Nonfiction 1. W.B. Carnochan alludes to the empirical qualities of the genre of the novel, as I am invoking them, in his observation concerning Watt’s The Rise of the Novel that over against “those who are theoretically inclined,” who “beg the question of what makes realism real,” it is the case that “even to have workable names for what Defoe and Richardson and Fielding were doing is a step toward empirical clarity and understanding” (177). The empirical, for the purposes of my argument, therefore consists of a collection of critical presuppositions within which contemporary approaches to fiction and those that approximate them relate to one another and remain separate in multiple and contrasting ways. 2. Kai Nielsen writes of empiricism, “While it plainly has its philosophical difficulties, there are parts of it that are very persuasive indeed and would seem to have become part of critical and reflective common sense. Indeed, in that very broad sense, it might very well even be a part of the framework of those contemporary phi losophers who . . . think of themselves as rationalists” (147). It is the very idea of the rational within and against which my argument is positioned. Experience, in this sense, is defined as the feelings, emotions, subjective states or actual observations associated with a series of facts or events which may, sometimes, in themselves be “considered as a source of knowledge,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. 3. Experience and the secular relate to each other in the context of my argument on the basis of the ways in which they intersect as critical paradigms of their own distinct kinds. This form of relationship is, in part, presented by Michael W.

Notes to pages 17–27 / 207 Kaufmann: “Secular thought and discourse do not so much replace religious thought and discourse as they displace them to the private domain of personal experience, belief, and practice” (607). It is by way of their intersections within, and challenges toward specific aspects of the religious that experience and the secular as investigative concepts serve to direct my argument. 4. Neil Sinyard notes that Graham Greene’s “collected writings on film . . . is . . . by any criterion . . . an impor tant dimension of Greene’s curriculum vitae” (45). I have chosen not to dwell on this aspect of Greene’s work. This is because I am concerned less with the cinematic dimensions of his fiction than with those that are literary in character or that pertain to the development of theatrical drama. 5. In the sense that Greene is alluding to the institution, I understand the Roman Catholic Church to be any facet of the administrative and ecclesiastical practices whose orga nizational center is the Holy See in Rome and whose head is the Pope. I mean to refer to both the denominations and branches that are specifically Roman Catholic in administration and those whose religious identities essentially proceed from their administrative center. The Church is a way of referring to their collective forms and expressions, whether in the present or in history. The Catholic religion, the Roman Catholic religion and their variants, depending on context, can refer to any precise aspect of those forms and expressions. 6. Greene’s comment on “the numinous pleasure” intersects with Rudolf Otto’s notions of “a definitely ‘numinous’ state of mind. . . . This mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other” (7). Similar to how Greene’s perspectives on the novel cannot themselves “be strictly defined” (7), so his literary criticism itself assumes aspects of the representation of the numinous. 7. The most notable exponent of the notion of the “common reader” is, of course, Samuel Johnson. Frank Kermode comments that “it is to this Common Reader, endowed with common sense but innocent of subtlety and learning, that many refined, subtle, dogmatic, and learned literary critics now profess to cede all judgement” (2). Inasmuch as Greene rejects the possibility of a simplified opposition between dogma and experience, it is this kind of reader with which I am myself concerned. 8. Greene’s characterization of Ford anticipates Marthe Robert’s conception of the novel genre: “A newcomer to the literary scene, a commoner made good who will always stand as something of an upstart, even a bit of a swindler, among the established genres it is gradually supplanting” (3). A genre that “has derived the violence of its desires and its irrepressible freedom from the Family Romance” (Theory 167), it is within the qualities of delinquency and nonconformity that are par ticu lar to the novel that Greene in turn positions Ford’s study as, in part, against any conceptual form which is dogmatically religious. 9. As Alexandra Harris herself observes concerning nature of “the ‘parish’ ” between the wars (193), “Graham Greene pointed out . . . the church was also the oldest theatre. . . . If regional culture was flagging, it was perhaps because churches had lost their sense of identity” (193–194). 10. Greene, of course, knew of drama’s origins in ancient Greece and beyond, as demonstrated in his review of Ford’s The March of Literature: From Confucius to the Modern Times, “Last Journey” (1939). The nature of those origins are even now hotly debated, as shown by Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller, for whom “it has long and universally been assumed that drama developed ‘out of ritual’” (1). Their preoccupations relate to mine on the grounds that “binary oppositions such as religious versus

208 / Notes to pages 28–35 secular or efficacious versus entertaining are seldom mutually exclusive and usually overlap in actual practice” (C.B. Davis 166). This form of overlapping is precisely what is at issue in Greene’s own novelistic technique. 11. Of par ticu lar concern to Luke Ferretter is Augustine’s assertion that “the essence of sin is ‘to abandon God and to exist in oneself, that is to please oneself’ ” (98; Augustine 572). Ferretter summarizes this position as follows: “The concept of pleasing oneself as opposed to God is similar to Freud’s concept of pleasing oneself as opposed to society” (98). Except that Paul’s conflict between “the law of sin,” and “the law of God” (NRSV, Rom 7:25), rests upon “something . . . fundamental” (Ferretter 97), which in Aquinas’s philosophy is “the powers of the soul . . . with respect to their proper order” (Ferretter 97). This means that the notion “ ‘God is dead’ is . . . an undisguised Oedipal wish-fulfilment” (Vitz and Gartner 13), pointing to the necessity of implicating secular discourses on social behav iors within a Christian theological critique. By encouraging dialogue between those who would rebel against God and those for whom psychoanalysis owes its development to “Neoplatonic Christianity by ‘cultural genealogy’ ” (Ferretter 96; Kirschner 3), there can emerge insights that might lessen the distance between atheistic philosophies like Nietzsche’s, and writers like Greene, whose work can draw on both secular and religious motifs, symbols, and tropes. 12. Ian Watt believes that the novel genre arose in the eighteenth century because of “five major changes conditioning the nature of the reading public” (Reeves 30). They included an increasing emphasis on “the question of realism” (31), “the rise of individualism and consequent changes in the mental and intellectual natures of individuals in the modern period” (31), “the rise of the middle class” and developments in “the role of female readers” (31). By his “rejection of universals and the emphasis on particulars” (Watt, Rise 15), Watt places less emphasis on “general human types” than the complexities of individual persons in all their variety (Rise 15), diversity and diference. 13. Greene writes that between winter and spring of 1948, when he traveled to the “Four Powers” Vienna to write his novella and when he returned with Carol Reed, he “was embarrassed to find” that the city “had completely changed” (Ways 96, 98). As Brigitte Timmermann comments, “no part of the city remained untouched by the war” (56). Greene was clearly satisfied by his own touch, since on seeing the final filmed version of his story, “he was completely won over” (400). 14. In his address to “political, cultural, business and religious leaders” of British society in Westminster Hall, Pope Benedict XVI remarked, “I would invite all of you . . . within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.” His speech addressed, among other matters, various moral issues that the Catholic Church views as problematic in the modern world. Mark Bosco contends that if Pope John Paul II could be characterized as “the phi losopher” and Pope Benedict XVI “the theologian,” in Pope Francis a diferent approach is at work: “it is neither philosophy nor theology that focalise this pope’s theological imagination. Rather, literature and art are the coalescing forms that shape his theology and philosophy” (“Coloring”; “Rock”). A literature in the mode of Pope Francis is, perhaps, founded on conversations both inside and outside religious likelihoods and imaginings. 15. Of elements of Greene’s “Catholic reception,” Kelly Noelle Fitch writes that “one alarming constant was the intrusion of interpretation from the religion of

Notes to pages 37–38 / 209 Greene’s characters into considerations of Greene’s own beliefs” (210). It is the case, nonetheless, that to impose onto Greene’s fiction any pattern of religious belief may itself be considered a singular religious position on the part of the critic. Sebastian Faulks has recently suggested that “what ‘Fate’ is to Hardy, Roman Catholicism is to Graham Greene—a loud gatecrasher at a muted family gathering,” which they must “try to make . . . not just welcome, but somehow natural in . . . often humdrum settings” (171). In conceiving core aspects of Greene’s imaginative development within a series of metaphorical allusions, Faulks’s opinions themselves appear to take a vague and general form. Interpretative comment on Greene has, perhaps, not developed from François Mauriac’s suggestion that “a young author . . . is not really unaware that he is in fact the subject matter of his books” (3). To this kind of opinion, Greene responded: “If my conscience were as acute as M. Mauriac’s showed itself to be . . . I could not write a line” (Why Do I Write? [1948] 31). In keeping with this comment, Peter Dufell, director of England Made Me (1972), remarks upon the challenges of “remain[ing] faithful to Graham Greene’s story and his intentions. . . . It’s the concrete nature of his work that can make the task seem deceptively easy.” Consistent with the creative force of this comment, and writing by way of the context of Greene’s abilities as a travel writer, Tim Butcher comments: “Each time I have read Journey Without Maps [1936] I have taken something new from the experience, truly the hallmark of the best writing” (ix). Moreover, referring to Greene’s sometimes exaggerated sense of “colour and texture,” Lara Feigel remarks that “to ignore the pleasure of the excess is to misread Greene” (“Aesthetics” 28). It is within the critical tenor of these comments that I suggest Greene’s fiction may be most appropriately judged, including the relationship between its religious and secular aspects. In this way, Greene is considered less by way of a series of more or less dogmatic religious standards than by his own individual forms of imaginative conception. 16. Greene, of course, positions himself largely against Catholic dogma of any kind, as shown by Bosco, for whom “Greene illustrates that one’s faith and belief in God is as treacherous a place as the world of politics and espionage” (“Development” 52). I agree inasmuch as “Greene’s religious imagination finds in Catholicism a perspective, a place to stand, and in doing so, a place to reflect and critique the world, including the world of Catholicism” (59). Greene’s version of religion is, in this sense, the very subject he both stands against and departs from.

2. Catholic Novels: Religious Anxieties in Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter 1. By society, I mean to refer to the values, principles, and collective interests shared between any range of individuals composing a par ticu lar group or community. Proceeding from Joshua Phillips’s recent presupposition “that all texts are communal products” (vii), the diferent forms and expressions of the collective and the communal, as I am invoking them, stem from the OED’s definition of society (specifically, that in the 1989 print edition): “The fact or condition of being connected or related; connexion or relationship; union or alliance; affinity.” I am especially concerned with how Graham Greene’s novels intersect with multiple kinds of the collective as investigative concepts because, as Phillips states: “imagined communities . . . partake of a larger idea. . . . Collective subjects . . . are constituted in

210 / Notes to pages 4 1–55 excess of single bodies and tend not to promote individuation” (3). In line with Stanley Fish, for whom “a system of intelligibility” determines the nature of any critical act on the basis that “communication occurs only within such a system (or context, or situation, or interpretive community)” (304), my argument is meant as an extension of a variety of critical positions. They include Fredric Jameson’s, who has questioned the very possibility of “collective identities”: “in a historical moment in which individual personal identity has been unmasked as a decentered locus of multiple subject-positions, surely it is not too much to ask that something analogous be conceptualized on the collective level” (472). The collective, in these terms, and for the purposes of my argument, is, then, a diverse collection of social, communal and collectivistic principles and capacities which both oppose and present any single form, conception, or notion of the individual. 2. Unless I indicate other wise, I shall refer throughout to the 2004 Vintage edition of Brighton Rock. 3. My definition of doctrine stems from that taught in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2000) for which “the Church’s social teaching . . . is articulated as the Church interprets events in the course of history, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, in the light of the whole of what has been revealed by Jesus Christ” (517). This “body of doctrine” “proposes principles for reflection; it provides criteria for judgment; it gives guidelines for action” (517, 517–518). In this sense, Greene’s novels and the characters within them both present ways of practicing diferent versions of religion and contradict their precise terms, including those of a par ticu lar interpretation. On this basis, it is impor tant to consider James M. Farrell’s opinion concerning the understanding of doctrine that “all Catholics are responsible for living out those truths[:] ‘This teaching can be more easily accepted by men of good will, the more the faithful let themselves be guided by it’ ” (508; Catechism 517). According to this premise, my argument is founded upon Greene’s adherence to and departure from any series of Catholic and Roman Catholic tenets, teachings, or dogmas. 4. The OED defines kenosis as “the self-renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the incarnation.” In biblical terms, the concept, as I am invoking it, proceeds more or less from Philippians 2:7a, in which Christ is said to have “emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave, / being born in human likeness” (NRSV). 5. Frank Kermode and P.D. Juhl debate the possibility of holding “One Correct Interpretation” (209). I suggest that the very interpretative essence of any single way of reading is under examination in Greene’s novel. Karen Priest’s position on Brighton Rock, in this sense, may need expansion. She contends that this novel, in part, “highlights Greene’s own conviction that we live in a world of oppositions where no true certainty can be found” (125). It is the case at the level of interpreting the text itself, any notion of certainty as a critical concept is both useful and in question. 6. Incidentally, the statement approximates to some degree with “the familiar Dostoevskian idea that if there is no God, all is permitted” (Morson 485). Dostoevsky’s theology “is processual: God genuinely made us free, and even He cannot know what we will do” (479). 7. As part of their definition of the genre, Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney write that “metaphysical detective stories often emphasize . . .

