THE
CREATIVE ARTIST’S VISION IN GRAHAM
GREENE’S
NOVELS
V. V. B. RAMA RAO
“The
highest art,” Lascelles Abercrombie wrote in his book
on Hardy, “must have a metaphysic; the final satisfaction of man’s creative
desire is only to be found in aesthetic formation of some credible
correspondence between perceived existence and a conceived absoluteness of
reality.” Graham Greene’s novels have a consistent “metaphysic” and we see in
them a “credible correspondence” between his perception of existence and his
conception of reality. Greene is an artist whose work makes manifest the
aesthetic formation of his metaphysic; he is one of the most skilled and
powerful of creative artists who have a standpoint and a vision. His is an
appalling vision. The existence of evil in this world as a predominant and
driving force fascinates him. His presentation of man’s predicament, though a
little exaggerated, is still a recognizable one. He does justice to his subject
by bringing the full weight of his artistry to bear upon the appalling vision.
Life, for him, is an endless quest for the understanding of certain serious
matters like good and evil, justice and grace. Art is the reflection of life
and we find in Greene’s fiction a preoccupation with eschatological issues.
Graham
Greene has to his credit more than thirty volumes of fiction, essays, stories
and plays. He has travelled extensively and he brings his varied experience,
worldly as well as artistic, to bear upon his fiction. He is a major force in
English fiction, continuing the tradition of the Victorian novelists,
displaying a vigorous individual talent for observation and analysis of the appalling
vision, the human impasse and the “terrible aboriginal calamity” in which
Newman saw the human race implicated. After a long quest, Greene has arrived at
a standpoint. His works reveal an intensely personal vision. In terms of his
vision, evil is a predominant force in life: man is susceptible to temptation and
sin but there is God’s grace. At the same time this is not a complacent
attitude. The struggles and conflicts in Greene’s world are extremely violent.
They are physical, mental and spiritual and into these are brought all the sins
in the calendar. Life is a violent conflict, but it is also a comedy and even a
farce sometimes. Greene’s standpoint is that hope and faith in divine grace.
Evil
in this world as envisaged by Greene is an extremely powerful force. In his
essay on Walter de la Mare Greene wrote: “Every creative writer worth our
consideration, every writer who can be called in the wide eighteenth century
use of the term a poet, is a victim: a man given to an obsession.” In Henry
James’s case the obsession of the artist is betrayal. In Hardy’s
case, it is pity: in Greene’s case, it is pity and evil. But there is an
essential difference between Hardy’s outlook and
Greene’s. Hardy’s characters are impelled by fate
towards their terrible ends, Greene’s by their own choice and commitment to evil.
Evil is the force, as Greene finds it, that drives
existence. He quotes Eliot: “It is true to say that the glory of man is his
capacity for salvation: it is also true to say that his glory is his capacity
for damnation. The worst that can be said of most malefactors, from statesmen
to thieves, is that they are not men enough to be damned.” Greene’s works
consistently reaffirm and illustrate this statement. What is right may not be
good and what is wrong may not be evil. Right and wrong, morality and
immorality are relative terms, whereas good and evil in the theological sense are
unvarying absolutes. With all his preoccupation with evil Greene does not
condemn it; he analyses it. He does not damn his sinners; he sympathizes with
them. Though the vision that he displays is diabolic, it is sufficiently
convincing.
The
major themes in Greene’s fiction are closely related to evil and they recur in
several of his novels. Betrayal, the Judas complex, is one of the most
recurring themes we find in his fiction. To these we may add ‘justice’, ‘pity’,
‘responsibility’, ‘jealousy’ and ‘innocence’. Greene’s obsession with the seedy
and the shabby and his fascination for failure come up in every of his books.
The radical themes in his novels are: betrayal and jealousy in The man
within, The name of action, Basement room and Stamboul
train; justice and “honour among thieves” in A
gun for sale, It’s a battlefield and England made me; childhood and
its terrible impact in Brighton rock and A gun for sale; pursuit
in The confidential agent and The ministry of fear; pity and
responsibility in The power and the glory and The heart of the matter;
love and hate in The end of the
affair; fear and suspicion
in The third man and Our man in Havana; the
unintelligibility, absurdity and illogicality of existence in a Burnt-out
case, The comedians and Travels with my aunt. Then there is his idea of resurrection
and reanimation which comes out in some
of his novels and plays. Greene’s principles are torn between ambivalent
attitudes like love and hate
and sympathy and jealousy.
