"Whosoever believes in God, but believes without passion, without anguish, without uncertainty, without doubt, without despair-in-consolation, believes only in the God-Idea, not in God-Himself."
--- Miguel de Unamuno, from The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, p.211

The fundamental burden and motive for the “modernist writer” in the early to mid-twentieth century, it would seem, was the re-imagining of one’s surroundings, and to this task perhaps no single author had more capability than British novelist Graham Greene.  And while it may be said that Greene had done the best he could to illustrate the hopelessness and disillusionment with and of the modern world, one may also posit that his perplexing theological constructions - especially those drawn during the period of his "Catholic Novels" (1938-1958) helped to re-imagine a religion - that is to say, a "bridge” to God - in light of, or perhaps despite of, the "modern condition."  For every allusion to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1) in Greene’s novels there are provided a vast array of escapes(2)from that landscape – whether those escapes are actually pursued by Greene’s characters or not.  The proceeding survey of Greene's "Catholic" output will bear mention of these escapes, although the emphasis herein will be placed on the "existential" predicaments engaged by specific characters, leading again and again to a dreadful resolve (i.e., suicide, blasphemy, murder, etc.).  While Greene - like so many other existentialists, like Camus, Sartre, and Jaspers - repeatedly dismissed the possibility that he was indeed an existentialist writer, his works are arguably open to such an interpretation.  Moreover for Greene, the aspect and practice of a religious faith would open the possibility to act out existentially on one’s faith and beliefs(3),  as though to propose a form of “Christian” existentialism.  It would seem that what really matters the most in Greene’s novels is if his characters undergo a change of heart.  But as this survey will demonstrate, the changes they undergo do more to assure their damnation than their salvation.  And neither God’s “omnipresent and appalling force of grace … [nor] complex and protean mercy”(4)  is sufficient to convince.  Greene often portrays divine grace as a “half-dove, half-vulture” beast, patiently seeking pieces of humanity to be redeemed,(5)  where nothing is to be had.  A priest’s comment that “you cannot conceive ... the strangeness of the mercy of God”(6)  goes unheard, again and again.

 It may be remarkable to note that a recurring theme in many of Greene's "pre-Catholic" novels(7)  is the aspect of characters "on the run" or "running away" from someone or some thing.  The opening page of Greene's first novel, The Man Within (1929), finds Andrews on the run from hoodlums from which he has just double-crossed. Rumour at Nightfall’s (1931) Crane is dodging bullets, smugglers, and relationships hinting of homosexuality while covering as a journalist for the Carlist Wars of 1870's Spain.  All the people and relationships onboard The Orient Express (a.k.a. The Stambol Train, 1932 and 1934) are constantly in motion, as the narrative shifts between characters throughout while the train races toward the Yugoslav Border.  Drover, in It's a Battlefield (1934), is running away indiscriminately from the truth behind an unmeditated homicide of a prostitute, as the case gains national press attention.  And in England Made Me (1935), Anthony is always running from the one woman who truly loves him, who is the same woman who he cannot allow himself to love in return.  We may consequently note that Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1938) was one running away from the possibility of spiritual or Christian salvation, which his Roman Catholic upbringing(8)  had offered but was always rejected.

Establishing the Boundaries: Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock begins not with an introduction to the novel’s main characters, but with the plans to murder Fred Hale, whose previous actions had led to the betrayal and death of Kite, the father figure for Pinkie Brown.  Pinkie assumes the responsibility upon himself to kill Hale by what he considers to be a “perfect murder” – the stabbing of Hale with a rod of sugar candy – Brighton Rock – which will dissolve in the body of the victim before any suspects or murder weapons are found and named.  The plan is executed as planned, except the act is witnessed by Rose, a waitress at a nearby restaurant.  Knowing her testimony in court would be damning to him, Pinkie decides to trick Rose into committing suicide – but not before she falls in love with him.  The rest of the novel tells the passage of a man, Pinkie, who flees from every opportunity of grace, and of a woman, Rose, who offers that grace to him in any way she can fathom.  But at every turn, the reader is given the luxury of understanding why Pinkie chooses to resist this grace.  More often than not, Pinkie’s resistance is pictured as legitimate, and Rose’s attempts are shaded as acts of her complacent religious beliefs.  Greene’s persistent contrasting of the motives of both Pinkie and Rose persuade the reader that the former’s final resolve – his own suicide – may indeed have been the most reasonable action possible.(9)

