Abstract
This article examines Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent and A Burnt-out Case as dystopian novels that expose the disillusionment and malaise of the modern world. Drawing on the conventions of dystopian fiction, Greene presents a world fraught with war, violence, dehumanisation, domestic dissonance, and spiritual emptiness. The central burden of this discourse is to prove that Greene’s novels steadily progressed in his bold use of the convention of dystopian fiction. Through the characters of D (in The Confidential Agent) and Querry (in A Burnt-out Case), Greene depicts Everyman’s plight in a world stripped of moral order, social cohesion, and human dignity.
Keywords: Graham Greene, dystopian fiction, The Confidential Agent, A Burnt-out Case, modern world, disillusionment, war, violence
Introduction
What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery…. Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotisms, evil — or else an absolute ignorance. (Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, 1948: 117)
Graham Greene was undoubtedly one of the most gifted and acclaimed novelists of the War/Post-war era in Britain. His novels reflect a constant search for new novelistic modes of expression capable of visualizing the disillusionment and malaise of the modern world. According to Waldo Clarke (1976), an enduring trait of Greene’s fiction is the willingness to look at the repulsive face of the twentieth century. Since literature mostly reflects the mood of its age and enabling contexts, Greene’s fiction dwells on the conflicts and pains of the modern world. The central burden of this discourse is to prove that Greene’s novels steadily progressed in his bold use of the convention of dystopian fiction. It has been proved elsewhere that Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter are quintessential existential dystopian novels (See: Ayo Kehinde, 2004). However, in this present paper, an attempt is made to study more closely the dystopian features and political and ideological implications of the deployment of this convention in Greene’s The Confidential Agent and A Burnt-out Case.
Western imaginative literature took a decidedly dystopian turn in the twentieth century; this was with a view to reflecting the problems of the Western world in that century of wars and agonies. According to Keith Booker (1995), “in many ways, dystopian fiction has become a paradigmatic expression of the Western imagination in the twentieth century” (58). Dystopian fiction is a generic term for a work that is skeptical about ideal states and is fearful of totalitarian thought control. In such fictional work, the future is depicted as a nightmare world of state or corporate control and of dehumanized mechanization (Edward Quinn, 2006). In dystopian fiction, the novelist is always blunt; he or she uses the text to interrogate the idyllic posture of the pre-twentieth century utopianism.
Barbara Foley (1993) sums up the features of the cosmos of a dystopian work in the following words: “oppositional confrontation between the desires of a presumably unique individual and demands of an oppressive society that insists on total obedience and conformity in its subjects” (21). Thus, the world of dystopian fiction offers a stifling threat to the freedom and integrity of the individual.
The Confidential Agent: A Dystopian Reading
The Confidential Agent is classified by Greene himself as an “Entertainment”. However, a close reading of it reveals that it is a serious and highly accomplished work of art that dwells on some issues which bother on the existential problems of man in the modern world. As a dystopian novel, there is a background story of war, revolution, uprising, natural disaster and some other painful events which result in dramatic changes to the societies.
Set in England, during a civil war in a neighboring country (Holland), The Confidential Agent traces the gradual dehumanization and brutalization of a spy (D). It shows how a person can degenerate into crime and violence in such a situation. In line with a tenet of dystopian fiction, D is a protagonist who questions his society, because he often feels intuitively that something is terribly wrong with it. In the novel, Greene presents the problems of humanity in the modern world by a most skilful manipulation of plot and structure, depicting each stage of brutalization and frustration processes, proceeding very logically and inevitably from the preceding. D goes to England hopefully to get the coal which he is bound to miss getting. We witness a rather static world, where to struggle is to grope towards doom and failure.
The reader is introduced to quite a lot of ravaging dystopian images, including gulls, mourning, death, half-speed, fog, coffin and heat. War, a ubiquitous fact of the modern world, is a common motif in dystopian fiction. D is obsessed with war: “He carried the war with him; wherever D was, there was a war” (9). A dystopian society glorifies and justifies violence, therefore bringing upon itself violence. Hence, the modern world is also portrayed in The Confidential Agent as fraught with danger and interpersonal dissonance, which is a product of distrust: “The one person you trusted was yourself” (10). It is a world of anonymity. It is also a world of extreme individualism where there is a breakdown of communication as a result of the dissonant relationships among people.
Through the character of D, Greene depicts the modern man as impoverished and disturbingly alone with himself. D’s lack of food and fine possessions, and at a later stage, any amount of money, mirrors the physical, spiritual and economic conditions of man. He is bereft of any reassuring social status and of helpful social relationships. He travels light, with nothing but a leather wallet containing a brush and a comb, a toothbrush, and a few oddments. His condition is very disquieting. The hitherto important man, an erudite professor and famous author, is now reduced to the status of a beggar, petty thief and animal.
The effects of war on humans are also represented in the personality of D. We identify many differences between his life during the pre-war era and the post-war era. The former life was slightly idyllic, while the new one is plagued with pain and dissonance. War, in fact, has telling effects on ageing, beauty, mood and physique. D has undergone a number of painful experiences. He has tasted imprisonment (six months in a military prison); he has lost his wife to the war; his house is also burnt. His life has indeed been a labyrinth of pains. War has killed his emotion; he feels nothing but fear. Thus, the previously handsome young professor now has a grey moustache, with heavy lines around his mouth. There is a scar on his chin. He tells the detective who contends the genuineness of his photograph: “You know war changes people” (13).
