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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Literature is the interpretation of life through imagination and passions. The

subject matter of literature is man and its theme is human life, its infinite forms and

manifestations. The mind of the artist is all-free, unrestricted and can take flight in

any direction, can talk of any subject under the sun in a personal way. A literary man

is the universal man – a man for all seasons and cl imes. The literary attitude is the

attitude of freedom, of liberal humanism. Humanism is a way of stating that our

perception of reality is always an exercise of human construing; that is, that religion,

art and science, are all human representations of reality. In other words, Humanism is

a paradigm of conceptual leverage on reality that places the fulcrum of conceptual

leverage inside the human mind and human experience.

In fact, the present age is neither humanistic, nor classical, nor scientific, nor

romantic, nor one of compromise. It cannot simply be called by a single charming

epithet, as in the case with the previous eras viz. the Age of Pope, the Age of

Wordsworth. It is a peculiar mess that entraps us with tempting baits heartlessly; it is

a baffling mass of currents and cross-currents. The moment one sets out to discover

it, it becomes a mirage as W.B.Yeats calls it. Instead of unfolding itself to us, it

rather engulfs us. It seems that this age has brought all the distinct threads trailing

through centuries together and tied them in a knot. In the following lines of “Dover

Beach”:

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The world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams

So various, so beautiful, so new

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. (30 – 33)

Matthew Arnold illustrates how life has become hollow and meaningless in

this present complex and diversified age. T.S.Eliot‟s “The Hollow Men” refers to this

world as: Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without

motion” (11–12). In his poem entitled “The Age of A nxiety” , W.H. Auden calls this

age an age of anxiety. W.B. Yeats‟ “The Second Comi ng” cries thus: “Things fall

apart, the centre cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (3–4). The

modern era as pictured above is characterized by intellectual revolution. Men have

grown strong in intellect and in their scientific and reasoning faculties. The

emancipated mind of modern man refuses to swallow any old-world tales which have

no rational or scientific basis. One effect of it has been their growing lack of faith in

religion.

One of the great purposes served by religion in promoting man‟s faith in

ordered and beneficent universe is smashed. Unfortunately nothing superior to the

exploded theories has found to fill the void. Just as the retreating waves leave the

beach high and dry, so also, faith having left them, modern men find their minds

emptied of peace and calm. The foundations of man‟s faith having been shaken, life

seems devoid of aim or purpose. The „one aim one purpose‟ of “The Scholar Gipsy”

is now a remote dream. An array of writers has voiced the concern of the age but

none has done as much as T.S.Eliot who in the following lines of “Four Quartets”:

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“Men and bits of paper whirled by the cool wind Tha t blows before and after time”

(III 15 – 16) portrays the disquietedness of the pr esent age.

Tracing the reason he himself remarks in his Religion and Literature, “moral

standards and the sense of religion have vanished completely in this present century,

where the centre of interest has been moved from the human to the inhuman” (154).

While the scientific discoveries have made man an insignificant speck in this

Godless Universe, the two World Wars have introduced violence, suspicion and

enmity among the people. It has resulted in abysmal corrosion in human nature with

the feeling of guilt, estrangement and of original sin. Self-hatred, masochistic

suffering, aggression, malice and coarseness have taken hold of man‟s psyche after

his loss of harmony and equilibrium. Thus the whole world has been turned into a

“Waste Land” and its inhabitants are as "distracted from distraction by distraction" as

pictured in “Four Quartets.” (III 12)

During the early years of the modernist period, the foremost writers were

English novelists like E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia

Woolf and Somerset Maugham. One of the major accomplishments of this period

came from Ireland with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, a work that

continues to be respected as a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature. In the

1920s and 1930s, the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Evelyn Waugh were harshly

critical of modern society, an attitude shared by many English men and women of the

day. In the 1930s and 1940s, novelists such as Graham Greene wrote traditional

fiction that was well-crafted enough both to stand up to innovative fiction of the day

and to gain a wide and loyal audience.

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Many writers of this period including Greene were born at the turn of the

century, near the end of the Victorian Era. These writers were reared in an

environment of romanticism, which often meant leading a relatively sheltered

childhood that left them ill-prepared for the realities of adult life. This background,

combined with events of the first half of the twentieth century, led writers such as

Greene to question the values of their past and to reevaluate the world in which they

lived as adults. The whole world is divided between the mechanized world of

segments and existence in its infinity. There is a contradiction between the sense of

defilement and innate goodness. It results in heterogeneity and homogeneity. And as

a result, the equivocations for social justice are accompanied by an outcry for divine

justice. Violence and cruelty, along with seediness, make up the present milieu which

in turn makes Greene to trace back, rather nostalgically, to the early life of man to

find out its cause. Greene writes in Journey without Maps:

When one sees to what unhappiness, to what peril of extinction

centuries of celebration have brought us, one sometimes has a

curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at

which point we went astray. (10)

Greene, the twentieth century laureate of sin and salvation was born in

Hertfordshire, England, on October 2, 1904, to Marion Greene first cousin of the

writer Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Henry Greene, a school headmaster. An

introverted and sensitive child, Greene had difficult early years because of his strict

father and boarding school bullies. At sixteen, Greene suffered a breakdown and

went to London for treatment by a student of Sigmund Freud. While in London,

Greene became an avid reader and writer. Before leaving, he met Ezra Pound and

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Gertrude Stein, who became lifelong literary mentors to him. His other influences

were Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford.

After graduating from high school in 1922, Greene attended Oxford

University's Balliol College, where he received a degree in history in 1925. While at

college, Greene became interested in politics, especially Marxist socialism. This

interest sometimes created tension in Greene's friendship with the conservative writer

Evelyn Waugh, although the two remained steady friends for many years. In 1926,

Greene converted to Catholicism for his fiancée, Vivien Dayrell Browning, whom he

married the following year. The couple eventually had two children. Greene is

generally considered a Catholic writer despite his insistence that the conversion was

not his greatest literary influence.

