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CONCEPTS 0F SAINTHDOD IN T HE NOVELS 0F
ALBERT GAMUS AND GRAHAM GREENE

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MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
BARBARA GUSDORF
1963

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ABSTRACT
CONCEPTS OF SAJNTHOOD IN THE NOVELS OF
ALBERT CAMUS AND GRAHAM GREENE

by Barbara Gusdorf

The purpose of this study is to compare the treatznent of saint-
hood by Albert Camus and Graham Greene, two authors of thoroughly
divergent views and backgrounds. Camus is, for all practical pur-
poses, an atheist, Greene is a Catholic; Camus is a Franco-Algerian
of proletarian background, while Greene is a middle-class Englishman.
Each is, however, equally concerned with the problem of Justice on
both the metaphysical and physical planes. Each knows that on the lat-
ter plane the elements which have brought our world to near disaster
are cruelty, envy, greed, and what Freud called the death instinct.
Additionally, because both authors feel they have a responsibility to
mankind, they both serve as a thorn in the side of complacency, believ-
ing it is their duty to alert those who accept social custom, or religious
and political dogma, blindly.

In the section called "Albert Camus: The Temptation Toward
Sainthood," Camus seeks to provide men with "styles" for a viable way
of life in the face of the absurd. This "absurd" is the tension created
between man and a hostile universe. Therefore Camus’ search is for
positive ways of living without losing consciousness of "the absurd" and
without yielding to any of its negations. In order to arrive at such a
style, he presents human types in their careers. The priest, the judge,

the anarchist, the Malraux-type hero, the doctor, and the municipal

Barbara Gusdorf

clerk are considered along with Jean Tarrou, the saint laique of his

 

novel, 1:2} Peste. In the section "Graham Greene: The Journey Toward

 

Sainthood," Greene is shown presenting his hierarchy of values through
the human types he depicts. His failures - the maimed and warped,
the complacent, the Opportunists, the perverse, and the innocent, are
Opposed to his positive characters who include his probable saints.

Major Scobie of The Heart o_f t_l_1_e_: Matter and the nameless Mexican

 

 

priest of The Power and 1113 Glory are considered in this study as pos-

 

sibilities for sainthood in an era whose interest in sanctity is directed
toward social commitment rather than individual salvation.

Certain values, as well as types, emerge as positive in the
views of both authors. Because guilt emerges from the knowledge of
evil, it can become a positive factor; innocence, on the other hand, is
nearly always suspect. Where innocence is primarily ignorance of evil,
guilt, resulting from awareness of another's pain, promotes such val-
ues as compassion, responsibility, and solidarity. Because evil exists
in both the worlds of Greene and of Camus, sin is present in the view
of both the Catholic and the non-believer. In Greene's world, failure
to live by what are considered God's wishes for men constitutes sin;
in Camus' world, sin is the failure to live within the terms of the lucid-
ity and measure demanded by the absurd.

In writing on sainthood from two different points of view, the two
authors disclose similarities. Their saints are, for instance, absolu-
tists in their demands for purity within themselves, a quality which
they find impossible to maintain in the world of human affairs. Intheir

failure to remain pure, although involved, they long for peace and

VI

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Barbara Gusdorf

passivity. As both peace and purity are impossibilities in life, they
long for death. In each case their deaths, whether from suicide, dis-
ease, or the bullets of executioners, are seen as self-willed. The
greatest dissimilarity among these potential saints is the greater renun-
ciation of ego in Greene's saints. Although both Scobie and the Mexican
priest have been taught that they must think primarily of their own
souls, each willingly sacrifices his eternal peace for another's salva-
tion. Tarrou, Camus' aspiring saint, on the other hand, seeks annihi-
lation and non-involvement after the cessation of the plague, while
Greene's saints remain involved up until the last moment of their lives.
Moreover, Major Scobie's suicide is not an act of egotism. He hopes,
in dying, to cease hurting God and those he loves. He regards his
death not as an escape from frustration but as the beginning of an eter-
nity of further pain.

Because the problem of justice on the supernatural level will
always remain a mystery to Greene, his potential saints are unortho-
dox, achieving their ends by sinning against the tenets of their Church.
Yet because justice in Camus' view must always remain a question of
limits — of lucid awareness of the human condition and of adherence to
human possibilities — it is Tarrou who has failed rather than Greene's

saints. Tarrou is a failure because in capitulating to death he sins
M

 

against the only certainty in his world which is his life. In his asPira-

 

tions for absolutes — those of purity and peace — and in his temptation

 

 

 

toward sainthood, which is his desire to surpass the human, he has

sinned against lucidity and measure.

 

It is not surprising, then, that Camus rejects his aspiring saint,

‘

 

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Barbara Gusdorf

preferring instead his heroes of "the absurd" who are in turn closer to
Greene's potential saints in their knowledge that they must live in
order to prolong their involvement in the never-ending struggle

between what is human and what is anti-human.

CONCEPTS OF SAINTHOOD IN THE NOVELS OF

ALBERT CAMUS AND GRAHAM GREENE

by

.l I [I‘b’i‘
Barbarai Gusdorf

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Comparative Literature

June 1968

tr.

‘2" 7

1'

C0pyright by

Barbara Gusdorf

1968

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to the English Depart-
ment of the College of General Studies of the University of Puerto Rico
and particularly to Mrs. Esther Cressey de Ma’rquez who very patiently
typed the first two drafts of this dissertation.

I am especially indebted to Dr. Russel B. Nye, the chairman of
my committee, and to the two other members of the committee,

Dr. Charles D. Blend and Professor A. J. M. Smith.
I would also like to thank Mrs. Hally Wood Stephenson, who typed

and gave her technical knowledge to the final draft of this dissertation.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

mTRODUCTION O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 1

BOOK ONE
ALBERT CAMUS: THE TEMPTATION TOWARD SAINTHOOD

PART I Désir de Durer, Destin de Mourir . . . . . . . 12
PART StylesdeVie.................20

II

PART III LaGénération d'Entre-Deux-Guerres. . . . . . 26
IV
V

PART The Saint's Progress . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

PART Sain ou Saint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

PART VI Creation Corrected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

PART VII Oran -— Entre Oui et Non . . . . . . . . . . . 73

PART VIII Tarrou on Trial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

PART D{ Santé ou Sainteté . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
BOOK TWO

GRAHAM GREENE: THE JOURNEY TOWARD SAINTHOOD

PART I The Map: Bits andPieces. . . . . . . . . . . 114

PART II The Greene World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
PART III Some Greenelanders . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
PART IV Beyond the Greene Baize Door . . . . . . . . . 160
PART V Who Would Be a Father? . . . . . . . . . . . 169
PART VI The Coast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

PART VII Not POppy, nor Mandragora . . . . . . . . . . 186
PART VIII The Pityandthe Terror. . . . . . . . . . . . 198

PART IX ForNaughtDidIinHate . . . . . . . . . . . 209

iii

iv
PART X The Map: New Pieces Coming into Place
I Wonder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
II Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226
CONCLUSION . . .' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
A LIST OF WORKS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251

 

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INTRODUC TION

The purpose of this study, "Concepts of Sainthood in the Novels
of Albert Camus and Graham Greene," is to discover the differences
and similarities existing in two apparently Opposing views of sainthood.
Such a study should consist principally of two factors: the common basis
for their interest in sainthood, and how these authors differ and, oddly
enough, often coincide, in the area of their chosen subject.

There are, first of all, marked contrasts in the backgrounds of
Camus and Greene. Camus, for instance, who was born of illiterate
parents,1 grew up in Belcourt, an Algerian slum p0pu1ated by EurOpeans
and non-EurOpeans of diverse nationalities, races, and religions.
Graham Greene, on the other hand, whose father was headmaster of
Berkhamsted, a boys’ school near London, comes from an English back-
ground which was both middle-class and homogeneous. While the poverty
suffered by Camus was greatly offset by the sea, sunlight, and beaches
of Algeria, Greene's greater economic security was cancelled by child-
hood fears, adolescent boredom, and a dull climate.

In respect to their religious backgrounds, Camus, who was born
into a predominantly Catholic background, early became a non-believer,

or, as Henri Peyre prefers to put it, a pagan.z Greene, however, was

 

1Although Camus' parents are often referred to as illiterate, the
father taught himself to read when he was over twenty; the mother, who
was deaf, remained illiterate and spoke with an impediment (see
Germaine Bre’e, Camus (New York, 1964) 15).

2"Camus the Pagan," Yale French Studies, xxv (Spring 1960).
20-25.

 

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converted from Anglo- to Roman Catholicism at the age Of twenty-two,

and has written from, or even against, this vieWpoint ever since. Yet

despite the different social and religious backgrounds of these authors,
they share two attitudes in common, their metaphysical and social con-
cerns.

Although each has been referred to as Pascalian, Jansenist, Cal-
vinist, Augustinian, Manichean, Pelagian, and even existentialist,3it is
more accurate to claim that both write within a wider trend — the gen-
eral background Of terror and anxiety— a trend which, in the present
century includes Kafka, Conrad, and James,4along with Melville and

Dostoevsky and others from the past century. Although the problem of

 

3Germaine Brée writes on Camus' doubtful existentialist position:
"If we think of a writer whose essential effort is directed toward eluci-
dating his Own experience through an effort Of his intelligence as a
'philosOpher' then Camus most certainly is a philosOpher, but nothing
could be more erroneous than to consider him an 'existentialist' writer.
Camus, himself, was more explicit on this point; his work supports his
Opinion; and his controversy with Sartre when L'Homme révolté was
published emphasized the difference in the orientation of their thought.
'I have little liking for the too famous existential philOSOphy, and, to
speak frankly, I think its conclusions are false,’ he wrote in 1945, a
point Of view he never altered" (Camus, 9-10).

4Greene maintains, "with the death of James the religious sense
was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the
sense of the importance of the human act" (Francois Mauriac," 69).
He lauds James's sense of supernatural evil. In "Henry James: The
Religious Aspect," he writes: "It is tempting to reinforce this point --
James's belief in supernatural evil — with [he Turn of th_e Screw.
Here in the two evil spirits - Peter Quint, the dead valet, with his gin-
ger hair and his little whiskers and his air of an actor and 'his white
face of damnation,‘ and Miss Jessel 'dark as midnight in her black dress,
her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe' - is the explicit breath of
hell. They declare themselves. . . with everything but voice, to be suf-
fering the torments Of the damned. . ." (37-38). Both citations are from
Greene's collection Of essays, The Lost Childhood (New York, 1962).

 

evil is radical in each, Greene, in aligning himself with such men, is
showing himself in Opposition to the ”liberal, Optimistic view Of the
world nurtured by the Enlightenment which was brought to fruition in
the 19th century vision of man'sipredicament as due to economic causes
(Marx) or to psychological ones (Freud)."5 Camus, although he has not
forgotten his early training in philosoPhy (especially Plotinus, St.
Augustine, and their relation to evil), embraces rather than censors
the classical or neO-classical heritage. In fact, Camus speaks Often of
his "Greek" or "Mediterranean" background. Therefore Camus Opts
for the rational approach, Greene for the irrational: Greene that man
may not prevail; Camus that in a sense he must prevail.

Sharing a sense Of terror and dread, both Greene and Camus
adhere to a view of life that many would consider pessimistic. But the
critics Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris assure their readers that ”the
pessimistic view Of life is in the long run simply an adult view. Youth,
physical well-being, success may temporarily blunt the sharpness Of
our perception of its truth, but the optimism dependent on these acci-
dents is always precarious. Job, Aeschylus, Dante, Pascal -— the cre-
ative artist or thinker —- is not a Cheeryble Brother."6

While both Camus and Greene are in agreement as far as meta-

physical anxiety is concerned (although they differ in their answers to

the problem), they are even closer in regard to the temporal

 

5"Introduction," Graham Greene: Some Critical Considerations,
ed. Robert 0. Evans (Lexington, Ky., 1963), xiv.

6The Art of Graham Greene (New York, 1963), 17.

 

4
manifestations of evil in their times. A citation from Greene expresses

both views:

Errol Flynn, or it may have been Tyrone Power (I don't know
how to distinguish them in tights), swung on rOpes and leaped
from balconies . . . . rescued a girl and killed his enemy and
led a charmed life. It was what they call a film for boys,

but the sight of Oedipus emerging with his bleeding eyeballs
from the palace at Thebes would surely give better training
for life today. 7

In regard to the prevalence Of evil in contemporary life, Morton
Dauwven Zabel states "crime has gone beyond Addison's ‘chink in the
armor' of civilized society; it has become the symptom Of a radical
1e 8ion in the stamina of humanity,"8 an idea that Greene already devel-

Oped in his The Ministry of Fear:

 

"You remember St. Clement's — the bells of St. Clement's.
They've smashed that —- St. James', Picadilly, the Burling-
ton Arcade, Garland's Hotel, where we stayed for the panto-
mime, Maples, and John Lewis. It sounds like a thriller,
doesn't it, but the thrillers are like life . . . . You used to
laugh at the books Miss Savage read -- about spies and mur-
ders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but, dear,
that‘s real life: it's what we've all made of the world since
you died. I'm your little Arthur who wouldn‘t hurt a beetle
and I’m a murderer too. The world has been remade by

William Le Queux."9
In speaking specifically for Greene, Nathan A. Scott, Jr. writes:

He has used violence and melodrama as instruments for
awakening his age out of its lethargies, for destroying its
specious securities and revealing the underlying nightmare
and tragedy. He has wanted to "prohibit sharply the

 

 

\
7The Quiet American (New York, 1957), 176.
0. 8"Graham Greene," Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van

 

Canor (Minneapolis, 1948), 289'."