D’s sudden degeneration into violence is also a case of ego-defence mechanism. His aggressive reactions are directed towards some innocent stimuli rather than the ones that actually cause his aggression. After his bid to purchase the coal fails, frustration, which subsequently elicits anger, creeps in. This leads D to engage in aggressive actions against his antagonists, with a view to ridding himself of obstacles. In a society replete with instances of brutalization, class discrimination, and victimization, violence, in man, is likely to break out soon, as we witness in D. D, ‘the hunted’, suddenly becomes ‘the hunter’.
In The Confidential Agents, Greene has raised some vital questions on the helplessness and restlessness of the various kinds of people in the modern world. It seems he proselytizes in the novel. To him, no human being, however intellectual he or she might be, can solve the problems of dissonance and pain in the world.
A Burnt-out Case: Terror and Spiritual Emptiness
Greene’s A Burnt-out Case is also perceived in this paper as a dystopian novel that dwells on a universe of terror, a society where there is subversion of utopian ideals. It explores the enduring conflict between human affection and moral imperatives and its accompanying metaphysical suffering, human limitations and failures. Indeed, the thematic foci of Greene in the novel revolve around the dissonance in a world of free-will, the disruptive chaos of a continuously changing world and the injustice that people visit on another. One of the central tenets of dystopian fiction that recurs in the novel is intentional miscarriage of justice. Greene insists, throughout the novel that the human beings in the modern world are encumbered with problems of dissonance and pain.
Querry, the protagonist of the novel, is an ambiguous character. A famous French Catholic architect, Querry is a man who has undergone a lot of negative metamorphoses. He attempts to expunge from his life everything that he has got and meant; he seems to be in a state of emptiness. This signifies the meaninglessness of life in the modern world. He has lost his sense and capacity for creativity, imagination, sexuality, hope and belief. He is completely bare of symbols, of indeed everything. His room is devoid of photographs of a community or a parent; it is “like a grave without a cross” (77). He has forsaken both pleasure (sex) and job (designing a building).
The character of Querry is therefore used to portray the frightening state of the modern world. He wants to enjoy a truce from the hurly burly of life, which continuously proves abortive. Father Thomas comments on this issue of inevitability of human fate: “For a good man, fame is always a problem” (142). A Burnt-out Case gives a vivid picture of the mood of the contemporary world and the plight of people living in it. W.B. Yeats, in his famous poem “The Second Coming”, captures the dissonant and painful realities of the world. It is a world where old and supposedly exhausted unities have been fractured and dissolved. There is total breakdown of order in the previously organised world. The scars left behind by the two world wars and other minor wars have turned human beings in the modern world into destroyers and murderers.
The novel is also replete with instances of domestic dissonance. This is mostly realised in the dissonant relationship between Rycker and his wife (Marie). In the family, we witness a very faulty husband-wife relationship. Rycker asserts his masculine prowess and invincibility by victimising his wife. In the novel, Greene dwells on the problem of “malignant sexism” (Ali Mazrui, 1993) in human society. Rycker subjects his wife to economic manipulation, sexual exploitation and political marginalisation.
It is against the background of the cut-throat domestic dissonance that Marie abandons her sick husband and elopes with Querry who does not understand her intention. She despises her husband because of a new ‘lover’. She sticks to her apparent lie that it is Querry, not Rycker, who is the father of the baby in her womb. This marks what the modern world has done to love and family life. Marriage has become a very fragile association that breaks very easily.
Querry’s involvement in the domestic affairs of the Ryckers stirs not only the wrath of the husband but also the anger and suspicion of the church. Querry is unable to read human motives. He does not know Marie can pose a threat to his living: “He thought rashly: poor frightened beast — this one was too young to be a great danger” (156). Rycker takes the law into his hands and follows an aggressive path to the resolution of his mental and domestic dissonance. His experiences and expectations brutalize him, and in turn make him so brutally callous that he murders Querry in cold blood.
Conclusion
Against the foregoing background, A Burnt-out Case lends itself to modernist critical probing because it foregrounds confusion, disillusionment and despair. The novel is Greene’s stock-taking of the problems of the post-world war era. Like the features of the period, the story deconstructs every established convention in society and critiques the rationale behind social institutions such as marriage, economy, politics, religion and education.
The socio-economic and political realities of the period make the novelist take some painful and dissonant issues as his thematic preoccupations in the novel. The modern man, like the average Greeneman, tends to keep on asking the question: “Who am I?” Discomfort is the pervading metaphor he uses to depict the pains of man in the modern world. Anybody who does not feel the pain of discomfort is dead; the feeling of discomfort is the measure of man’s existence — hence, the parody of the famous Descartean philosophical postulation, “Cogito Ergo Sum” (“I think, therefore, I am) by the Cabin-passenger in the novel: “I feel discomfort, therefore, I am alive” (9).
Like most of Greene’s novels, The Confidential Agent and A Burnt-out Case raise questions about the modern world, its predicaments and destination. Predictably, the image of humanity that the novels offer is negative. Greene’s treatment of the dissonant and painful realities of humanity in the modern world is both remarkable and unique. His fiction shows a shift in the belief in Robert Browning’s comforting refrain: “God’s in his Heaven/All’s right with the world!” The characters are out of step with their societies because the values of the societies are seen as warped or misguided. The characters rebel against the pressure and stress of the modern world, but, according to a seemingly ineluctable strategy of containment, they pay for their temporary emancipation with some significant loss of lives and of social respectability.