Notes to pages 58–60 / 211 transcendence . . . by becoming self-reflexive (that is, by representing allegorically the text’s own processes of composition)” (2). The critics claim to trace the development of the genre “from its beginnings in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination to recent works by Umberto Eco, George Perec, Paul Auster, and many others” (1). 8. Greene’s novel continues to be marked by questionable interpretation. Rowan Jofé’s 2011 film adaptation is, by his own admission, premised on his own heavi ly individual reading of the text: “I was addicted to the idea of telling this story. I honestly believe with every fibre of my being that this is the most interesting love story I have ever read. I was so in love with it I wasn’t acting rationally any more” (Whitworth). Moreover, in his foreword to the novel, he writes, “like Rose, I had fallen in love with a potentially deadly object of desire: Brighton Rock. And when you’re in love you behave naïvely, irrationally, insanely even” (vii). To contend that Greene’s novel may assume either a singular interpretative approach or forms of belief that conform to single kinds of imaginative conception may well be premised on good intentions, and, moreover, produce credible results. Peter Bradshaw comments: “It’s an intelligent and creative movie, not a masterpiece, but much better than some rather disobliging reviews have suggested.” I would nevertheless argue that Jofé is at risk of failing to acknowledge the degree to which Greene’s novel engenders multiple and far-reaching critical responses among any range of readers, or, in this context, filmgoers. In these terms, it is perhaps within diferent senses of “responsible, imaginative, and lively enquiry” that future adaptations of Greene’s fiction might take their most engaging and constructive cues (Bordwell and Carroll xvii). 9. The notion that Greene’s novel is imbued with singular kinds of belief in religious salvation and damnation on the parts of diferent readers meets with David Jasper’s opinion that “one still encounters endless projects to establish . . . versions of doctrines of atonement embedded in the narratives of fiction and drama” (“How” 20). To attempt to draw any stable conclusions from the text through any religious or secular doctrine is, then, generally misguided, since this does not acknowledge the degree to which Greene’s writing is imaginatively conceived and, therefore, premised on questioning singular forms of response, critical or other wise. Frances McCormack has recently commented on the “creative inspiration” that “writers . . . consistently” found in “the Middle Ages” (“Later” 263). It seems to me that “focusing . . . on the redemptive power, and yet the transience, of human love” presents a reasonably rigorous approach to Greene (276). Focusing on the specifically human dynamic of Greene’s work facilitates a turn toward individual imagination and away from levels of religious absolutism. 10. R.A. Wobbe notes that the first British edition is subtitled A Novel by Graham Greene (41), while in America the text was printed in June 1938 under the subtitle, An Entertainment (42). The Collected Edition (1970) rejects the label “Entertainment” altogether, indexing the text under a list of “Novels” (ii). 11. David Lodge identifies four “ingredients” in his definition of the “Catholic novel” in his introduction to Mauriac’s The Knot of Vipers (1932): “the idea of the sinner being ‘at the heart of Christianity’ (Péguy’s phrase), the idea of ‘mystical substitution’ (Little Marie’s self-sacrifice), the implied critique of materialism, the tireless pursuit of the erring soul by God, ‘the Hound of Heaven’ in Francis Thompson’s famous metaphor” (7). Before this definition, and in line with Theodore P. Fraser’s opinion that Lodge provides a “useful summary of major

212 / Notes to pages 61–80 thematic material” (xvi), Mark Bosco comments that The Heart of the Matter serves to “illustrate Greene’s own absorption in the French Catholic literary revival” (Catholic Imagination 9). Moreover, Bosco identifies a “fifth element of the Catholic modern aesthetics: the modern way in which sex and sexuality become ‘a way to God’ ” (“Modernist”; “Modernism,” Integritas 11–12; “Modernism,” Studies 13). Bosco’s comments are valuable in that they are premised on the range of Greene’s imagination, spiritual, religious, and theological. I would argue that the Catholic status of Greene’s fiction is subject to both critical challenge and expansion. 12. Commenting on the relationship between this text and Greene’s other novels between 1938 and 1951, Bosco writes that “Greene takes Péguy’s famous text ‘Le pécheur est au coeur même de chrétienté’ [‘The sinner is at the heart of Christianity’] (Greene, Why the Epigraph? [1989] 25)] as the epigraph of The Heart of the Matter, but it could be the epigraph and the theological lens for all of his novels from this period”: that is, a means of viewing as conceived through “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God” (Catholic Imagination 9). Bosco’s position on Greene’s version of religion means that he does not consider how Greene might actually question his very capacity to assume a singular interpretation. 13. Pity is an emotion that is vital in multiple respects to an understanding of any aspect of the Roman Catholic religion. John F. O’Grady explores the origins of its numerous beliefs within the opposition between the individual and society by which I am myself framing my critique of Greene’s novels. He points especially to the following Bible verse: “Behold as the eyes of the servants are on the hands of their masters, / As the eyes of a maid are on the hands of her mistress, / So are our eyes on the Lord, our Lord till he has pity on us” (Ps 123:2 qtd. in O’Grady 195). Inasmuch as Greene invokes attention on the nature of the very possibility of salvation, his approaches to pity point to the interpretative premises of innumerable diferent Roman Catholic traditions. 14. For Mark Mortimer, this is a reference to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19, in which Lot persuades the angels not to destroy a village subsequently named Zoar, which means “ little” (Holy Bible: NLT 16). 15. This could be an allusion to the Holy Spirit in Genesis 1:2: “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” (NIV).

3. Creator of Heaven and Earth: Catholicism and the “Catholic” in The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair 1. Trudier Harris writes that “genre . . . means ‘kind’ or ‘genus’ . . . [and] is thus an umbrella concept that allows for many disparate, and often related, concepts to be conveniently divided and subdivided” (509). My approach to the concept stems from Graham Greene’s capacities to unsettle its diferent forms and expressions, as presented within his novels, including how: “we imagine various genres as speaking in diferent voices” (Ruf 5). 2. By form I mean the arrangements of the styles and patterns of thought and idea in a literary composition, as well as the reasons for those specific arrangements. By theme, I mean the par ticu lar conditions and circumstances that support any way of conceiving those arrangements and reasons. Their possible oppositions and convergences proceed from Alexander Zholkovsky’s opinion that “in today’s criticism . . . thematic/structural criticism can and should internalize the new

Notes to pages 83–90 / 213 relativism” (297). On this basis, I am concerned with the invocation of the OED’s definition of content as the totality of any par ticu lar collection of themes, “the sum of qualities, notions, ideal elements given in or composing a conception.” 3. Arguing that “at this moment . . . thematics may be an approach to literature that dares not speak its name” (Sollors xiv), Werner Sollors comments that “thematics may be interesting to the scholar concerned with constants as well as to the reader interested in variations” (xix). The chapter proceeds from precisely this conceptual premise, focusing on engendering Greene’s novels with thematic coherence even as “the study of themes . . . seems rather to be a minefield without adequate maps” (xxiii). 4. Beauty is, of course, highly impor tant within matters Catholic, as explored by Raymond Gawronski, who has asked, “What is the role of beauty in coming to know God?” (188). He comments especially on the notion of the “radically cataphatic” specific to the religious practices of St. Ignatius (188). It is within the context of the quality of the cataphatic, by which I mean the act of “defining God positively or by positive statements” (OED), that Greene’s own distinctively Catholic approaches to beauty present themselves as critically significant. 5. Hans Urs von Balthasar himself writes that “beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendour around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another” (Glory 1:18). Since my focus is literary-critical rather than exclusively theological, I have decided not to explore Balthasar’s primary materials. Nevertheless, I suggest that his own position on theology, characterized by diverse qualities of the metaphoric and the absolute, implicates the kind of critically expansive framework with which I am myself concerned in my interpretation of Greene. In The Christian and Anxiety (1952), Balthasar remarks briefly on Greene in terms of his unconventional representations of religious experience, commenting that “even a great writer like Graham Greene . . . cannot be absolved from what Karl Rahner has branded as a false and fatal ‘mystique of sin.’ . . . This plainly and necessarily contradicts true redemption” (113; Rahner 46). It is a truism that sin as a conceptual if not applied possibility pervades the hearts and minds of Greene’s characters, individually and collectively. This instills them with a vital secular importance, albeit one of a perplexing and paradoxical salvific potential. David Jasper has recently made a similar assertion in regard to Greene’s explorations of the priesthood, within and “beyond the boundaries of the Church” (“Priest” 87), stating: “Priests, in the complex worlds of Graham Greene, bear an indelible stain that can never be eradicated by the perversities of this world” (84). In my opinion, the religious figurations and configurations that define the contours of Greene’s imaginative landscapes transcend the par ticu lar privileges imbibed by singular, stable referents. This is so, however attractive or seductive their elliptical or rhetorical significances might seem. 6. In his evidence at The Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, Norman St John-Stevas remarked that an aim of a Catholic priest is “to rid the sexual instinct, the sexual act, of any taint or false shame” (Hyde 33). This kind of perspective on human sexuality is precisely what the whisky priest is alluding to. 7. Richard Greene interprets Greene’s critical incident in an alternative way, situating his fear of the moment in the context of his tendency to risk his life in diferent manners. This began in adolescence when, following a course of

214 / Notes to page 90 psychoanalysis, “he had begun to experience the terrible boredom that would afflict him all his life” (Russian Roulette 31). He apparently turned to playing Russian roulette with a revolver because “his survival thrilled him” (32). It could be that this part of Greene’s life is “a personal myth, a story that allows Greene to explain a recurrent pattern” (32–33), one of occasional thrill-seeking. For Richard Greene, the epiphany that Greene documented constituted the point when “his game of Russian roulette had played out. The round in the chamber had fallen into place but somehow failed to discharge. Indeed, after this, Greene’s impulse towards self-destruction would never be the same” (90). Greene’s inclinations toward and concomitant aversions concerning danger and risk intersect with the contention that his religious disposition was continually shifting, evolving according to context, whatever its subtlety or extremity. Richard Greene observes that Greene’s immersions in the vicissitudes of religion, especially in regard to fictional representation, are in part solidly corporeal, even carnal, in their nature: “In Greene’s most Catholic novels, there is a remarkable fleshiness, with characters belching and hiccupping, as if the idea of Incarnation were being probed to the last unsettling degree. Of course, the version of Catholicism that Greene adopted in the 1920s was fleshy . . . against the Lutheran idea that salvation was by faith alone” (129). It is reasonable to contend that Greene explored diferent versions of religion, “intellectual” (280), “very Catholic” (430; emphasis added), and other wise, appropriated and reappropriated according to need, bond, kinship, and circumstance. They were also particularized by their acts of transition within and between their terms of concern, and in opposition to totalizations of genre, whose own terms are decidedly fluid. That is to say, events and critical moments, however formulated and whatever their par ticu lar natures, are, in fictive and linear patterns, conceived according to changefulness and contingency. This is in contradistinction to “God’s plan” (194), whether He (or She) happens to be “the Christian God” (457), or another supervening deity, one who may or may not invoke in a Catholic believer such as Greene “surprisingly conservative” “theological views” (503). Having “written . . . successful plays” (336), Greene could shape his fiction according to “dramatic terms,” using “structural device[s]” (336) that employ Audenesque preoccupations about “whether art can ever bring about political change” (367). But, given his intersection with religion as an assembling and dis-assembling influence, it is impor tant to consider what his work does, as distinct from what it does not do. For Nick Ripatrazone, who enquires into what constitutes “sincerely Catholic” fiction (11), distinctively Catholic religious tropes and ideas ofer forms of continuity and structure that facilitate the construction of narrative-designs: “Catholicism is an architectural faith—literally, in the grandness of its physical spaces, and theologically” (98). It is naturally axiomatic that, in regard to Greene’s flawed characters, such as the whisky priest, “to say we come to a conclusion is not at all to assert . . . that there is closure” (Lakeland 184). Equally, it is so that the imperative “to create new meaning” (Valverde 186), sometimes caricatured as a “litmus test of critical and theoretical competence” (Watts, “Fiction” 99), can manifest itself in an interpretative competitiveness: one whose terms of engagement are best met in “the study of interrelationships between religious or theological traditions and literary traditions, both oral and written” (Ziolkowski 1). To write and speak well of quality imaginative “ ‘texts’ (oral and written)” (1), is, in peculiar ways, to enter into manners of relationship that are solidly interrogative and universally becoming.