9London, 1943, 71-72.

rehearsed response" to resurrect the heart through terror
and to exhibit the world itself in all its degradation, as a
country wherein man‘s spiritual nature is to be rediscov-
ered.l

Camus has referred to this century as "1e siecle de la peur," and

the critic Nicola Chiaromonte gives the gist of Camus' Columbia Uni-

versity speech, in which Camus enumerates the specific problems of

the times:

We were born at the beginning of the First World War. As
adolescents we had the crisis Of 1929; at twenty, Hitler.
Then came the EthiOpian War, the Civil War in Spain, and
Munich. These were the foundations of our education. Next
came the Second World War, the defeat, and Hitler in our
homes and cities. Born and bred in such a world, what did
we believe in? Nothing. Nothing except the obstinate nega-
tion in which we were forced to close ourselves from the
beginning. The world in which we were called to exist was
an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could
take refuge. The world of culture was beautiful but it was
not real. And when we found ourselves face to face with
Hitler's terror, in what values could we take comfort, what
values could we Oppose to negation? In none. If the prob-
lem had been the bankruptcy Of a political ideology or a sys-
tem Of government, it would have been simple enough. But
what had happened came from the very root Of man and
society. There was no doubt about this, and it was con—
firmed day after day, not so much by the behavior of the
criminals but by that of the average man. The facts showed
that men deserved what was happening to them. Their way
of life had so little value; and the violence of the Hitlerian
negation was in itself logical. But it was unbearable and

we fought i_t[italics added].11 _ _ _

 

 

Starting from nothing and questioning that negation, Camus has realized

that "nous portons tous en nous nos bagnes, nos crimes et nos ravages.

 

10"Graham Greene: Christian Tragedian," Graham Greene: Some
Critical Considerations, ed. Robert 0. Evans (Lexington, Ky. , 1963), 26.

 

11"Albert Camus: In Memoriam," Albert Camus: A Collection c_1_f
gitical Essay_s, ed. Germaine Brée (Englewood Cliffs, N.- J.', 1967),

14-15.

6

Mais notre tache n'est pas de les déchatner a travers le monde; elle est
Mt

 

 

 

de les combattre en nous-marnes et dans les autres."12
r M

Because Greene and Camus have dedicated themselves to fighting
nihilism wherever it becomes manifest, it is necessary to mention some
of the concepts that are to be included under this heading. Nihilism or
nothing (112111) was represented in its most radical form, for Camus, in
death. Yet generally speaking, and for the purpose of this study, nihil-
ism includes any 3 ort of evil -—- that is, any impulse, action, or atti—
tude — capable of mutilating men or draining their lives of significance.
Nihilism, it can be said, falls into two categories, philosophical and
political nihilism. The former is an attitude of despair promoted to a
value or a way of life. Such despair, when it leads to an "All is per-
mitted" policy, negates such values as love, honor, truth, and the pur—
suit Of happiness, and encourages violence and injustice. When nihil-
ism becomes political, it embraces totalitarianism and bureaucratic
systems which deny the rights of individuals by systematizing disorder,
encouraging cant and falsehood, and practicing the inversion of good
and evil. By making a principle of the end justifying the means, living
men are sacrificed to distant goals or ideals.

While Camus is often referred to as a conscience of his time —-
he received the Nobel Prize in 1957 in recognition for the "clear-sighted
earnestness" with which he had illuminated the problems of the human

conscience of our time"— Greene, who has up to this point received less

 

12L'Homme révolté (Paris, 1951), 361.

credit for this aspect of his thinking, will undoubtedly accrue more
recognition as time goes by.

It is the action of conscience directed towards the problems of
one's time which is the source Of the contemporary interest in saint-
hood. It is to this end that Mauriac, Bernanos, Silone, Updike, even
Simenon, in addition to Camus and Greene, have treated sainthood as a
literary theme. The contemporary saint, as well as the absurd hero,
offers the secular society of today a reconsideration of values. Of
this Henri Peyre writes:

. . . the acclaim poured out to Camus, to Dr. Schweitzer or
to Gandhi, or to POpe John (for they are comparable) testi-
fied to the deep thirst for moral heroism among our con-

temporaries and to our readiness to be guided by saints,
even by picaresque ones, in an age Of creative discontent.

l3
Peyre's reference to the contemporary creative discontent

should be understood not so much in terms of the literary artist's dis-
satisfaction with matters Of style and expression (although there is the
continuous need for new myths and images) but as a discontent which
is creative in the sense that it is positive or fructifying, leading us out
Of what John Cruickshank refers to as the "breakdown of the settled
established intellectual and moral order which the literature Of this

century has registered."14

In the Twentieth Century Engclopedia (if Catholicism, Jacques

 

 

 

l3Modern Literature / The Literature 9f France (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J., 1966), 196.

 

14"lntrodnction," The Novelist 2L3 Philosopher: Studies in French
Fiction 1935-1260 (London, 1962), ix.

 

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Douillet asks the question, "What is a saint?” In attempting an answer
he writes that in one sense the answer is: "A saint is a person now dead,

whom the Church allows to be publicly venerated."15 In Saints £33 Now,

 

edited by Clare Boothe Luce, Mrs. Luce hazards a more extensive defi-
nition:
What is a Saint? To speak in a dictionary manner, a Saint —
with a capital "S" -— is one Of those persons recognized by
the Church as having, by holiness of life and heroic virtue,
attained a highplace in heaven, and as being therefore
entitled to the veneration Of the faithful, fit to serve them as
a spiritual model and able to intercede for them in the
courts of God. The men and women thus recognized as
Saints do not, Of course, include all the holy, or exhaust all
the possibilities Of holiness. But of them we are certain.1
Jacques Douillet and Mrs. Luce agree that the saints' recovery Of
Christ's virtues is always fractional.

Both authors mention aspects of sainthood which apply at times
most particularly to either Greene's somewhat unorthodox saints or to
Camus' completely unorthodox saint. Jacques DOuillet, for instance,
mentions absolutism, a quality which belongs, however, to most saints:
"Given their genius," he writes, "they were incapable of evading issues,
Of half-measures, of playing at two tables at once" (58); "they did not

try to efface what was peculiar, but rather emphasized it" (105).

What Jacques Douillet writes concerning the unified love of the

 

15What i_s_ _a_ Saint? volume XLVI of the Twentieth Century Encyclo-
pedia 9f Catholicism, ed. Henry Daniel-R0ps (New York, 1958), 84. All
subsequent references to this volume will be given in the text immedi-
ately following the quotation.

 

16Saints f2; Now (New York, 1952), 1. All subsequent references
will be given in the text immediately following the quotation.

”L.

35..

‘7'“

 

 

 

9
saints applies particularly to Greene's saints: "The saints' love for God
does not prevent them from loving all around them; but it is so intense
that these other loves are not only subordinate to it, they are wrapped
up and permeated by it. They do in truth love 'in God' " (56).

Each writes Of the saints as sinners - an aspect which relates
them tO both Greene's and Camus' saints. "The very meaning Of the
lives of the Saints for us," Mrs. Luce explains, "lies in the fact that
they were sinners like ourselves trying like ourselves to combat sin.
The only difference between them and us is that they kept on trying; pre-
cisely because they believed that the revision and editing of sinner-into-
saint is not done by man's pen but by God’s grace" (3).

Although the aspirations of some saints appear remote today (par-
ticularly the monasticism of the desert), those monks were fleeing
from the abominations of their world no more than is Camus' contem-
porary saint. It is the flight that Camus condemns. His saint in fleeing
from guilt, enters as they did, a spiritual desert as well, for his saint
knows too well, as did Saint Paul, that "guilt makes no more claim on
a man who is dead."

Heroic virtue is what is usually needed to distinguish the saint
from the average man. Writing Of the heroism Of the saints, Jacques
Douillet recounts that "the hero is tenacious; he does not count the cost
Of attaining his goal; he will wear himself out doing it, and his strength
seems more than a man's" (58). But along with heroism goes the renun-
ciation Of ego. The martyrs have usually found their strength in the

consciousness of their responsibility to their brethren: the idea of

10
failing those for whom they struggle is more abhorrent than suffering
or death.

Both of Greene's saints are heroic in their actions, but one par-
ticularly practices the heroism Of those saints not called to the glory of
martyrdom. However, his heroism equals that Of those who give their
lives all at once, proving, as did St. The’rése of Lisieux, that the "little
way Of the Cross, is not the way of the little cross." Jacques Douillet
elaborates this idea Of "pinprick martyrdom" or the "widow's mite" as
it has existed among the unknown. For there are

millions Of holy men and women, some Of them perhaps
greater in the eyes of God than canonized saints, who are
unknown because they lived in Obscurity or because their
inward holiness was never recognized by their fellows.
Their hiddenness serves to enhance their worth before

God. . . (118)

Camus' potential saint is Jean Tarrou in his novel If Peste.

 

Greene's potential saints are the anonymous Mexican priest in The

Power and the Glory, Major Henry Scobie in The Heart if th__e Matter,

 

 

and Sarah Miles in 'I_‘_h_e End O_f the A__f_f_ai_1;. Only the first two of
Greene's aspiring saints will be considered in this study, for the inter-
est in sainthood today is predominantly an interest in commitment,
involvement, or engagement in the community. Sarah Miles' approach
to sanctity is closer to the extreme individual approach Of Camus'
absurd hero and stranger, Meursault.

The content of this study will reveal the possibilities of a new

coherence as they are presented by Graham Greene and Albert Camus

in their considerations Of sainthood and will show how, in their searches

II

11
for coherence, Camus' saint fails, while Greene's saints are the heroes

of the hour .

BOOK ONE
ALBERT CAMUS: THE TEMPTATION TOWARD SAINTHOOD

PART I
DESIR DE DURER, DESTIN DE MOURIR

Of Albert Camus it has been written: "In a true sense, he

was constantly attempting to bring into the clearing of

rationality more and more territory, territory which was

constantly threatening to step back into the jungles Of

chaos and mindlessness. In this he joined the Greeks.

What is the Odyssey after all but an attempt to clear out

of chaos a territory Of reason where the human community

could exist in mutual justice ?1

Camus believes, as do Nietzsche and Tolstoy, that modern man

lacks a sense Of direction. For this reason he has dedicated his writ-
ings to a study Of positive ways of living in a world which Offers much
that is negative. It was to this end that Camus proposed in his re’cit,
L’Etranger, the constant confrontation or awareness Of the fact of death
as an antidote to the nihilism Of a goalless life. By refusing to accept
conventional attitudes toward death or attitudes of unknowing indiffer-
ence, man avoids what Camus refers to as self-deception or inauthenti-
city.

Tolstoy derives a similar premise from his study of the theme of

conscious death2 in his nouvelle, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan Ilyich

 

 

 

lAustin Fowler, Albert Camus' The Stranger, The Plague 3&1
Other Works (New York, 1965),*60.

 

 

2Frequent acknowledgment is given to the influence Of Kierkegaard,
Melville, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, among others, on Camus' thought;

12

13

had always hidden his authentic self and the knowledge that he will some
day die amidst the trivializing details Of his social, Official, and famil-

ial routine. With the imminence Of death and with the questions he asks

himself in the face of it, the futility of his unexamined life becomes

apparent. As Tolstoy prescribed the constant reminder of death as an

antidote to meaninglessness, so does Camus.
According to Louis R. Rossi in his study "Albert Camus: The

Plague of Absurdity,"3 Camus' protagonist, Meursault. is an embodi-

ment of Heidegger's Being-toward-Death (Sein zum Tode), that is, one
WhO. having lived his life with a minimum of hypocrisy and self-decep-
tion, had been aware, even if unconsciously, that "du fond de mon
avenir, pendant toute cette vie absurde que j'avais mene’e, un souffle
obscur remontait vers moi é travers des anne’es que n'étaient pas
enc Ore venues et ce souffle e’galisait sur son passage tout ce qu'on me

Proposait alors dans les années pas plus réelles que je vivais."