During World War II, Greene did intelligence work for the British

government in West Africa. His experiences at home and abroad inspired works like

The Heart of the Matter (1948). In addition to his novels of intrigue, peopled with

spies, criminals, and other colorful characters, Greene wrote short stories, essays,

screenplays, autobiographies and criticism. His literary reputation rests primarily on

what are termed his Catholic novels, Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory

(1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951), and his

Cold War era political novels, which include The Quiet American (1955), and A

Burnt-out Case (1960), and The Comedians (1966). Greene is considered one of the

most important English writers of the twentieth century, and his honors include

consideration for a Nobel Prize. His works are popular with critics and readers, and

they have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have sold more than

twenty million copies.

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Greene considers despair as an unalterable historical fact. Instead of giving

way to despair, man should hope to find a substitute in which he could repose his

faith. Religion alone offers medicine to the sickness of human condition. Religion is

not sophistry but is a lived reality. To gain relief and attain fulfillment from the stress

and strain of this modern life, religion becomes essential to man. It lays a strong

foundation on which humanity can build a healthy empire. But in the present

century- the society, the environs, the ghoulish political present and the accent on

historical subversiveness proves how religiosity is stripped off its substance and how

jeopardy in value system need to be reformulated. Undoubtedly art has always served

as a means to achieve this right end.

Novel, as a literary genre, has always concerned itself with the enmeshed

baseness of the human heart. It elevates and debunks heroes, disclaiming and

reclaiming them in their state of jeopardy. And as a result, characters suffer from

indifference and alienation. Modern novel envisages the complexity of human

relations – socio, economic, existentialist, psycho logical, – racial and ideological.

Hence, the truth of life is ensnared between the absolute and the relative, the

irrational and the rational, the sacred and the secular, and the sublime and the

profane. Though the primary duty of art is to itself, it cannot rise to greater glory

merely through a portrayal of the immediate and the contemporary without

accentuating them through juxtaposition with the enduring and universal.

The secularization of art was so alarming during the post-war period, as if

keeping pace with the alarming secularization of life itself that T.S.Eliot was

prompted to lambaste this tendency in his essay entitled Religion and Literature

(1935). There he condemns the whole of modern literature, which is corrupted by

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secularism. In Kermode in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), says “the

artistic sensibility” in our times “is impoverished by its divorce from the religious

sensibility” (294). Like T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene also feels that religion and

literature are inseparable and good literature should be unconsciously rather than

consciously religious. In his essay on „Francois Mauriac‟ in his book Collected

Essays, he too laments the loss of the religious sense in the English Novels:

... With the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English

novel and with religious sense work the sense of importance of the

human act. It was as if the world of fiction has lost a dimension. (115)

Graham Greene has brought back to the English novel this religious sense

and what is more, he presents it more effectively than Henry James. Samuel Hynes

says in his Introduction to Graham Greene that:

Greene has an artist‟s sense of the importance and the dignity of his

craft and like Conrad, James and Ford he has always understood that

technique is not enough and that if the novel is to matter, it must be

moral. (5)

According to Graham Greene himself, the following lines from one of Robert

Browning‟s poem “Bishop Blougram's Apology”, poems could serve as an epigraph

for all the novels that he has written:

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Our interest‟s on the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist, demirep

That loves and saves her soul in new French books --

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway. (395–400)

These lines seem to contain a list of the chief characteristics of Graham

Greene‟s work-the melodramatic characters, the heightened action on the “dangerous

edge”, and the precarious moral equilibrium of the actors, between honesty and

thievery, between tenderness and murder. Graham Greene has therefore been

concerned to restore that importance and thus to justify the novel not only in

aesthetic but also in moral terms. This object is at the centre of his artistic intentions.

What matters in his novels is not the action, but the moral meaning of the

human act. Graham Greene‟s development as a novelist reveals above all an attempt

to restore to the English novel two qualities which it had lost: one, the religious

sense; and two, the sense of the importance of the human act. Thus Graham Greene

brings back to the English novel that extra dimension which places characters against

the background of a world in which they are seen through the eyes of God. However

unimportant they may seem in the world of the senses they have an overwhelming

importance in another world. Graham Greene often chooses to portray the weak, the

failures; and through their very weakness and sense of failure they have a special

love for God which makes them the heroes of his novels.

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To give solidarity to the dissolving earth, to impart meaning and coherence to

the contemporary chaos and to induce humanism became the chief aim of Graham

Greene. He is a novelist and a playwright who has made bookstore and box-office

appeal out of ingredients such as sin, conscience, good and evil, humanism, salvation

and grace, and the search for God. What is remarkable is that Graham Greene had

been able to do this successfully, since the climate of thought and feeling of his time

seemed to be much against him.