Notes to pages 90–105 / 215 8. This approach to the relationship between theme and form may seem counterintuitive before Clive Bell’s suggestion that “every form in a work of art has . . . to be made aesthetically significant” (121). Moreover, modernism shifts emphasis away from theme and toward form: “ ‘Works of art’ become the conceptual inversions of historical aporias, conceptual forms of anticapital” (Larsen xxv). But, in keeping with Roger Fry, who himself perceives “the form of the work of art to be its most essential quality” (206), it is nevertheless the case that the contemplation of “significant form[,] something other than agreeable arrangements of form,” may raise its own series of questions about the precise nature of “reality” (211). Fry feared landing himself “in the depths of mysticism,” concluding: “On the edge of that gulf I stop” (211). I suggest that an attempt at crossing may be possible. 9. By “soteriological perspective,” Lee Barrett is pointing to any notion of meaning that is of or pertains to a distinctively Christian doctrine of salvation. 10. By Godhead I mean to refer to the supreme deity of the Christian triune conception of God, as composed of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 11. Commenting on how he discovered his position on theology, Martin Luther writes: “I began to understand that . . . the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates” (11). It is precisely this focus on the role of the individual believer in engendering her religious faith that Greene expands. 12. Norman Sherry remarks at length upon numerous parallels, including the individuals upon whom Greene might have based par ticu lar characters (1:678, 688, 703–704, 720), the description of specific places and scenes (696, 703–704), and the representations of his own religious anx ieties (698). Furthermore, Bernard Schweizer comments upon how Greene’s novel “owes much of its vividness to Greene’s own nightmarish journey in Tabasco” (123). 13. Greene’s approaches to the idea of limit-experience, as I am invoking them, stem in part from those of Michel Foucault, George Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot. Against “the phenomenologist’s ‘lived experience’ (le vécu) . . . ‘the everyday in its transitory form,’ . . . there is also the ‘unlivable’ [sic] experience of Nietzsche, Bataille and Blanchot” (Gutting, “Foucault” 74; Trombadori 241). Diverse notions of “transgression as an experience” are characterized in the case of Bataille by their capacities to be “decisive for our culture” and in Blanchot by “an attempt to give an account of ‘the experience of the outside’ ” (O’Leary, 548; Foucault “Preface,” 72; “Thought,” 149). On the basis of a sense of “experience that involves ‘the maximum of intensity and the maximum of impossibility at the same time’ . . . we have, in contrast to le vécu of phenomenology, ‘the idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself’ ” (Gutting, “Foucault” 74, 75; Foucault, “Interview” 241). In my discussion, this wrenching takes the form of the questioning of the relationship between novelistic theme and form in the context of the very possibility of such a relationship being possible. 14. The book, a collector’s item, has received limited critical comment. Michael Shelden remarks upon its “embarrassing title” (93), and Norman Sherry considers its circumstances of publication (1:164–171). Richard Greene observes that Greene responded to its reception by “never allowing it to be reprinted” (Russian Roulette 34). 15. Darren J. N. Middleton’s main argument is that The End of the Affair (1951) constitutes Greene’s “most impressive—and perhaps most disturbing—theological

216 / Notes to pages 107–113 novel” (Theology 15), since “Greene’s deity, it might be said, is much too sinister and unpredictable to warrant our worship” (15). Basing the course of his argument on, among other theologies, that of Anselm, for whom “the life of the intellect and the life of prayer are not in opposition” (23), Middleton concludes on Greene’s “strangely elusive and markedly ironic” version of God by commenting (45): “To my mind, this characterization . . . reminds those of us who live in the light and power of the Christian story that we have little option, especially in the face of our ambiguous world, but to uphold theological mystery” (45). Stemming from the practice of religion as distinct from its theory, for me Middleton’s argument is too imbued in his own ideological position. 16. Michael Edwards conceptualizes these terms as “the greatness and wretchedness, of the human condition. . . . All that is great about a man derives from his ‘first nature,’ given to him in ‘the state of creation.’ His wretchedness—blindness, ‘concupiscence,’ mortality—is constituted by his ‘second nature,’ which has resulted from the original sin of Adam” (2–3). 17. My conception of a master narrative derives from James K. A. Smith’s discussion of a metanarrative. Commenting on Jean-François Lyotard’s approaches to “the incredulity towards metanarratives” (Hermida 101; Lyotard, Postmodern xxiv), he writes: “What is at stake is not the scope of these narratives but the nature of the claims they make. . . . Metanarratives . . . not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal societies do that), but also claim to legitimate the story and its claims by an appeal to universal Reason. . . . What is wrong with this is that such a grand reçit fails to see that it, too, is grounded in a myth and faith-commitments” (354–355). On this basis, “the term modern” is used by Lyotard “to designate any science that legitimises itself with reference to a metadiscourse . . . [which is premised on] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative . . .” (Postmodern xxiii). A master narrative, distinguished from a grand narrative by any par ticu lar individual’s capacity to “recognize that there is a master narrative in place” (Lawless 61), is therefore that which “we,” as “participants” of its terms, should “call . . . into question, [and] examine . . . and [then we should] ask ourselves whether or not we want to change it” (61). My argument in this chapter stems from Greene’s agreement with and contradiction of Lyotard’s notion of the “modern.” This is because Greene’s conception of a master narrative, as presented in and through his work’s own interpretative terms, “unlike the modernist version . . . does not rest on reason for its legitimation but is instead ‘trusted in faith’ ” (Hermida 104; James K. A. Smith 355). 18. The degree to which this position has been overlooked may be exemplified by Andrew Tate, for whom “Christian ity is a faith tradition that is judged, by some observers, to be in a state of terminal decline” (2). Within this religious position, concerning Bendrix, Tate argues that “the fact that Greene’s cynical narrator is also a novelist is an allegorical as well as an autobiographical device: as a creator of plots . . . the author is widely recognised as an analogue for the creator God. . . . Bendrix’s resistance to ‘God and his hypostases,’ including narrative itself, is defeated by the discovery of a plot beyond his interpretative control” (102–103; Barthes, “Death,” 147). In seeming to interpret Greene’s novel within a single aspect of Barthes’s critical framework, Tate appears not to perceive Greene’s capacity to assume those aspects of it with which any par ticu lar version of religion would not necessarily be opposed. While for some readers, “God . . . not Bendrix, is in charge of the story” (Hodgkins

Notes to pages 119–121 / 217 68), it is also the case that for others, including Greene himself, absolutist forms of critical approach are in question, no matter what kinds of “personal and artistic fatigue” happen be in play (Sutton 168).

4. Entertaining the Second Vatican Council: Creative Theologies in The Honorary Consul and Monsignor Quixote 1. Focused on exploring the relationship between fiction, work, and text within the context of Graham Greene’s novels, this chapter calls for working definitions of several key terms at the outset. I see fiction as a literary composition that is “imaginatively invented” (OED), and not necessarily based on fact, of which a novel has become the preeminent form. Work is a single literary composition or a body of compositions produced by way of the efort of an individual author, in this case, Greene. Text comprises the very words that constitute an author’s work, whether fiction or nonfiction, and which, in its unpublished form, is also the product of a writer who is distinguished from an author by the degree to which she is remunerated and recognized as the originator of her writing. In this sense, a specific creative act may be less one of writing than authorship. Inasmuch as each of these terms shift and develop in more or less complex ways, I shall define some of them in more detail as my argument progresses. 2. In his argument that “poetic history . . . is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence” (Bloom, Anxiety 5), Harold Bloom alludes to Jorge Luis Borges’s statement, remarking: “If the dead poets, as Eliot insisted, constituted their successors’ par ticu lar advances in knowledge, that knowledge is still their successors’ creation, made by the living for the needs of the living” (19). It is by way of Greene’s relationship to diferent forms of the poetic, as conceived historically or within poetic practices themselves, that his work acquires aspects of its critical significance. 3. Elliott Malamet’s opinions approximate in part to Wayne C. Booth’s concept of “the ‘career author’ ” (Company 150; Critical Understanding 270–271), a term used “to cover what is implied by the writing of a sequence of works. . . . Our picture of this abstraction . . . can itself become critically impor tant in two ways. It can distort our critical judgement. . . . On the other hand, acquaintance with a career author can properly enhance our admiration, as we accumulate evidence of expanding power and range” (Company 150). It is within exactly these kinds of distortion and enhanced admiration that my argument is founded. 4. The meeting of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965 was considered an “epoch-making event” (Wicks 628), premised, as it was, on Pope John XXIII’s “notion . . . that the Church needed to begin a dialogue with the modern world” (J.Z. Smith 1114). 5. Murray Roston notes that “among Greene’s many signs of irritation on this point was his statement: ‘I would claim not to be a writer of Catholic novels, but a writer who in four or five books took characters with Catholic ideas for his material’ ” (163; Greene, In Search of a Character [1961] 24). Whatever the nature of this contention, for me, at issue is what is revealed about the interpretative natures of individual readers themselves, as distinct from Greene. I therefore agree with the critical investigations of A.P. Martinich and Yang Xiao, who write, “since all ideal-reader interpretation posits an ideal author, all ideal interpretations posit an ideal author” (103–104). In a similar way to which “there is no such thing . . . as an

218 / Notes to pages 122–135 ‘ideal’ reader” (Markley and DeMaria 147), so Greene himself is a figure of dynamically creative and critical imaginative breadth. 6. Christian process theology may be defined as a body of doctrine whereby “God needs the stimulation provided by temporal actualizations of aesthetic worth in order to know how to supply some overall teleology to the creative process” (Middleton, “Kazantzakis” 286). Darren J. N. Middleton writes that for the commentators John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, a believer’s “assistance is essential to God’s growth. We ‘save’ God” (286; Cobb and Griffin 41–62; Cobb 42–66). 7. In a letter of September 1, 1947, Greene wrote to Catherine Walston, with whom he had a long-term afair: “At the weekend I read a fascinating Book The Medieval Manichee [1947] by Steven Runciman [emphasis added]. I’ve almost come to the conclusion that I’m a good Gnostic instead of a Bad Catholic. It’s much more convenient. Even The Power & the Glory is a Gnostic phrase & not a Catholic one.” Greene’s interests in the spectrum of religious energies conveyed in and through Manichaeism clearly had an impact upon his identity as a religious believer. The doctrine directed his practice as a novelist by way of the invocation of interrelating, innovative, and innovating forms of critical vitality. I am grateful to Richard Greene for drawing my attention to this letter by Greene and to the continuing interest that Runciman’s study prompted in him. Please consult Richard Greene’s biography of Greene for another consideration of Manichaeism, as well as “process theology” (Russian Roulette 408), in which “God cannot force final outcomes in the material order, though he may create possibilities for free beings to accept or reject” (408). Richard Greene is “grateful to Professor Gilles Mongeau, SJ, for his observations on this subject” (549). 8. Founded as his opinions are on his medical practice, Plarr’s allusion to the academic field of semantics, “the study of meaning communicated through language” (Saeed 3), nevertheless points beyond the interpretation of his patients’ physical signs and symptoms. In alluding to those which are abstract in nature, including those premised on a religious faith, the practice of his profession is “an attempt to reflect a speaker’s knowledge” (4), whether himself or a patient, in the broadest possible manner. 9. The former position is exhibited by Gordon Leah, for whom Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory can “in orthodox terms and by any standards . . . be considered a bad priest” (“Bad Priest?” 18). The latter is presented by Michael Torre, for whom Greene “bore witness to the truth of faith, hope, and love” (76). Booth ofers a sensible compromise: “we can infer that the really harmful misreading, the most tragic false identifications of the reader with the vicious centers of consciousness, never are discussed in print” (Rhetoric 389). Greene appears to concur with this opinion when, in “A Visit to Morin” (1957), Morin states, “A man can accept anything to do with God until scholars begin to go into the details and the implications” (224). 10. Roland Barthes’s opinion on the role and function of literary works intersects with Pierre Bourdieu’s “definition of the habitus. . . . It proposes structures that determine individual action, thus allowing the political analysis of language, works of art and cultural institutions without necessary reference to the beliefs or awareness of specific individuals caught up in those larger structures” (Loesberg 1038). This concept, as consisting of “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured

Notes to pages 136–142 / 219 structures” (Bourdieu 53), is, in part, precisely what Greene’s approaches to diferent acts of writing converge with. 11. Middleton has presented an idea which is similar in tone in his reading of The End of the Affair. For him, God is characterized as a figure who “seduces Sarah with rare displays of providence— God insures that Maurice survives a bomb blast” (“Ironic” 9). Middleton therefore asks, “Are we encouraged to feel sympathy for God, for the tactics God must use in the battle to engage our modern, secular minds?” (9). Middleton’s interpretation is itself religious in meaning, premised, as it is, on conceiving Greene to be an author who contributes “to a biblical tradition still in the making” (10). Middleton points to his own par ticu lar conceptions of what God, the secular, and the religious are, which, I contend, are not necessarily in keeping with Greene’s capacity to question them. Middleton’s opinions on the role of the figure of God in the interpretation of Greene’s novels are developed further in his opinion that “Graham Greene’s life and literary art displays a touch of evolutionary religion” (“Touch” 181), which serves to make him “a novel theologian” (192). In the same way as the novel has no single definition, so what is new may be theorized imaginatively in almost every sense. 12. Leόn’s version of religion approximates to some degree with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance. Spanos defines the term “not simply” as meaning “some thing that is unlike some other thing; rather, as Derrida has shown, in spelling it as ‘diferance,’ as deferral: that which wards of all eforts to re-present and comprehend ‘it’ ” (16). In his comments on the “multiple” “meanings” of différance (xvii), Alan Bass writes that the term “often functions as an aporia: it is diference in neither time nor space and makes both possible” (xviii). In keeping with the shifting spectrum of meaning implicit within Derrida’s term, Leόn’s version of religion is impor tant to Greene’s novel by way of its status as a figure of critical possibility. 13. A stick of rock is a long, hard item of confectionary, often sold in UK seaside towns. As described in the The Oxford Companion to Food (2014), “each cylindrical stick consists of a coloured outer layer enclosing a white core with lettering made of coloured candy . . . which runs the whole length of the stick. . . . Wherever the rock is broken the exposed ends will show a legible inscription” (Davidson 686). Graham Holderness means to refer to the words “Brighton Rock.” 14. For example, Robert Murray Davis observes the similar themes between the two novels, particularly that of “pursuit through a marred world. . . . Sometimes the pursuit is geographical, . . . sometimes . . . psychological. . . . In any case, the movement . . . is linear . . .” (“Figures,” Address; “Figures,” Studies 24–25). In my view, any such sense of linearity is nevertheless implicated in Greene’s manifold questioning of the relationship between the religious and the secular. 15. Many critics have observed that Greene’s work is, in part, the articulation of a specific position on theology, including that of Saint Augustine. Jae-Suck Choi observes of Greene that “since he published Brighton Rock [1938], he has been called a Manichaeist, a Jansenist, an Augustanist, a Pelegianist, a Quietist, and an Existentialist” (Greene and Unamuno 1). Choi heeds Greene’s warning to “critics who concentrate on looking for theology in his literary works not to do so, for there is nothing theological in them” (2). Whatever the truth or disingenuousness of this comment, Choi’s approach to Greene’s work is nonetheless itself theological, as betrayed by his observation that “Greene belongs to a well-known tradition of

220 / Notes to pages 14 4–149 passionate Christian contemplatives who have lived in a state of creative sufering” (5). For me, it is precisely Greene’s appropriation of multiple creative and critical paradigms, including those which are to a greater or lesser extent Christian in focus, which constitutes the drama of his fiction. I am interested less in any doctrinal parallels between Greene’s work and a par ticu lar theological perspective, including that of Augustine, than in how Greene engenders innumerable ways of conceiving the relationship between literature and theology themselves. 16. The correspondence was first proposed by Pritchett in the spring of 1946 and collected under the title, Why Do I Write? (1948) (R. Greene, Letters 147). 17. By thought experiment, I mean an aspect of the ways of thinking explored by Thomas Kuhn, who considers forms of “analytical thought experimentation . . . perfectly calculated to expose the old paradigm to existing knowledge in ways . . . unattainable in the laboratory” (88). 18. Robert Murray Davis comments, “I have not read Jone, but he sounds like the author of the textbook Catholic Marriage, required at my Jesuit university, who, defending the use of the rhythm method of birth control, wrote, ‘After all, one is not obliged to have sexual intercourse at a par ticu lar time’ ” (“Figures”). I agree with Davis to the degree that Heribert Jone is indeed stringently dogmatic. 19. Francis Oakley observes that “the meanings attached to epikeia have by no means been constant. . . . The scholastic theologians . . . used it as a synonym for equity” (403). Insofar as Jone adopts the definition of the word proposed by Aquinas, who professes that in some points of moral theology, “it is good to set aside the letter of the law and to follow the dictates of justice and the common good” (qtd. in Oakley 403), it is a specifically scholastic notion of epikeia that Greene disturbs. 20. My sense of the collective and the collectivist in this chapter is carried over from Chapter 2, in which I position the interpretative frameworks of Joshua Phillips, Stanley Fish, and Fredric Jameson against any conception, expression, or notion of the individual that is singular in its critical principles. In this chapter, I develop this form of opposition to include an awareness of what Greene’s fiction might mean for any individuals, groups, or communities whose diferent sensibilities, including the many kinds of authority imbued within them, would normally in some sense conflict in their approaches to him. 21. Commenting on the relationship between “the analogical imagination” and “the dialectical imagination” in Greene, Mark Bosco writes, “Greene’s texts constantly criticize the self-satisfied religious pietism he found in either Catholicism or liberal Protestantism, and excoriates the excessively institutional side of Catholicism” (“Development” 59). Describing “the analogical and dialectical language of religious discourse” (73), David Tracy concludes, “The final power with which both self and world must deal is none other than the harsh, demanding, healing power of the ultimate real ity afecting and afected by all, the Love who is God” (438). This conclusion is consistent with Beverley Clack’s argument that Greene “might consider the way in which the transcendent can be shown to break into the secular world. . . . Alternatively, his work can consider what it means to be religious or good . . .” (317). Inasmuch as the two forms of imagination described by Bosco and Tracy and employed by Clack intersect at the level of Greene’s own version of religion, as presented within and without his novels, it is the case that multiple forms and expressions of the analogical and the dialectical are key to Greene’s work.

Notes to pages 150–155 / 221 22. The manner in which this novel and, furthermore, Greene’s fiction itself are subject to their own critical terms proceeds from Jameson’s approaches to the dialectic: “thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) and reflexive (or conscious of its own thought processes)” (322). I am especially interested in Jameson’s argument that “no transhistorical or absolute thinking or understanding is possible” (322). Stemming from Jameson’s belief “that thought must somehow attempt to approximate its own concrete historical situation” (322), it is within Greene’s very capacity to comment on his own investigative premises with which my own argument is concerned. In par ticu lar, by way of his intersection within the relationship between the individual and society, including the diferent forms and expressions of the collective imbued within this, Greene anticipates Jameson’s suggestion “that as we are ourselves always involved in ideology, our thinking must include the attempt to reckon ourselves as observers into the process” (322). It is precisely this process which marks the point within which the secular and the religious as critical forms are vital to an understanding of Greene. 23. Commenting on how David Lodge “came of age in the last decade of the Tridentine Church” (which gave way to the institutional changes of Vatican II) (Fraser 180), Theodore P. Fraser argues that “as a critic of the novel, Lodge has been from the start primarily interested not in thematic content or meaning but in language” (180). In the sense that I am invoking his critical practices, Lodge’s preoccupations with language are also preoccupations with the relationships between diferent forms of evaluation, including those which are more religious than secular in nature. 24. Lodge writes that “academic criticism is the demonstration of a professional mastery. It cannot help trying to say the last word on its subject; it cannot help giving the impression that it operates on a higher plane of truth than the texts it discusses” (“Literary” 98). It is this notion of criticism as a form of text over and above any other against which Greene positions himself. 25. C. Jan Swearingen comments on how “English studies has been accommodated by new practices of reading. Alongside and sometimes instead of literary works, ‘the text’ and its construction are the objects of reading, with attention to other artifacts of the ‘culture’ of which texts are a result or trace, a partial and distorted representation” (145). I suggest that an understanding of issues of representation is vital to that of Greene’s work at nearly every level, invoking, as he does, a conceptually broad range of interpretative terms. 26. Lodge’s approach to criticism can, within the context of Greene, assume Derrida’s conception of reading and criticism as supplementation, a critical form for which “in what one calls the real life of these existences of ‘flesh and bone’ . . . there has never been anything but writing. . . . That what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida, Grammatology 159). It is by way of Greene’s capacity to be read within and apart from any specific investigative approach that his novels assume their primary critical importance. 27. I am now in a position to define what I mean by deductive and inductive notions of theology. They are models of meaning which are to a greater or lesser extent singularly religious or secular in premise, principle, and conceptual approximation. The former include Jone’s emphasis on “competent judges in the confessional” (vi). The latter consists of Barthes’s advancements toward “a sociology of language” (“Authors” 185).