Meursault's life is neither empty nor joyless. He knows that he

\

2
C(cont.)yet it is Walter Kaufmann who, in Religion from Tolstoy t_9
Ca\111118_ (New York, 1961), brought out the close relationship between
isamus and Tolstoy, declaring: "What is so remarkable about Camus
of, as much as anything, that he had the courage to accept the heritage
he.Tolstoy, when no one else could stand before the world as Tolstoy's
Bel-1'" (39). He further points out: "The persistent preoccupation with
1i 1frdeception and an appeal to the reader to abandon his inauthenticity
Cults Anna Kare’nina with The Death 9f Ivan Ilyich" (3). In by-passing
elf-Inn“ L'Etranger, Kaufmann noted, "The Plague is the posthumous
11d of The Death 2f Ivan Ilyich" (40).

3The Kenyon Review, XX, 3(Summer 1958), 399-422.

an 4Albert Camus, W (Paris, 1957), 176-177. Subsequent
otations from L'Etranger are taken from this edition.

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14
has been happy, that he will continue to be happy, and he anticipates
the moment of his death with equanirnity, as the rounding out Of his

life, that his life may become an entity, that all may be consummated.

Rossi points out that Camus, "like the existentialists and Nietzsche

(and their predecessor Hegel) proceeds by negation, "for death defines
liberty and gives meaning to life; the acceptance of evil leads to inno-
cence (414-415). In Camus’ use Of death5 as a means of fighting nihil-
ism, he has learned that the confrontation of death can be a cure for
"de ad souls," forcing them whenever they face death as a fact, to
arrive at an hone st and even positive evaluation of life. In ad0pting the

method of Bazarov — the protagonist of Turgenev's Fathers 3.2? Sons

 

and literature’s first nihilist recognized as such --which was to accept

n(”filling (nihil) as valid without first submitting it to critical testing,

\

50n the predominance of death as a theme in contemporary and

deern EurOpean literature, R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The Picaresque
m Representative Figures i_r_l Contemporay Fiction (Philadelphia
and New York, 1959): "It is not easy for the majority Of American read-
ers_ to understand, much less to sympathize with Camus' deep preoccu-
$313,011 with death. . . . The public impulse in America, when faced
c 1th a work Of Camus, is to inquire into the causes for the psychologi-
eal abnormality allegedly there depicted: to ask how Meursault, for
sxafilple, or even Camus himself got so maladjusted in a generally
Siltlsfying world. The EurOpean reader, remembering that both 'I_‘l_1_<_e
W and 'I_'_l_l_e Myth ch Sisyphus were written during the Second
- Orld War and the occupation of France, for the most part, finds their
tigolvement with death almost inevitable. For death, cruelty, humilia-
di 11,. violent aberrations of justice, and a searing contempt for human
Eugnlty have been the norms of contemporary experience for many
Europeans." Lewis, at the same time that he points out that recent
de 1‘Opean literature would be inexplicable without death also points out
to :th's traditional importance, "that it is more than a natural reaction
Philhe atrocious events Of the twentieth century. It has the status Of a

. OsOphical position, " relating Camus particularly to Dostoevsky and

tune teenth century Russian literature (72)-

15

Camus proceeds to reexamine all values in the harsh light of man's
mortality. Testing them for viability, only such values or attitudes
which do not threaten life or endanger man's happiness are reinstated;
in this way many Of mankind's cherished self-deceptions are discarded.
Furthermore, in employing the nineteenth-century nihilists' meth-
ods which advocated, in some instances, the destruction of a world in
order to build it anew, Camus paradoxically applies their method to the

restoration Of order over chaos and to the instatement of sounder values

and attitudes. Working through the denial of much that humanity vener-

ate 3, Camus inaugurates in hilnself and in his protagonists the nihilistic
approach of the anti-nihilist!

Camus' knowledge that new values are Obviously needed derives
from his early and late encounters with death and dissolution. With the
Poverty of his childhood, there is "the dead father, the dying grand-
IIIOther, the paralyzed uncle, the deaf and silent mother," but Opposed
to 1ihis there is the sun Of Algeria. It is in the "dark night" of EurOpe
that Camus learns that death was not only part Of his personal life but
is al so the rule Of the day.

In fighting death and the nihilistic reaction to death, Camus seeks
"1a, gue’rison au bout de la maladie." He has one clue. He knows that
death often results from excesses and that nihilism is a form Of excess
and that excesses are, by their very nature, abnormalities or diseases.

For that reason Camus uses the plague or 1_a

\
6Fowler, 5.

l6

Eeste7 as one of the symbols or controlling metaphors in his writings
to depict such excesses as nihilism, wars, death --- whatever is life-

denying or destructive tO human happiness. In his novel 1.3 Peste, on

 

one level Of meaning BEE? signifies war in general, for Camus points
out that not only has the bubonic plague been one Of the most dreaded
threats to human life, but that there have been as many plagues as wars
in history. The term also stands more specifically for the French
defeat in 1940 (in the German occupation which followed, the occupying
troops were actually referred to as 1_a peste brune). Camus expands
the sense of the word pea—to so that it appears to include all that he has
also implied in his uses of the term "nihilism."

Of this symbolism Rachel BeSpaloff wrote in her study of Camus,

n'I‘he World Of the Man Condemned to Death":

Perhaps the use of the term cryptic to define a style which
is at times sententious and whose transparency appears
without mystery, will seem debatable. The multiplicity

of meanings and interpretations it suggests, the decipher-
ing it necessitates, certainly seem to remove it from alle-
gory, which always conceals some precise Object. Nothing
Of the sort in 'I_‘_h_e Plague, where the scourge sometimes
designates the event, sometimes the human condition,

sometimes misfortune. 3
Germaine Brée also implies that the word plague or peste covers

many forms of nihilism as she describes the syndrome of the twentieth-
\ V

7The image of plague or peste appears for the first time in
W— the first version of which was written as early as 1938, and
1:13am in 1947 and 1948 in La Bests and the play yEtat gig siege respec-
(lgely’ and it also appears from time to time in the Carnets I and II
354942) and (1942-51). The remaining Carnets have not yet been
publishecl.

(E 89111138; A C_o_1_le_c_t_i_9£ Of Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée
11glewood Cliffs, N. J., 1967.), 98.

17
century mal d_u siecle and the implications of such a syndrome for

humanity: the plague, she writes,
in whatever context we consider it, symbolizes any force
which systematically cuts humanity Off from the breath of
life, the physical joy of love, the freedom to plan our
tomorrows. In a very general way it is death and, in
human terms, al_1 that enters into complicity with death:
metaphysical or political systems, bureaucratic abstrac—
t____ions and even Tarrou' s and Paneloux's efforts t_(_) trans-
cend their humanity [italics added]. 9
To Germaine Bre’e’s elucidations other concepts may be added
which still remain within the categories of peste or nihilism. They are:
fanaticism, tyranny, self-deception, or bad faith, le___s ombres inutiles
(Cant or residues Of false reasoning), crimes, lawlessness, disorder,
a'liibsolutism, and surprisingly enough, the temptation toward sainthood!
In Camus' consideration of whatever constitutes a threat to the
moral health of his times, he has, first of all, in determining the
Ila-tlare Of the ailment, to study its symptoms, to isolate the microbe
befOre he can inaugurate its cure. To this end he refers to the illness
PIOVisionally as 1_e mal, 1_e malheur, 1_a maladie, 1_a malaise, 1_e fléau,

and 13. peste, or in English the plague, the pest, or the pestilence. To

the list of maux which Camus sees afflicting contemporary man, he also

 

added 1e malentendu,lo as it poses, more than a mere annoyance, a real

\

G 9Camus (New York, 1964), 128. Subsequent quotations from
erIllatine Bre: e's Camus are taken from this edition.

th 10Whether in Le Malentendu, Camus' play Of that name, or in his
- e1- treatments Of the same theme, Camus Obviously wishes, accord-
W§r ‘30 S. Beynon John, to create another myth of man's existence in the
111a 1d. "the world without signs or sense, the absurd world in which
11. is never at home" (89). Rachel Bespaloff sees the world that Camus

l

18

threat to the human community. Of 1_e malentendu or the misunderstand-
ing as a current theme, John Cruickshank has written that Camus' writ-
ings on the absurd "belong to a wider world in which the sense Of incoher-
ence has grown rapidly more acute, and for which he bears witness to an

age marked by increasing division, conflict, violence, and the failure to

communicate adequately."11 On this subject Camus himself writes in

L’Homme re’volte’, written in 1951 as an attempt to understand the times,

 

"chaque équivoque, chaque malentendu suscite la mort. Le sommet de

toutes les tragedies est dans la surdité de heros."12 Camus‘ intuition

in including l_e malentendu as yet another mal or evil besetting mankind

 

is productive, for it proves to be an important factor in the complex

recognized as nihilism or pest .

It is apparent that in the very heart of Camus' nihilistic world

View -—- the absurd -- he finds values which, while constituting "la

guéri son an bout de la maladie," instigate a movement from the negative

\
¥0(C0nt.)describes as one where "everyone is betrayed by everyone,

w eluding himself. . . .there is almost no sentence in the second act
hiCh does not have a different meaning for the one who speaks it and
tor 1ihe one who hears it. The entire play is built on ambiguity; one has
0 choose in the dark, without being recognized, without being able to
zlake oneself known. . . . Camus saw the heart Of the matter: our mod-

sin tragedy is the tragedy of ambiguity touching all mankind" (105). His

G 01": story "L'HOte" treats another facet of ambiguity, for according to

fraeton Picon, it treats Of a misunderstanding in which the "gestures Of

(1 ggernity turn against us leaving only the solitude Of incomprehension. . .”
)- A11 quotations are from Camus: A Collection if Critical EssaLs,

a
1 rea.dy cited.

 

11Albert Camus a_n_c_l tile Literature O_f Revolt (New York, 1960), 22.

 

12L'Homme révolté (Paris, 1951), 340. Subsequent quotations

fr
0111 L'Homme re’volté are taken from this edition.

if?

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19
to the positive, from incoherence to coherence, from negation itself to
a solution for living. In Rachel Bespaloff's recognition that Camus has
tried to restore meaning and the sense of joy for all the Ivan Ilyiches —

who far outnumber the Meursaults of this world— and who remain
strangers to life, she writes:
Reduced to its simplest expression, Camus's thought is con-
tained in a single question: What value abides in the eyes of
the man condemned to death who refuses the consolation of
the supernatural? Camus cannot take his mind Off this ques-

tion. All his characters bring an answer; one has only to
listen to them. 13

13Bespaloff, 9 2.

PART II

STYLES DE VIE

In his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Camus Speaks of the neces-
sity of fighting nihilism and the death instinct at work in Our society. It
is necessary, he claims, "8e forger un art de vivre par temps de
catastroPhe, pour nai‘tre une seconde fois, et lutter ensuite, a visage
déc ouvert, contre l'instinct de mort a 1'oeuvre dans notre histoire."l4
Germaine Bre’e writes that in countering a nihilism he refuses to accept,
Camus realizes that what is needed is a ”style of life" worthy of a man
(209 ).

In seeking these "styles Of life" worthy of men, Camus has pro-
Posed in all his writings, but particularly in his novel If M, a hier-
archy of attitudes Opposed to nihilism. Such attitudes are studied and
c°n8idered for acceptance or rejection on the basis of viability in a
wol‘ld where death has become the order of the day. These attitudes
are symbolized in certain "careers." Some Of the "careers" which Camus
has tested are those Of the anarchist, the revolutionist, the bureaucrat,
the tYrant, the Malraux-type hero, the police Official, the priest, and

the judge (le__s robes rouges). Against these, he juxtaposes the absurd

 

man in whatever role he is given, whether that of the engineer, the
s
choolteacher, the municipal clerk, the commercial salesman, l_e_

J:&e&rier délicat, the poet, or the physician. It is those who, in adOpt-

 

111g a scornful image of man, side with nihilism by bringing about the

\

thi 14% (E giggle (Paris, 1958), 17. Subsequent quotations from
8 Work are taken from this edition.

20

‘9
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. . .
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s

21
destruction of others and the annihilation of self. Am0ng these is the

saint.

In his consideration of sainthood as an approach to living, Camus

presents his protagonist Jean Tarrou in the novel 1_a Peste. Tarrou's

 

temptation toward sainthood is part of a peculiar manifestation of this
century; the desire for sanctity without God.

Camus' aspiring saint is governed largely by nostalgia -- by forms
0f nostalgia determined by what might be described as his "life cycle."
This "life cycle" which prOpagates nostalgia consists of four stages:

( 1) an initial innocence; (2) an awakening to the knowledge that the world
is not madeto his order; (3) resulting in an exhausting struggle to try
to make the world fit a preferred pattern; and (4) a weariness with life
and the by now acquired consciousness that he has been aspiring to
Sainthood. The accompanying nostalgias are: a longing for an absolute
of good or purity in a world made up of both good and evil; and the long-
ing for, or concentration on an abstraction, goal, or ideal projected
t:oVVard future realization; and finally, the nostalgia for peace or com-
Plete annihilation in death. It is then evident that his weariness with
life: his concern with an ideal not realizable within his own lifetime,
and his yearning for self-annihilation all add up to a complete rejection
of 1ife by the saint.