All of this provides the framework for Greene to establish the existential extremities of engagement between Pinkie and Rose, where Rose personifies the sincere yet flawed trust in a weak Christian faith.  Pinkie’s character always suggests a position that nothing may garner meaning in life but through a resolve of senseless, prolonged slaughter.(10)    While a similarity may be drawn between Rose’s predicament with Pinkie and the Grandmother’s predicament while held at gunpoint by ‘the Misfit’ in Flannery O’Connor’s perennial Christian Existentialist short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,”(11) it is worth noting that Greene’s ingenuity has at focus Pinkie’s predicament, not Rose’s.  Instead of learning Rose’s upbringing and subsequent naivete as O’Connor portrays the grandmother character, the reader of Brighton Rock trembles along sympathetically to the effects of Pinkie’s tragic childhood past.  For Pinkie, the option to die trying to run away is better than choosing to live with anyone like Rose or anything like her complacent system of religious beliefs – regardless of how meaningful those beliefs may in fact be for her.  Pinkie’s running off a high cliff to his death is more acceptable than falling prey to the God and Savior of Rose’s simple religion.

Nothing Like a Good Run: The Power and the Glory

 Likewise with Brighton Rock, the possibility of an untimely yet immanent death awaits the unnamed “whiskey-priest” character of The Power and the Glory, but the focus is his “painful way to sainthood … marked with fear, betrayal, and [the] temptations especially typical of modern society.”(12)  Greene increases the heat of his criticism about the highly organized, pathetically complacent Roman Catholic Church.
Cates Baldridge has boldly pointed out that at no time in The Power and the Glory is an "unpersecuted church depicted to be ... spiritually adequate,"(13)  and the mere suggestion of this demonstrates the depth of the extremities Greene has conjured in the landscape.(14)   But perhaps a most remarkable instance of this occurs when the whiskey-priest instantly negates any sense of martyrdom and commitment as soon as he crosses the border to Tabasco - a "safe" territory in other words, where Roman Catholicism is still outlawed, but is now only punishable by a petty fine. He is most committed to his faith when “on the run” for his life.  At every refusal the whiskey-priest makes to allow a confession or offer to administer the elements of the Lord’s Supper, the reader is given insight to the imperative race to the border is intertwined with his own doubt.  Disbelief in God is never an option, but the efficacy of the priest’s ministry is always hanging out of balance. And throughout the length The Power and the Glory, the narrative occasionally shifts to Tench the dentist, as though possibly to suggest that not a single character in the story - nor a single reader engaged in the story - is immune from the slowly decaying, infecting, and imperfectly treated dread of our modern-world surroundings.

The ingenuity of Greene's narrative is that at every footstep, the whiskey-priest is met with the predicament of either running for his life and not performing his priestly orders for those who request or need it, cheating death yet chased by the death wishes of his persecutors (most notably the lieutenant, who like the whiskey-priest is also unnamed), or compromising the integrity of his Holy Office and settle for some undefined mass of security and complacency.  But seldom does he ever typify the conventional Roman Catholic priest.  Throughout The Power and the Glory, the whiskey-priest is always involuntarily challenging - and is being challenged - by the strains of expectations about his priesthood among parishioners.(15)

This ever-present polarity is exhibited where the extremes are yet a breath apart, as when the whiskey priest safely passes into “safe” territory – that is, to a state where Christianity is still illegal, but punishable only by a small fine, not by death – and yet crosses back to the side of high persecution to give confession to a dying gangster.  Yet, near the end of the novel he crosses to safety once again – this time for good – and then balks at the request to give confession for a payment of only a few pesos.(16)   He opts to fall into a lapse of complacency immediately after crossing the state border, while somehow disregarding the predicament he had just escaped.(17)  It is interesting to note that Greene offers both shades of this predicament, and that the reader is persuaded to entertain the possible fate of the whiskey priest up to this point, and unto his execution sooner after, but is offered enough compelling support for a faith within the guise of both complacency and vibrancy.   And yet, this is indeed a matter of Christian existentialism, for the whiskey priest is always “intensely pursued by the power of grace.”(18)   The final lines of the novel(19)  do not seem to seal the answer about his fate, except to say that by the time of his execution the whiskey-priest has realized the destiny of his ministry.  Having established the extremes of engagement between authenticity and complacency, Greene next called himself to the task of exploring, in unbearable subtlety, the predicament of an individual so deeply in the claws of a supposedly respectable system of dogma, that his only recourse for change is compromise.