222 / Notes to pages 161–165

5. Theory and Theology: Graham Greene’s Remapping of Common Ground 1. Anti-intentionalism means in its most basic sense the act of “distinguishing between what words mean and what people mean” (Chatman 78), a position that, “no matter how venerable, has not been successfully refuted” (80). Graham Greene’s novels exhibit this position to the degree that they intersect with the concerns of “an era when skepticism prevails about the very possibility of knowledge, communication, and interpretation” (80). This is because they assume elements of methods which may be considered theoretical, while nevertheless presenting an antithetical set of interpretative terms, which can be framed as theological in their conceptual orientation. 2. In considering the merits of the “possible readings” of a literary text, Frank Kermode and P.D. Juhl debate the possibility “that there must be a right one” (209). A reading based on the principle of the making of multiple interpretations might include a range of factors. As well as the suggestion that Greene “speaks of good and evil as aesthetic categories in the context of fiction” (Sinclair 131), they include the notion that Greene employs a “method of fable-making” (Ward, “How” 84). Also impor tant is Greene’s contention that “some saintly people” have an “aura” (P. Sherry, “Novels” 258; Allain 156), and the sense that Greene “force[s] people to reappraise their Christian beliefs and to imagine just how they would react if their beliefs placed their lives at risk” (Maher, “A ‘Price’ ” 26). These critical principles stem from “our ability to reflect and to know the truth of things” and the suggestion that “ human beings cannot not attempt to create meaning” (Jasper and Allen 162; Detweiler 36). In this way, Greene both supports and rejects “the Biblical truth that our eternal salvation is God’s doing, not ours” (Rossow 29). As “living on the borders is dangerous and perplexing, beyond the comforts of settled truth and being” (Jasper, Foreword vii), so, for Greene, meaning is dynamically capacious. For him, its origins might best be found in the context of the argument that “the interests of religion are without limit” (Knight 3). In this regard, a “theology . . . isolated from the life of the spirit and . . . eventually rendered voiceless” should be challenged in every sense (Jasper, Desert 4). It is imperative to conceive experience by keeping to the approaches by which novels in their own conditions, bases, and circumstances may be most productively read. This presupposition can take its essence from how “the eighteenth-century novel needs to be read on its own terms” (Seager 189). If “there is still critical work to be done to delineate what exactly those terms are” (189), it is also the case that “every such context by which the sign is substantially defined is unique” (Sahlins 287). Similar to how “every individual’s expression of the culture-as-constituted” is specific to the critical advances of an individual (287), so “literature” is vital because it “seeks to tell the truth” (Boyle 125). Concomitantly, the importance of the notion that “reading is not just a question of seeking meanings” means that acts of reading Greene are primarily diferent kinds of imaginative engagement (Jasper, Hermeneutics 8). Interpretations of Greene’s work are ways of investigating concerns that Greene himself explores in diferent ways. As Mark Bosco writes in response to a relatively recent critical study: “the conflict between faith and doubt, hope and despair and love and betrayal inspired his intellectual life and creativity” (Rev. of Graham Greene

Notes to page 165 / 223 165). It is therefore necessary to bring Greene “scholarship back to a study of the works per se” (Leah, Rev. 160). Particularly impor tant herein is the imperative to address in the context of novelistic enquiry “questions that need to be asked and qualifications that have to be made” (Knight and Woodman 1). The necessity to interpret Greene’s writing within its own specific critical imaginative domains means perceiving lines of exploration that range beyond “the certainty of damnation and the infinite mercy of God” (Bosco, Rev. of Catholic Revival 202). Key to this act of perceiving is the realization that “confronting a serious enemy in secularism” meets on equal terms (Crowe, “The Catholic”), interpretatively, with the belief that “Graham Greene was a great novelist of a special kind” (Royal). Also impor tant is the need to consider in what measure Greene’s “novels . . . are full of reluctant Christians” (Eagleton, “Religion”). Productive consideration may be had from observing in Greene’s fiction “a way of experiencing life that is both loyal and disloyal to the official teachings of the Church” (Middleton, “Believing” 22). Extending investigations beyond some of the diferent concerns with “life’s ambiguity” can lead to constructive critical-interpretative conclusions (28), whatever the par ticu lar natures of the “religious doubt” invoked in reading Greene (29). In the same way as “those who read, write, and teach literature have a fundamental responsibility” (Joseph and Ortiz 1), so “our ordinary ways of thinking” need to be dramatically expanded (Gutting, Thinking 196). One such form of expansion can mean looking upon “life . . . as an elegant solution to a certain problem: How to bring into being and preserve very complex forms” (Matson 11). This way of looking might include “the loosening of the bonds of community consequent on religious failure” (196), whether by “exorcizing the ghost of metaphysics” so as to “contribute to the achievement of social justice” (Hector 293), or, as Hegel writes, by considering how “the element of art was said to be in its general nature an unworthy element, as consisting in appearance and deception” (10). The question of what is “properly Greenean” with regard to some kinds of narrative closure may well remain valid (Finn). The promise of “build[ing] interdisciplinarity upon an ethical naturalism” is thereby pursued beyond specifically religious “considerations of sacred place” (P. Anderson 292; E. Anderson 368). Similar to how vital attention has been brought to “the excesses of identity politics” (A. Anderson 69), so, to expand aspects of Steven Moore’s emphases, the novel is much more than “both a work of art and a form of entertainment” (7). Just as it is reasonable to say that “ human beings have produced juridical, political, religious, artistic and philosophical forms” (Lefebvre 68), so “to regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes and fashions has more and more become the tendency of postmodern thought” (Hanson 365). The assertion that “Catholicism is mystery” and that it is necessary (DelRosso, Eicke, and Kothe, Creative 1), within its domains, “to challenge literary, social, political, or religious hierarchies” imposes interpretative demands when reading Greene’s work (DelRosso, Eicke, and Kothe, Critical 5). In par ticu lar, by conceiving Greene’s fiction in ways that expand the kinds of concerns that arise “[with]in the allegorical mode” (Salván, “Being” 108), the critical interests of Greene himself become visible. Greene writes that by “joining” the Roman Catholic Church: “I became a foreigner in my own country – not a bad thing to be for one who wanted to be a novelist, for a foreigner sees his surroundings with fresh eyes. But to be a foreigner entailed, too, certain assumptions for which I cared much less. The chief one was that as a Roman Catholic I must, it was generally

224 / Notes to page 165 assumed, belong politically to the Right” (Foreword xv). Greene’s lack of conformity to political expectations means that the act of interpreting his fiction is similar to those of the interpretation of poetry. “Concerned,” as poetry is, “not just with the meaning of experience, but with the experience of meaning” (Eagleton, How 192), Greene’s work is itself a vital critical tool. One consequence of such a kind of conception is that of considering his novels in ways which progress concerns of either “God . . . [or] the crisis occasioned by his apparent disappearance” (Death viii). Since “the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to dispose of” (ix), attention is most productively placed on concepts of wide investigative range, such as the “Modernity” of Anthony Giddens (Benton 41), “marked by its restless dynamism, and its ruthless undermining of tradition” (41). The spectrum of meaning imbued in the concept meets with the interpretative practice of David Jasper, who writes, “To read anything requires, if you will, an initial act of faith in the text before us” (Hermeneutics 8). Similar to the recent pronouncement that postmodernism “has become institutionalised” (Huber 1), so the very notion of the making of diferent critical interpretations is called into question. Greene can counter diferent criticisms, especially the accusation that he writes “an unbalanced novel” (Richardson 167), by way of elements of his primary significance. This may sometimes include “a parodic filter, distanced by irony” (Rawson xi). The suspicion of George Eliot concerning “that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” therefore requires continuous attention (141). Moreover, the belief that “all human words have a performative dimension” is presented in a way that renders visible its own limitations as a critical or creative investigative factor (Milbank, Order 2). The irony invoked in the reading of Greene calls into question the solidity of certain assumptions, and narratives. They may even include parts of those composed during “the cultural efects of the Reformation” (Ackroyd 469). Of enduring value is the suggestion that “the memory of history” continues to be “erased in order to take the next leap forward” (469). Terry Eagleton’s belief that “there are no guarantees that . . . a transfigured future will ever be born” (Reason 169) meets on equal terms with an assertion by Tony Judt: “Phi losophers, it was famously observed, have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (237). It is not the case that “Greene’s fictional world” is “nebulous” and of “implicit tenuousness” (Nagpal 1). Greene pursues neither a “quest for personal knowledge” (Wittman 44), nor a “premise [that] can be stated as a question: Can an individual vanish from the face of the world?” (Salván, “Enquiry” 303). Greene is capable of writing “a Lacanian text par excellence” (Restuccia 369). Moreover, sometimes in the context of the course of his work “fact . . . [is] just as compelling as fiction” (Ruane 452). Aspects of Greene’s fiction can of course “remain[s] uncoerced and unverifiable, outside the text” (Steigman 22), just as he does not in The End of the Affair or indeed typically write about “a romantic hero” (Mattson and LaGrand 275). Similar to how it is unfair to conclude that Greene “used his writing in a therapeutic way” (Schwerdt 173), so his capacity to sustain his own interpretative methods needs addressing. Reading practices that explore “central questions” (Garfitt 230), such as “whether Catholic literature can survive as theology moves on” (230), may receive sustained merit. In par ticu lar, Greene, who “affirmed no consistent ideology as a writer” (Herlinger 66), and whose language could be “cool, elegant, [and] objective—if

Notes to pages 166–173 / 225 slightly icy” (67), can play a central role in the critical lives of diferent groups and individuals themselves. They may, in a sense, feel empowered to give interpretative sense and shape to both Greene’s work, and to other critically engaged narrative fictions, such as “Romances . . . not improperly . . . called the polite literature of early ages” (Reeve iii). Through diferent investigative “hauntings” (Ormsby), especially those in the “familiar shade” of “Greene” (Ormsby), the very act of interpretation itself is, in some forms, “as much to be resisted as adored” (Ormsby). An “aesthetics . . . born as a discourse of the body” (Eagleton, Aesthetic 13), when mediated through the interpretative methods by which meaning itself is engendered, ofers discourses of imaginative satisfaction. For this reason, the validity of “[Jon] Hegglund’s contention” regarding modernist writing needs to be observed (Garver 411). For Hegglund, Greene, among others, “explore[s] . . . the tension between a ‘realist’ mode of narration that privileges local knowledge and fragmented particularity and a more ‘abstract, geographical’ mode of representation that aspires towards totalizing universality” (Garver 411). In the same way as “writing is a form of truth-telling” (J. Berman 579), and “storytelling becomes a kind of mapping” (Reynolds 12), so “a parabolic subtext” pervades elements of Greene’s work (Snyder 131): a pervasion that, at times, appears to extend to some forms of criticism, one of which, on Greene, seems “narrow” because of the “endeavour to convert the Christian to seeing literature as a possible avenue for theological reflection” (Bosco, Rev. of Theology after Reading 144). Investigation into “belief and meaninglessness, and what it might mean to believe in meaninglessness” (Hungerford xiii), is to meet with that whereby “all beliefs . . . can serve as premises for action” (Elster 27). Such a meeting of investigations means that “the psychological and social effects of religion” become of significant concern at every level of the analysis of Greene (46). This concern converges with the opinions of David Lodge, for whom Greene’s “interventions in politics, both public and secret, were not driven by any coherent ideological conviction” (Lives 17). Steven Moore’s belief that “only in literature . . . is difficulty considered a fault rather than a virtue” means that the experience of “a special kinship with a writer” is particularly impor tant (Moore 21; Lodge, Lives 105). However significant “the essence” of Monsignor Quixote’s “priestly convictions, duties and commitments” (Leah, “Last Year’s” 977), constant attention is to be paid to an assertion by Michael Schmidt. He writes in relation to The Power and the Glory that: “Pity is not love, but it is on the way to a kind of love” (930–931; emphasis added). Love—an apt last word to describe the course of an extended encounter with (as distinct from an “experience of reception” concerning [Hand and Purssell 138]) the work of Graham Greene. 3. Greene alludes to the following lines: “But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” (ll. 65–67). 4. Pity derives from the Latin pietās, which means “piety” (OED). Its meaning was extended in postclassical Latin to mean “compassion, pity,” and this appears in Old French as pitié and pieté. It is within the context of Scobie’s and, moreover, Greene’s approaches to pity as both religious in its interpretative application, and notably secularist in its further critical implications, that I am myself concerned with pity as an investigative concept in this chapter. 5. Harold Bloom is both an obvious and unlikely candidate for conceiving the imaginative dimensions of Greene’s fiction because while commenting that Greene is