In his treatment of Jean Tarrou as an aspiring saint, Camus indi-
cates that Tarrou's yearning for saintliness, his nostalgia for purity
and peace, incorporates attitudes which, although positive, become

aspects of nihilism when excessively manifested. For in Camus' view

L‘.

C

l

a;

luv

U6.

h‘fi
‘ VKA

‘
a

68

.F.

FIV

22
any ideal or temptation which leads the individual on the path of absolutes
makes him a stranger to life and a friend of death. This is apparent in
the term itself, for ”absolute" is synonymous with "complete," "perfect,"
”total," "unconditional," "ultimate"; to aSpire to purity or peace in their
mo st concentrated, complete, or perfect forms is to Opt for excesses,
such excesses that, because they can only be attained in death, are inim-
ic al to life. The aspiring saint by-passes life. He seeks escape in his
annihilation rather than in continued rebellion against 1_a condition
Efi-ll'l'ilaine.

All of Camus' works become studies of true or false rebels and it
is in regard to the would-be saint that Camus shows his reservations as
early as the spring or summer of 1942 as his Carnets reveal:

Qu'est-ce qui fait 1a supe’riorité d’exemple (1a seule) du
christianisme? Le Christ et ses saints — la recherche
d'un style d_e y_i_e_. Cette oeuvre comptera [as his work
progresses toward a definition of the atheistic saint]

autant de formes que d'étapes sur 1e chemin d'une per-
fection sans recompense. L'Etran er est 1e point zéro.

1_._§ Peste est un progrés, non de zero vers l'infini, mais
vers une complexite’ plus profonde qui reste a definir. Le
dernier point sera le saint, mais i1 aura sa valeur arithmé-
tique -—- me surable comme l'homme. 15

The would-be saint's cooPeration with nihilism, through his nos-

gla for qualities or a state unattainable 1n life, induces 1n Tarrou,

El.
hd occasionally in Camus, a death instinct.16

\

Q 15Carnets, II (Paris, 1964), 31. Subsequent quotations from
M, II, are taken from this edition.

Such a longing for

16In the early 1920's Freud began to consider the possibility of a
a‘th instinct as an integral part of the human personality. In his study
titled "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," he considered the fact that

§
§h

23

absolutes is referred to by Tarrou as his Beste intérieure. Undermin-

ing both will and intellect, it constitutes a threat to both the personality

and the life of the individual.

Indications of the threat of such dissolution in Camus himself can

be noted in his writings. In L'Eté, which contains "Le Minotaure ou la

ha]. te d’Oran" written as early as 1939, Camus equates such a temptation
With the desire to achieve in death the peace of stones: "Quelle tentation
de passer a l’ennemi! Quelle tentation de s'indentifier a ces pierres,

de se confondre avec cet univers brfllant et impossible qui de’fie l'his-

toire et ses agitations."17

Emily Zants has made a study of the symbolism involved in such
elel'rnents as sea, sky, and deserts in Camus' writing. In her "Camus'
De Berts and Their Allies, Kingdoms of the Stranger" she observes that
I.<)<=1<s are the major characteristic of his deserts and as such constitute
the "world" which stands in Opposition to man. The "world" Opposes
him because it is made up of elements antagonistic to life --- stone, heat,
drought, silence. Yet some individuals are attracted by these hostile
elements; the stranger, for instance, "is one who is enticed by the phy-
sic all world of nature, drawn away from man; he is tempted by the gen-

§ 33a], by the absolute -- which culminates in death -- negating man's

\

1 6.

Q1 (cont.)instincts tend toward a return to an earlier state and that since

q 1 forms of life rose originally out of the inanimate, the trend toward
ga-th may be considered inborn, a death instinct.

 

ta 17L'Eté (Paris, 1954), 61. Subsequent quotations from L'Ete’ are
1‘en from this edition.

 

0C

'0

24
nature which being life is the individual or particular."18 Camus knew
at least as early as April 1937 the danger of this sort of nostalgia, for
he entered in his notebooks "1a tentation la plus dangereuse: ne

res sembler a rien,"19

an idea he continued to develoP, for in "Le Mino-
taure . . ." he wrote "il y a dans chaque homme un instinct profond qui
n‘est celui de la destruction, ni celui de la creation" for "i1 s'agit seule-

"20 In "Le Vent a Djémila," in the ruins

ment de ne ressembler a rien.
of the Roman city hidden in the Algerian desert, Camus realized that
this desire to become something which is not of the world of men "ne
méne nulle part et n'ouvre sur aucun pays," that Djémila and Oran were
only brief sorties into the desert, each being "un lieu d'ou l'on revient,"21
which, paradoxically, one visited in order to learn from the "black sun
of death" how to become reconstituted into the kingdom of men and of
history.

Detecting other instances of his desire to pass over into the inhu-
man world of absolutes or abstractions, he later wrote "i1 y a toujours
dans l'homme une part qui refuse l‘amour. C'est la part qui veut

22

mourir. C'est celle qui demande a Etre pardonner": in another entry

 

18Symposium, XVII (Spring 1963), 30.

 

19Carnets, I (Paris, 1962), 45. Subsequent quotations from Car-
nets, I, are taken from this edition.

ZOUEté, 6 1.

 

21Noces (Paris, 1950), 30. Subsequent quotations from Noces are
taken from this edition.

 

ZZCarnets, II, 318.

25
commenting on his identification with a friend's suicide, Camus' death
instinct becomes more explicit: "Suicide d'A. Bouleversé parce que je
1'aimais beaucoup, bien stir, mais aussi parce que j'ai soudainement
compris que j'avais envie de faire comme lui."23 Later in 1957 (the
last two entries were of March and April 1950 reapectively) he writes
in that volume in which he collaborated with Arthur Koestler: "L'homme
desire vivre mais il est vain d'espérer que ce de’sir régnera sur toutes
ses actions. 11 désire aussi n'etre rien, il veut l'irréparable, et la
mort pour elle-mane."24 It is evident, then, from such pronounce-
ments in respect to death, in his waverings between "oui et non,"
between the "désir de durer et le destin du mort," that Camus occa-
sionally shares his protagonist's nearly permanent nostalgia for "1a
paix des pierres," " 1e bonheur stupide de cailloux,” which Tarrou
longs for and hOpes to find, first in a Lyle (_le yi_e consisting of an accu-
mulation of innocuous habits or idiosyncrasies, an approximation to
peace in a way of life designed to exact as little of the self as possible.
Barring such an accomplishment, death beckons as a release or way

out.

 

23Carnets, I I, 322.

24"Réflexions sur la guillotine," Réflexions s35 lg peine capitale
(Paris, 1957), 141.

 

 

PART III

LA GENERATION D'ENTRE-DEUX—GUERRES

If physical violence continued endemic during the long reprieve
between two world wars, despair had reached epidemic prOportions.

Most members of the génération d'entre-deux-guerres, seated in Euro-

 

pean cafés or sunning themselves on the beaches of Algeria, felt that
their disenchantment and defeatism had been imposed on them from with-
out. Derived from the disillusionment Of World War I, added to the

inherited 13:11 (in si‘ecle of the former century, their de8pair differed

 

from Tarrou's peste intérieure and Camus' periods of dejection, in that

 

 

theirs so Obviously lacked a sense of guilt. Camus' Meursault and

Sartre’s Roquentin (L'Etranger was finished by May 1940, If Nause’e

 

was published in 1938) were representative of those who, so long as they
languished at their cafe-tables, enjoyed a protracted innocence.

When brought to trial, Meursault is convicted for what is inter-
preted as his 2232: lé er (his apparent insouciance because he does not
weep at his mother's funeral). Still blaming the fact that he has broken
the harmony of his days on exterior factors such as history and nature,
still remaining passive despite the activities for which he is, as a part
of history, responsible, he attributes his killing of an Arab to the sun.
"C'était a cause du soleil" (151), he asserts during the trial.

Meursault's and Roquentin's was the indifference Of their genera-
tion, sitting out the eventuality of Abyssinia, of Spain, and the first days
of the occupation Of France. Only with 1939, when murder became

wholesale, did each acknowledge: "pour la premiere fois, j'ai compris

26

27
que j'e’tais coupable" (33). In contrast to Meursault, most are not
brought to trial, but put themselves on trial. In Camus' case it was not
his own conviction, but that of another, Gabriel Péri, a prominent anti-
Nazi, executed in 1941, that precipitated Camus into action.

Death, then, is still the catalyst. With the threat of extinction,
or of the disappearance of a way of life, brought about by World War II,
existence is no longer a bore or an object for scorn but a search for sur-
vival. The philOSOphical question had ceased to be suicide and was now
murder; individual revolt against mortality became collective revolt —
a revolt no longer based on the principle of "All is permitted" but on
the ethical development implicit in another principle, "All are responsi-
ble for all." Revolt at this point becomes a value involving the well-
being and right to happiness, not of "I," but of "we"-—- not of one, but of
all.

Philip Thody explains the new stand of rebellion which, when it
surpasses what Jean Bloch-Michel refers to as Meursault's nihilisme
pa_ss_if, becomes a value:

The first discovery which the rebel makes, in his movement
towards human solidarity, is that he shares a common suf-
fering with all men. He is united with his fellows, but in a
community which more resembles a prison than a free and
hospitable city. He is no longer alone, but the hostile
absurdity of his state has not changed. "In an absurd world,"
Camus writes, "the rebel still has one certainty. . . . the

fact that the grocer and he are both Oppressed. . . . The
world cannot be transformed but it can be resisted."25

 

25_A_1rbert Camus: _A_ Study (if I_ii_s Work (New York, 1957), 29. Sub-
sequent quotations from this work are taken from the same edition.

28
The true rebel, then, is he who feels re8ponsible for all life in
the face of death. Such rebellion can thus be a step to a higher form Of
moral existence. Such a leap or trajectory is witnessed in Camus’

writings from L'Etranger and If Mythe ck: SisEhe (1942) to 1‘3. Peste

 

(1947), L'Etat d_e si‘e e (1948), Les Justes (1950), and L'Homme révolté

 

 

(1951), as well as in his political articles written after 1945.26 The mor-
tal dangers to mankind were, Camus maintained, both in the structure
of society and in the beliefs man lives by, or perhaps better said in too
many cases, dies by. For this reason Thody relates that Camus never
accepts as solutions "any but human criteria or any value which could
be placed higher than the individual"(27).

Aware that the death instincts of individuals or even of societies,
which in both involve the failure of the individual (or individuals) to live
fulfilled lives was reducing the stamina of both, the true rebel looks for
admonishment, and more astonishingly, even guidance, to that most
basic negation of all, death.

It is from this, the most absolute negation, that Camus derives
his notion of 1'absurde, a deduction resulting from a series Of ironies
or discrepancies, the greatest of which is man’s forfeited immortality.
Rachel Bespaloff wrote that Camus, like Caligula, has "meditated on

this very simple and very clear and somewhat idiotic truth, but a truth

 

26Camus utilized the myth of Sisyphus and that of Prometheus to
designate these two stages in his own develoPment as a writer and
thinker: Sisyphus is, of course, purely individual revolt, Prometheus,
collective revolt. Just before his death, Camus began another stage,
that of balance, justice, or Nemesis. Each work, rather than belong-
ing to one stage, spans two.

29
difficult to discover and heavy to bear 'men die and they are not happy' ”'
(95).

Camus calls the physical-metaphysical Opposition Of which man is
conscious, l'absurde,27 because it withstands every effort put forth by
human will and reason. He derives l'absurde from a separation or
divorce between man and his world, from the discrepancies revealed,
by what man as a sentient being demands of the insentient. The first
and most radical term of l'absurde is (1) man's desire to live and his
ineluctable fate, _which is death; (2) man's desire for clarity in an
ambiguous universe; and (3) man's desire for unity and order in the
face of a creation which appears fragmented rather than whole, and
where men themselves reveal duality or duplicity. Such terms outrage
the intellect.

Take away the intellect and there is no absurdity. Remove the
world and there is likewise no absurdity. The absurd then demands the
mutual confrontation of world and mind. If the confrontation urged by
Camus outrages human reason, what then is its purpose?

Camus believes that from absurdity or incongruity itself, from

man's "unreasonable" demands and the universe's "unreasoning" with-

 

27The absurd is a term which has been used by many authors and
critics with some variation in meaning. In Sartre the absurd is the
result Of the fact that both man and the universe are in his view super-
fluous or cl; t_r_qp, hence man's "nausea" or terror resulting from his
accidental presence. In Malraux the absurd comes into being as a
result Of the fact that man is a plaything of every fatality a hostile uni-
verse throws in his way. In Camus the absurd is the result of the jux-
taposition of sentient man and the insentient universe, of what the for-
mer desires and Of what the latter withholds.