The Maddening Tragedy of Human Pity: The Heart of the Matter

It is remarkable to note that, unlike the whiskey-priest of The Power and the Glory, Scobie of The Heart of the Matter is entrapped in a surety-laden, highly complacent Roman Catholicism, so much that his faith affects all his emotions almost unknowingly and systematically in a most decisive manner.  Also unlike the whiskey-priest’s open-ended fate, Scobie’s death by suicide is unquestionably damning, according to the rules of his faith’s dogma.  Yet, there is an increasingly maddening process of existential resolve with Scobie as with the whiskey-priest.  A common mode to gauge the process of Scobie’s deterioration is his ever-broadening capacity to pity other people: first his wife Louise, then his mistress Helen, until ultimately God Himself.(20)

The Heart of the Matter, unlike Brighton Rock, depends not on the extremities of a situation, but on the subtleties of the characters – and for this reason Heart is considered among Greene’s perennial works.  More so than any of the other titles in this survey, the plot creeps along at a petty pace, gradually opening in all might, until the reader can bear no more.  “Don’t imagine you – or I – know a thing about God’s mercy,” says his priest, and yet Scobie disregards the warning, and still wants to believe that faith is a matter easily figured out as though “worked out on paper like a problem in mathematics, and the answer arrived at without pain.”(21)

It is the genius of Graham Greene to present these resolves in a manner that garners our support and sympathy, no matter how maddening the resolve may be.  For Scobie - just as the rest of us - he must choose if God's omnipotence precedes or is overshadowed by God's omniscience, or vice versa.  Said differently: is God all-knowing, or all-powerful, or one "more" than the other?  Far it be for Scobie to alter his well-tuned Roman Catholic system of faith, when his relationship with others is more readily malleable.  Although an ideal theology would allow for both, Scobie's "mad theology" must have one over the other: to him, God not only lacks all power, but is weakened to the extent to having no more power and strength than anyone else in his life.  In fact, God is lowered to the level of just another being to be pitied, just as Scobie has done to Helen, Louise, and everyone else in the story.  Indeed, Scobie’s lowering of his expectations of God begin only when no one else respond to his ability to pity them.

But his pity does not occur in a vacuum.  He pities his wife Louise when she feels more anguish than he for being passed over on a job promotion does.  And since divorce is not an option allowed by his Roman Catholicism, he agrees to her request to send her away from him – for he refuses to accept any responsibility for the failure of their marriage.  As they separate, he falls into an affair with Helen, who has just lost her husband from a shipwreck.  But she refuses to accept his offering of pity, and in fact views it as an insulting aspect of his failed Roman Catholicism. His imposition to pity other people affects the outcome of nearly every action he pursues, hence it may be figured as a feeling or emotion that leads to the existential resolve at the end of Heart to commit suicide.  However, there is a much greater and saddening transformation at work behind Scobie’s transference of pity.   Pity may indeed act as a disease,(22)    But for Scobie it is a more welcome infection than the pursuit of reexamining his concept of God’s strength, benevolence, and intimacy.  And since he is already an adulterer, he cannot excuse his stubbornness on his Roman Catholic dogma.  In fact, Greene seems to imply that for Scobie, keeping the system of Roman Catholicism intact is more important than engaging in a perverse and challenging, yet fully authentic relationship with God.  It is better to compromise one’s impression of divine mercy, or so it is maddeningly persuaded by Scobie, than to impose change on the rituality of a dogma.  Indeed, this is an unusual tactic of inquiry within a detective novel, as The Heart of the Matter is said to have been by Greene himself.

