26 - Graham Greene

Summary

Born in the same generation as Borges, Beckett, and Barthes, Graham Greene (1904–91) studiously avoided postmodernism: not for him, the myth-making, the magic, the bizarre hilarity of a world gone crazed after the death of God. Although his career spanned the period that, in England, ran from the height of modernism in the 1920s to that of postmodernism in the 1980s, his major novels display little of the self-consciousness characteristic of these literary movements, and their only implausible events are the result of his Catholicism (though even these are always capable of a natural explanation). Occasionally a character speaks to God, and God replies. How are we to construe that? The odd unobtrusive miracle takes place – or does it? Apart from these brief flashes of the supernatural, Greene is relentless in portraying the world as absurd, grotesque, and deeply disappointing. His first novel, The Man Within, appeared in 1929, two years after Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It contains passages that could be described as stream of consciousness, but Greene soon abandoned this modernist technique for a tougher, more muscular stance that he shared with George Orwell : enough of this effete introspection – let’s portray the real world in all its horror and squalor. He wrote twenty-six novels (including two that were never published and those he called ‘entertainments’) plus short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, biographies, autobiographies, children’s books, travel writing, journalism, essays, and film criticism.