30
drawal in the face Of such demands, benefits may be drawn. Camus
early concludes that the only possibility of man's regaining his moral
and physical well-being in the face of these negations depends entirely
on his recognition of the absurd. If confronting l'absurde teaches that
human existence is brief, painful, and inevitably annihilated, it also
teaches that there is in absurdity a position which has meaning.

In lie Mythe d_e Sisyphe Camus says that there are in the face of

1_a condition humaine only two intellectual attitudes, that of La Pallice

 

and that of Don Quixote. Philip Thody, in a note in the English transla-

tion of the first volume of Carnets or Notebooks, writes, "the contrast

 

seems to be between someone who accepts the things that are Obviously
and completely true and someone who completely neglects them."28
Thody believes that to Camus both positions are accepted as equally
absurd and that only through a balance between them can both emotion
and clarity be achieved. There exists, on the contrary, the possibility
that Camus' purpose in juxtaposing these two types may be to show that
the Don Quixotes Of this world are those who live in deception, ameli-
orating the truth of the human condition by refusing to confront l'absurde;
whereas La Pallice, "mort devant Pavie / un quart d'heure avant sa
mort / il était encore en vie," is the hero Of l'absurde who realizes that
without life, he has nothing.

Because the conscious man (that is, the absurd hero) feels most

at home in the realm of physical sensations, he wisely lives without

fl

28W 1935-1945 (New York, 1963), 155. Subsequent quota-
tions from this work are taken from this edition.

c.._,.

v
A
.
‘n
.
t

I

r-

3 l
nostalgia. Honestly confronting his ordained annihilation and yet refus-
ing to honor the natural order that ordains it, he refuses "laters"
(betrayals of his only certainty, his life) which hold out promises of
eternal life or of social utOpias — either, payable at an unknown future
date. 29

Refusing such consolations, Dr. Rieux, one Of the protagonists of

If 1323, shows that the notion of l'absurde, born of negation, becomes
a positive factor, a challenge to struggle and survival, rather than an
invitation to surrender. DevelOping his plan of action, based on his
awareness of l'absurde (Tarrou earlier remarks that Rieux looks knowl-
edgeable —- having "l'air renseigné"), even Rieux cannot immediately
realize that the plague has descended on Oran, a modern Algerian sea—
port. Soon abandoning subterfuge, he confronts l'absurde, differing in
this way radically from the passive citizens Of Oran. Standing at a
window overlooking the town, his first reactions are ostrich-like:

Le docteur regardait toujours par la fenétre. D'un cOté de

la vitre, 1e ciel frais du printemps, et de l'autre cOté 1e

mot qui resonnait encore dans la piéce: la peste . . . . une

tranquillite’ si pacifique et si indifferent niait presque sans

effort les vieilles iznages du fléau. . . .non, tout cela,

n'était pas encore assez fort pour tuer la paix de cette

journée. De l'autre cd'té de la vitre, 1e timbre d‘un tram-
way invisible résonnait tout d'un coup et re’futait en une

 

29The conscious man also refuses to betray his life by choosing
among other possibilities the wrong freedom. For there are many forms
of self-deception which Sartre terms mauvaise f_oi or bad faith. In his
"An Explication Of The Straw," Sartre refers to mauvaise Loi when he
writes, "custom and diversion conceal man's nothingness, his forlorn-
ness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness from himself"
(Camus: A Collection o_f Critical Essays, ed. Germaine Brée [Engle-
wood Cliffs, N. J., 1962], 109).

32
seconde la cruauté et la douleur. Seule la mer au bout du
damier terne des maisons témoignait de ce qu'il y a
d'inquiétant et de jamais reposé dans le monde . . .

In order to adjust his mind to what has happened, Rieux thinks of
the historic visitations of the black death he can recall, tries to imagine
the city p0pu1ated with the dying and the coastline fringed with corpses.
"Mais ce vertige ne tenait pas devant 1a raison. Il est vrai qu'a la
minute mane le fléau secouait et jetait s terre une ou deux victimes.
Mais quoi, cela pouvait s'arréter." Then in abandoning self-deception
and in adopting a sincere confrontation of death in the form of plague,
Dr. Rieux instinctively adOpts one of the values born of l'absurde, which
is lucidité. Another will be mesure. "Ce qu'il fallait faire c'était
reconnattre clairement ce qui devait Etre reconnu, ' chasser enfin les
ombres inutiles et prendre les mesures qui convenaient."

As Rieux continues to speculate regarding the plague's duration,
he knows that hOpe is a false and dangerous line Of reasoning:

cela pouvait s'arreter . . . .1a peste s’arreterait parce que
la peste ne s'imaginait pas Ou s'imaginait faussement. Si
elle s'arreterait, et c’était 1e plus probable, tout irait
bien. Dans le cas contraire, on saurait ce quelle était

et s‘il n'y avait pas moyen de s'en arranger d'abord pour
la vaincre ensuite.

Facing up to the absurd, as Rieux does, is to know that one is a

man condemned among other condemned men. 30 This realization

emphasizes the importance of mesure, or limits, for the limits of man's

 

30The death sentence is the central theme of Camus' work as well
as one Of the leading concerns in his life. It forms the thematic center
of L’Etran er, _I_._.a_ Peste, L'Etat d_e siége, Les Justes, "Réflexions sur
la guillotine," and many of his other journalistic writings.

33

position are defined in relation to such absolutes. Awareness of
l'absurde gives significance to life and provides the absurd man with an
answer for combatting that absurdity itself, whether it asserts itself in
the form of death from plague or from other sources.

If man does (not use the predictability Of his daily routine as a
tranquilizer for deadening metaphysical anxieties, he discovers the

value Of limits or mesure, an ethic of faire 1_e possible, emerging from

 

life or from the act Of living itself. Rieux is reminded of this possibil-
ity when through the window
1e bruit de la ville s‘enfla d'un coup. D'un atelier voisin
montait le sifflement bref et re’pété d'une scie me’canique,
Rieux se secoua. La était la certitude, dans le travail de
tous les jours. Le reste tenait a des fils et de mouvements
insignifiants, on ne pouvait s'y arreter. L'essentiel était
de bien faire son métier.
Through his profession — the skills acquired which he is able to
bring to bear for the betterment Of the human condition — Rieux has con-

quered in great measure the nostalgia for unity to which men are prey.

Such an i_gnus fatuus is one Of the sources of man's present moral i11-

 

nesses and it must hOpefully cede to an amor fati, if coherence and

 

order are to be achieved. Rieux has conquered this nostalgia by choos-
ing one, the only successful one, of the two ways in which man can forge
a unity for himself -- either within the world or by turning away from the
world. If he turns away from the world (as will the aspiring saint), an
austerity will have to be defined; if he turns to seek unity or coherence

within the world, a morality will be defined.

 

31Peste (Paris, 1947), 36. Subsequent quotations from 1_a; Peste
are taken from this edition.

\

b"

'\

6X

n)
"t)

9“

PART IV

THE SAINT'S PROGRESS

Camus centers his consideration of sainthood as a possibility for
living, corrective to nihilism, in the figure of Jean Tarrou, a protago-
nist of his novel I_._a Peste. Tarrou, of course, does not fit into any
known category of sainthood. He is rather, as Camus sees it, a mani-
festation of one direction taken in the contemporary interest in the sub-
ject.

Unlike the traditional religiously-oriented saint, Camus' candi-
date for atheistic sainthood is neither holy, meek, patient, loving, nor
exceptionally charitable. Instead, as one of Camus' rebels or re’volte’s
against the human condition in which death is paramount, Tarrou has
been trying to ameliorate men's lives by fighting social injustice in
general, and governments which he feels convinced owe their very exis-
tences to the death sentence in particular. Later, in relating his ear-
lier experiences as an algfié, a vgé, to Dr. Rieux, he states, "j'ai cru
que la société oil je vivais était celle qui reposait sur la condamnation
s mort et qu'en 1a combattant, je combattrais l'assassinat"(206).
Although Tarrou does find satisfaction in his efforts to improve the
human condition and in washing the sores of the afflicted during the
plague year, he does, as a matter of fact, no more in the line of char-
ity than others. Whether the others are the anonymous workers in the

formations sanitaires volontaires, or those whom Camus prefers to

 

name, instead of Tarrou, his true rebels or heroes of la peste and

l'absurde —- Joseph Grand, Raymond Rambert, and Dr. Bernard Rieux -

34

at

35

each works to combat 1_a peste.
Camus will discard Tarrou's type of heroism which strives to go

fl

beyond the human and which invariably COOperates with death. The atti-
tudes and action of this protagonist will provide the clearest definition
of the type Camus has considered, among others, as a possibility for a
viable approach to life. Tarrou, when studied, reveals in his tempta-
tion toward a peculiar form of twentieth-century sainthood, sainthood
without God, several forms of nostalgia determined, in part, by his
life-cycle. Such a life-cycle consists of, first, an initial stage of inno-
cence, a stage in which life seems to be made pretty much to the order
Of the persOn, followed by an flail or awakening. This awakening from
innocence or ignorance to a knowledge of evil, recognized particularly
in death, is the second stage. In this stage the person concerned real-
izes that things are no longer what they seemed in a world which once
appeared as friendly and compatible, and now seems no longer made to
fit human specifications for comfort and security.

After such an awakening, the future aspirant to sanctity (he has
not yet become aware that such an ambition is develOping within him)
embarks on the third stage, a crusade on behalf of the victims against
their executioners. For the would-be saint sees the world not only
founded upon a universal death sentence but a world in which further
injustice is augmented by man himself in his own inhumanity to man.

In his endeavor to rescue the victimes from their bourreaux, whether

 

the latter be governments, microbes, or God, the révolté himself can

only gain to lose. In fighting the system on the physical as well as the

36
metaphysical plane, he strives after wind. Here Tarrou learns that in
his attempt to eliminate evil, he has only increased it. He knows that:

je n'avais pas cessé d'etre un pestiféré pendant toutes
ces longues années oil pourtant, de toute mon ame, je
croyais lutter justement contre la peste. J'ai appris
que j’avais indirectement souscrit a la mort de milliers
d'hommes, que j'avais merne provoque’ cette mort en
trouvant bons les actions et les principes qui l'avaient
fatalement entraine’e. (207,)

It is only with the fourth stage of his progress that Tarrou real-
izes that his has been a progression or temptation toward sainthood.
This is a stage of passivity32which results from the humiliation and
frustration realized in his admission: "je souffrais déja de la peste bien
avant de connattre cette ville et cette e’pidemie"(203). Later he speaks
in the same vein: "j'ai continue’ d'avoir honte, j'ai appris cela, que
nous étions tous dans la peste, et j'ai perdu la paix" (208). His combat
fatigue comes from his refusal to accept as victories any relative tri-

umph against the forces of evil or death. At this point, deliberately

leading a life as lasse, ennuyée, passive as that of the preconscious

 

Meursault, this conscious révolté endeavors never to be "amene’ dans
une minute de distraction, e respirer dans la figure d'un autre et a lui
coller 1'infection" (208).

Each revolt is a nostalgia for innocence —- that is, a refusal to
accept the world as it is, a longing for the time when one lived without

the knowledge that the world is not to be borne. Tarrou's cravings for

 

32Tarrou's name may possibly be derived from the phrase tare’
d_e t_O___ut, thus reflecting his weariness with life, only alleviated for a
time by his preoccupation with the plague.

37
purity and peace are secondary nostalgias to this, and are closely
related to man's denial of his universe - in man's desire for clarity,
for unity, and for a state Of existence in which pain or death have no
part. Of the nostalgia for a lost innocence or a "paradis perdu," Jean
Bloch-Michel writes in his essay, "Albert Camus et la tentation de
l'innocence," that "l'important est alors de décider s'il se résigne Ou
s'il garde la nostalgic de son Eden perdu." If a person fails to react
against a world which he sees as imperfect, he joins the passive mass
of unconscious men because "se résigner a la perte de l'innocence, c'est
accepter le monde tel qu'il est." On the other hand, "chaque re’volte est
nostalgie d'innocence et appel de l'é‘tre."33 The révolté who has regis-
tered his protest in an act of commitment will have to be content with
triumphs Of good over evil which are both impermanent and relative for
he can never completely obliterate these undesirable aspects from his
absurd existence. If he credits temporary victories he will taste again
his lost innocence because "chaque home, a condition qu'il en ait regu
le don, peut la connattre au moment Ot‘l se produit cette sorte d'adéqua-
tion merveilleuse entre son corps, ses appe’tits et le monde. . . . Cette
innocence qui est la vraie est donc passag‘ere" (5).