Graham Greene has successfully understood the predicament in which man

finds himself today and his heroes, who are trapped in an existential web and who

create their own beings are shown to have discovered even in their isolation,

disillusionment, defeat, or death some human values of life - love, compassion

mobility, dignity and authenticity. Hence he makes the readers aware of the fact that

there is a dimension to human personality that cannot be explained solely on

scientific evidence and that only a sound humanistic faith can rehabilitate the whole

man, supporting him to crisis, and giving meaning and purpose to his life. Graham

Greene has made use of the concepts of humanism and modern psychology to

penetrate to the root of religion and the causes of man‟s distress and has achieved

something unique in literature by this blending of humanism and modern psychology

in his works. In his essay on Walter de la Mare in The Lost Childhood and Other

Essays, Graham Greene makes a remark, which is self revealing:

Every creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can

be called in the wide eighteenth century use of the term, poet, is a

victim: a man given over to obsession. (151)

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An obsession is what possesses a man‟s mind. It provides a kind of

orientation that enables him to apply his sensibility to certain experiences. With

Henry James it was fear of treachery, with Hardy pity for human beings, with De la

Mare, it was death and with Graham Greene, without any doubt, the obsession is

humanism. Malcolm Bradbury in the Modern British Novels observes “like Conrad,

Graham Greene was becoming a novelist of the gloomier moral flavors, of fidelity

and infidelity, trust and betrayal” (239). The pred icament of man in an evil world is

the basic obsession of Graham Greene. It has been produced by his acute sensitivity

to his varied experiences in childhood. Later his radical experiences and observations

of cruelty, violence and ugliness in lands as far away as Liberia, Mexico, Indochina

and Haiti served as accretions to his childhood awareness. This obsession accounts

for a number of recurrent themes and motifs which form a matrix of impulses and

circumstances for Graham Greene‟s characters. Isolation and failure, guilt and

betrayal, squalor and corruption, crime and violence, sin and suffering, tragic love

and fatality, childhood traumas and adult perversion, excesses of pity and innocence

–all these symbolize or dramatize the evil through the picturization of which Graham

Greene stresses the need for humanism and it is this that permeates his world.

Graham Greene‟s humanistic vision as he himself says “Remembering Mr.

Jones” in The Lost Childhood conveys the horror of existence – “the mental

degradation to which a man‟s intelligence is exposed on its way through life” (113).

Graham Greene‟s dilemma reminds us of Hamlet‟s: “to be or not to be”. He too

visualizes a “terrible aboriginal calamity” (6) fac ing man which he had quoted as

Newman‟s vision The Lawless Roads. For Henry James, evil was overwhelmingly

part of his visible world. So is it for Graham Greene. Graham Greene‟s abstention of

11 human nature shows his human realism. In The Lost Childhood: Personal Prologue

Graham Greene who says, “Nature is not black and wh ite but black and grey,” also

says “that human nature is not despicable” (15) lik e William Shakespeare, Henry

Fielding and Tolstoy like Malraux, Sholokhov and Sartre, the great humanists in

world literature, Graham Greene is committed to humanity in the world literature,

Graham Greene is committed to humanity in its fight against evil. David Pryce Jones

rightly sums it up as follows in his Graham Greene, that Graham Greene offers us:

“a tragic vision of man‟s predicament. This mood of predicament, is closely woven

into the novels through Graham Greene‟s literary approach.” (105)

His ingrained humanism makes itself felt in his extreme liberality of opinion,

his passionate love for truth, his acute awareness of a brutal world impinging on

man. Graham Greene‟s obsession can best be stated in terms of the following

passage which Graham Greene has quoted from Cardinal Newman, as an epigraph to

his Mexican travel-book, The Lawless Roads:

“To consider the world in its length and breadth, i ts various history, the many

races of man, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, their forms of worship; their

enterprises, their random achievements, the impotent conclusions of long-

standing fact ; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short

duration, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil,

physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the

corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion-all this is a vision to dizzy and appall ;

and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely

beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-sending, reason-

bewildering fact? I can only answer that either there is no Creator or

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this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.... If

there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some

terrible aboriginal calamity.” (7)

Although Cardinal Newman lived in the Victorian age, his view of life stated

above is also contemporary and melodramatic. Newman was describing sinful, fallen

humanity in terms of the Christian doctrine, but his vision of mankind might equally

be described in the contemporary language of alienation and attachment towards loss

of human values. His is portraiture of a bleak and sombre world, a world bereft of

God's grace. It is a world full of chicanery injustice, corruption and sin. In such a

world, truth is always crucified and good defeated. He depicts mankind as fearful,

defeated, and alone. This is true of mankind today also.

What Newman observed in the nineteenth century provides Graham Greene

with a basic framework of moral perception. He has taken-up contemporary

situations in his novels and has used them in his characteristic manner to expound his

basic themes. Graham Greene‟s characters may be lapsed Catholics, or whisky

priests, but their situations are metaphors for the human condition, and in this

fundamental sense Graham Greene‟s novels are undoubtedly contemporary. Graham

Greene‟s politics implies a religious understanding of the human situation. Graham

Greene feels the need of some form of democratic socialism based on Cardinal

Newman‟s vision of life, that is, a system which minimizes the power of human

beings to impose suffering on other human beings.

The political – sociological - existential - histor ical backdrop of Graham

Greene‟s portraiture provides an image of a godless world where the criminal hero is

13 driven towards his self destructive doom, damnation with his insane hatred, malice,

and blasphemy. His characters have to confront the state of degeneration, soulless

sense of disorder and gnawing, and dehumanized levels of experience. They prove

that the deranged world of segments cannot imbue in them their sense of

belongingness. They exist only as brute, inhuman and disorderly beings. Hence,

Judith Adamson in his Graham Greene: The Dangerous Edge where Art and Politics

Meet writes:

The sense of uncertainty, of indeterminacy of entities constantly

dissolving into their opposites has been the mainstay of Greene‟s art.

He has cultivated the dangerous edge of things in his books so that

faith wavers, love betrays, the uninvolved die for causes. (187)

The sense of delinquent and deviant makes Graham Greene‟s characters an

instrument of the unknown and uncontrollable forces.

