The Language of Ethics and Community in Graham Greene’s Fiction

Paula Martín Salvan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349576159
  9781137540102
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137540119
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A study of Graham Greene's fiction from the perspective of ethics and community, focusing on the narrative pattern that emerges from the author's idiosyncratic use of keywords like peace, despair, compassion or commitment. This book explores their potential for the textual articulation of narrative conflict and the dramatization of the ethical.

1

Peace

In a crucial scene from The Tenth Man (1985), in which Carosse tries to seduce Therese in Charlot’s presence, Greene provides a definition of “peace” that could well serve to qualify his idiosyncratic understanding of this term. From Charlot’s perspective, we read: “the restless playboy [Carosse] knew how to offer what most people wanted more than love – peace” (151; emphasis added). For Greene, peace is the most desirable of emotional and psychological states. In a different context, he described peace as “the most beautiful word in the language” (Letter to Catherine Walston, June 27, 1947; qtd. in Sherry Life 2, 233). Greene’s personal desire for peace is frequently expressed in his autobiographical works, suggesting a series of associated meanings that often find their way into his fiction. From a narrative point of view, peace is the zero degree position for his characters: a starting point, a state they wish to return to, and the situation against which all narrative events develop. Except for a few individuals like Alfred Jones in Dr Fischer of Geneva, who succeeds in finding it against his will, peace is something Greene’s characters long for but rarely attain. For most of them, peace only comes with death, which is in some contexts a closely associated term in Greene’s vocabulary. Thus, absence of peace becomes in his fictional universe the condition upon which narrative develops, and also the cause of much distress. In The Lawless Roads, Greene expressed most clearly this understanding of the world as “a valley of tears” in which peace is unreachable: “The world is all of a piece, of course; it is engaged everywhere in the same subterranean struggle, lying like a tiny neutral state, with whom no one ever observes his treaties, between the two eternities of pain and – God knows the opposite of pain, not we […] There is no peace anywhere where there is human life” (33; emphasis added). Lack of peace, moreover, is related to the impossibility of remaining detached from a situation or a person in an ethical sense. Peace and responsibility, or commitment, are antagonistic concepts in Greene’s usage. In this chapter, the semantic peculiarities of “peace” will be explored, and the ethical import of the term will be analyzed in terms of its potential as a narrative trigger.

The meanings of peace

In Graham Greene’s fictional universe, most characters long for peace. In Brighton Rock, Pinkie constantly repeats the mantra “Dona nobis pacem” (“give us peace”) (54, 103, 248, 261), which is also used in The Comedians (248). The desire for peace is present also in many other novels, expressed as an unattainable dream: “Peace was a sanity which he did not believe that he had ever known” (Man 43); “he dreamed of peace by day and night” (Heart 50); “Do you never have a desire, Mr. Wormold, to go back to the peace?” (Havana 145). Greene’s understanding of peace may be read along four discursive lines, connected in the ethical pattern dramatized by his novels: peace as redemption, peace as quietism, peace as freedom from decision, peace as death.

The most obvious expression of this longing for peace that most Greenean heroes share is the idea of spiritual or religious redemption, in which peace appears in opposition to sin and guilt. Being at peace, in this sense, would equal being in a state from which the disturbing presence of guilt has been erased. Greene’s characters rarely enjoy this state, but they desire it as they see it reflected in others. It is in this indirect way that we may learn about its meaning. In The Heart of the Matter, Scobie attends a church service from which he feels estranged, his own guilty conscience separating him from the community of those at peace with God: “An immeasurable distance already separated him from these people who knelt and prayed and would presently receive God in peace. He knelt and pretended to pray” (207). In the Catholic context, this is the kind of peace that comes with confession. In The Power and the Glory, the Whisky Priest expresses his longing for peace in terms of comparison with others who have attained it precisely by confessing to him: “Perhaps it was his duty […] to discover peace. He felt an immense envy of all those people who had confessed to him and been absolved. In six days, he told himself, in Las Casas, I too … But he couldn’t believe that anybody anywhere would rid him of his heavy heart” (170).

Pinkie, in Brighton Rock, shares this notion of peace as forgiveness in a religious sense. In the early moments of the story he thinks he may attain it after all; by the end of the novel he is sure of his own damnation. Here, peace has a strong religious meaning of redemption. Compare two moments of the narrative: “then, when he was thoroughly secure, he could begin to think of making peace, of going home, and his heart weakened with a faint nostalgia” (116); “he’d learnt the other day that when the time was short there were other things than contrition to think about. It didn’t matter anyway … he wasn’t made for peace, he couldn’t believe in it. Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust” (248). The skepticism about the idea of peace denoted in the second passage is related to Pinkie’s own course of action, which has taken him beyond redemption according to his own peculiar religious standard.

Extending it beyond the strictly religious realm, however, it is easy to discover how the same envy for others’ peace is present as well in other characters. What they all have in common is a feeling of guilt that provokes a double sense of estrangement: from their past lives, and from the communities to which they belong. Characters who feel guilty about something they have done in the past, and need to atone for it, are recurrent in Greene’s oeuvre. Possibly the clearest example would be Arthur Rowe in The Ministry of Fear, whose entire life is dominated by the guilt he feels for having killed his sick wife out of mercy. As a consequence, Rowe does not recognize himself as the man who was once happy, and he doesn’t consider he may ever be at peace again. It is also as a consequence of this act that he has become estranged from those who constituted his community, isolating himself from friends and family – “there had been a time when he had friends” (75). His isolation, the narrator states, has made him a peculiar man: “Like all men living alone, he believed his own habits to be the world’s; it never occurred to him that other men might not eat biscuits at six” (23).

The remorseful hero could be said in fact to constitute an archetype in Greene’s work. At this point, however, it would be necessary to establish a distinction in terms of the narrative sequences created by Greene. Some of his remorseful heroes have regrets about something belonging to their past life. Querry feels guilty about the dehumanizing dissolute life he led as a celebrity architect in A Burnt-Out Case, Wormold feels guilty about his divorce from his wife in Our Man in Havana, and the already mentioned Arthur Rowe is consumed by his mercy killing. In some other cases, however, guilt develops as a consequence of the influence that characters’ actions have on others in the course of the narrative. This is the case with D. in The Confidential Agent, who feels responsible for Else’s death: “It was as if he had been given a glimpse of the guilt which clings to all of us without our knowing it. None of us knows how much innocence we have betrayed. He would be responsible …” (54). Like him, Andrews is responsible for the harm done to Elizabeth by Carlyon in The Man Within, Greene’s first novel.

In some cases, that guilt is not only an internal psychological phenomenon, but one brought about by external forces persecuting the hero. For the Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory, finding peace is not only a spiritual matter, but also one related to security, derived from his status as a persecuted individual. Like him, other haunted characters in Greene’s work express the same desire for safety.¹ In The Man Within, Greene depicted Andrews as a persecuted man whose decision to betray the smuggler Carlyon provokes both his guilty consciousness and a manhunt aimed at taking revenge on him. Thus, his desire for peace acquires a double character as he tries to escape from himself and from others: “his desperate longing for peace returned, a peace which would be empty of caution and deception” (106).

These texts share a narrative perspective from which the possibility of peace has been eradicated; it belongs to a past that cannot be recuperated. In this sense, they are set in a post-lapsarian world. These novels can only tell about the character’s reality after the fall; whatever happened before remains outside the limits of the narrative, and it can only be recalled through the filter of guilty consciousness. The two novels where Greene experimented with first-person narrators constitute in fact narrative exercises on guilty consciousness. Both Fowler in The Quiet American and Bendrix in The End of the Affair must give account of themselves precisely because they feel guilty about the damage they have done to others – to Pyle in Fowler’s case, and to Sarah in Brendrix’s. Their narratives may be read as confessions, and they establish in the diegetic present a post-lapsarian state from which the narrators/characters feel there is no way out. Like Pinkie, they feel they are beyond redemption. The damage they have provoked is irreversible, and peace is untenable for them.² Their respective identities as narrators, moreover, may be said to emerge precisely from the realization that they are the cause of an irreparable injury to others (Butler Giving 85).

Even in this situation, however, a sort of peace may be found, if only of a temporary and illusory character. This second sense of peace is closer to the sort of ethical quietism famously identified by Jean-Paul Sartre as “quietism of despair” (345) in “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946). It could be characterized as lack of action, non-involvement, a refusal to make decisions or choices. It is articulated in A Burnt-Out Case in the following terms: “If no change means peace, this certainly was peace, to be found like a nut at the center of the hard shell of discomfort” (1). This understanding of peace may be said to spring from the realization that being alive means suffering and making others suffer. Here, Greene’s understanding of the ethical finds its best philosophical expression in Sartre’s understanding of responsibility and commitment. For the novelist, as for the French existentialist, anguish is the condition of ethical action, and its absence can only mean a renunciation to what makes us human, which is precisely the anguish of responsibility and commitment. In this context, if peace is to be attained, it can only come through the annihilation of the will and the subject’s withdrawal from the realm of the ethical in which individual action inevitably affects others. Characters like Querry (A Burnt-Out Case) and Scobie (The Heart of the Matter) seem particularly sensitive to this conception. In both cases, their longing for peace is also related to their guilty feelings about how their actions have provoked others’ suffering: “I can’t bear to see suffering and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out” (Heart 216); “Her pain struck at my pain: we were back at the old routine of hurting each other. If only it were possible to love without injury” (Quiet 110).

Their aspiration comes close to what Greene wrote in connection to Evelyn Waugh in Ways of Escape: “Peace he was not granted – only a long despair which he passed off with the lighter word, boredom” (264). Monsignor Quixote offers a clear articulation of how the interchange with other human beings may disrupt the peace that comes with routine and boredom: “The presence of Professor Pilbeam, whose second visit to Osera this was, had removed Father Leopoldo from the peace of a routine to a more confused world, the world of intellectual speculation” (227). In this novel, the monastery appears as the ultimate location where peace is to be attained through isolation from the outside world. And yet, as shown in the novel, even this monastic peace is a precarious one: “They wanted in a romantic way to sacrifice their lives. But he had come here only to find a precarious peace” (ibid.).

A further dimension of Greene’s understanding of peace may be found in how this “quietism of despair” relates to the idea of decision making. In terms of the ethical predicament in which most of Greene’s characters find themselves, peace may be defined as lack of decision, not having to deliberate, to act. The idea goes back to early modern political thought, in which citizenship is defined in terms of how the individual decisions of many may be conjugated (Locke). In Hobbes’s Leviathan, decision means “deliberation” (probably a false etymology), “putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our own Appetite, or Aversion” (Leviathan ch. 6, 44). One stops being free the moment one makes a decision, and acts out an irrevocable choice. In this context, decision making is understood as an action that puts the individual in connection with others, affecting others.

In the context of Greene’s fiction, the implications of this idea are explored in terms that come close to an existentialist framework. Greene’s characters tend to identify in the moment of decision the embodiment of ethical action, and in the retreat from situations that demand decision making a liberation from responsibility. Sartre uses the example of a military leader sending his soldiers to death to illustrate his view of what human responsibility over others entails:

In making the decision, he cannot but feel a certain anguish. All leaders know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen. Now it is anguish of that kind which existentialism describes, and moreover, as we shall see, makes explicit through direct responsibility towards other men who are concerned. Far from being a screen which could separate us from action, it is a condition of action itself. (Sartre “Existentialism” 352)

For someone who has adopted a commitment, peace is therefore impossible. This is the case of the Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory, for whom peace is a temptation to liberate himself from his commitment, abandoning himself to death: “Would they shoot him out of hand? A delusive promise of peace tempted him […] Death was not the end of pain – to believe in peace was a kind of heresy” (73). Repeatedly throughout the novel, peace is presented as a mirage: “The oddest thing of all was that he felt quite cheerful; he had never really believed in this peace. He had dreamed of it so often on the other side that now it meant no more to him than a dream” (177). The entire novel could be read as a series of failed attempts at finding peace and security in a succession of scenarios – the hotel room, his lover’s village, the little girl’s farm, the prison cell, the Lutherans’ house – a peace that can eventually come only with death.

Fowler (The Quiet American) may be seen as the epitome of the Greenean hero who has found an illusory peace in his detachment, one from which he will be shaken out in the course of the narrative. Like him, several others point to a constant in Greene’s fictional universe: peace can only be attained by removing all links to other human beings, by avoiding responsibility over others’ lives and wellbeing. These characters have “deliberately withdrawn to the sidelines, out of the conflict, to be in a position from which they may be spectators but which isolates them from involvement” (Land 77). In The Comedians, Brown stands as the only character who seems to be able to remain “a comedian,” a fluid identity not attached to others. The key to his peace of mind comes precisely from his lack of responsibility toward others: “somewhere years ago I had forgotten how to be involved in anything. Somehow somewhere I had lost completely the capacity to be concerned” (183). Crane, in Rumour at Nightfall (1931), makes a very similar point: “I am on the borders now of that cold inhuman land: I have only to relinquish pain, to know the truth and not to care, and I need never fear again” (155). This is the zero responsibility position that a character like Scobie seems to find impossible to attain. In The Heart of the Matter, the character who represents a position equivalent to Brown’s would be the merchant Yusef, who gives Scobie advice on how to deal with women: “The way is not to care a damn” (225).³

At the other end of the ethical spectrum we find those characters who have realized that peace is just a form of despair, and have found in action a way out of quietism. This is particularly noticeable in some of the thrillers, where the genre convention calls for a narrative structure in which the succession of events must be frenetic. The most direct connection between the thriller convention and this longing for action can probably be found in The Confidential Agent, where D., the main character, progressively gains control over the situation he finds himself in: “It occurred to him that never once yet had he been allowed the initiative. He had been like a lay figure other people moved about […] it seemed to him that at last the initiative was passing into his hands; he wished he had more vitality to take it, but he was exhausted” (80–81). In The Ministry of Fear, Rowe’s progressive involvement in the espionage plot is described as a coming back to life after a period of numbness: “he was happily drunk with danger and action. This was more like the life he had imagined years ago” (159). When the novel begins, he is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Occasions for Unselfing
• 1 Peace
• 2 Bargain
• 3 Despair
• 4 Pity and Compassion
• 5 Commitment
• 6 Caritas
• Conclusion: The Ethics of Reading (Graham Greene)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index