Greene’s
novels introduce us to a world which to a large extent resembles our own. But
his vision apprehends reality in such a way as to reveal a new perception. But in any artist, as only some aspects
of experience shape his imagination and guide his creativity, his achievement is necessarily limited to the
presentation of his own perception. That is
to say, the artist’s imagination limits the range of his perception.
David Cecil pointed out in his
lectures on Hardy: “Hardy said that the highest art was that which, though
changing the appearance of what it describes, only does so in order the better
to bring out its essential quality.” Greene’s view of life has the limitations
imposed upon him by his range but his view of life is consistent and it has a
sharp quality of reality.
Greene’s
vision has two facets, each distinct and clear-cut. The world is seen as a
subtle combination of appearance and reality. The creative artist sees flashes
of illusion and flashes of reality. The vision of appearance is sordid and
seedy, squalid and trivial. Human existence in the vision of reality is tragic.
In the vision of appearance it is comic, almost farcical. Men in this world can
be divided into two sharply opposite types; those who are committed to reality
and those who are afraid of it. Characters like Scobie,
the whiskey priest and Dr Magiot are alive to the tragic
reality. Wormold and Aunt Augusta cling to
appearance. Greene in his serious books deals with people who display a sense of
commitment. Those who are afraid of reality and those who are congenitally
deficient and cannot envisage it, are content with the peripheral, the
external, the appearance and the illusion. Such are Greene’s characters in his
lighter fiction. These men and women are mere products of the age in which they
live, their environment and upbringing They are more
worldly than the men and women in his serious novels. Though their attitudes
are different both the types live in the same world of violence and distrust.
Reality for them is something horrifying–hence their attempt to escape and
strive for something which appears to be within their reach.
The
aim of fiction is the creation of a world through the presentation of ideas;
the artist’s task is to present a world that is philosophically adequate. While
the presentation part of it requires skill, the philosophical part requires
sensibility. Greene’s philosophy may not be acceptable as true but it is
adequate. The great artists of the past who remade the world are eminent
writers like Dickens and Hardy, though by no means can it be said that their
worlds are entirely similar. Dickens’s, Hardy’s and
Greene’s–each is a world distorted in some measure by
the standpoint of the individual artist. Greene’s work is nearer to the English
novels of Dickens and Hardy than to those of the innovators like Joyce and Woolf, since he is preoccupied with the presentation of,
and comment on, what is going on around him. Greene is accused of having an eye
for the unsavoury and the brutal which of itself, it
is further alleged, does not betoken any greatness. But his greatness lies in
what he does with it. He succeeds in exercising the capacity of the reader’s
pity for the condemned and communicates his conviction that God’s mercy is
appallingly strange. With his thesis that none is sinner enough to be condemned
to Hell, he stings his readers into a new awareness of puzzlement and in the
end throws at them his conclusion that existence is absurd and that nothing in
life really matters.
Greene
seems to believe that there is no fundamental dissonance between man and his
environment which Lord David Cecil saw in Hardy’s
work. He has successfully plodded through his death-wish to a point where one
acquires a jest for life. He has displayed more than fellow feeling for other
men: he has evoked our sympathy and made us appreciate the normal satisfactions
of human life. He is endowed with a highly intense creative imagination and his
work never fails to convince us as good fiction. He tells us, having shown sin
in all its rawness, that the greatest things are understanding, sympathy and
charity.
Greene’s
world is inhabited by lewd people, demoniacs, criminals, sexual monsters,
satyrs, lechers, drunkards, fornicators, liars and the like. It stinks with a
musty smell; there are cockroaches and spiders everywhere. His works are
chronicles of sin and suffering where we hardly come across genuine love or genuine
happiness. Love, for the characters in Greene, is only reckoned in terms of
affairs and an affair, by his definition, must come to an end, more often than
not, leaving a bad taste in the mouth. This attitude has been severely criticised as emanating from Greene’s Jansenist
tendencies. In fact Greene’s portrayal of evil is so vivid that critics have
accused him of Manichaenism. But it should be noted
that his preoccupation with evil is a process of rendering justice to God in an
artistic tradition exemplified in the novels of Dickens, Henry James and
Conrad. In the artistic expression of the creative writer an attitude towards
the world has to be presented and it happens that in Greene’s picture of the
world, sin and evil are more striking than everything else. Though the weakness
of the flesh appears to be his primary focus, Greene is more interested in the
sinner than in the sin itself. His characters
compel our sympathy. Ida Arnold says in Brighton
Rock “It’s like those sticks of
rock; bite it all the way down, you’ll still read
In
Greene’s fiction, the characters whose ideals and aims are not related to the
highest things in life have, comparatively, a much smoother sailing. Ida Arnold
and Aunt Augusta have no cares of the other world, for as Browning says:
Irks
care the cropful bird,
Frets
doubt the maw-crammed beast
An optimistic belief in the mysteries of divine
grace is the distinctive quality of Greene’s writing. The appalling vision of
existence, the horrors of life and the presence of evil have turned Huxley into
a cynic. Greene is also accused of cynicism and expressions like “Hell lay
about them in their infancy” have been cited to prove the point. It has to be
pointed out here that Greene hated complacency and only as a protest against
this that the line from Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode: “Heaven lies about us in
our infancy” has been twisted. The evil that Greene paints with a vividness
that he alone can manage tempts us to draw the unjust conclusion that he is a
pessimist. Man finds himself faced with, insoluble problems; human intellect
cannot grapple with matters like sin and damnation. But the realization that
God is in His Heaven that life itself, however absurd or farcical, is worth
living is an acceptance of the terms of life. With a largeness of heart that is
remarkable Greene exercises our pity and urges us to be charitable to his
sinners without parading moral righteousness.
Though
Greene’s vision of the world is horrifying, he do not
leave us breaking into a cold sweat. He lights a ray of hope in the endless
mercy of the Creator, which however eludes human comprehension. We, hollow men,
are taught by him never to condemn anybody or anything since our conception and
understanding of divine mercy are distressingly limited. Ours is human
understanding and for that very reason, a very deficient one. Given proper
understanding, we tend to pity the worst sinner. Scobie,
the central character in The heart of the matter,
wonders if one would have to pity even the planets, if one knew the facts
and reached what they called the heart of the matter. (Greene’s novels abound
in priests, who have a vocation to understand, to forgive and to absolve.) The
whisky priest in The power and the glory tells
the pious woman in the prison cell in the background they hear the cries of a
copulating pair) that our sins have so much of beauty. The priest in Brighton
Rock tells the bereaved wife that none can understand the appalling
strangeness of God’s mercy. The crippled priest in Greene’s play The living room says that Hell is for the very great and that none is great enough for Hell
except Satan.
As
a novelist, Greene has made manifest to his readers the creative artists’s personal myth and this, very easily, is his outstanding
contribution to the world of fiction. The myth and its background are so
recognizable that one is tempted very to murmur: “Why this is Greeneland nor am out of it.” Greeneland is a distinct and easily recognizable setting against
which the action in the various novels takes place. Wherever the scene is laid
the qualities of the Greene hero are always the same, the qualities of his
world unmistakable. We same the sordidness and squalor.
Human beings are always the same here, the adulterous and fornicating pairs,
the sensitive sinners and the hunted criminals. They are always under the
all-seeing eye of their Creator. They are often pursued by the cruel hounds of
their desires, for in Greene, we come across very frequently schizophrenic
characters. Whatever might be the external manifestations of their deep guilt
and sin, his characters are always the victims of a delicate sensibility as
exemplified in their introspection and self-analysis. With his clinical
detachment while surveying sin, Greene reminds us of the lines of T. S. Eliot:
Men’s
curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The
point of intersection of the timeless
with time, is an occupation of the saint.
Greene has said in several places that our sins
have a grandeur and that the fallen angels were not
the ugly ones. He has the saint’s sympathy for man caught in the whirl of
circumstances, a victim of his own
desires, terror and pity. This deep understanding and largeness of heart are of
abiding interest in a creative artist. We find in Greene’s fiction the spirit
of the statement attributed to St. Juliana of
Sin
is behovely, but
All
shall be well, and
All
manner of things shall be well.
Greene’s
personal vision of the “
God’s
in His Heaven,
All’s
right with the world.
Greene
appears to be greatly influenced by two writers–Elliot and Baudelaire. His
world is not very different from the one presented by Eliot in This
Eliot
wrote:
Be
not curious of good and evil;
Seek
not to count the future wave of time,
But
be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.
Greene
is curious of good and evil and his long journeys and electrifying career as a
novelist are protracted attempts to find a foothold. The foothold that he has
found is humility, the acceptance of faith reached by intellectual conviction.
The outcome of this humility and implicit faith in God is the conviction that divine
grace is limitless.