Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence

188 Pages·1996·20.16 MB·English

by  Robert Pendleton (auth.)

GRAHAM GREENE'S CONRADIAN MASTERPLOT
Graham. Greene's
Conradian Masterplot
The Arabesques of Influence
Robert Pendleton
First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-24365-5 ISBN 978-1-349-24363-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24363-1
First published in the United States of America 1996 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC ..
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-12571-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pendleton, Robert.
Graham Greene's Conradian masterplot: the arabesques of influence
I Robert Pendleton.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indelt.
ISBN 978-0-312-12571-4
I. Greene, Graham, 1904-91-Knowledge-Literature. 2. Greene,
Graham, 1904-91-Stories, plots etc. 3. Conrad, Joseph,
1857-1924---lnfluence. 4. English fiction-Stories, plots, etc.
S. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Title.
PR6013.R44Z6578 1996
823'.912-dc20 94-44448
CIP
© Robert Pendleton 1996
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-62888-1
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of
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the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
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10 9 8 7 6 s 4 3 2
OS 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 'The Proper Formula': Conrad's Transformed
Adventure Story 11
2 'Writing off the Elaborate Scaffolding': Greene's
Detour to Adventure 56
3 'A Distant Memory of the Sanctus Bell': Greene's
Catholic 'Heart of Darkness' 90
4 'He Who Forms a Tie': The Conradian Protagonist in
Greene's Later Novels 117
5 'Dissolving into Laughter': Comedy and Carnival
in the Final Chapter 139
Epilogue 156
Notes 160
Bibliography 170
Index 178
v
For G.S. and F.D.M.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for
allowing me to inspect Greene's letters, manuscripts and diaries.
Appreciative thanks are also extended to Porter Abbott, Bettina
Barrett, Bishop George Barrett, Eloise Hay, Joss Marsh, Evelyn B.
Pendleton, Donna Rudolph and Cedric Watts for their helpful com
mentaries on the manuscript at various stages of its completion.
vii
Introduction
Literary influence comes easily and dies hard. Graham Greene seems,
at least from his undergraduate years, to have experienced an
almost fatal attraction for Joseph Conrad. At Balliol, for example,
Greene wrote a poem which asserted that 'no Browne brings me
such pleasure, I As my loved Barrie, Conrad, Bernard Shaw' (129),
and in a letter to his fianc~e in 1925, he told her 'I love you more
than John Donne ... and Joseph Conrad and wet laurels' (219).1
While it remains unclear if the eventual failure of their marriage
can be attributed to Greene's penchant for.such comparisons, his
own testimony in the travel journal In Search of a Character (1962)
blames Conrad's 'too great and too disastrous' influence (31) for the
failure of his second novel, Rumour at Nightfall (1931). In the auto
biographical work, A Sort of Life (1972), Greene reflects that 'There
is no spark in The Name of Action or Rumour at Nightfall because
there was nothing of myself in them .... All that was left in the heavy
pages of the second was the distorted ghost of Conrad' (A Sort of
Life 206). He castigates Rumour at Nightfall as 'romantic and deriva
tive' (211), describing its prose in Ways of Escape (1982) as 'flat and
stilted and pretentious' and its characterisation as 'non-existent',
explaining that 'the young writer had obviously been reading again
and alas! admiring Conrad's worst novel, The Arrow of Gold' (Ways
16-17).
However, Greene's assertion that this influence was mainly sty
listic obscures the generic similarity of his novels to Conrad's. Both
writers show a common tendency to merge different kinds of nar
rative, producing what E.D. HirschJr defines as an 'intrinsic genre'.2
Hirsch argues that 'the growth of new genres depends upon an
imaginative leap [by which] the old is assimilated to the new and
something genuinely new is realised' (Hirsch 105), a process which
may occur through 'two old types [being] amalgamated ... or an
existing type ... extended' (105). I wish to argue that both Conrad's
and Greene's novels join the adventure story of Robert Louis
Stevenson, Rider Haggard and John Buchan, on the one hand, with
the more realistic political novel defined by Flaubert, Turgenev and
1
2 Graltam Greene's Conradian Masterplot
Maupassant, and the intricate depiction of human interiority by
Henry James, on the other. TI1e result is the creation of a unique
type of political adventure story dramatised by psychological
motivation.
While many critics have noted comparisons between Greene and
Conrad, they usually concentrate their attention upon theme rather
than genre? It seems more profitable, however, to examine Conrad's