The fact is, Scobie's own policing is under scrutiny, because he is unable to elude detection.  And since Scobie "fails" - indeed, the reader knows who is watching Scobie as early as the first sentence of the novel - his commitment to hide his tracks "challenges his efficacy and policing powers,"(23)  according to one commentator, Eliot Malamet. Adding that " Scobie is both policed, and, so he thinks, evades policing,"(24) Malamet seems to be implying an outright arrogance on Scobie's part: not only has he convinced himself that he's perfected his ability to hide from the detection of others, he's also fallen into the trap of thinking that everything - and every One - is within his grasp.  The primary question then, as this failure pertains to Scobie’s religious engagement, seems to be this: If Scobie, as professionally and acutely as he should be at hiding his own tracks (he's the Lt. Commissioner, after all), fails at the act of avoiding disclosure, how less successful can the reader of The Heart of the Matter be?   For Scobie, it is completely inconceivable that in a life where one is above and better than all his responsibilities - to his wife, to his job, to his Church, to be a good Catholic - there's no room for uncertainty, and certainly no room for the possibility that anyone would detect anything he's trying to hide about himself.  To relieve God of His responsibilities by committing suicide, Scobie absolves himself from any burden of re-thinking his concept of God.  In one short, maddening fell swoop, Scobie expresses his sincerest word of repentance, to be sure; but it is one irreversibly tainted by his arrogant pride, his blind capacity to contain and reduce divine power, and his unrelenting will to pity even God:

                    O God, I am the only guilty one because I’ve known the answers all the time.
                    I’ve preferred to give you pain rather than give pain to Helen or my wife because
                    I can’t observe your suffering. I can only imagine it. But there are limits to what I
                    can  do to you - or them. I can’t desert them while I’m alive, but I can die and
                    remove myself from their blood-stream ...  I can’t go on, month after month,
                    insulting you. You’ll be better off if you lose me once and for all. I know what
                    I’m doing ... I’ve longed for peace and I’m never going to know peace again.
                    But you’ll be at peace when I am out of your reach … you’ll be able to forget me,
                    God, for eternity… I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling
                    of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks  … I  can’t
                    shift my responsibility to you. I’m responsible and I’ll see it through the only
                    way I can. We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”(25)

And with these words Scobie takes his life, never having acknowledged – nor even entertained – the notion that a loving, suffering, humbled God may not necessarily correlate with the impossibility of a pitied, weakened, lesser God.
 

The Relentless Love of a Good Hater: The End of the Affair

By many counts, The End of the Affair is considered the boldest entry among Greene's set of Catholic novels, primarily because the protagonist, Bendrix, makes no minced implications about his independence and even disbelief in God. The hint of damnation as suggested thus far in The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter proceeds in The End of the Affair from the first page,(26)  to the point to utter inevitability with the outright cry of Bendrix’s words of blasphemy –

                    "O God, You've done enough …  You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired to
                    learn to love, leave me alone forever.”(27)

The story begins when Bendrix runs into Henry for the first time in nearly two years, and the reader soon learns that Bendrix's interest in Henry lies only with his wife, Sarah, with whom Bendrix had an affair a couple of years prior. Bendrix only had a relationship with Sarah because of her own husband could not fulfill her desire for what one may consider “an intense longing for a more complete union”(28)  – a quest not unlike that of one pursuing a fuller relationship with God.  Indeed, it is God who ultimately captures Sarah and pulls her from Bendrix’s grasp, but the unfolding story of The End of the Affair is the search and discovery behind the matters that led to Sarah’s breaking off of her relationship with Bendrix. The reasons for Sarah breaking off this affair are concealed in the novel until Bendrix learns: he being left for dead after an air raid, Sarah vows to God that if Bendrix will live, she will never love him again. The reader learns as Bendrix learns of her promise to God, in a section of the novel dedicated to Bendrix reading of her diary.  This is a peculiar experience for the reader, for we are given insight into the meetings between Bendrix and Sarah as she saw them - the same meetings that we had already experienced earlier in the novel from his perspective.   Bendrix pursues both a love and a hate relationship not only with Sarah, but also with God, which climaxes with Bendrix’s ‘prayer’, “I hate you as though you existed.”(29)   Throughout the length of the novel, it would seem that the same nerves that excite the one to curse and hate God are the ones that may also proceed one to love and honor God, also.  It is remarkable to reinstate on these grounds that Graham Greene is once again broadening the possibilities of the extremities laid before the reader.  This possibility is not formally an existential predicament, however the manner in which Bendrix struggles with and resolves this matter certainly may be construed as such.