Graham Greene‟s fiction is built on the juxtaposition of despair and belief,

evil and faith. The existence of one implies the existence of the other. Graham

Greene‟s preoccupation with evil is inextricably linked with his religious

consciousness, his obsessive awareness of God and His Mercy. It is, therefore not

surprising that so many of his characters, in spite of their experiences of evil, cannot

altogether stifle their longing for God or for a lost peace or ideal. They are pulled in

opposite directions, as Graham Greene was in his early years. They live on the point

of intersection where the devil wrestles with God for the possession of the heart of

man. In their stories, Graham Greene exhibits not only sin, corruption, egoism and,

in general, the “demonic” element in man; he exhibi ts with equal force man‟s

14 impulses towards love, charity, fidelity and self-sacrifice-in general, the „angelic‟

principle which makes man turn to God.

The force and significance of antinomies in Graham Greene‟s novels, their

entire spectrum of possibilities between the poles of good and evil, derive directly

from his two primaries obsessions-evil and faith. It is the dialectic of good set in

motion by their surrender to evil which orients the destinies of Graham Greene‟s

characters. His novels offer a telling picture of the hopeless condition of modern life.

Stripped of family, home and country man today is drifting from place to place in

search of livelihood. As mentioned earlier in the words of The Waste Land, man‟s

preoccupation with money has become so extremely dictatorial that it prevents him

from thinking about the higher goals of living and attending to the higher business of

finding his soul. This finds an echo and illustration in the life of Graham Greene‟s

heroes. They drift away without being able to get any settlement in life. In pure

ignorance they commit sin which also helps them in deriving the divine Grace.

One factor in Graham Greene‟s popularity in the immediate post-war period

may have been the glimpse of exotic parts of the worlds afforded to general readers

whose mental picture of Africa, the far East and so on probably came mainly from

the printed matter. Isherwood went to Berlin, John Lehman and Spender to Vienna,

George Orwell to Paris, Graham Greene to Liberia and Mexico. Although the

voyages of Graham Greene‟s peers were to places more interesting politically than

Liberia, their accounts resemble his in that they too turned their travels into interior

journeys and parables of their times. He records his culture‟s breakup with gloomy

despair, at once turned and terrified by what he saw. He keeps his pen to the details,

but his mind seeks ways to escape.

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In his attempt to find escape Graham Greene the reporter and Graham Greene

the novelist is the same man. His compassion gives an honest account of what he

sees, and forces him to grow as he moves through the dangerous political geography

of his travels a second time in his fiction. In a very real way, each novel is a voyage

of discovery for Graham Greene and perhaps that is one reason he has remained so

cryptic about himself. He has preferred to let experience compose itself in his literary

imagination than analyze it in the hope of finding a glib answer. His experience is

thus that of his characters. As a journalist and a much-travelled man, Graham Greene

had a very good opportunity of observing contemporary life in all its seediness and

made use of it for portraying human condition. But as a Catholic, he could not

eschew the danger of interpreting his knowledge of modern life with a tinge of his

own faith. The result was that his work was a peculiar blend of realism and

Catholicism.

Like Francois Mauriac and Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene is a Catholic

convert. From the time when Graham Greene published his first successful novel,

Stamboul Train (1932), he has been discussed at many levels and from different

points of view. Over the past fifty years his novels have received much critical

attention. The major bulk of critical evaluation is directed towards his use of Catholic

themes, which are considered as an essential characteristic of his artistic and literary

expression. Catholicism has led several literary critics and theological scholars, such

as Alastair Fowler, Walter Allen, Anthony Burgess, Frederick Karl and many others

to probe deeply into Graham Greene‟s insights into the meaning of sin, death by

suicide, damnation and his use of themes such as extramarital sex as a grave sin and

despair beyond expectation of God‟s grace.

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Generally Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and Glory (1940), The Heart of

the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951) and A Burnt-out Case are referred to

as Graham Greene‟s “Catholic” novels. They argue th at in these novels Graham

Greene is greatly concerned with the interpretation of the conflict between good and

evil within the framework of Catholic belief. Referring to Graham Greene‟s mode of

fiction which belongs to the realistic tradition David Lodge in his Modes of Modern

Writing, 1977 says: “it is a great tradition revised to ad mit the Christian

eschatology” (51).

It is quite true that in these novels, Graham Greene makes Catholic characters

such as whisky Priest and Scobie, his protagonists. But Catholicism as a system of

principles and beliefs does not offer a sufficiently satisfactory solution to the

problems depicted by Graham Greene in these novels; rather Graham Greene seems

to be critical of Catholic faith and its principles. Though a catholic, in all his works

he denounces the working of Catholic Church, especially its practices and the

flamboyant, hyperbolical flourishes of the priests as they are cut off from the realities

of life. However, some essential beliefs of Catholicism relevant to Graham Greene‟s

works are:

There is a God; his ways are unknowable and his judgments are inscrutable.

His mercy showered even upon sinners.

There is also a devil – responsible for evil in the modern world.

Man is tainted by original sin.

There is a heaven or a hell after life.

Man has to have faith in God – it is his duty.

The final judgement is on the basis of faith or lack of faith only.

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The most deadly sin is despair – the total loss of faith due to a mistaken

conviction that God has abandoned one completely.

Suicide is the ultimate expression of despair – the most damning action.

Catholicism is perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Graham

Greene‟s work. He has been praised and admired by critics like R.A. Scott James

who have a keen interest in the depiction of Catholic ideas in literature. These critics

emphasize that since Graham Greene is himself a Catholic convert, he is at his best

in those novels that deal with the principles and prejudices of the Catholic faith. On

the contrary, there are critics like David Lodge and John Atkins who rightly adopt

the view that Catholicism as conventionally understood, is not an adequate

explanation of Graham Greene‟s thematic content. According to them, if Graham

Greene may be called a “Catholic” writer it is beca use his greatest works revolve

around characters and situations deeply concerned with the teachings of Catholicism.

