Our Man in Havana and Auteurism

Abstract

Our Man in Havana, like all fiction, could be read by audiences in different circumstances in different ways, depending on the sort of expectations they brought to the text. The story deployed elements and processes associated with several genres, including the espionage thriller, the comedy of manners, and the romantic comedy. For those intent on appreciating the story specifically as a Greene novel, many of the semantic elements from his earlier work reappeared in this 1958 novel: a seedy atmosphere (this time Batista’s Cuba), a protagonist with a checkered past and a seemingly dull future (here Jim Wormold, a British expatriate vacuum cleaner salesman), Catholicism (in the form of Wormold’s daughter Milly, raised a Catholic in accordance with his ex-wife’s wishes), and so forth. The Third Man was notable partly because it enabled intellectuals to read an explicitly anti-popular message in a film that ‘mass’ audiences made one of the most popular British films of all time; Greene’s Our Man in Havana, by contrast, prompted intellectual readers to reconsider the legitimacy of the auteurist sensibility that scholars had brought to bear on his work in the intervening years. In short, it presented intellectuals with a Greene novel that refused to behave the way that they believed a Greene novel should have behaved.KeywordsAuthorial PersonalityPolitical ClassAuthorial AudienceCountry ClubYork Time Book ReviewThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.