TOWARDS A
QUEST FOR SECULAR IDENTITY:
GRAHAM GREENE
Prof. K. Venkata Reddy
The one English writer who has spanned the decades from the 1920’s to the present with a series of works–novels, short stories, travelogues, poems, plays, screenplays and essays that never seem to lose their power or their extraordinary unageing topicality is Graham Greene, an aggressively left - winger, who passed away on 3rd April, 1991. Essentially, he was concerned with what, in Catholic terms, is the idea of the mercy of God. But, we do not need to be Catholics ourselves to respond to his work, for this idea functions, in all that he wrote, as human compassion.
Born on October, 2, 1904, Greene was the son of a former headmaster of a Public School at Berkhamsted, North - West of London. He was educated at this school until he went up to Oxford. In his recent autobiography, A Sort of Life, he describes the depressing effect which school life had on him in late adolescence, and how his parents sent him to a psycho - analyst.
Even at Oxford he seems to have been very much aware of the uselessness and the evil of life. He was converted to Roman Catholicism and this has clearly had a deep influence on his thought and writing. His work is marked by a bleakness of atmosphere and a sense of disillusion. To Greene, “there is an icicle at the heart of the writer.” It was this frigidity that is said to have barred him from receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, endowed for “the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.”
Travel, the dominant fact of Greene’s life, is also the central theme and metaphor of his work. He toured Mexico in 1938 and in 1939 published a reflective travel book, The Lawless Roads: A Mexican Journey based on his experiences. The Power and the Glory, which appeared in 1940, was the fictional transformation of his encounter with Mexico. Similarly, his journeys to Attica yielded two travel books, Journey Without Maps and In search of a Character, as well as two novels The Heart of the Matter and A Burnt-out Case. Travel in Greene, however, is internal as well as external, temporal as well as spatial.
The earliest phase of Greene’s career stems from his first novel, The Man Within (1929) extending to Brighton Rock (1938), the first major novel During this decade, Greene produced, among other writings, five “novels” and two “entertainments”. These share a Cast of characters whose internal chaos is produced and mirrored by their environments- smugglers, strikers and political assassins, “cousins of the morally ambiguous beings.” In all these early stories, Greene’s rhetoric manouevres the reader into a questioning of conventional notions of good and evil and into a sympathetic understanding of the failure and the criminal.
The second period of Greene’s career is marked by the introduction of an explicitly religious dimension into the world created in the novels of the 1930’s. The importance of religion in the novels of 1940’s like The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948) is that it gives the characters a deeper and a more tragic awareness of the human condition. The individuality of Greene’s Catholic characters lies in their divided natures. They are torn between the religious belief and the human demands of existence. The whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, though he has betrayed his priestly office, appears to be redeemed by his pity for human suffering. Similarly Scobie, the hero of The Heart of the Matter is split between divine decree and human compassion.
During the third phase of Greene’s career, there are changes of direction, or at least of emphasis. His fictive universe becomes comic rather than tragic. The End of the Affair (1951), which consists of two accounts of an apparent miracle, one by a believer and another by a non - believer, marks the transition to Greene’s later work which is vastly different. The move from tragedy to comedy is paralleled by a concentration on secular themes. In the “Catholic” novels, the central conflict is between human and divine wills, and tragedy emerges from their irreconcilability. The later novels adopt different criteria for the definition of identity. Greene the theologian, is superseded by Greene, the psychologist, and the quest for identity with God becomes a quest for secular identity.
This explains the intensification of Greene’s use of the picaresque ‘bildungsroman’ form and his increased interest in novels. Fowler in Quiet American (1955) Brown in The Comedians (1966) and Plarr in The Honorary Consul (1973) are rootless, faithless men existing in the familiar strife torn environments - Vietnam, a leper colony and Duvalier’s corrupt Haiti. These characters are committed to no religious faith. They are hollow men, unable to find, or even to seek, something with which to fill the void left by the disappearance of God. They undergo a process by which they are shaken into curiosity and, sometimes, into commitment, often through confrontation with a character-Alden Pyle in TheQuiet American, Messrs Smith and Jones in The Comedians and Aunt Augusta in Travels with my Aunt - who epitomizes all that is good and bad in such commitment.
Though there is no obvious continuity in Greene’s work in the sense of characters moving from one novel to the next, it does have a thematic unity. What Greene wrote of one of his acknowledged masters, Henry James, that “the symmetry of his thought lends the whole body of his work the importance of a system, “is just as applicable to his own work, for it too has a uniformity of vision. The consistency of Greene’s fictive world is partly rooted in the recurrence of certain themes, symbols and settings. The lingering influence of childhood, pity for human suffering, “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”, seediness and failure, loyalty and betrayal and, above all, a quest for secular identity-these are some of the elements which render Graham Greene’s writings so instantly recongnisable that W.H. Auden could confidently coin the term, “grahamgreenish”.