He is first and foremost a creative artist, and he appeals to all types of

readers, whether they are Catholics or not. He is not propagating any religious

doctrine. Like the great French philosopher, Jacques Maritain, he believes that the

creative artist should show a sense of compassion for the sinner, without depicting an

agreement with evil and sin. In fact, in The Heart of the Matter and The Power and

the Glory Graham Greene has in fact, captured the very essence of Peguy‟s dictum

found in the Epigraph to The Heart of the Matter that, “The sinner is at the heart of

Christendom” (15). This is so because Graham Greene ‟s characters in these novels

are defenseless in the fact both of their weaknesses, and their sense of compassion. In

spite of recurrent critical opinions which pin down Graham Greene as a Catholic

novelist, what Maria Couto says in about the role of Catholicism in her Graham

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Greene: On the Frontier, Politics and Religion in the Novels writings merits attention of

the readers she claims:

The artistic validity of Greene‟s use of Catholicism in this novel can

best be appreciated when we come to understand that it functions not

in, by and for itself but as a way to exploring reality. (23)

Scobie, and the whisky priest are denied human dignity, tormented by guilt,

tortured by fears, yet they maintain their humanness and spiritual dignity. When seen

from this angle, Graham Greene cannot be simply called a “Catholic writer” but one

of the greatest artists who forcefully depict the Catholic universe of good and evil.

Graham Greene‟s own statement during a conversation with Mary Francois Allain,

about the use of Catholicism in his novels, supports the argument that in these novels

he does not wish to propagate Christianity. He says in his The Other Man:

Conversation with Graham Greene: “I don‟t as a rule write to defend an idea…. I

don‟t want to use literature for religious ends… My so called “Catholic” (78) novels

are written to convert any one.

However Graham Greene is impatient to transform the social disorder he has

come to associate with selfishness and capitalist greed. He despises the methods of

fascism and distrusts those of communism. He comes to think of humanism as a

corrective. To Graham Greene, then, Catholicism was both a source of internal

cultural unity and a transcendent tie across cultures and generations. Catholicism, he

supposes, would change people‟s attitudes and restore order without the violence

associated with class conflict. He seeks the redemptive and reformative quality of

Catholic belief. Richard Johnson in the Will to Believe Novelists of the Nineteen

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Thirties further asserts that: “Catholicism presented itself as the cure for the illness of

the times. It became for them not a means of retreat from the modern world, but of

ordering, in fiction and in life, a specifically contemporary reality.” (5)

There are some critics like George Woodcock who consider Graham Greene

as a political novelist. They give much weightage to his intense awareness of the

political climate of the twentieth century. They illustrate this view from his novels

located in war-torn parts of the globe, for example, Vietnam in The Quiet American

(1955), and countries ruined by dictatorship and political tension, for instance, Haiti

in The Comedians (1966), and Paraguay in The Honorary Consul (1973). But

Graham Greene is not essentially a political novelist, any more than he is a

“Catholic” writer. It is right that he often choose s as background countries crushed

under war or dictatorship but this choice does not necessarily mean that he wants to

achieve any political ends. Rather such places provide him with a backdrop to

describe suffering which is an integral part of life. Commenting on the “political”

nature of his novels, he says in his The Other Man: Conversation with Graham

Greene:

Certain books have clearly enough exercised a considerable political

influence, but mine don‟t belong in this category… I don‟t want to use

literature for political ends… Even if my novels ha ppen incidentally

to be political books, they‟re (not) written to provoke changes.. (75 –

76)

In a world dominated by political „isms‟ and instit ution and devoid of faith,

some sort of belief or commitment is called for and cannot be evaded. Graham

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Greene‟s picture of Haiti is just a microcosm of the chaotic conditions in the world at

large. In an attempt to establish their individual points of view critics have tended to

ignore the central aspect of Graham Greene‟s art. The human predicament, which is

Graham Greene‟s dominant concern, has escaped the notice of Graham Greene‟s

critics. The thread of humanity that gives unity to Graham Greene‟s novels needs to

be explored. Whatever the formal and ideological accretions, it is a humane approach

to the human situation on our generation that forms the nucleus of Graham Greene‟s

artistic vision and achievement.

The way to unify the various locales and the contemporaneity that is the

theme of Graham Greene‟s changing foreground in each novel is to give it the

comprehensive name of humanism. Whether the ostensible theme is religion or

withdrawal from religion, there is a persistent strain of humanism in all Graham

Greene‟s novels. T.S. Eliot in his In a Critique of the Humanism of Irving Babbit,

writes that the humanistic point of view is essentially “auxiliary to and dependent

upon the religious point of view” (6). T.S. Eliot‟s conception of humanism is

immensely relevant to the understanding and explication of Graham Greene‟s

philosophy grounded radically in his Catholicism. As Graham Greene develops, from

Brighton Rock to The Honorary Consul, a broadening up of his concern with religion

into a sort of religious humanism, which approximates to Eliot‟s viewpoint, is seen

clearly. These half a dozen novels of Graham Greene are basically unified by the

philosophy of humanism that lends his major works a thread of continuity. Graham

Greene‟s outlook on life is sustained by all humanists, he is committed to the defense

of humanity.

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Graham Greene‟s fiction reflects his humanism, his feeling for and

recognition of the world of man. His art is humanistic in content and universal in

form. It shows that artists‟ ceaseless struggle, his grappling with an intractable world;

in everything, technique and outlook, Graham Greene is human. His fiction

communicates his own life experiences, which is also the life experience of the

struggling, suffering humanity. Graham Greene‟s outlook on life, as J. Michiner in

his The Conscience of the Contemporary Novel, The Arts in Renewal views, is

sustained by “those well springs of humanism that h ave nourished our society in the

past” (132). He affirms the positive human values a nd reasserts in clear and

unequivocal terms the need for a moral life. Graham Greene‟s novels are memorable

defenses of men against machines of military life, tyranny and despair. He is aware

of man‟s weakness. He also recognizes the moral strength of man. Like all

humanists, he is committed to the defense of humanity.

