After the Fall: The World of Graham Greene's Thrillers

Abstract

Although such statements from Greene have tended to discourage critical consideration of his entertainments, if we overlook the perfunctory tone we can see the remark revealing his understanding that such formulaic literature as spy novels demands a special structure of narrative conventions not encountered in serious or, to use J.A. Cawelti's term, fiction-conventions which, as critics like Cawelti, Robert Warshow and Ralph Harper argue, both determine and are determined by the expectations readers bring to these works. Yet, despite his labelling Stamboul Train, The Confidential Agent, The Ministry of Fear and Our Man in Havana as entertainments, and authorial comments like the one quoted above notwithstanding, I shall argue that Greene deliberately sets out to challenge-if not frustrate-reader expectations by either departing from the basic conventions of the formulaic narrative world or else utilizing these conventions in such a way as to blur the line separating formulaic from mimetic fiction. I do not wish to suggest, however, that these entertainments are mere literary games in which a clever author plays with his readers' sensibilities. Like Conrad's The Secret Agent before them, Greene's thrillers represent a attempt to establish the spy novel as an appropriate vehicle for exploring the tensions, ambiguities, darkness and sense of alienation which characterize the experience of modernity in the twentieth century. The most significant feature of formulaic narratives-spy novels, westerns, gothic romances, science fiction fantasies, detective thrillers-as defined by Warshow is self-referentiality: