| 书目名称 | Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot | | 编辑 | Robert Pendleton | | 视频video | | | 图书封面 |  | | 出版日期 | Book 1996 | | 版次 | 1 | | doi | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24363-1 | | isbn_softcover | 978-1-349-24365-5 | | isbn_ebook | 978-1-349-24363-1 |
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Front Matter |
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Abstract
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,Introduction, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
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, / As my loved Barrie, Conrad, Bernard Shaw’ (129), and in a letter to his fiancée in 1925, he told her ‘I love you more than John Donne … and Joseph Conrad and wet laurels’ (219).. 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 . (1962) blames Conrad’s ‘too great and too disastrous’ influence (31) for the failure of his second novel, . (1931). In the autobiographical work, . (1972), Greene reflects that ‘There is no spark in . or . 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’ (. 206). He castigates . as ‘romantic and derivative’ (211), describing its prose in . (1982) as ‘flat and stilted and pretentious’ and its characterisation as ‘non-existent’, explaining that ‘the young writer had obviously been reading
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,‘The Proper Formula’: Conrad’s Transformed Adventure Story, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
In ., Conrad reports that . was his ‘first introduction to English imaginative literature’ (. 71), and confesses that he has ‘such an intense and unreasoning affection’ for ., ‘dating from the days of [his] childhood, that its very weaknesses are more precious to [him] than the strengths of other men’s work’ (124). Conrad found Dickens attractive for his ability to combine a suspenseful plot with a revelation of character and atmosphere through structure, style, and imagery. In ., we can clearly see the combination of a formulaic detective plot with a wider tragic vision of English society, where a continuing self-examination by the protagonist Esther Summerson produces an interrogation of the self and that society at multiple levels. In this sense, Dickens’s narrative technique becomes one of Conrad’s principal inspirations.
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,‘Writing off the Elaborate Scaffolding’: Greene’s Detour to Adventure, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
During his first years of writing, Greene was, as he later confessed, ‘reading again and alas! admiring Conrad’s worst novel .’ (. 17). Yet it is not so much what he called the ‘romantic[ism] and derivative[ness]’ of this novel’s theme that mars his early fiction, but the confusion of its generic makeup. Like Conrad, Greene seems unsure what . of novel he is attempting to write. . (1929) teeters uneasily between interior revelation and boys’ smuggling adventure. Similarly, . (1930) is unsure whether to be a spy story or a tale of erotic intrigue, while . (1931) is an almost unintelligible interior drama which seethes with romantic rivalry. Complicated by a series of . and multiple betrayals, it is even set during the Carlist revolution, Conrad’s personal stamping ground. Greene’s novels from . to . (1933) represent the period of quiescence or narrative non-being that Peter Brooks describes in terms of Freudian theory as preceding the beginning and end of single narrative plots.
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,‘A Distant Memory of the Sanctus Bell’: Greene’s Catholic ‘Heart of Darkness’, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
While Catholicism in Greene’s entertainments is generally subordinated to psychological melodrama, the reverse is the case in his other novels of this period. Here, theology reveals interior consciousness, while still repressing the political narrative. In . (1980), Greene writes that at first his ‘professional life … and religion were contained in quite separate compartments’ (. 75); only ‘the socialist persecution of religion in Mexico, and … General Franco’s attack on Republican Spain’ overcame his reluctance ‘to bring them together’ (75). I would argue, however, that even though the main focus of Greene’s fiction is on Catholicism in the late thirties, it is much later before it becomes ‘inextricably involved … in contemporary life’ (75). During the thirties and forties, Greene experiments with the interior narrative both in his Catholic novels and in his melodramatic entertainments, leaving the political narrative largely in abeyance.
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,‘He Who Forms a Tie’: The Conradian Protagonist in Greene’s Later Novels, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
In his book . (1984), Peter Brooks discusses narrative repetition as ‘a . in the text, a doubling back … a return to origins or a return of the repressed’ which ‘works as a process of . towards the creation of an energetic constant-state situation’ (Brooks 100–1). What Brooks means by this is that narratives moving towards their conclusions seem to ‘come together’, integrating hitherto fragmented material in new and significant ways. Applying this to the Conradian masterplot in Greene’s later fiction, we can see a return . and a return . the repressed political narrative, ‘both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it’ (Brooks 99–100). In . (1955), . (1966), . (1973) and . (1978), the political narrative returns with full force to become more integrated with the Catholic interior narrative and thriller plot.
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,‘Dissolving into Laughter’: Comedy and Carnival in the Final Chapter, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
While . (1955) signals the beginning of Greene’s mature political era, the same year also marks the publication of a very different work, ., which displaces the Catholic interior narrative into the genre of romantic comedy. Declaring that ‘[a] reputation is like a death mask’, which he ‘wanted to smash’ (. 216), Greene describes the book as ‘an amusing, agreeably sentimental ., something which neither [his] friends nor [his] enemies would expect’ (216). In spite of its apparent lightness, however, the story dramatises a more serious religious and moral theme, initiating a series of comic novels which bring the religious, political and psychological narratives into yet another relation.
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,Epilogue, |
Robert Pendleton |
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Abstract
If . represents an ‘open’ conclusion to Greene’s long dialogue with Conrad, his final novel, . (1988), returns to a kind of narrative quiescence, a coming to rest in a more or less unmodified version of the Conradian masterplot which recapitulates the secular interior narrative of .. The book begins as a comic, quasi-religious allegory, with the Captain winning the narrator-protagonist Jim from his father, nicknamed ‘the Devil’, in a game of Backgammon; later, however, it abandons this potential dialogue between a religious interior plot and a political one to become a more purely Conradian version of the narrative of political commitment and betrayal.
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Back Matter |
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Abstract
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发表于 2025-3-21 19:57:57