In his commitment to defend humanity, Graham Greene realizes the

significance of faith. Faith to Greene is unconditioned and unconditional. It is the

free movement of the heart which as stated in The Lawless Roads comes to one

“shapelessly, without dogma” (14). Graham Greene‟s heroes acquire faith without

observing the rules of the church. Graham Greene‟s view of faith comes close to

Kierkegaard‟s, who was angry at Christianity, being reduced to conventionalized

institution which he regards as an apostasy, for it takes away all true decisions and

deep seriousness of the leap of faith.

To Kierkeggard as stated in his Fear and Trembling it flows out of man‟s

“inwardness” (89) and it is without objective evide nce. Graham Greene like

Kierkeggard, emphasizes the paradoxical nature of faith. But his religion leads him

22

not to turn his back on the wicked world, but, to embrace it and to wrestle with it and

plumb its depths not in any hatred even of its foulness, since even in creatures bestial

and unredeemed when he recognizes the image of God. Graham Greene‟s failure to

be orthodox, to accept without questioning, resulted in an anguished individualism.

Peter Mudford in Graham Greene affirms that: Dostoevsky‟s belief that man could

not live without pity was shared by Graham Greene, and extended to a metaphysical

belief in the mercy of God, of which it was a reflection. (6)

Though his principal characters remain true to their religious spirit, they are

in many respects wretched heretics, grievous offenders against express

commandments of the church. They often seek to conquer boredom and frustration

through a more or less clear-sighted acceptance of evil and all that it entails. They try

to achieve a sense of life, and self-identity through a submission to the destructive

element in their own nature and in the world outside. A sense of doom hovers about

his characters and they live and die conscious of their failure. They are vile and

despicable creatures, but they are also the children of the Lord and even in their

drunkenness and fornication and betrayal they bear witness to the miracle of God‟s

Grace.

The heart and hope of the unbeliever as well as vital intuitions that support

the devout catholic are well known to Graham Greene. And he knows, too, that the

devils of doubt at times sorely afflict the believer. His emphasis is on the agony of

the search, the evil that dwells in the heart of man, the importance of human beings

when they depend on their own finite powers, their longing for the absolute. God

remains unknowable, and the only certainty is as in Brighton Rock that of damnation.

Faith works paradoxically and incomprehensibly in Graham Greene‟s novels. The

23

agony is part of the search, the price of gaining the vision of God. Graham Greene‟s

vision of escape is indeed eschatological, miserable, fainted and tortured. It is

through suffering that they come close to God and gain a deeper, luminous, insight

into spiritual reality. When they are most abandoned, when they feel utterly lost, it is

then that they turn in despair to God.

Graham Greene takes God as a merciful God. He is considered the source of

all love. He is a supreme God, good in infinite intenseness. Graham Greene, as a

convert to Catholicism is not burdened by the traditions of theology, the weight of

dogmas which is why sin is effortlessly and artfully externalized. All Graham

Greene‟s novels have grace, the truth that man does not know. Hence, the novels

attempt an expression of faith and the moral imperatives implicit in humanity

through the use of confession, sacrilegious communion – the externals or the

apparatus of belief. Graham Greene in an interview with Philip Toynbee, The

Observer, 15. Sep. 1957 affirms that: “And the thing which interests me mo st is

discovering the humanity that exists in apparently inhuman characters.”

The discovery of being as religions state lies in submission and passivity.

According to Paul Tillich as he states in his The Courage to Be: “encountering God

means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity” (165). The

characters in Graham Greene‟s novels seek to define their apathy, erosion and

degeneration by their consistent struggle to establish their receptivity towards a trans-

personal, transcendent, region of bliss. And as a result, the devilish sinners have to

grapple with their person in an inverse scenario. They have to ascertain that guilt and

corruption are vices and innocence and righteousness are moral virtues. It is as Maria

Couto‟s Graham Greene: On the Frontier remarks: “The sense of freedom with

24 which Greene approaches Catholicism, paradoxically makes his evocation of the

spiritual more real.” (65)

As rebels of hierarchies, orthodoxies, Graham Greene‟s protagonists engage

themselves in an intellectual – instinctive – medit ative dialogue between their selves

and God. Hence, the Priest in The Power and the Glory, Scobie in The Heart of the

Matter, Sarah in The End of the Affair and Querry in A Burnt-out Case are trapped in

a dialectical tension between the exercise of free will and their sense of divine order.

It is to say, Graham Greene‟s characters are obsessed with the basic issue of final

cause and human reason as god, man and the devil, supra-rational, rational and

irrational, becoming, being and non-being constitute points of reference in his

novels. Scobie, Sarah, the Priest and Querry are shaken from their ground as they

seek to pursue the voice of their conscience, the authenticity of their selves, moral

righteousness, and social justice. What they seek is solidity, and validation for

themselves in their collective responses.

Milton‟s “Paradise Lost” is concerned with the fall enness of humanity and its

capacity for regaining its bliss. Graham Greene‟s preoccupation too is the fallenness of

humanity and the possibility of redemption. Graham Greene‟s Catholicism is in full play

in his novels and it absolves even the worst sinners and confers even sainthood on them.

What will astonish even a casual reader is that it simply is not a religion position which

salvages the sinners in Greene‟s world. There is something more. Added to his

Catholicism what the casual reader as well as the critical researcher will notice is

perhaps his humanism, which cannot condemn any soul to perish in hell fire. Crime, sin,

evil, fear, despair and damnation are his common themes. But they are mixed with

redemption, salvation, love, pity, and belief in God.