226 / Notes to pages 174–17 7 “honored as an eminent contemporary novelist” (Novels 372), he is also noted as “an apocalyptically undiscriminating and mood-driven reader of the contemporary critical scene” (Peltason 1011). I suggest that if his sense of Greene’s accomplishments as an author are “not yet clear” (Bloom, Novels 372), it is also the case that Bloom’s criticism, within its own sense of influence and being influenced, is continually relevant to an interpretation of multiple aspects of Greene. 6. In his interview with Marie-Françoise Allain, Greene alludes to his literary influences. They include Marjorie Bowen, H. Rider Haggard, and Stanley Weyman (61–62). Marjorie Bowen is given par ticu lar credit as an author who, in The Viper of Milan (1904), led Greene to find himself “trapped in literature. Her novel had supplied me with my pattern in the carpet—which religion was to explain for me later” (62). He states that he mentioned the authors in his correspondence with Elizabeth Bowen and V.S. Pritchett in 1948, collected under the title, Why Do I Write? (1948). He also states that he mentioned the influences only as a way of “being provocative” (Allain 62). The authors are not mentioned in the letters, but do feature in his discussion of his childhood reading in his first memoir, A Sort of Life (1971) (40), and in his essay “The Lost Childhood” (1947) (13, 16–17). It seems that Greene’s capacity to be provocative never really left him. 7. Perhaps the perspectives on “theory” presented within the opinions of William Spanos, Maria Couto, Ronald C. Walker, and Shirley Hazzard may be interpreted through Cedric Watts’s approaches to “Janiform Novels.” Watts imagines “a Janiform Novel” to be “a two-faced novel: morally it seems to be centrally or importantly paradoxical or self-contradictory” (“Novels” 40). While “Janiformity” might be “clearly pernicious as a critical tool: irredeemably schematic” (49), the concept may nevertheless act to frame elements of the largely schematic readings to which Greene’s work has been subject. Watts has expanded on his opinions in relation to The Power and the Glory. He argues that “this reputedly Roman Catholic novel may appeal to the sceptic as much, or almost as much, as to the Christian” (“Janiform Greene” 97). Watts concludes, “we, the faithful and faithless alike, can experience that easy paradox as a mundane but sustaining miracle” (112). These comments by Watts are valuable so long as they are used as a way of exploring how Greene’s novel acts as its own form of critical reflection. As Dorothea Barrett argues, “it is impor tant not to detach” Greene’s “Catholic ideas from their contexts” (429). Of importance is the imperative not to impose onto Greene’s fiction patterns of meaning that are in themselves to a greater or less extent uninvited by its critical terms. Pico Iyer has defined aspects of some of the kinds of meaning that Greene’s work can invite into critical discussion, writing in his memoir, “Greene . . . appeals to some of us . . . in part because he is so acutely sensitive to all the ways we can fail to understand one another” (The Man 39). Commenting on Greene’s short stories, Iyer also writes, “Insofar as Greene was drawn to the shabby or the secret . . . it was because he was always unable to turn away from the human, or to give up on the prospects of even the most moth-eaten” (Introduction x). Greene’s capacity to invoke in his work almost any aspect of human character is supported by James Naughtie, for whom “Greene’s game was danger. . . . His last words, in hospital in Switzerland in April 1991 . . . were, ‘Why must it take so long to come?’ ” (19, 23). The tendency by Greene to both penetrate and withdraw from diferent kinds of critical and creative range is stated by Lara Feigel in her commentary on his war time involvement as an

Notes to page 17 7 / 227 ARP warden: “He observed in his diary that a street accident was horrible and random, but the casualties of war were more disturbing because ‘all this belonged to human nature’ ” (Love-charm 128; Greene, Ways 86). Feigel’s approach to Greene’s conception of the random occurrences of tragedy may be theorized through the work of Andrew Hass, for whom “we imagine we know the structures of knowledge, the systems and disciplines we need to accrue knowledge, even if some knowledge still remains out of our reach” (“Discipline” 19). Hass writes in concluding his argument, “The expert will always, interrogatively and interruptively, be willing to abandon herself, her grasp of knowledge, in an imagined intelligence that understands there is always another way to see things, another beyond, even Beyond” (35). Within the terms of Greene’s own forms of imaginative conception, meaning can never assume common, let alone definitive, kinds of critical agreement. Jean-François Lyotard demonstrates ways in which fiction by Greene can serve to create relationships with diferent groups and individuals, even as he himself withdraws from those very same subjects: “With negation, reflection positions itself at the juncture between two experiences: speaking and seeing” (Discourse 23). If the “problem” of “whether human freedom has some purpose beyond self-direction and self-fulfilment” is valid (Sudlow 72), Slavoj Žižek’s point about the convergence between diferent forms of comprehension is impor tant: “It all begins with Kant, with his idea of the transcendental constitution of reality. . . . Prior to Kant, philosophy was ultimately perceived as a general science of Being as such” (Less 9). The suggestion that a critical position is both expanded and contracted on the basis of its consistency within a specific philosophical perspective is consistent with Greene’s own theory and practice. As John Auchard comments, “The via negativa is the constant path in Greene’s religious novels—books where God may not exist, but where he is never even slightly dead” (xix). Greene himself said, “with the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness” (xxv). If, as Žižek remarks, in the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition “Kant is the only German Idealist to be taken seriously” (Less 11), it is also not unfair to propose that the “ ‘text,’ under the force of hermeneutics, is exploded open into spaces both cultural and existential” (Hass, “Theoretical Community” 295). But this form of appraisal is perhaps taken too far if its final contention is that “the tension between immanental and transcendental continues to mark the terrain of the interdisciplinarity that is literature and theology” (301). No matter what the nature of “the tension-filled . . . circle” that “readers and interpreters” occupy (303, 302), there is, perhaps, a preferable pattern of reading and interpretation, and this is one shaped by an emphasis on numerous diferent kinds of irony. The interpretative practices found in postmodern communities therefore retain their value. As Stuart Sim states, “a governing aesthetic is no more acceptable . . . than a governing political metanarrative is” (11). Within this presupposition, “the aesthetics of the past” may sometimes assume their most defined and visible shape (11). Critical practitioners should acknowledge then, as a principle, the capacities of their ways of reading to be framed and wholly rejected by way of the very binaries which they position themselves against. In this sense, notions of otherness, whether ontological or epistemological in tone, are valid because of their potential to be interpreted as a mark of singular alterity. On the topic of how “the other always presses upon the Other,” Hass states: “And this is why the theological is never far away from the literary (as metaphor), and why the literary is never far away from the

228 / Notes to page 17 7 theological” (Hass, “Discipline” 32). In keeping with Levinas, “perhaps our best phi losopher of the other” (31), for whom “consciousness presents itself as a sphere of absolute existence” (Levinas, Theory of Intuition 30), I make the following contention: Any act of critical interpretation cannot be undertaken within a monolithic range of interpretative procedures, no matter how valid or laudable a critic’s reasons for adopting them might be. Texts should be read, rather, according to “the critical exigencies of rational discourse, the resolve to think in response to what Being gives . . . movements of responsibility” (Lingis xii). In this sense, in relation to Greene specifically, literature and theology are not subject to reassessments of “their previous hegemonic aspirations” (Walton, Introduction 1). Nor are they dependent on a series of “definitive pointers towards future trends” (“Re-visioning” 17), whatever the possible foolishness of contending with such terms might be and however “obvious” “the interdisciplinarity of theology” might seem (Martinson 67). Still less are literature and theology in either whole or part sense centrally premised on the constitutive notions and ingredients of “that complex, humane and inclusive task of flourishing” (Jasper, “Interdisciplinarity” 16). Rather, for Greene, texts serve to question in every way what can be considered reasonably and sensibly within their diferent terms of critical engagement. Ralph C. Wood makes a similar suggestion to mine, inferring that “the End that is the one and true eternal Beginning called Paradise” need not necessarily rest only with “a people whose lives are sustained by the Grand Drama of God’s work in the world” (100, vii). This is because par ticu lar kinds of “echoes and reflections of the gospel” meet with an “experience” of reading that is designed to “prompt rather than foreclose discussion” (vii). The invocation by David Lyle Jefrey and Gregory Maillet of “an apt injunction of our greatest storyteller and literary critic himself” (327), should, in this sense, not be premised on “a flight away from literary works themselves toward newer theoretical dogmas” (316). Neither should this kind of critical awareness necessarily be founded centrally on Rowan Williams’s beliefs in “the par ticu lar obligations” that “Catholicism . . . entailed for its adherents” (Dostoevsky 5). This opinion may support the comment by Richard Griffiths that “Greene stands as a rock at the centre of the Catholic literature of his time” (177). But the critical positioning of Williams, founded on a largely singular dogmatic premise, does not contribute to an exploration of the critical range of Greene’s work. Any discussion of the specificity and breadth of Greene’s writing should perhaps begin with their convergence in relation to Greene himself. As Mark Bosco and Dermot Gilvary have remarked, “Greene’s Catholicism would give him a unique point of view throughout his literary career and would generate a consistency to his art” (Introduction 4). It is this sense of consistency that, for me, describes how Greene’s fiction invokes diferent forms of imaginative reflection. Similar to the way in which “Christian theology is the set of conversations that leads to the clarification of Christian religious life” (Felderhof 10–11), so, for Barry Forshaw, the version of religion represented in elements of Greene’s work demands careful interpretative negotiation: “the acquisition of faith in his [Greene’s] books is rarely a lifeenhancing, positive experience” (Forshaw 13). The beliefs presented in and through Greene’s work would appear to constitute “a constellation of discourse that [has] gravitated around a single concept—‘culture’ ” (Gibson 1). It is within such a space, characterized by degrees of both celebration and disafection, that, for me, Greene makes his most dramatic impact upon society.

Notes to page 17 7 / 229 Michael G. Brennan proposes that “an awareness of Greene’s eclectic political perspectives from the mid-1920s until the late 1980s is crucial to an informed understanding of his literary productivity” (Political Writer ix). Brennan writes, “Greene’s political and Christian instincts remain inextricably intertwined” (176), such that “politics were unavoidable for Greene” (176). In many respects, this contention is consistent with the insight into Greene’s characters by Eagleton, for whom “most men and women, like Eliot’s hollow men, are too spiritually vacuous even to be damned” (Hope 128). Eagleton continues, “Only those endowed with a distinctive selfhood are capable of recognising how that self is grounded in eternity” (129). Eagleton’s belief in the importance of “an art in the ser vice of the living” (137) can, in some ways, point specifically to Greene’s own religious and secular qualities. John Bowker’s encouragement in a religious discussion to “begin to share and take delight in the imaginations that have made us what we are” (307) is, then, acutely critical in premise: in being shaped by Greene’s “own twentieth century wasteland” (Bosco, “Aesthetic” 89), and “Greene’s construal of faith as troubled commitment” (Middleton, “Endo” 70), Bowker’s imaginative foci may in themselves become center points for investigation. Perhaps one of the central themes of any consideration of Greene is the strength of his authorial voice. This is one that poses a unique challenge to theologies whose critical foundations are themselves not as strong as they need to be. Eagleton has recently remarked on how “an embarrassment about God’s pathetic vulnerability is a staple motif of Graham Greene’s fiction” (Radical 42). Perceiving elements of the strength of a divine figurehead is necessary if any belief, dogma, or investigative inquiry is to be formulated in the first place. Eagleton continues, “If one is to have a deity at all, one should surely opt for the kind who will make one feel agreeably chastised” (42). Anthony Domestico would support the contention that a commitment to an especially authoritative notion of divinity requires strength of character and personality on the parts of both the believer and the deity. These qualities are often best formed and reformed in the unique conditions created by literary endeavors. Domestico writes, “theology tests itself against literature, literature against theology, and the two disciplines are the richer for it” (3). Literature and theology appear to occupy broadly similar areas of enquiry at the level of theory and practice. Likewise, in a sense, their questions are often answered and unanswered within the very same technicalities par ticu lar to the shaping of literary efect and afect. In this regard, Heidi Hartwig, exploring the role of religious conversion in the creation of literary novels, suggests that in looking for conversionist themes in Greene there is evident “a character’s dynamic evolution from one set of beliefs to another” (148). Language is, of course, central to both the acquisition and rejection of beliefs. This is a suggestion that Emily R. Brower might support in her exploration of the efficacy of the technicalities of language itself: “Written language is not only a physical symbol on a page, but a marker of truth in an irrevocable way” (249–250). For me, the defining mark of Greene’s contemporaneity is the extent and power of his imagination as an author of novels of pointedly capacious interpretative challenge. Amy Kind, writing on the philosophy of imagination, could add that the intersections between form, content, and context in a text are also the domains whereby meaning as its own critical concept is incubated. For her, this is intimately connected with all things imaginary, inclusive, perhaps, of a specifically Catholic imaginary. Kind writes that in the “philosophical interest in imagination” there is