It is because Tarrou demands a return to this former stage which
goes beyond the merely transitory rehabilitation accepted by other men
that he cannot be content with the ephemeral return to innocence expe-

rienced by him and by Dr. Rieux in their brief respite from 1_a peste,

 

33Preuves, cx (April 1960), 5.

38
or in such occasional returns enjoyed by Camus in the world of sports
or in such group participations as he experienced in the theater. Accord-
ing to Bloch-Michel, one of Camus' theatrical productions given at the
Chateau d'Angers was such a re-entry into a lost Eden:

Camus se retourna vers moi et eut un geste de la main pour.
me montrer les spectateurs immobiles, un geste et un bref
sourire. Entre lui, les comédiens et le public, venait de
nattre, seulement pour une second peut-étre, cette commun—
ion que permet 1e spectacle de la beauté, ce qui recompens-
ait et justifiait a la fois les efforts qu'il avait exigés, et

le bonheur que chacun avait trouvé dans ces efforts. La
communauté chaleureuse qui venait de naitre, si éphémere
qu'elle fut, cette beauté, la douceur de la nuit chaude, nous
rendaient tous pour un instant a l'innocence (9).

Tarrou not only expresses his revolt in his refusal of "le monde
tel qu'il est," but in his refusal of relative victories in his endeavors to
fight 1_a peste in the form Of suffering or injustice or of "life itself," as
one of Camus' lesser protagonists puts it. Tarrou reduces the occur-
rence of such returns from exile and increases his own estrangement
from life, declaring to Dr. Rieux, "d'ici la, je sais que je ne vaux plus
rien pour ce monde lui-meme et qu'a partir du moment oil j’ai rénoncé
s tuer, je me suis condamné a un exil de’finitif" (209).

If Tarrou is primarily a man of nostalgia, those characters whom
Camus proferts as true re’voltés or true heroes of l'absurde are men
who live with a minimum of nostalgia, adapting their actions to life,
which is the "here and now."

Tarrou, in declaring he will leave it to such men to make history,

has already in his mind turned his back on "here and now" and Opted for

"later." For he is now conscious of his desire to be a saint without God.

39
The fourth stage of his progress toward sainthood has been before the
advent of plague, a pursuit of a kind of infantile peace, in which (by cul-
tivating the most harmless Of activities) he sought never to breathe the
germs of pests: into another's face. The "later" which he holds out as a
trump card is his death, for his death from the plague at its close is a
higher form ofsuicide, a quest for an absolute of peace and purity

unattainable in life.

PART V

SAIN OU SAINT

The first stage in the temptation toward sainthood -- an initial
innocence — resembles the earliest experience Of many human beings.
It is an Eden in which the being lives, without knowledge of evil, in
physical rapport with his world. This state of innocence, however,

34 In his

because it excludes knowledge, is also a state of ignorance.
Carnets, I, Camus included Giraudoux' definition of innocence: "L'inno-
cence d’un Etre est l'adaptation absolue a l'univers dans lequel i1 vit.
Ex: innocence du loup. L'innocence est celui que n'explique pas" (89-
90). In 1.1? Myths. . . he wrote, "Si j'étais arbre parmi les arbres,

chat parmi les animaux, cette vie aurait un sens ou plutOt ce probléme
n'en aurait point car je ferait partie de ce monde. Je serais ce monde
auquel je m'Oppose maintenant par toute ma conscience et par toute mon
' exigence de familiarite’. Cette raison si dérisoire, c'est elle qui

m’0ppose a toute création."35

In Noces, that volume Of essays in which
Camus celebrated man's nuptials with the world, he wrote: "mais qu'est-

ce que le bonheur sinon 1e simple accord entre un Gtre et l'existence

 

34The point that innocence is really ignorance is brought out by
Roger Quilliot in his study, "Albert Camus's Algeria" (Camus: _A_ Collec-
t_igg of Critical Essays, op. gi_t. , 39). Camus, sustained by an "invinci-
ble summer" (his memory of the Algerian sun) in dark and war-torn
Europe, knows, Quilliot points out, the two aspects of rapport or com-
plicity with the natural world, for the sun is not only "life- giving, but
the sun kills. It rides high in the sky, it dazzles Meursault's eyes, it
triggers the murderous shot — the sun is the real murderer."

35% hm <3: 511312129 (Paris, 1942), 74. Subsequent quotations
from Mflhe . . . are taken from this edition.

40

~l

41

qu’il méne?" (93). Considerably later in 14a Chute, Camus’ récit pub-

 

lished in 1956, Jean-Baptiste Clamence acknowledges his lost innocence:
"Oui, peu d'étres ont été plus naturels que moi. Mon accord avec la vie
e’tait total, j’adhérais s cc quelle était du haut en bas, sans rien refuser
de ses ironies, de sa grandeur, ni de ses servitudes. En particulier,
1a chair, la matiére, 1e physique en un mot, qui déconcerte ou décou-
rage tant d'hommes dans l'amour ou dans la solitude, m'apportait, sans

. "36 It is,

m'asservir, des jO‘ies égales. J’e’tais fait pour un corps . .
then, not only the physical rapport with the world, but a mental and
spiritual agreement as well,37 for Clamence also reported, "je vivais
impune’ment. J e n’étais concerné par aucun jugement" (32). "N'était-
ce pas cela, en effet, l'Eden, cher monsieur: la vie en prise directe?"
(34), and having lost this blessed state, Clamence later declares "oui,
nous avons perdu la lumi‘ere, les matins, la sainte innocence de celui
qui se pardonne a lui-mane" (167).

At this point Caligula's "les hommes meurent et ils ne sont pas
heureux" splits into the two terms of a dichotomy: "les hommes
meurent" is that aspect of 1'absurde which, as death, explains man's
dissatisfaction with an order which exacts his removal from a world

in which for the most part he feels physically at home; the "et ils ne

sont pas heureux" relates more closely to the spiritual and intellectual

 

361,3 Chute (Paris, 1956), 35. Subsequent quotations from l._._a
Chute are taken from this edition.

37Jean Bloch-Michel explains that happiness and innocence are
not synonymous, yet are to some degree co-existent: "s'il n'y a pas
d'innocence sans bonheur, celui-ci ne se confond pourtant pas avec
celle-1a" (4).

42
alienaticn derived from man who exacts clarity and unity from a uni-
verse which refuses both. Clamence's first fall from innocence (his
failure to respond to the cries of a drowning girl) makes him realize
that even he himself lacks wholeness, that instead of being "all of a
piece," is merely "in a way," that he, as well as all men, is a Judas
or a double. He also knows that he and others "confrontés toujours aux
memes questions bien que nous connaissions d'avance les résponses"
would when the young woman again threw herself into the Seine, fail
again to rescue her and salvage his self-image. "O jeune fille, jette-

toi encore dans l‘eau pour que j'aie une seconde foi la chance de nous

 

sauver tous les deux!. . . Brr. . . 3 l'eau est si froide! Mais rassurons

 

 

nous! Il est trop tard, maintenant, i1 sera toujours trOp tard. Heur-
eusementl "(italics added] (170).

Meursault represents the other term or extreme, for rather than
remaining exiled from his former felicity, he reenters his garden; for
it was he who never explains himself, who never feels the need of jus-
tification precisely because in living in the least Opposition to creation
as it stands, he is able to be "partie de ce monde." Meursault also,
before he encounters death or evil on the beach, lives in - if not con-
scious at least consistent -- accord with his world. Content with the
banal routine of a life containing "pas de complexes, pas de problémes,"
himself a "modéle de normalité," in his contact with death, he commits
an act which Germaine Brée maintains was "equivalent to killing that
unconscious animal oneness with the universe which is destroyed when

the human being accedes to the world of intellectual

43
consciousness" (68).38 Meursault describes the moment Of his forfeited
innocence as "J'ai compris que j'avais de’truit l’equilibre du jour, 1e
silence exceptionnel d'une plage oil j'avais e’té heureux"(90). Having
lost in his subsequent imprisonment his happy delight in an "apparently
indestructible routine broken only by the sea and sun of successive
Mediterranean weekends,"39 Meursault's stage of alienation, his nos-
talgia for some type of spiritual oneness with a cosmos he will be able
to accept, does not outlast the unwelcome visit Of the aumOnier. Robert
Champigny interprets Meursault's successful reintegration as his "refus
de devenir un étranger total, c'est-a-dire un refus de devenir un
e’tranger a sOi-mEme, a sa prOpre vie."40 Refusing the priest's prom-
ises of religious consolations Meursault’s outburst has purged him Of
evil and he recognizes himself as a harmonious entity when "vidé
d’espoir, devant cette nuit chargé se signes et d'étoiles; je m'ouvrais
pour la premiére fois a la tendre indifference-du monde. De l'e’prouver
si pareil a moi, si fraternel enfin, j'ai senti que j'avais été heureux, et
que je 1'étais encore" (179).

Yet all of Camus' protagonists are at least for a time révoltés,
and depending on the quality of their rebellion, become in turn either

his true or his false rebels. One of the latter, Caligula, for instance,

 

33Here Miss Brée is discussing those earlier versions of
Wager, the unpublished "La Vie heureuse," later called "La Mort
heureuse" in which Mersault replaced Meursault, Zagreus, the Arab.

39Brée, 92.

40§_u_r u_n héros paien (Paris, 1959), 31.

 

\J

r-

‘4

44
awakes to rebellion at the death of his sister-mistress Drusilla. But
his revolttook the form of tyranny — an emulation rather than an Oppo—
sition to the absurd. In such a way he becomes himself an aspect of
1.2 seats

Camus, too, has gone through these stages and, unlike Clamence,
has not been able to live "a la surface de la vie."41 From his early
association with poverty and even death in an Algerian slum, he knows
that life consists of the two sides of a coin—l’envers e_t l’endroit. He
has personally faced up to l'absurde in his own near-death from tuber-
culosis and he experiences death on a large scale when he joins the pub-

1ic world of misery. His revolt is his decision to fight for the vic-

 

times against the bourreaux in occupied France.

 

Camus’ entry in his notebooks, "j’ai ve’cu toute ma jeunesse avec

"42

pas d'idée du tout. Aujourd'hui . . . , is repeated almost verbatim by

Tarrou when he describes his early innocence and his abrupt awakening
to the conditions of life:

Quand j'étais jeune, je vivais avec l'idée de mon innocence,
c'est-a-dire avec pas d'idée du tout. Je n'ai pas le genre
tourmente’, j'ai débuté comme i1 convenait. Tout me
réussissait, j'e’tais a l'aise dans l'intelligence, au mieux
avec les femmes, et si j‘avais quelques inquiétudes, elle
passaient cormne elle étaient venues. Un 'jour, j'ai com-
mencé a réfléchir. (203)

Tarrou's "un jour, j’ai commence’ a réfle’chir. Maintenant. . ."

marks the day of his awakening at seventeen when he is invited to attend

 

412 Chute, 60.

 

42Carnets, I I, 154.

45
a trial in which his father, a public prosecutor, demands the death pen-
alty for the defendant. (At the same age Camus, with his first serious
attack of tuberculosis, has his closest experience of death). The trial
is, among other things, the end of the cordial relationship between father
and son. This relationship has been largely based on his father's avoca-
tion, the "railway guide game," but with the discovery of his father's
vocation a train Of thoughts, destined to carry him far, has been set go-
ing in the young Tarrou.

In later relating his .éleil or awakening to Dr. Rieux, Tarrou des-
cribes it in this way: "je ne me re’veillais vraiment qu'avec le réquisi-
toire de mon pére" (205). He is referring literally to the alarm clock
which his father had always set whenever he had to awaken early to
attend, in his official capacity, an execution. Figuratively, of course,
the alarm clock was Tarrou's call to action for Carl A. Viggiani recalls
that "in social terms, for Camus, murder, or death is the door through
which man enters history."43 This is true for Tarrou, for less than a
year after he attends the trial, he leaves home permanently because
that particular victim of his father's has become his life-long affair.
For in his dedication to other victims of injustice (or during the plague,
of disease), he remains Opposed to that initial "sale aventure Oil des
bouches empestées annoncaient a un homme dans les chatnes qu'il allait
mourir et réglaient toutes choses pour qu'il meure, en effet, apres des

nuits d'agonie pendant lesquelles il attendait d'etre assassiné les yeux

 

43"Camus' L'Etranger," PMLA, Lxx1 (December, 1956), 883.

 

46
ouverts" (207-208).

Tarrou, in his struggle to remake the world to his own taste -- a
world without pain in which he can remain pure — follows closely the
course of events of near contemporary EurOpe, asserting, "i1 n'est pas
de pays en EurOpe dont je n'aie partagé les luttes"(206). It is because
his father's victim is executed in the name Of justice that he applies him-
self to the revision of such systems. It is only when he yields to argu—

ments of efficacy and force majeure that Tarrou knows he has inadver-

 

tently become an executioner and that he has ceased for the time to be
interested in concrete cases, sacrificing them to the ideals of abstract
justice. .

