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Creed and credibility : aesthetic consequences of faith in the fiction of Graham Greene

University of British Columbia

Beliefs a writer holds dear clearly influence the selection and treatment of ideas in his fiction: the purpose of this study is to examine the effect of Greene's religious sensibility on theme, mode, and characterization in a representative selection of his novels. From the late 30's to the early 50's, Greene's novels deal with dilemmas of faith that beset his Catholic characters; In The Power and the Glory (1940) he achieves startling and dramatic effects from the religious paradigms at the core of the novel. After the contentious success of the so-called 'Catholic' trilogy, The End of the Affair (1951) illustrates the difficulties to which an overzealous concern with specific issues of doctrine can lead when religious premises conflict directly with artistic requirements. From this point on, the perspective of Greene's novels is less and less specifically religious as he turns to considerations of a wider moral and social kind. In The Quiet American (1955), Greene explores the more existentialist questions of the freedom of choice and the responsibility of individual existence; however, his long preoccupation with Catholicism still intrudes in ways detrimental to the established development of the fiction. With the publication of The Comedians (1966) it is evident that Greene has moved even further away from the crises of faith that hounded his earlier characters as he focuses on an uncommitted anti-hero surrounded by an assortment of ideologies and forms of commitment. The development in Greene's religious vision has made him see and respond to the world of experience differently so that the themes and techniques of his fiction have changed accordingly. The broadening of his religious concerns has resulted in fiction that is less doctrinaire, less controversial, and perhaps more accessible. The negative presentation of the necessity of any form of faith through an anti-heroic central character has meant some loss of the intensity he could achieve as a novelist of urgent spiritual conflicts in his 'Catholic' period: it has also meant he could transcend specific issues of doctrine that could be so binding on his literary imagination, enabling him to create a more detached and witty representation of his broader religious ideas.

Text

2010-02-26

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/21095

English

University of British Columbia

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