230 / Notes to pages 181–190 “one question [that] may be left surprisingly unanswered—or at least insufficiently answered. . . . Namely, the question of what imagination is” (1). That question, when asked in the context of my exploration of Greene, might, for some, pose an impossibly vast series of other questions. Perhaps one that will remain, unless a suitable answer can be found, is how, after reading Greene to a degree of investigative exhaustion, does one productively reread him? 8. The collection has, to date, received no critical comment, except for Shelden’s remark that Greene “was careful to make certain that few people would notice the book except collectors” (94). The poem was composed in the 1940s (Greene, A Quick xi). 9. The typescript, a photocopy owned by the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, has not, to date, received substantive critical comment. Darren J. N. Middleton states that he consulted the manuscript at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in the University of Texas (“Redeeming” 523). But he does not comment on how he used the document, except to remark on parallels between the various edits to Greene’s novel and “Teilhardian Catholic process theology. . . . The world is in the process of evolution, and Christ is completing himself within it” (544). I expand this kind of critical investigation by questioning Greene’s capacity to assume single forms of critical approach. 10. I have cited the page numbers of the published text rather than those of the typescript. 11. This kind of critique is explored, in part, by Kermode and Juhl’s exchanges on the extent to which a literary “work were to yield several correct interpretations” (209). 12. If, as Bloom suggests, any inquiry into “the true object of Don Quixote’s quest” is “unanswerable” (Introduction, Don Quixote xxi), it is also the case that for Miguel de Cervantes and, by implication, Greene, the protagonist is an enigma. As Cervantes’s narrator concludes, “people . . . are already stumbling over the history of my true Don Quixote” (940). Furthermore, as concluded by Miguel de Unamuno in his commentary, which Greene states he “enjoyed reading . . . more than Don Quixote itself” (Cornwell 127), “Every madman is driven mad by his sanity” (Unamuno 356). In this sense, Valerie Sedlak’s presupposition that, by “paralleling” Cervantes’s text, “Greene verified La Mancha as the seat of his comic vision” (577), points to Bosco’s conception of a “world . . . still tinged with ‘Greene,’ ” a hue that, he suggests, “is very much part of the volatile and difficult struggles we face today” (Introduction xxii). It is within his capacities as an author who may question how and why his novels engender precisely this kind of response that Greene both adopts and subverts the conceptual framework of Cervantes’s own text. This includes the extent to which Greene writes texts that are fictional and, more especially, novelistic in genre. 13. Insofar as my focus is on the novel rather than fiction, the ways in which romance and the novel relate are in themselves key to aspects of my argument. Defining the two genres, Geofrey Day writes that “ ‘novels’ tend to reflect those areas of life with which the reader is conversant; ‘romances’ engage in wilder flights and fancy” (6). Premised as my argument is on diferent kinds and expressions of the former, Greene’s novels intersect with the methodological premises of the genres’ distinctions, enabling as they do, “readers and critics both of the eighteenth century and of the twentieth to generate informed critical opinions” (6). In this sense, Greene’s novels are imbued with multiple critical approaches to any element of their very status as novels.

Notes to page 196 / 231

Conclusion: Where Now? 1. In the second edition of his study, John Milbank replaces “absolute Christian” with “Catholic” (442). The former term nevertheless conveys the meaning I intend. This is because while Milbank argues that “a Catholic Christian account of reality might be entertained as the most finally persuasive one” (xi), it is the case that in “point[ing] beyond both liberalism and positivism in every sense . . . the sounding shapes of shared celestial glory” correspond to Graham Greene’s appropriation of Newman (xxxi). My opinions on Greene and Newman are in keeping with Terry Eagleton’s “explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century . . . ‘the failure of religion’ ” (Literary 22). Eagleton writes, “Liberalism, Romanticism, protestantism, economic individualism: all these are the perverted dogmas of those expelled from the happy garden of the organic society, with nothing to fall back on but their own paltry individual resources” (39). I suggest that those resources, for Greene, are less dogmatic forms of intention and critical conception than the very means within which opposing approaches to a literary text, of any concern or agenda, may intersect.

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Index

abortion, 9 Ackroyd, Peter, 38–39, 224 Adamson, Judith, 84, 94, 154 agnosticism, 2 Ali, Monica, 96 Allain, Marie-Françoise, 4, 5, 133, 205, 222, 226 anti-intentionalism, 112, 222 anxiety, 31, 40, 53–54, 68, 79, 125, 137, 159 Aquinas, Thomas, 18, 87, 117, 208, 220 Asad, Talal, 8 atheism, 2, 30, 54, 95 Auerbach, Erich, 39 Augustine, Saint, 28, 208, 220 Baker, Robert J., 60–61 Bakhtin, M. M., 7–8, 75, 133, 138, 149 Baldridge, Cates, 84, 92 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 5, 81, 86–87, 90, 91–92, 98, 213 Barth, Karl, 191 Barthes, Roland, 2, 29, 112–113, 135–136, 153, 154, 157, 160, 218, 221 Bataille, George, 215 Baudelaire, Charles, 33 beauty, 86–88, 213 belief, 1, 110; in A Burnt-Out Case, 12–13; definition of, 4; and doubt, 52, 179; emotional, 110 Bell, Catherine, 157 Bell, Clive, 215 Bergonzi, Bernard, 6, 15, 43–44, 55, 61–62, 73, 84,123–124, 187

Berlin, Isaiah, 107 Berman, Marshall, 32–33 Bible, 93; verses in, 9, 33, 168, 210, 212 biographies of Graham Greene, 205–206. See also Durán, Leopoldo; Greene, Richard; Shelden, Michael; and Sherry, Norman “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (Browning), 3, 38, 78 Blanchot, Maurice, 215 Bloom, Harold, 173, 217, 225–226, 230 Booth, Wayne C., 50, 217, 218 Borges, Jorge Luis, 120, 217 Bosco, Mark, SJ, 6, 8, 15, 52, 53, 60, 61, 62, 81–82, 83, 104, 120–121, 123, 131–133, 139, 141, 149–150, 187, 208, 209, 211–212, 220, 222–223, 225, 228, 229, 230 Bourdieu, Pierre, 218–219 Bowen, Marjorie, 226 Bowker, John, 229 Boyd, William, 169 Boyle, Nicholas, 222 Bradshaw, Peter, 211, Brennan, Michael G., 6–7, 43, 58, 60, 121, 126–127, 188, 197, 229 Brighton Rock (Jofé), 211 Browning, Robert, 3, 38, 78 Butcher, Tim, 205, 209 cataphatic, 213 catechism, 128, 138, 210 Catholic, the, 109, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 195; notions of, 90, 102

262 / index Catholic imaginary, 229 Catholic novel, 5, 60, 80, 159, 187, 193; definition of, 50, 188, 191, 195, 211–212 Catholicism, 83,133; definition of, 8; Greene’s, 2, 6, 29; and literature, 184; and Protestantism, 149; truth claims of, 27. See also Second Vatican Council Cervantes, Miguel de, 189, 230 Chesterton, G. K., 15–16 Choi, Jae-Suck, 59, 193, 219–220 Christ, 35, 46–47, 54, 92, 104, 136, 146, 147. See also Jesus Christianity, 8, 37, 98, 216; branches of, 149; versions of, 127 closure, 52, 214, 223 Coetzee, J. M., 29, 43 Cohn, Dorrit, 29 common reader, 21, 207 The Communist Manifesto (Marx), 33 consciousness, 29, 52, 218, 228 context, definition of, 53 contextual, the, 75, 124, 127, 163, 182, 183 contraception, 9 conversion, 89, 229 Cottingham, John, 51, 115–116, 192, 198–199 Couto, Maria, 177, 226 critical, the, 75, 179, 193–194 Crowe, Marian, 80–81, 98, 223 Cunningham, Valentine, 54 Darwin, Charles, 28 Davis, Robert Murray, 110, 148, 169, 197–198, 219, 220 Day, Geofrey, 230 “The Death of the Author” (Barthes), 29, 112–113, 160 deconstruction, 1, 9, 34, 113, 177 Derrida, Jacques, 30–31, 34, 98, 219, 221 despair, 99, 119, 126, 141 detective story, 45–46, 210–211 Dickinson, Colby, 199 Diederich, Bernard, 205 Diemert, Brian, 45 différance, 219 Dobozy, Tamas, 71, 145–146 doctrine, 142, 166, 197, 210 dogma, 4, 39, 170 Dollimore, Jonathan, 177, 178 Domestico, Anthony, 229 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 188, 230 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 210 doubt, 3–4, 52, 116, 117, 141, 146–147, 192 Dufell, Peter, 209 Durán, Leopoldo, 137–138, 139

Eagleton, Terry, 164–165, 182, 223, 224, 225, 229, 231 Edwards, Michael, 107, 216 Eliot, George, 224 Eliot, T. S., 16, 32, 33, 52 Elster, Jon, 225 empirical, the, 206 empiricism, 17, 206 epikeia, 149, 220 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, 55 evil, 164–167; good and, 16, 33, 54, 57, 163 evolution, 125, 126, 137, 230 experience, 17, 80, 105, 132, 170, 206. See also limit-experience faith, 3, 4, 140, 205, 215 Faulks, Sebastian, 209 Feigel, Lara, 209, 226–227 Ferretter, Luke, 18, 28, 30, 31, 34, 37, 107, 208 Fiddes, Paul, 98, 196–197 figurative, the, 176, 179, 180, 181, 182, 193 “The Figure in the Carpet” (James), 5 Fish, Stanley, 210, 220 form, literary, 3, 7, 80, 212; and content, 1, 29, 83, 98, 106, 141. See also genre Forster, E. M., 26, 100–101 Foucault, Michel, 215 Franke, William, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 208 Fry, Roger, 215 Gardner, Helen, 25 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 26 genre, 29, 80, 124, 188, 212. See also form, literary Giddens, Anthony, 224 Giles, Paul, 98 Girardi, Giulio, 34 God, 208, 219; and Roland Barthes, 113; and Fyodor Dostoevsky, 210; and faith, 4; figure of, 59, 72, 82, 136, 171, 172, 186, 196; and grace, 43; Greene and disbelief, 54; and process theology, 218; and Leόn Rivas, 136–137; and the whisky priest, 114; and Slavoj Žižek, 46 Godhead, 87, 92, 215 Gordon, Haim, 164 Gospel, 24, 87, 133, 134, 150, 215, 228 Gotia, Andrei, 81–82 grace, 43, 61, 65, 68, 87, 88, 98, 106, 140, 168 Greeley, Andrew, 178 Greene, Graham (letters): Catherine Walston, 218; “Catholic Debate,” 35; Denis Cannan, 114–115; Father André