and Greene's fictions in terms of the way they fuse different types
of story, in order to convey thematic concerns at a more profound
level. The dramatisation of such a dilemma between faith and be
trayal in Under Western Eyes and The Quiet American, for example,
reveals interiority of character in the form of Fowler's and Razumov's
personal guilt and remorse. Psychological revelation actually struc
tures the adventure plot, the conspiratorial machinations of which
enmesh these protagonists in a more than physical way, so that
finally the individual's dilemma microcosmically embodies the larger
imperialistic oppression which the novels seek to interrogate.
Recent studies move towards a consensus that there is a complex
interaction between genres. John G. Cawelti and Robert Scholes
suggest that we need to be flexible in defining the 'popular' and the
'serious'. Cawelti distinguishes 'formulaic' works, which 'necessar
ily stress intense and immediate kinds of excitement and gratifi
cation' from 'mimetic' ones characterised by 'more complex and
ambiguous analyses of character and motivation' (Cawelti 14), seeing
these genres as 'two poles that most literary works lie somewhere
between' (13). Similarly, Robert Scholes describes 'a continuum of
possibilities, along which superior linguistic competence enables
readers to derive entertainment from increasingly complex works'
(Scholes 59). Winifred Fluck goes further, attempting to complicate
the view which sees popular culture as formulaic and stereotypical
'because it does not dare or does not want to disturb existing patterns
of perception' (Fluck 53). He argues that we cannot take for granted
that this 'mere affirmation' which is hypothetically to be found in
formulaic literature 'should provide pleasure to such an unusual
degree that it is consistently sought' (53). He thinks that 'only if the
text provides a certain amount of genuinely felt anxiety and distur
bance will the reader become engaged' (53-6). Rejecting the distinc
tion between modernism and mass culture which separates 'the
conventional use of signs on the one side and the model of an
unexpected new and semantically disruptive combination of signs
on the other' (56), Fluck argues that 'each medium and genre within
Introduction 3
popular culture obviously has its own cycle of innovation and con
ventionalization' (56). Popular texts can be innovative, he thinks, by
mediating between 'a conventional use of signs and its disturbance
in ways that may not endanger its own readability', whereas the
experimental text 'cannot entirely dissolve convention if it wants to
retain a last remnant of accessibility' (57). Fluck concludes that it is
necessary to develop 'a perspective in which the popular text ... is
not merely the "low" or debased version of established cultural
forms, but emerges as a "third" model of aesthetic function besides
those of realism and modernism' (62).
Peter Rabinowitz shifts the argument further towards reception
theory to view the notions of 'popular' and 'serious' literature merely
as ready-made 'strategies' for reading, which can be narrower or
broader, depending on how many and which 'rules' the reader
applies (Rabinowitz 176-8). Rabinowitz argues that in popular lit
erature, which is metonymic and plot-oriented, the reader usually
emphasises 'rules of configuration' (185), 'a knowledge of patterns
[whereby] we can ... develop expectations and experience a sense
of completion' (44). In this way, we tend to consider an element
which is brought to our attention in a work of popular fiction 'in
terms of what it may tell us about plot outcome, rather than in
terms of what it may reveal about the inner states of the characters
and the world of the book' (185).4
Conrad's and Greene's novels demand to be read with an aware
ness of these rules of notice, which apply both to plot-orientated
fiction and to narratives which deal with 'inner states of the char
acters and the world of the book'. If, as Jerry Palmer suggests, the
plot of the thriller 'is the process by which the hero averts [a] con
spiracy' (Palmer 53), then the hero who averts this conspiracy in
Greene's and Conrad's novels is often the conspirator himself.
Marlow, the narrator of Lord Jim, for example, is as much concerned
with the inner changes of the protagonist (and his own) as with
Jim's external successes in Patusan; the narrative constantly interro
gates Jim's inner failure in deserting the Patna pilgrims and his
decision to face execution for unintentionally betraying his adopted
people, 'the Bugis'. It is impossible finally to distinguish the external
adventure from the interior one.
This mixed genre was not of course immaculately conceived by
Conrad. His novels in many ways constitute a response to a divi
sion between the adventure formula and the interior narrative which
began to make itself felt in the later part of the nineteenth century