25

As Graham Greene himself states in A Sense of Reality “the obedient flock did not

give the shepherd any satisfaction or the loyal son interest his father.” (48)

An analysis of his novels will illustrate this point. John Spurling in his

Graham Greene says “it is the quintessential rogue's or sinner's creed which is

recited implied with more or less seriousness in almost every book Greene has

written” (7). His novels basically deal with the th eme of sin and salvation which is

damnation in the eyes of the orthodox people, and salvation in the eyes of the liberal

people. His novels impart the message that out of the darkness of the present

generation, one can get light only by god's mercy, by cultivating a pure heart, by

believing in God, by seeking salvation and redemption from misery, sin and

damnation.

The crimes committed by man are considered aberrations that call for

rehabilitation, not sins that may endanger one's chance for ultimate salvation. People

believe in God, but only a few know His presence with the acute, sometimes aching,

awareness of Graham Greene's characters. For, Graham Greene believes that from

impurity comes purity, from demonism saintliness, from unbelief belief and from

vice virtue. His heroes often seem closer to demons than to saints.

Indeed, it can be boldly asserted that Graham Greene has revised the

Christian novel. If the proto type of the Christian quest in Bunyan‟s Pilgrim’s

Progress is the quest for God and for the Heavenly city of God, then Graham Greene

has indeed changed the procedure. In Graham Greene‟s work, the quest is undertaken

by a sinner who stumbles along the way to the heavenly city almost forsaking God

and embracing the devil in his crude inability to fulfill what God

26 requires. It is this concern how the poor in spirit, the weak in will, the proud in soul

can be saved which won him the title the twentieth century laureate of sin and

salvation.

Nearly every serious protagonist of Graham Greene, despite external

expedience and even personal degradation, has a vision of saintliness, while his inner

conflict often not apparent to him results from his inability to live up to his ideal. In

these terms Graham Greene places the tension between pride and moderation,

analogous to the conflict of the Greek tragic hero. Like Oedipus, whose pride has

overwhelmed his sense of reasonableness, the whisky priest, Scobie, Sarah and

Querry all recognize how far short they have fallen of the ideal, how mortal they

really are. Through these heroes Graham Greene retells the tale of the false heroism

and pride, which drives men into thinking themselves as Gods. The heroes of his

novels, as R.W.B. Lewis says in “The Triology”, Graham Greene A Collection of

Critical Essays, represent:

The shifting and interwoven attributes of the Graham Greenean man:

a being capable of imitating both Christ and Judas; a person who is at

once a pursuer and the man pursued; a creature with the splendid

potentiality either of damnation or salvation. (52)

Graham Greene believes that it is only through humbling oneself before God

can one become truly heroic. The imperfect man, the one closer to the devil, is for

Graham Greene, precisely the one who is in need of God. His hero, the successful,

boasting man full of overweening pride, challenges the order of the universe by

considering himself greater than the Gods, and this point, when he attempts from

27

man-size to God-size at the very apex of pride and vanity, he is struck down. In their

hatred, his heroes are closer to God than those who love God. Graham Greene feels

that God seeks out the one who would deny Him, for they are probing the very roots

of His existence and with this God can sympathize. God is, in Graham Greene's

terms, reborn only in those who question Him, and he is not present in those who

accept His supremacy unquestioningly. Graham Greene rejects the view that the

believer will be saved and the unbeliever damned.

This is how Graham Greene imaginatively reiterates one of his dominant

obsessions, namely, that it is the sinner who unwittingly possesses sainthood and

thereby traits of humanism reach a quality of God. He affirms the belief that the

spiritual existence of love is the supreme revelation of existence of the self. This is to

admit that the self is a material individual as well as a spiritual personality. Moved

by an irrational affection for the inhabitants of this world, he shows ways to the

present day “hollow man” to become a blissful man. The humblest of the humble

will be highly honoured. As Eliot says in “East Coc ker” ( Four Quartets): The only

wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless (47-

48).

He has travelled almost all the continents of the world and has been through

Liberia, Mexico, Indo-China, Congo, India and a number of other countries. These

countries exposed to him new levels of artistic consciousness which is reflected in

his works. Though his works reveal the contemporary gloom and anxiety, it is wrong

to dub him as a pessimist. At the very bottom of this heap of degraded humanity he

believes that there exists the possibility of love. Out of the darkness of the present

generation, Graham Greene, by showering love upon sinners, hopes one can get light

28 only by God's grace, by having a good and pure heart, by believing in God, by

seeking salvation and redemption from misery and sin. No man is past salvation in

life. God‟s grace dawns not only upon perfect men but also on the sinners leading

them to the path of salvation. It is because as Alexander Pope says, “to err is human,

and to forgive is divine.” Through the characters o f Graham Greene says David

Pryce Jones in his Graham Greene that: “only by a profound knowledge, almost a

love of sin and the despair accompanying it, can a human being reach salvation”

(33).

The heroes only by sinking to the depths of sin are brought to faith and

redemption. They try to pursue or attain the state of “stillness” from the state of

sinfulness. As a researcher S. Cauveri has said in her “Theme of Guilt and Love in

the Family Reunion and Brighton Rock” : Suffering and sin naturally entail a

spiritual rebirth (155). This is illustrated through their lives and their sinful past is

turned into glorious future. They represent the hunted man who in turn becomes the

hunter, the peaceful man who has learned to love justice by suffering injustice. In an

interview with Martin Shuttle work and Simon Raven, quoted in Graham Greene: A

Collection of critical Essays Graham Greene himself once said: “They sin but the re

is no limit to God's mercy and because this is important there is a difference between

not confessions in fact and the complacent and the pious may not realize it.” (159)

If Graham Greene today enjoys immense renown, it is because he along with

other writers like Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eiot, William Golding and Evelyn Waugh

has breathed life into the vanishing values of life. It is well known that no man can

escape the universal net of sin. Hence to live is to fall, to be human is to be sinful. It

29

is this human situation that has a perennial significance, finds expression in most of

Graham Greene‟s novels as viewed above.