index / 263 Blanchet, 53, 125; “Kidnapped,” 129; Professor Roger Sharrock, 177 Greene, Graham (works): “After Strange Gods,” 36; “All the Facts of Fiction,” 17–18, 23; Babbling April, 101, 215; Brighton Rock, 11, 38, 39, 40, 41–59, 62, 68, 76, 78, 161, 163–167, 172, 193, 210, 211, 219; British Dramatists, 24, 25–26, 28, 29–30, 31, 34; A Burnt-Out Case, 12, 125–126; The Comedians, 12, 13; “Creative Reading,” 19–20, 21, 23; The End of the Affair, 12, 80, 82, 95–107, 108–109, 110, 111–112, 113, 114, 117, 161, 173, 174–175, 176, 179–182, 193, 215–216, 219, 224; “Fears,” 101–102; “Foreword: The Social Challenge of the Gospel,” 223–224; “François Mauriac,” 6, 26, 38, 46; “From the Mantelpiece,” 26–27; “G. K. Chesterton. 1,” 15–16; “The Grass,” 181–182; The Heart of the Matter, 6, 11, 38, 39–40, 41, 59–73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 161, 167–172, 193, 212; The Honorary Consul, 12, 119, 120, 121, 122–124, 127–139, 154–155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 183, 184–187, 189, 190; “Ideas in the Cinema,” 32; “The Improbable Tale of the Archbishop of Canterbridge,” 197; In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, 217; Introduction. Brighton Rock, 129, 163–164; Introduction. The End of the Affair, 95–96; Journey Without Maps, 70, 89–90, 94, 209; “Last Journey,” 22–23, 207; The Lawless Roads, 94; “The Lesson of the Master,” 20–21, 23; “The Lost Childhood,” 174, 226; “Malaya, the Forgotten War,” 141; “Men and Messages,” 21–22, 23; Monsignor Quixote, 12, 119, 120, 122, 139–152, 155–157, 158, 159, 161, 183, 188–190, 192, 225; “Our Lady and Her Assumption: ‘The Only Figure of Perfect Human Love,’ ” 2; Our Man in Havana, 205; The Power and the Glory, 12, 80, 83–94, 98, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 116, 117, 124, 141, 161, 174–176, 182, 193, 218, 225, 226; A Quick Look Behind: Footnotes to an Autobiography, 181, 230; “The Seed Cake and the Love Lady,” 200; “Some Notes on Somerset Maugham,” 154; A Sort of Life, 54, 116, 174, 226; The Third Man, 32, 208; “The Trial of Pan,” 197; “Typescript of The Honorary Consul,” 185–187; “The Virtue of Disloyalty,” 35–36; “A Visit to Morin,” 218; Ways of Escape, 33, 45, 67, 73, 81, 95, 96, 129, 159, 163–164, 208, 227; Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham

Greene, and V. S. Pritchett, 36, 144–145, 158, 195, 196, 209, 220, 226; Why the Epigraph?, 38, 77, 212; Yours Etc. Letters to the Press 1945–1989, 130, 206 Greene, Richard, 3, 24, 114, 115, 205–206, 213–214, 215, 218, 220 Greeneland, 123, 129, 131 Griffiths, Richard, 228 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 123 Gutting, Gary, 215, 223 habitus, 218–219 Hamilton, Alex, 94 Hanson, Ellis, 223 Hardy, Thomas, 15, 123 Harris, Alexandra, 24, 26, 207 Hartshorne, Charles, 124, 125, 126 Hass, Andrew W., 227–228 Hawtree, Christopher, 130, 206 Hazzard, Shirley, 177, 226 Heaven, 101, 102, 108, 110–111, 118, 225 Hector, Kevin W., 223 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 223 Heidegger, Martin, 178 Hell, 46, 48, 49, 165, 166 hermeneutics, 2, 3, 87 Higdon, David Leon, 67 Hitchens, Christopher, 51 Hoggart, Richard, 55 Holderness, Graham, 140–141, 219 Holy Spirit, 47, 210, 212 homosexuality, 9 Hooker, Richard, 4 Hoskins, Robert, 122, 174–175, 192 Hügel, Baron Friedrich von, 95 Hull, Chris, 205 humanism, 9, 10, 106, 107, 133, 147 Hungerford, Amy, 225 identity, 5, 65, 66, 112, 135, 178; Greene’s, 6, 140, 152, 159, 218 ideology, 83–84, 94, 135, 141, 199, 221, 224 imagination, 48, 143, 173, 229–230; analogical, 220; authorial, 6; Catholic, 3, 80, 132, 141; dialectical, 220; Greene’s, 131, 143, 174, 205, 209, 212; theological, 3, 98, 208 imaginative, the, 173, 174, 176, 193 impulse, 7, 50, 115, 155, 178, 191, 192, 214; religious, 9, 50–51, 116, 191–192, 198–199 “Inside the Whale” (Orwell), 4–5 instruction, 2, 54 Iyer, Pico, 226

264 / index Jackson, Geofrey, 129–130 James, Henry, 5, 20–21, 24, 30, 46, 145 Jameson, Fredric, 210, 220, 221 Jasper, David, 113, 211, 213, 222, 224, 228 Jay, Martin, 17 Jesus, 91, 133, 210. See also Christ Jofé, Rowan, 211 Johnson, Samuel, 207 Johnstone, Richard, 110 Jone, Rev. Heribert, 148–149, 152, 160, 220, 221 Judt, Tony, 224 Juhl, P. D., 112, 161, 210, 222, 230 justice, 34, 89, 114, 140, 163, 199, 220, 223 Kant, Immanuel, 227 Kaufmann, Michael W., 8, 206–207 Kearney, Richard, 116 kenosis, 46, 210 Ker, Ian, 46 Kermode, Frank, 52, 207, 210, 222, 230 King, Ursula, 52 Knight, Mark, 222, 223 Kuhn, Thomas S., 220 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, trial, 213 Lakeland, Paul, 214 Land, Stephen K., 42 language, 38–39, 53, 55, 106, 107, 112, 131, 133, 153, 191, 221, 229 Leah, Gordon, 168, 218, 223, 225 Lefebvre, Henri, 223 “The Lesson of the Master” (James), 20 Levinas, Emmanuel, 228 Lewis, Jeremy, 24 limit-experience, 96, 97, 215 literary, the, 173, 174, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 227–228 literary theory, 7, 198 Lodge, David, 152, 154, 173, 174, 211–212, 221, 225 love, 52, 91, 97, 103, 127, 141, 158, 181, 225; God as, 111, 178, 220 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 52 Luther, Martin, 92, 215 Lyotard, Jean-François, 216, 227 machismo, 127, 131, 134 magic, 95–96, 135 Maini, Irma, 65–66 Malamet, Elliott, 1, 7, 40, 41, 58–59, 83, 84, 98, 120, 121, 217 Manichaeism, 43, 126–127, 218 Maritain, Jacques, 27, 98

Marx, Karl, 30, 33, 139, 143, 147 master narrative, 109, 216. See also metanarrative Mauriac, François, 209, 211. See also “François Mauriac” (Greene) McBrien, Richard P., 37, 149 McClymond, Kathryn, 156–157 McFague, Sallie, 190, 191 McKeon, Michael, 74–75, 76 metanarrative, 216, 227. See also master narrative MI6, 31 Middleton, Darren J. N., 105, 122–123, 215–216, 218, 219, 223, 229, 230 Milbank, John, 195, 196, 224, 231 miracle, 95, 97, 114, 197, 226 modernism, 15, 26, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 215 Moore, Steven, 223, 225 morality, 27, 67, 152, 158 Morgan, Charles, 199 Mudford, Peter, 55 Murdoch, Iris, 82 Murphy, Michael P., 2–3, 80, 81, 98, 113 mystery, 88, 98, 141, 151, 163–164, 216, 223 Naipaul, V. S., 206 Naughtie, James, 226 Newman, John Henry, 195, 196–197, 231 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 208, 215 Oakeshott, Michael, 17 Omega Point, 51, 53, 124 orthopraxis, 123 Orwell, George, 4–5, 68 Otto, Rudolf, 207 People’s Prison (Jackson), 129–130 The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard de Chardin), 53 Phillips, Joshua, 64–65, 209, 220 pity, 12, 59, 73, 168–172, 186, 212, 225 poetry, 62, 135, 157, 173, 224 Pope Benedict XVI, 208 Pope Francis, 53, 208 Pope John XXIII, 155, 217 Pope John Paul II, 208 Pope Paul VI, 34 postmodernism, 224 poststructuralism, 1, 177 prayer, 1, 51, 58, 77, 96, 99–100, 147, 180, 216 Prodigal Son, 142, 143 Protestantism, 30, 91, 92, 93, 94, 149, 220, 231 psychoanalysis, 28, 70, 208, 213–214

index / 265 Rahner, Karl, 213 realism, 16–17, 18, 74, 99, 206, 208 Reeve, Clara, 225 Reformation, 6, 30, 224 Reichardt, Mary R., 184 religion, 8, 16, 25, 37, 116, 205 representational, the, 179, 180 revelation, 33, 178 Ricoeur, Paul, 87 right and wrong, 33, 45, 54, 55, 57 Ripatrazone, Nick, 214 The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 7, 29, 206, 208 ritual, 24, 25, 26, 28, 156, 157, 207 Robert, Marthe, 207 Roman Catholic Church, 8, 19, 35, 39, 120, 156, 207 romance, 30, 75, 76, 119, 120, 225, 230 romanticism, 231 Roston, Murray, 121, 122, 141, 217 Royal, Robert, 223 Ruane, Kevin, 224 Runciman, Steven, 127, 218 Russian roulette, 214 Sahlins, Marshall, 222 Salván, Paula Martín, 11, 223, 224 salvation, 42, 58, 80–81, 124, 140, 211, 212, 214, 215, 222 Schad, John, 197 Schmidt, Michael, 225 Schwartz, Adam, 35 Searle, John R., 162 Second Vatican Council, 6, 34, 36, 120, 122, 131–132, 133, 136, 138, 152, 155, 159–160, 187, 217, 221 A Secular Age (Taylor), 9 secularism, 4, 35, 51, 94, 98, 115, 141, 179, 184, 222 semantics, 128, 131, 218 Sharma, S. K., 84 Sharrock, Roger, 16, 41, 177 Shelden, Michael, 215, 230 Sherry, Norman, 31, 205, 215 Sherry, Patrick, 193, 222 sin, 43, 88, 148, 166, 168, 208, 213 Sinyard, Neil, 5–6, 100, 129, 207 Smith, James K. A., 10, 216 Sollors, Werner, 213 Spanos, William, 176, 178–179, 219, 226 spirituality, 9, 51, 88, 113–114, 116, 132, 184 St. John-Stevas, Norman, 213 suicide, 59, 70, 72, 73, 130, 169, 171

Tate, Andrew, 216 Taylor, Charles, 9, 10 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 51, 52, 53, 122, 124, 125–126 thematics, 213 theological aesthetics, 5, 15, 33–34, 81, 83, 86, 90, 91, 92, 98, 104, 179, 198 theology, 16, 107, 191, 193, 194, 198, 229; inductive and deductive, 155, 221; process, 5, 122, 218, 230 theory, see poststructuralism Thomas, Brian, 119–120 Thomson, Brian Lindsay, 6, 144, 151–152 Tillich, Paul, 132–133 Timmermann, Brigitte, 208 Tracy, David, 220 Trinity, 86–87, 128, 139, 142–143, 147–148, 181, 215 truth, 100, 127, 222 Unamuno, Miguel de, 230 uninstructed Catholic (Greene), 2, 19, 161, 198 Vann, Gerald, 168, 169, 170 Vatican, 8 Virgin Mary, the, 2 Waldmeir, John C., 104, 133 Walton, Heather, 228 Ward, Graham, 191, 223 “The Waste Land” (T. S. Eliot), 32 Watt, Ian, 7, 29, 31, 74, 75, 76, 206, 208 Watts, Cedric, 43, 214, 226 Waugh, Evelyn, 169 whisky priest, 81, 84, 115, 120, 124, 194, 213, 214, 218 Whitehead, Alfred North, 124–126 Whitehouse, J. C., 36, 82, Wilde, Oscar, 152 Williams, Rowan, 228 Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley, 112 Wood, James, 68–69 Wood, Ralph C., 228 Woodman, Thomas, 29, 31, 38, 39, 174, 223 Woolf, Virginia, 24, 26, 27 Wordsworth, William, 166, 225 Wright, T. R., 106–108 Zabel, Morton Dauwen, 4–5 Zimbardo, Philip, 164 Ziolkowski, Eric, 214 Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 46, 47, 165, 183–184, 227

Martyn Sampson earned his Ph.D. from the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he taught English. He served as Director of the 2018 and 2019 Graham Greene International Festivals.

Studies in the Catholic Imagination: The Flannery O’Connor Trust Series Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor Martyn Sampson, Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel