httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UnrYBq0SONI<\/p>\n
Graham Greene is a writer whose celebrity has waned somewhat since the 1970s, when he was among the best-known and most widely read of literary figures.\u00a0 In terms of the modern literature syllabus at most universities, if my anecdotal impressions are at all representative, he has been squeezed out, like some other British writers of the mid-century (remember William Golding<\/a> and Iris Murdoch<\/a>?) by the new generation of postmodern and postcolonial writers.\u00a0 The Modernists of the early twentieth century are still going strong, and someone had to make room for Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith.\u00a0 On the other hand, people must still be reading Greene, as my local Chapters usually has a good selection of his novels for sale.<\/p>\n Greene was one of the first serious writers I read, since he was at the height of his fame during my high school and undergraduate years.\u00a0 Moreover my father had a large collection of Greene\u2019s work, including some first editions from his middle period.\u00a0 Since I am working on a paper on Greene, I have naturally thought about him in relation to Northrop Frye.\u00a0 A little bit of checking turned up the fact that the two men died within a few months of each other in 1991.\u00a0 Greene was born in 1904, making him eight years older than Frye.\u00a0 He established himself as a writer fairly early on, but the book that consolidated his literary reputation as the most prominent British novelist of his time was The Heart of the Matter<\/em> (1948), a dark story of wartime espionage and sexual rivalry that appeared the year after Fearful Symmetry<\/em>.<\/p>\n Northrop Frye does not say a great deal about Graham Greene, whose major works are in the mode of ironic realism, and who shares the vision of extremity of the Modernists but without the overt mythic elements that attracted Frye.\u00a0 The discussion of ironic comedy in the first essay of the Anatomy<\/em> refers to \u201cthe kind of intellectualized parody of melodramatic formulas represented by, for instance, the novels of Graham Greene.\u201d\u00a0 Frye did allude a number of times to The Ministry of Fear<\/em> (1943), one of Greene\u2019s strangest works, which has been termed dangerously close to self-parody.\u00a0 It contains a number of romance elements, and it is mentioned in Words with Power<\/em> and several times in the Notebooks, where Frye remarks on its use of \u201cAmnesia & variants of the twin theme, no less\u201d (Notebook 11e [51]; CW<\/em> 13:329).\u00a0 He was impressed by the classic film noir, The Third Man<\/a><\/em> (1949), starring Orson Welles, for which Greene wrote the screenplay, and he recorded his impressions of the film in his diary on 26 April 1950. (The unforgettable closing scene is featured above.)<\/p>\n There is a very good book on Greene\u2019s later fiction by Brian Thomas (An Underground Fate: The Idiom of Romance in the Later Novels of Graham Greene<\/em>, 1988) that makes extensive use of Frye\u2019s work, and especially of The Sacred Scripture<\/em>.\u00a0 Greene\u2019s imagination was shaped by his childhood reading of the imperial romances of the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, as a result of which Joseph Conrad became a literary influence who caused Greene much anxiety: several of his works are essentially rewritings of Heart of Darkness<\/em>, and he suppressed his second and third novels, The Name of Action<\/em> (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall<\/em> (1932), tales of adventure that read like imitations of Conrad\u2019s weakest fiction.\u00a0 Thomas demonstrates a return to romance, though of a different kind, in Greene\u2019s later novels, some of which bewildered their first readers and proved difficult for critics to assimilate to their pre-existing view of the writer.<\/p>\n He begins with Greene\u2019s works of the 1950s, which include The Quiet American<\/em>, a novel about Vietnam at the point where American involvement was in its earliest stages, and the war was still a French colonial war.\u00a0 The Quiet American<\/em> (1955) contains elements of a detective novel, of travel writing, and of straightforward journalistic reporting.\u00a0 It can be read as a novel about sexual jealousy, or as a political novel, or both, and it was very controversial in the United States on first publication, since it expresses Greene\u2019s deep anti-Americanism.\u00a0 A. J. Liebling\u2019s<\/a> negative review in The New Yorker<\/em> expressed the resentment many Americans felt when The Quiet American<\/em> was published, though it also inspired war journalists like David Halberstam<\/a>.\u00a0 (See here<\/a> for a discussion of the recent film<\/a> of The Quiet American<\/em> that points to some ambivalences in the novel\u2019s portrayal of America and Americans.)\u00a0 None of the standard readings that precede Thomas\u2019s book seems to capture the reason for The Quiet American<\/em>\u2019s profound appeal: I have read it many times, and have encountered quite a few other people for whom it is likewise a favourite book.\u00a0 Brian Thomas\u2019s examination of the romance archetypes in The Quiet American<\/em> provides a convincing explanation of how Greene has combined the disparate elements I have mentioned into one of the best English novels of the twentieth century, and his book is also a demonstration of how Frye\u2019s theory of romance illuminates a writer for whom Frye himself did not have a particular affinity.<\/p>\n Thomas sees Greene\u2019s later protagonists as characters who tend to be \u201cescapists\u201d (one of Greene\u2019s volumes of autobiography is entitled Ways of Escape<\/em>, in which he memorably describes writing as a \u201cform of therapy\u201d), \u201cnot merely because they are irresponsible romantics but because they need to recover a sense of identity that has somehow been lost. . . .\u00a0 Escape increasingly becomes a distinctively fictive business, a heroic literary pilgrimage into the archetypal underground territory of the imagination itself.\u00a0 And despite all Greene\u2019s protestations that he represents the world as it \u2018is,\u2019 this territory is<\/em> the real Greeneland.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UnrYBq0SONI Graham Greene is a writer whose celebrity has waned somewhat since the 1970s, when he was among the best-known and most widely read of literary figures.\u00a0 In terms of the modern literature syllabus at most universities, if my anecdotal impressions are at all representative, he has been squeezed out, like some other British writers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[92,165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism","category-video"],"yoast_head":"\n