Once he learns that he has sacrificed the men of today for the man
of tomorrow, he can no longer preclude from his own actions the terms
"murder," "injustice," and "nihilism." He knows that he, too, like

Marthe, the sister in I_.._e Malentendu, has been killing his brothers
44
ll

 

"sciemment pour Etre heureux aprés.
Many French intellectuals who survived the ineffectual twenties

and thirties and the sturm und drang of the forties, in refusing the ivory

 

tower, chose either Catholicism or communism. It is in the forties
that Camus knows that the type Of socialism he has dreamedof during
the war years was becoming a new type Of tyranny in the hands of the

French left. Such a tyranny aims particularly at the guilt-ridden and

 

4“lCarina Gadourek, Lg Innocents e_:_t l_§_i_3 coupables (The Hague,
1963), 109. Subsequent quotations from this work are taken from this
edition.

47
hence "straying bourgeois," becoming a new "nihilism of efficiency,"
practicing the principle that the end justifies the means.

Camus and his sometimes alter ego, Tarrou, refuses this type of
engagement, for each is determined at the end of such clear-cut issues
as the Resistance to Nazi aggression and the fight against plague (in
which to Tarrou's delight he could fight microbes and not men) to main-
tain as closely as possible a principle of "clean hands." Such a longing
on Camus' part for "1e combat juste et sans violence" led to journalis-
tic brushes with Jean-Paul Sartre and other members Of the French
left and to the definitive and famous querelle Sartre-Camus, as well as

the composition of Sartre's play, Les Mains sales (1948), and Camus'

 

 

rebuttal in the form of another dramatic piece, Les Justes (1950). In

 

1951 the publication of Camus' L'Homme révolté incited rejoinders

 

from Sartre and his satellites grouped around Sartre's review, Les

Temps modernes, which in turn brought forth Camus' final récit, 1_._a

 

 

Chute, in 1957 and his dramatic adaptation Of Dostoevsky's anti-nihilis-

tic novel, The Possessed, in 1959.

 

The fall from innocence undergone by all of Camus’ major protag-
onists, as well as by himself, can be regarded in the light of a fortunate
fall - a phrase which is, R. W. B. Lewis explains,

intended to suggest, within the Christian framework,
that the fall Of Adam (that is, the fall of man) proved
to be fortunate for mankind since it made necessary
the entrance into human history of God as man; it
made necessary the Incarnation. Modern literature,
however, has often exploited a humanistic equivalent
of the religious idea; and has suggested that the fall
from innocence or virtue can have a fortunate effect

4

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v
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. c
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Q
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.
. ,.
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a
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48

upon an individual, that it can educate, enrich and
humanize him."45

Camus, Of course, used the humanist concept of the fortunate fall,
in his short stories and novels. This fall is fortunate in that it leads to
revolt; and while it is a fall from innocence, it is at the same time a
progression from ignorance to knowledge, which allows for the possi-
bility of an enlightened revolt. Not all of his protagonists, however,
profit from this awakening and fall, for these events mark only the
beginning Of an absurd freedom, just as for the Christian the fall marks
only the beginning of his journey toward salvation.

With absurd man in mind, Rachel Bespaloff asked, ”What free-
dom can there be in the fullest sense‘without assurance of eternity?"
She then compared the freedom, or plight, of the being without God to
that of "Adam and Eve banished from paradise, at the moment when
alone an unprotected they assume the burden of their earthly existence.
The mutilated freedom of Adam and Eve after the fall is not devoid Of
love," she continued, "since it begets the solidarity of this first v_v_e fac-
ing a hostile world. If we examine it even more closely, we recognize
the frightening present-day freedom, with which we face a future that
must be created out of nothing" (100-101).

Although some Of Camus' protagonists had not reached what
Bespaloff refers to as the "we" stage, and'some profit more completely

than others from the baptism of human love, each had, however,

 

4F’The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures i_1_1 Contemporary
Fiction (Philadelphia and New York, 1959 )a 107.

 

 

49
followed what was, according to Herbert Weisinger, Milton's conviction

that "to be truly man, o_n_e must be capable of choice, and more, must

 

be capable if bearing 13.13 burden of that choice [italics added]. 46 Leslie

 

Fiedler sees the burden no longer as it was "so Often in the past, a view
of man struggling to fulfill some revealed or inherited view of himself
and his destiny: but Of man learning that it is the struggle itself which is
his definition"[italics added]. 47 Meursault, as Camus' other true reb-
els, does find self-definition in the acceptance of his fate or his rock,
and does, as the true rebel must, in order to distinguish himself from
the nihilist, demonstrate his willingness to give life for life, knowing,
"J.'e’tais coupable, je payais, on ne pouvait rien me demander de plus"
(166). Additionally, as the absurd man destined to gain awareness,
Meursault defines himself in his increasing and finally complete lucidity.
Camus' true rebel must pass through stages in his develOping
awareness which resemble those Of a religious conversion; that is, a
"progression from ignorance through experience to light" the attain-
ment of an "intelligible pattern of human destiny capable of being held
with the most profound conviction" wrenched from a "universe in which
man enjoys, though at a bitter price, a transcendent rapport with him-

48

self, with nature, and with God." Germain Brée describes a similar

progression in Camus’ plays (and she could well have included his novels

 

4(’Tragedy and the Paradox of th__e Fortunate Fall (London, 1953), 20.

 

47"No! In Thunder." Esquire, LIV (September, 1960), 79.

48Weisinger, 20.

50
and short stories as well), in which the protagonists, albeit without God,
follow a basic common pattern which curiously resembles the stages of
mysticism or religious conversion: ”the 'natural' order of human life is
dislocated: a system takes over which is the very negation of order, a
systematized disorder, a perversion in which the notion of good and evil
are inverted; life is drained of its substance, then comes a struggle and
a final resolution in which, temporarily, the natural order reasserts
itself" (165).

The false rebel is he who falls or fails, or more precisely is he
who is constantly failing, rather than falling, in respect to his self-ful—
fillment or in respect to himself as he feels he should be. Such a dis-
crepancy between intent and accomplishment gives rise to a sense of
guilt, more or less acute according to the stringencies of the individu-
al's self-demands. In the case of Tarrou, the would-be saint, his guilt

(referred to as his peste intérieure) became no longer an incentive to his

 

search for authenticity but completely eclipsed it. For aside from the
clear-cut issues Of plague where one fought microbes rather than men,
Tarrou is rendered inactive by his fear of "lapses." In regard to these
"lapses," Thomas C. Hanna writes of Tarrou's fear of inadvertently
breathing the germs of geste in another's face:

We may well wonder if Tarrou is not speaking of sin when
he talks of "lapses." The plague is evil and sin is giving

in to this evil. It is obvious that Tarrou, in speaking for
Camus is speaking of sin, but that it i_§ s_i;1 without God.

This is to say that, in Tarrou's thought, evil is of this
world, man is of this world, and sin is against a value which
is Of this world. God in no way figures in the problem.

 

49'I_‘_1_1_e Thought 9.95.1 A}: of Albert Camus (Chicago, 1958), 202.

 

51

Camus himself wrote in If Mythe . . .: "L‘absurde qui est l'état

 

métaphysique de 1'homme conscient, ne mene pas a Dieu. Peut-etre
cette notion s'éclaircira-t-elle si je hasarde cette énormité: l'absurde
c'est le péché sans Dieu" (60). Admitting sin to his universe, although
reluctantly, Camus speaks for himself and fellow Algérois:

11 y a des mots que je n'ai jamais bien compris comme

celui de péché. Je crois savoir pourtant que ces hommes

n'ont pas péché contre la vie. Car s‘il y a un péché contre

la vie, ce n’est peut-Etre pas tant d‘en de’spérer, que

d'e’sPérer une autre vie, et se dérober a 1'i1nplacable

grandeur de celle-Ci. 50
Rossi sums this all up by stating,

It seems that the sense of absurdity is the atheistical equi-

valent of the Christian concept of sin, and, more exactly,

of original sin. It is consciousness Of a fall, an "incal-

culable fall before the image of what we are” (Sisyphus),

a sense of deficiency arising from the void which separates

the irrationality of the world and our desperate longing for

clarity and unity (402).

Although guilt engendered by sin, whether Christian or atheistic,

can be the step toward a higher form Of moral existence, it must be a
reasonable or calculated culpability rather than the total culpability
assumed by Tarrou. Such an assumption Of total guilt leads to Camusean
sin, 1. e. , a turning away from this life toward some type Of "later" or
solution outside of life. And Tarrou, Of course, with his nostalgia for
absolute purity, for the search of a lost innocence which would be per-
manent rather than transitory, and for his final nostalgia for perfect

peace, the "paix des pierres," or nothingness, was banking not on life,

but on' death, for these nostalgias are evasions of life and constitute a

 

5”Noces, 69.

52
death instinct.

If, as Rachel Bespaloff stated, "Sin without God is nothing but the
choice of the wrong freedom, " Tarrou, in turning away from life in his
great quest for perfection, has followed the road of other absolutists in
Camus' writing —— of Caligula, or "1e renégat, and of Stavrogin in

Camus' adaptation for the theater of Dostoevsky's The Possessed, end-

 

ing with nothing. His death, regarded as a higher form Of suicide,
reveals that his temptation toward sainthood marks for Tarrou a regres-
sion rather than a progression, that his passage is not from "ignorance
through experience to light" but rather from newness to oldness, from
exultation to despair, from spiritual victory to meaninglessness, from

life to death.

PART VI

CREATION CORRECTED

In Camus' oeuvre revolt takes two forms -- that of political or

 

social action and that of artistic creation. In L'Homme révolté, Camus

 

cites Van Gogh as having said, "Je crois de plus en plus. . .qu'il ne
faut pas juger 1e bon Dieu sur ce monde-ci. C'est une étude de lui qui
est mal venue" (306). It is the writer's duty then, Camus believes,
because the world is basically unjust, to improve or correct this faulty
sketch. The artist should then become, on the basis Of his revolt, a
fabricator of new worlds containing the unity and clarity which this one
lacks.

However, Camus does not completely reject the world-as-it-is,
but rather revolts against it "a cause de ce qui lui manque et au nom de
ce que, parfois, il est."51 For Camus still believes that the world is
man's true kingdom in those ephemeral moments Of rapport realized
between the creature and his environment.

In this respect -- in the task Of correcting creation-- Camus feels
that poetry has failed, that the nineteenth-century Russian and Ameri-
can novels have come closest to the realization that should be the goal
of the contemporary novel. Camus particularly feels that Romanticism
limits its revolt to vain ostentation, to the flaunting Of the artist's wick-
edness and originality-as a challenge to God. Surrealism, he feels, has

never gone beyond nihilism. Thus it fails to transform unsatisfactory

 

51L'Homme révolté, 303.

 

53

54
reality into a unified and satisfying whole. Entries in Camus’ Carnets,
devoted to the annotation of events and ideas, as well as to projections
of future works, sometimes carry this label: "Creation Corrected."

Keeping notebooks can be thought of as a family enterprise in
Camus' microcosm. Camus, who kept his own Carnets from 1935 till

his death in 1960, writes his novel L_a Peste in the form of a chronicle

 

kept by Dr. Rieux. Rieux' chronicle is, in turn, augmented by Tarrou's
notes left at his death in Rieux' possession. There are also sporadic
discussions of the literary endeavors of two other characters in E
M. For the diligent municipal clerk, Joseph Grand, in writing a
novel takes numerous philological notes to help himself over an insur-
mountable Obstacle —- the first sentence; while the journalist, Raymond
Rambert, has been gathering data on the native p0pu1ation (a task which

resembles Camus' earlier reports made to the Alger-Republicain on a

 

Berber tribe, the Kabyle).

Meursault manifests this trait, too, but in a manner consistent
with his personality. For he is keeping a scrapbook in which he pastes
amusing newspaper clippings. What Robert de Luppé claims for
Meursault's scrapbooks also holds true for those of Camus and Tarrou --
that each is a compilation of "détails qui n'offrent aucun sens, afin de
maintenir sa conscience éveille’."52 An example Of such absurd vision
is included in Camus' Carnets, I:

Le type dans une brasserie qui entend une dame téléphoner
et appeler son numéro et son nom. £1 répond au bout du fil.

 

52Albert Camus (Paris, 1963), 80.

 

55

E11 l_u_i_ parle comme s'il e’tait la-bas (famille, détails
précis, etc.) I1 ne comprend pas. C'est comme ca"(208-209).