Remarkably, the polemic atheistic notions uttered by another of Sarah’s lovers, Richard,  only serve to convince Sarah of the truth of God’s existence.(30)  Sarah calls herself a bitch and a fake before God, but she says this out of repentance and a hope for a fuller union with God.  We are reminded once again grace has an active interest in Greene’s characters, yet Bendrix’s determination to claim victory over God is futile.  Grace seeks out the rebels because by their actions they probe the mystery of God.(31)   While we may note that mental suffering and terror may indeed be a precursor to one’s spiritual transformation, more often than not in Greene’s novels the elements of madness lead them to a further mode of spiritual void or outright damnation rather than enlightenment or salvation.(32)    Once again, Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Misfit’ whispers his breath under Greene’s narrative, this time in Bendrix.(33)   Bendrix not only blames the end of his affair with Sarah on God; but he also blames God for her death (for she was on the way to see the priest when she should have been in bed).   "I hate you enough as though you existed,”(34)  Bendrix finally cries out.

A common discussion among the many interpretations of The End of the Affair is if Bendrix's final thought of the novel, that of commanding God to leave him alone forever, points to the end of his relationship with God, or is possibly a new beginning and re-learning with a God who allows for free will.  This is indeed an important and worthy topic, but an accounting of the existential resolve leading to this utterance can be found to revolve around the recurring motifs of love and hate among the story's two main characters, Bendrix and Sarah.  They both discover that the same actions that lead one to love can also lead one to hate, and both feelings are surely a response to attempting to struggle through and resolve an inner turmoil.  Bendrix still madly loves Sarah enough that his only possible emotion is to hate her if he cannot have her.  And Sarah has vowed never to love Bendrix anymore, although she thinks - and writes - about him.    Her constant writing of her love for him intensifies both the love and the hate that he feels for her (as he reads her diary), while at the same time he learns that she will not - cannot - love him ever again.  His point of final resolve comes when Sarah dies, and when he re-focuses his hatred to God for taking her away and never letting her love him.  Bendrix's hatred rises until it can rise no more, until he is “too tired” to hate anymore.(35)   Thus leads to his final words of the novel, and thus leads to the opposing interpretations of total free will and total abandonment to God.  Perhaps only by coincidence, The End of the Affair is considered Greene's “end of affair” with a fascination with Roman Catholic complacency and symbolism. And while this is certainly not an inaccurate assessment of the period between 1943 and 1958 for Greene, it must be said to be a generalized statement, as well.  In fact, Greene became even more “politically conscious” in some novels after this period, and one could argue that few of the novels written after this point were completely void of “religious elements.”  So while The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair are considered the closest to the “theological thriller” label, later works would not exactly be shaken of this characterization.  This is most notably exhibited in the narrative's focus on the discreet and individual thoughts of both Sarah and Bendrix, and especially, the latter's resolve of meaninglessness despite of Roman Catholicism's emphasis on the individual. (36)   "You preach the importance of the individual," says Bendrix to the Priest, "[where] our hairs are all numbered,"(37)  although it is quite apparent Bendrix is mocking this view, suggesting once and for all that no formal set of religious rules can bring solace to any existential predicament.  Although he would continue to utilize religious themes in his novels, Greene would never again employ these themes as heavily - or explore them as readily - as he had in Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.  It is most disheartening that God is at the forefront of Bendrix’s thoughts, although Bendrix has absolutely no inclination to establish a trusting relationship with God.
 
 

Reading Graham Greene's novels existentially, as in the preceding survey, would ideally leave nary a word in his texts prone to neglect or oversight.  And although many crucial details from each of the novels previously mentioned have been ignored (38) hopefully enough has been demonstrated to offer a glimpse into the dread experienced by the main characters of Greene's Catholic period, religiously existential or not.  While none of these novels should be considered to have ended properly or redeemingly in any conventionally Christian sense, one may nonetheless find benefit from the investigation of the miles traveled and the decisions made by the characters.  Indeed, one is reminded that Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, among Greene’s final works, concludes on a note of finality that rejects all benevolence and power of divine grace and mercy, where God’s only “boundless” attribute is his preponderance to humiliate His creation.(39)   Such a God, to cite Evelyn Waugh, could be neither just nor loveable.(40)   Likewise. it was not Greene's intention to write the stories of his Catholic novels with a spiritually edifying conclusion, nor was it his intention to focus exclusively on the existential elements of these works, as emphasized in this survey.  Nonetheless, Greene’s Catholic Texts are sufficiently compelling enough to demand the reader to rethink the pervasive natures of grace and mercy. Even if we must live a season of doubt, of uncertainty, of anguish, or of despair, we must never enter a faith without passion. And passion is stronger than any value.  Jesus Christ’s command to “love one another”