The sordid, wicked and evil modern life has completely gone astray from

religious canons. To restore order, to retain people‟s interest in church became the

sole aim of Graham Greene. The main endeavour of Graham Greene in his life and

career as reviewed above has been to make a search for the green patch of happiness

in life which is just a dry desert of boredom, conflicts, corruption and frustration. As

a whole, his novels suggest that life without kindness is meaningless. Through his

novels he shows that his is a way, a religious way, a radiant way and a humanistic

way. To achieve this he instills hope that even the lost sheep is cared for by its

shepherd. When human beings develop their capacity to love others, they in turn are

loved by God. Human love is an emblem of divine love. It is aptly observed by S.T.

Coleridge in the “Ancient Mariner” that:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us.

He made and loveth all. (II, 614 – 617)

The above study leads to formulate the fact that Graham Greene‟s works

reveal his preoccupation with the human condition and his abundant humanity for the

fallen mankind. It is far more spiritual rather than religious and secular. Something

transcendental, an experience of feeling one with every human being, fathoming out

a saint in a sinner, a stooping low to grasp the sinner in order to elevate. For him

humanism is not merely a high brow sense of feeling pity for the underdog, but to

30

show respect for all living beings and true tolerance for the variety in which living is

expressed. To him, religion – be it Catholicism or any sect, cannot simply be a set of

dogmas. To him the religious dogmas as well as secular laws are not for hunting the

poor aberrant fellow beings. He will rather go to any extend to twist and bend the

same if only a damned fellow can be saved. To him no man is a saint or a sinner

entirely. He believes every human is a bundle of both divine virtue and devilish evil.

It only needs little compassion to save the other if only humanity has to progress.

Thus his humanistic attitudes transcend the limits and bounds of ordinary perceptions

and hover in the realms of spiritualism.

This has ended up in using the paradox that even fundamentalist can become

a humanist in many of his novels. His heroes may be sinners or demonic, but they are

full of human kindness and pity. Sarah, Scobie and the Priest are full of compassion.

And these characters though completely disintegrated by sin appear to be closer to

spiritual reality than the pious and complacent people. Because of their willingness to

sacrifice their lives and even suffer eternal damnation for the sake of those whom

they love, Graham Greene credits Sarah, the whisky priest, and Scobie, for all their

sinfullness, with spiritual experiences comparable with those of saints.

It is gratifying to note that similar theme has found expression in Hindu

tradition centuries back. The lives of some of the great saints of India, show how

they who happened to be „sinners‟ later evolved int o real saints by the grace of God.

Valmiki, whom Indians call „Adi Kavi‟, the author o f The Ramayana, according to

the tradition had been a thief in his past life, before he took to penance.

Thirumangaialwar also lived the life of a thief but became a saint in his later life. The

conversion of Perialvar, one of the twelve devotees of Lord Vishnu, from a thief to a

31 saint, the changes to which Arunagirinathar has ordinated himself from the state of

sinning to the state of becoming a staunch devotee of Lord Muruga lead to

comprehend the showering of God‟s grace on even sinners.

According to many religions, what is more important is what happens when a

man takes to sanyasa and his past life is regarded as an aspect of „Maya‟. Tagore‟s

Chitra illustrates it thus: “Illusion is the first appeara nce of truth”. His heroes have

succeeded in bringing forth the idea that the end of life is not in beginning to enjoy

the evanescent pleasures of life, but in the realization of faith. Faith is the beginning

of life. It is just as “East Coker” says: “In my en d is my beginning.” (V-38)

Temporal borders may differ; languages may differ; religions may differ;

their outlook and approach may differ; but man‟s relationship with god remains the

same wherever he is and whatever be his religion is. Though the religions differ in

details they throw light on the main fact, that God never abandons anybody and even

the base and the mean are cared for and saved by Him. It is as stated in The

Upanishad “the self, deep hidden in all being, is not reveal ed to all but to the seer

pure in heart and concentrated in mind (29). The humanism exemplified by Jesus

Christ, M.K. Gandhi and Lord Buddha through their sufferings is ever a path, though

not the often taken road, to attain wisdom of life.

The particular works taken for the present study are The Power and the

Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair and A Burnt-out Case because

the central theme - the sinner to the saint paradox - of these novels find expression

more or less in the same pattern. A. Arunachalam‟s research on A Comparative study

of Greene and Golding in 1996 examined the then prevailing conditions of life as

32

stated in the novels of Graham Greene and Golding. The research established sincere

longings and hopes to enter into the world of bliss from which man has fallen by

disobedience and disregard to listen to the voice of god, through humility once again.

Stimulated by the relevance of A. Arunachalam‟s research and its relevance even

now to the prevailing society, the present research is undertaken to re-plough new

furrows in the old soil, that is to say the discovery of fresh insights with regard to

Graham Greene‟s humanism as expressed in his novels .

The present research on Graham Greene, adopting moralistic and psychological

approach under the title “Transcenden tal Humanism in the Select Novels of Graham

Greene”, is divided into five chap ters. The first chapter introduces the author, his

background, art, characterization, the concept of transcendental humanism and

formulates the hypothesis. The second chapter tries to discover the secular concept of sin

and salvation in the novels taken for study and its significance in the present context.

The third chapter attempts to find out the Catholic concept of sin and salvation as per

Christian doctrines. The fourth chapter focuses on Graham Greene‟s transcendental

humanistic concept of sin and salvation. The last chapter sums up the arguments stated

earlier and suggests some areas that may be of vital interest to those scholars who aspire

to take up Greene‟s works for doctoral studies.