Modernism's Shell-Shocked History: Amnesia, Repetition, and the War in Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear

Abstract

[T]he 1930s quickly became associated with the rejection of high modernism as it had developed after the war and with a renewed dedication realism and political commitment. Brian Diemert (23) [T]o fight against forgetting means fight remember that forgets as soon as believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain. Jean-Francois Lyotard (10) In his timely study of Greene's early entertainments and their use of the thriller format, [1] Diemert argues convincingly for the seriousness of these works and of The Ministry of Fear, one of [Greene's] most skillful and complex novels (151), in particular. Further, as my first epigraph testifies, Diemert sees much of the complexity of this novel as stemming from Greene's attempt, through his adoption of such a popular narrative form, repudiate the aesthetic elitism and dubious politics of that generation of high modernist writers that preceded his own (28, 35). Indeed, in so situating Greene's early works, Diemert concurs with the standard critical wisdom on British writers of the 1930s and their relationship the modernists who went before them. [2] Yet it is my contention that Greene's work, and The Ministry of Fear especially, cannot be so neatly disentangled from the project of Anglo-American modernism. Indeed, Greene's sole novel written during the war years [3] remains an essentially moderni st one, in that the Second World War is made comprehensible here by taking its place in that of repetition that was the touchstone of those modernists whom Orwell saw as temperamentally hostile the notion of 'progress' (507). That is say, the war, as Greene figures it, is both understandable and inevitable precisely as it is mandated by a Western conceived, in modernist terms, as the ceaseless rehearsal of past atrocity. Greene, in The Ministry of Fear's attempt find a discourse make a sense of the world of the blitz (R. Smith 115), thus extends the modernists' own repudiation of the meliorist historiography of liberal thought, presenting instead a that inexorably reenacts past rituals of violence. This bloody repetition, moreover, perpetuates itself, for Greene, through a process of forgetting akin that which Lyotard decries in my second epigraph. Central the story of Arthur Rowe is not only the shellshock amnesia that disrupts the narrative but also his persistent forgetting, not, significantly, of the past but of the present real condition of self and others. Greene's novel, in its treatment of Rowe's steady adherence the adventure-tale ethics learned in childhood and of his resulting susceptibility pity as a destructive emotion, shows both Rowe and his war-torn world more generally be repeating their respective pasts in the form of deadly force. While the engine of such dire repetition is thus revealed as a kind of remembering, this memory acts also as a forgetting in Lyotard's sense, a holding for certain of an inherited ethos that is oblivious both the actual character of the self and the very selfhood of others. In this way, Greene's text, in its presentation of the war as r ehearsal, repeats, in its turn, the modernists' antiliberal sense of history, but does so by diagnosing Western as the necessary, if slaughterous, result of a refusal grant the other particularity and autonomy, grant her, in other words, selfhood in liberal terms. Yet before proceeding examine Greene's explication of the war as an instance of modernist thinking on history, I want first proffer some defense for my claim that Anglo-American modernism centers on this sense of as tragic repetition. To be sure, current formulations of modernism tend paint a rather different picture, with many critics, indeed, reading modernism as nothing other than a retreat from questions of history. [4] Thus Marianne DeKoven sees modernist fiction as deliberately suppressing the historical referent, seeking instead to save the world through an art purified of history (138), [5] though, on her account, this suppression is doomed the happiest of failures, such strategies only serving to render those [historical] facts with greater power than direct representation would give (151). …