                    “ … is not a scolding.  And it is not a little romantic lesson in feeling good about
                    everybody and acting silly.  It is … a rich, evangelical statement that there is more
                    to life than our capacity to contain it all in our little moral categories, whereby life
                    is reduced to a simple set of black/white, yes/no moral choices.”(41)

Indeed, “it’s not repentance you lack,” Greene’s God tells modern-world Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, but “just a few simple actions.”(42)
 

John K. Joachim

The possibilities of Christian Existentialism are applied to the interpretation of four Post-War novels by British Modernist writer Graham Greene - Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.

After a brief overview of the recurring “running away” motif in Greene’s early fiction, Brighton Rock is introduced as an example of Greene’s use of existential extremities. Pinkie, the central character of the novel, is drawn as someone who would rather die trying to run away from grace than live and settle down to a system of complacent religious beliefs. A parallel is made between this work and “A Good Man is hard to Find,” the short story by Roman Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor.

The Power and the Glory demonstrates the crisis of resolving the threat of complacency, over the possibility of a vibrant, authentic Christian faith.  The whiskey-priest of this story is always struggling to cross the border between Mexican states, into “safe” territory, to a place where the practice of Christianity is not punishable by death. He is most committed to his faith when “on the run” for his life.

 The Heart of the Matter serves as an exemplar for the natural human inclination to compromise the attributes of God in order to maintain the propensity for our own emotive capabilities. Faith is not something that can be figured out on paper, and one should never expect to truly know the depths of God's mercy. Scobie, however, chooses that his capacity to pity others is more crucial to his identity than a meaningful and passionate identification with divine grace and mercy. As a maddening demonstration of his pity towards God, Scobie’s resolution to commit suicide is figured as a viable option - even as a favor to God.

In The End of the Affair, Bendrix and Sarah both discover that the same actions that lead one to love can also lead one to hate, and both characters are shown to have God as the focus of their emotions. While Sarah moves into saint-hood, Bendrix resolves to hate God for taking Sarah away in her death, and wants God to leave him alone forever.

Such less-then-exemplar resolutions continued throughout the fictional works for the remaining of Greene’s career. While his fiction is rich enough to avoid any constraints of an exclusively existentialist interpretation, such a reading of his works - specifically, the works surveyed in this paper - is nonetheless a viable and worthwhile endeavor.

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1  Greene’s propensity and talent for offering “prose” treatments of T.S. Eliot’s poetic tones and moods is widely acknowledged as his chief qualification as a Modernist Writer. References to ouija boards, broken windows, death by water, the gramophone, and even the Cosmopolitan Hotel, figure predominantly into the plot of Brighton Rock; reference to The Power and the Glory's whiskey-priest as "among the world's hollow men" is very likely an allusion to Eliot's modernist poem of the same name; Bendrix is "dead" and then "reborn" on a staircase, as is the setting of  Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday,”  in The End of the Affair.   Cf. also Selden, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (New York: Random House, 1994), and DeVitis, Graham Greene, Revised Edition ( Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986),  for further references to Eliot. Note also Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume I: 1904-1939 (New York: Viking, 1989) for Eliot’s notable influence on Greene during his college years. Back to text.
 

2 This notion of “escape” might be more fully and appropriately termed “existential resolve,” as noted by existentialist philosopher Martin Heidigger’s Being and Time and its English translators John Macquarrie and Micnael Gelvin.  According to this text’s existential analytic, no less than three options are available to an individual experiencing an existential predicament.  Utilizing the English translations to Heidigger’s usage, one may pursue “truth”, “reality”, or “care.”  In “truth,” the individual accepts the hopelessness of the predicament, and pursues his or her death; in “reality,” the individual accepts the predicament as inescapable, yet tolerable if not challenging or compelling; and “care,” the individual engages oneself with a possibility of authentic existence, and is led to a further mode of predicament, leading to a renewed offer of “truth,” “reality,” or “care.”  Though a “Christian” existentialism is in many a sense oxymoronic, attempts have been made, to relative intrigue, to integrate Heidigger’s analytic into a methodology adhering to Christian beliefs and norms Cf. MacQuarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 1st Edition [ but not the 2nd Edition, where Macquarrie had ommitted his references to Heidigger] (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1966) for the tenants borrowed to arrive at this definition, and Gelvin, A Commentary of Heidigger’s Being and Time (Princeton, 1984) for an appropriation of Heidigger’s terminology to English.Back to text.

3  On the persecution of religious leaders in Mexico and that regime’s attack on Republican Spain – both leading to the writing of The Lawless Roads travel book, and then The Power and the Glory novel – Greene said this: “I think it was under these two influences – and the backward and forward sway of my sympathies – that I began to examine the effect of faith on action.”  Ways of Escape.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980, p78-9.  Back to text.

4  Gaston, The Pursuit of Salvation: A Critical Guide to the Novels of Graham Greene (Troy, NY: Whitson, 1984), p.24. Back to text.

5  Case in point, this passage from Brighton Rock: “An old man went stooping the shore, very slowly, turning the stones, picking among the dry seaweed for cigarette ends, scraps of food.  The gulls which stood like candles down the beach rose and cried under the promenade.  The old man found a boot and stowed it in his sack and a gull dropped down from the parade and swept through the iron nave of the Palace Pier, white and purposeful in the obscurity: half-vulture and half-dove.” Brighton Rock (New York: Bantam Books, 1968. p.161. Back to text.

6  Brighton Rock, p. 308. Back to text.

7   ... although not all of Greene’s novels: case in point is A Case of Action, which has not been allowed by the Greene estate for re-publication, hence was not available for this survey.  See also Sherry (1989) for insight into Greene’s chronic mental illness (especially paranoia) as possible explanation for this “running away” inclination, esp. pp. 77-84, 188ff, 303ff, and 399ff.  Back to text.

8  Cf. Baldridge, Graham Greene’s Fictions: The Virtues of Extremity (Columbia: Univeristy of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 77ff for elaboration on Pinkie’s Roman Catholic upbringing and its relevance to the Brighton Rock  narrative. Back to text.

9  For an elaboration on this device of contrasts, cf. Gaston (1984), p.21ff.  Back to text.

10  Even the closest inclination to Pinkie praying is, “My God, have I got to have a massacre?”Brighton Rock, p. 303  Back to text.

11  Thus says O'Connor's 'Misfit': "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead ... and He shouldn’t have done it.  He th[r]own everything off balance.  If he did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but th[r]ow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can - by killing somebody or burning down his house or some other meanness to him.  No pleasure but meanness."  (from O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," San Diego: Harvest Books, 1983)  p.28.  Back to text.

12  Gaston, p. 28.  Back to text.

13  Baldridge, p. 92. Back to text.

14  It is remarkable to note that Greene was mostly inspired to write The Power and the Glory as a result of his passionate anger towards the unsympathetic cruelty he had witnessed in Mexico during the mid-30’s.  See also Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 2: 1939-1955 (New York: Viking, 1994). Back to text.

15  If for no other reason than to maintain the validity of Heidigger’s existential analytic, it is worth mentioning that the whiskey-priest resembles a close approximation of Being and Time’s concept of “reality.”  Ultimately, further categorization of this aspect, and how the other two concepts of “truth” and “care,” figure into The Power and the Glory is beyond the scope of the existential aspects of this present survey. Back to text.

16  An equally notable yet less explicit predicament experienced by the whiskey-priest is his struggle to choose the higher importance between two different facets of his responsibilities: the forgiveness of sins, or his glorifying of God.  I would submit that an exploration of this matter would proceed via the search for “proof-texts” in The Power and the Glory, if not handled properly.  For this reason, this predicament is regrettably unexplored in the present survey. Back to text.

17 This very issue is at the heart of my argument, and is peculiarly absent from all commentaries I reviewed in preparation for this survey.  Back to text.

18  Gaston, p.29.  Back to text.

19  “He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint.”  The Power and the Glory, p. 253.  For a further discussion on how this line may imply a higher mode of either complacency or vibrancy, see Gaston, p. 34ff., and DeVitis, Graham Greene, Revised Edition.  (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986), p.102.  Back to text.

20  While “pity” is not formally considered within Heidigger’s existential analytic, it is interesting to note that Scobie’s pitying functions as a combination of Heidigger’s “truth,” “reality”, and “care.”  His capacity to pity his wife Louise, for example, stems from the dread he experiences in his life, and that he is transferring his engagement of “reality” and  “truth” to her, leaving the far more noble aspect of “care” for himself.  Any further elaboration on this existential analytic, though relevant, is beyond the scope of this present survey.   Back to text.

21  The Heart of the Matter,( New York: Penguin Books,1976),  p. 194.  Back to text.

22  See Allott,  in The Quiet American: The Viking Critical Edition.  Ed. John Clark Pratt.  New York: Penguin Books  1996.), p. 459ff.  Back to text.

23  Malamet,  “Penning the Police/Policing the Pen: The Case of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter” Twentieth Century Literature.  39.3 (1993): 283-305., p.287.  Back to text.

24  Malamet, p.291.  Back to text.

25  The Heart of the Matter, pp. 229-31.  Back to text.

26  “This is a record of hate far more than of love.”  The End of the Affair (New York: Penguin Books, 1979), p.1.  Back to text.

27  The End of the Affair, p.192.  Back to text.

28  Gaston, p.44.  Back to text.

29  The End of the Affair, p.102.  Back to text.

30  At one point, Sarah is perplexed as follows: “Could anyone be so serious, so argumentative about [disproving] a legend?  When I understood anything at all, it was some strange fact I didn’t know that hardly seemed to me to help his case… I had gone to him to rid me of a superstition, but every time I went his fanaticism fixed the superstition even deeper.”  The End of the Affair, p. 115.  As an aside note, the exclusion of this Society’s influence on Sarah in Neil Jordan’s (dir) 1999 film The End of the Affair is the only oversight of an otherwise excellent adaptation of Greene’s novel. Back to text.

31  Cf. Karl,  “Graham Greene’s Demoniacal Heroes.”  In The Contemporary English Novel. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Company, 1962), p.90.  Back to text.

32  A common alternative proposal is that these words at the novel’s end mark the beginning of Bendrix’s pursuit for salvation: “When he finally does recognize his insufficiency [to both love and hate], he is taking the characteristically Christian first step toward the possibility of redemption.”  See Gaston, p. 47 ff.   Back to text.

33  As Bendrix notes to the Priest: “For if this God exists … we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all; if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint.  It’s something he can demand of any of us – leap !  But I won’t leap.”  The End of the Affair, p. 171. Back to text.

34  The End of the Affair, p. 159.  Back to text.

35  The End of the Affair, p.192.  Back to text.

36  Whitehouse, “Men, Women, God and So Forth”  (Logos. 4:1 (2001). p. 59-60.  Back to text.

37  The End of the Affair, p. 187. Back to text.

38  To be sure, the relationship between Pinkie and Rose - and Pinkie and Ida - could have and should have been developed at least marginally in this text; a comparison between the whiskey-priest and the lieutenant who ultimately kills him could have strengthened this survey's arguments; more about the "pitied" relationship between Scobie and Helen is perhaps the most notable oversight in this entire survey; Sarah's relationship with the priest would had surely intensified the argument for Bendrix's love/hate relationship towards God  - all would had contributed to the tenants of this survey. Back to text.

39  Near the end of this novel, Dr. Fischer says this: “Well, the believers and the sentimentalists say that [God] is greedy for our love.  I prefer to think that, judging from the world he is supposed to have made, he can only be greedy for our humiliation, and that greed how can he ever exhaust?  It’s bottomless.  The world grows more and more miserable while he twists the endless screw, though he gives us [useless] presents – for a universal suicide would defeat his purpose – to alleviate the humiliations we suffer.  A cancer of the rectum, a streaming cold, incontinence.  For example, you are a poor man, so he gives you a small present, my daughter, to keep you satisfied a little longer.”  Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 189. Back to text.

40  Evelyn Waugh, "Felix Culpa," Commonweal 48 (16 July, 1948), p. 324. Back to text.

41  Walter Brueggemann, The Threat of Life, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), p. 13. Back to text.

42  The Heart of the Matter, p. 230. Back to text.

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