The artist with his type of vision ”knows the limits Of his mind,
the limits of his life," ‘writes Germaine Brée, "and the uselessness of
an effort which he maintains at its highest level of intensity. Knowing
the limits of his mind," she continues, "the artist does not attempt to
'reason the concrete,‘ but through his intelligence, he orders a sumptu-
ous 'mime' of concrete images that testify to the carnal reality Of a uni-
verse whose mystery remains intact" (246).

Meursault's very milieu was made up of created characters capa-
ble of throwing light on those absurd lives which Tarrou later records
in his notebooks. One such is that strange little woman whom Meursault
encounters in his café-restaurant, who sits opposite him systematically
checking Off every program in a twelve-page radio guide, who orders
and pays for her lunch mechanically, and who is afterwards seen by
Meursault winding her way through traffic in the same abstracted man-
ner. It is this same automatic woman who sits through Meursault's
trial a year later, unwavering in her attention, yet showing no recogni-
tion whatever. Various justifications have been offered for her pres-

ence in the re’cit and each bears a relationship to the types of entries

 

Tarrou is to make in his own notebooks.

The most generalized Of the explanations for her presence is that
she underlines the mechanical nature of Meursault's life before the epi-
sode on the beach: a life devoid Of conscious values or a sense Of direc-
tion, set in motion only by physical stimuli or the fortuitous; in this

respect her presence again emphasizes this early life pattern of

IT

56
Meursault's, in her display of an intense dedication to what matters so
little (her radio programs) and her absence of dedication to what matters
so much (traffic and a murder trial, occurrences in which life itself is
hazarded). In such a way she parodies the amorality of Meursault's
earliest activities which show no difference in degrees of commitment
between making love to Marie or the pleasure of drying his hands on a
clean towel.

Carl A. Viggiani reminds the reader that Meursault has found this
robot-woman bizarre, pointing out that the word bizarre appears two or
three times in the 1_-__e:£i_t used for the fir st time two pages before the
appearance of the Odd lady, by Marie to describe Meursault. "In an
author as careful as Camus," he writes, "this is probably intentional,

his aim being to mirror Meursault in the image of the petite automate"

 

(880-881). To underline Meursault as bizarre is to emphasize that he
is the "stranger," not so much to life as to society. It is, however,
those who make up this society whose mores Meursault has je0pardized
in his refusal to He, who are, in turn, due to their own self-deceptions,
the true "strangers," strangers, that is, to life.

Louis R. Rossi sees this woman's function in the 1623 in yet
another light, for he sees in Meursault a potential forHeidegger's
Being-toward-Death. As one who in his refusal to practice the conven-
tional attitudes towards death, and as one who has never regarded death
with the usual unknowing indifference, Meursault is a foil to society and
this robot-woman. For she is to life what the director of the Old peo-

ple's home is to death: the director with "his long handclasp, his files,

57
and the civil service manner" was one who obviously went through cere-
monies related to death "quite Often in his Official capacity, simply as
a matter of form and almost mechanically"(404).

The robot-woman's fir st actions witnessed by Meursault make it
clear that in the importance which she gives to entertainment, she
reveals not only the passive role of the early Meursault, but she is also
a murderer. Because she kills time as an audience, whether to radio
or to murder trials, she is another type of criminal, for by denying
life's seriousness, she plays with it to the extent that she even denies
the seriousness Of taking life. She COOperates, indeed, with the gen-
eral levity involved in Meursault's trial revealed in such issues as his
not having wept at his mother's funeral, which betray the fact that he is
to be executed, not for murder, but because he does not play society's
game. Of all involved in that trial he is the only one who sees life as a
serious matter. The proof that others do not, is demonstrated by the
journalist's overt admission that the indignation, even believed to be
"righteous," has been fanned by a public hungry for melodrama: "Vous
savez," he tells Meursault, "nous avons monté un peu votre affaire.
L'éte’, c'est la saison creuse pour les journaux. Et il n'y avait que
votre histoire et celle du parricide qui vaillent quelque chose" (124).

The robot-woman in her stare, devoid of recognition, points up
the fact that this failure on her part is above all tantamount to the fail-
ure Of society— its Officials, its witnesses, and its audiences -— to rec-
ognize their own common fate, for Meursault is, in reality, only one

condemned man among all men equally condemned. The automate, then,

58
reveals above all the mechanical nature of a universe which kills impla-
cably. Against such insentience Meursault has for a time hOped to find
a way out, a "chance in a million, " a hOpe which he, more conscious
than the majority, abandons, knowing that "la mécanique e’crasait tout"
(164). It was from the estrangement of this mechanical aspect of the

condition humaine, however, that Meursault does, at last, escape: the

 

automatic woman then is the very mechanism he has escaped: the daily
automatism Of the lives and attitudes of the self-deceived who never
learn, as he does, that it is not the evasion of death, but the awareness
of death which "defines liberty and gives meaning to life."53
His final defection from the mechanical puts Meursault on the con-
scious level of Tarrou and Rieux, for (to use a Sartrean term) he has
escaped from mauvaise fo_i, which is self-deception or bad faith. Serge
Doubrovsky attempts to give the significance of these terms in describ-

ing them as "man's desperate effort to give consistency Of being to his

existence, to make himself exist through symbolic possession of the
54

 

world, through other peOple's view of him, etc." The utilization of
the robot-woman in L'Etranger shows Camus' concern, as well as

Sartre's, with the blinders men employ, assuming, as in the case of
this strange woman, a variety of forms. There is stultifying routine;

there are the ceremonies and duties of position, such as those to which

Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich adhered; there are diversions and there is social

 

53Rossi, 414-415.

54"The Ethics of Albert Camus," Camus: A Collection 9f Critical
Essays, ed. Brée (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), 77.

59
status which leads men to believe that life is a game played according
to a decreed set of rules; there is the false seriousness Of authority
which blinds some into a humorless and relentless pursuit of ideals or
absolutes. Most prevalent of all are the conventional attitudes toward
death, for

At bottom, nobody believes in his own death. Or, and this
is the same: In his unconsciousness, everyone of us is con-
vinced of his immortality. As for the death of others, a
cultured man will carefully avoid speaking of this possibil-
ity, if the person fated to die can hear him. Only children
ignore this rule. . . . We regularly emphasize the acci-
dental cause of death, the mishap, the disease, the infec-
tion, the advanced age, and thus betray our eagerness to
demote death from a necessity to a mere accident. 5

In the same vein Tarrou has noted in his notebooks the following
conversation Overheard in a streetcar and considered by him as typical
of the attitude Of all those who in order to quiet their anxieties, talk
away the inexplicable:

- Tu as bien connu Camps, disait 1'un.

— Camps! un grand, avec une mou stache noire?

-- C'est ce. Il était a l'aiguillage.

— Oui, bien stir.

-- Eh bien, il est mort.

- Ah! et quand donc ?

-- Apr‘es l'histoire des rats.

— Tiens? Et qu'est-ce qu'il a eu?

-- Je ne sais pas, la fiévre. Et puis, il n'était pas fort.
II a eu des abces sous les bras. I1 n'a pas résisté.

— Il avait pourtant 1'air comme tout le monde.

— Non, il avait sa poitrine faible, et i1 faisait de la musique
a l'Orphéon. Toujours souffler dans un piston ca use.

- Ah! termine le deuxieme, quand on est malade, i1 ne faut
pas souffler dans un piston.(22)

 

55Walter Kaufmann's translation of an excerpt from Freud's "Our
Relation to Death, " from Ifir_n' ely Thoughts gr; m a_ggi Death. Taken from
Kaufmann's "Existentialism and Death" in The Meaning 9f Death, ed.
Herman Feifel (New York, 1959), 48.

 

60

It is very obvious that this man who his friends claim died because
he blew a horn and had a weak chest, instead of from fever and buboes,
must have died at the beginning of the bubonic plague for its recent arri-
val allowed these Oranais their deviousness in the face of death even
after the dead rats had started to appear and their friends to disappear,
However, these men of the working class are those who would have, like
the poor of the working-class district where Camus grew up in Algiers,
little besides their somewhat extravagant stories to shield them from
the truth of peste.

It was another class who was able to wear their blinders longer,
well-clothed against the black wind which Meur sault, and any other hero
Of l’absurde, has felt blowing toward him all his life. The following
event must have been taken from Tarrou's notebook, for it is concerned
with the evening he and Cottard spent at the theater. The function was
grimly appropriate for it was Gluck‘s Opera Orphée which, despite the
plague, men continued to attend with all their apprOpriate regalia. The
tone is Tarrou's rather than Rieux':

Ceux qui arrivaient s'appliquaient visiblement a ne pas
manquer leur entre’e. Sous 1a lumiére éblouissante de
l'avant-rideau, pendant les musiciens accordaient dis-
cretement leurs instruments, les silhouettes se de’tach-
aient avec precision, passaient d‘un rang a l'autre,
s’inclinaient avec grace. Dans le léger brouhaha d'une
conversation de bon ton, les hommes reprenaient l'assur-
ance qui leur manquaient quelques heures auparavant,
parmi les rues noires de la ville. L'habit chassait 1a
peste.(163)

Despite the sure charm against peste Of evening dress, Orpheus

on that particular night fell victim to the plague during one of his pitiful

arias addressed to the deceased Eurydice. In the ensuing panic the

6 l
theater was precipitately emptied, the audience leaving behind them
traces of "tout un luxe devenu inutile, sous la forme d'éventails oublie’s
et de dentelles traTnant sur le rouge des fauteuils" (164). This was one
Of the scenes in which the elaborate stage sets men erect to shield them
from l'absurde collapses, for "au contraire d'Eurydice, l'absurde ne
meurt que lorsqu'on s‘en de’tourne."

Another form Of mauvaise f_o_i_ is achieved through the self-assur-
ance gained through professional status. TO illustrate this point Tarrou
refers frequently to Judge Othon in his notebooks. Tarrou puts the
judge on record as one who "arrive toujours le premier a la porte de
restaurant. . . laisse passer sa femme, menue comrne une souris noire,
et entre alors avec, sur les talons, un petit garcon et une petite fille
habillés comme des chiens savants" (24- 25). His unfortunate son "vetu
de noire. . . la petite ombre se son pére"(99), dies first, preceding his
father of whom some wag has remarked that he is, dressed as is his
custom, ready for the undertaker. Judge Othon does, however, under-
go a reversal, for at the death of his little black shadow, his personal
appearance, badge of his profession and prestige, reflects his new lack
of assurance. Othon, like other Camusean protagonists, has awakened
from innocence or ignorance with the advent of death: "i1 était toujours
habillé de la mEme fagon et portait le meme col dur. Tarrou remarqua
seulement que ses touffes, sur les temps, étaient beaucoup plus hérissées
et qu'un de ses lacets était dénoué, 1e juge avait l'air fatigue’ et, pas une
seule fois, il ne regarda ses interlocuteurs en face." When Othon asks

Tarrou, who has witnessed the death of his son, if the son had suffered

 

s.)

62
much, Tarrou knows that "quelque chose était changé" (198). It is Rieux
who becomes indignant, not Othon, when he learns that Othon has mis-
takenly been kept in quarantine beyond the designated time. Othon then
displays his recent descent from the absolute to the relative point of
view: "M. Othon. . . leva une main molle et dit, pesant ses mots, que
tout le monde pouvait se tromper" (214).

Not so with others of his profession. Tarrou in describing his
father, a prosecuting attorney, to Rieux, stressed his father's mechani-
cal approach tO life which permits the older Tarrou's adherence to the
heartless machinery of justice. This was the railway guide game, a
game which through constant practice made his father a walking time-
table:

il était ‘a meme de vous dire exactement les heures de départ
et aller de Paris-Berlin, les combinaisons d’horaires qu'il
fallait faire pour aller de Lyon a Varsovie, 1e kilome’trage
exact entre les capitales de votre choix. Etes-vous capable
de dire comment on va de Briangon a Chamonix? Meme un
chef de gare s'y perdrait. . . . Il s'exergait a pen prés

tous les soirs a enricher ses connaissances sur ce point,

et i1 en était plutOt fier . . . . je lui fournissais un auditoire
dont i1 appréciait la bonne volonté. . . (203-204)

Absurd as the activity was, it was on the surface as harmless as
many of the eccentric activities later described in Tarrou's notebooks.
It was instead the discovery of his father’s role as a judge that touches
off a train of thoughts concerning the machinery Of human justice which
will later lead him to fight even divine justice. Up to this moment, how-
ever, Tarrou’s concept of what went on in a law court has been quite

abstract and softened by such deviations as legal nomenclature and ter-

minology offers. Meursault's comments on the fatuous and humorless

63
proceedings of his own trial are:

le fait que le sentence avait e’te’ lue a vingt heures plutOt
qu’a dix-sept, le fait qu'elle aurait pu Etre toute autre,
qu'elle avait éte’ prise par des hommes qui changent de
linge, qu'elle avait été porte’e au credit d'une notion aussi
impre’cise que le peuple frangais (ou allemand, ou chinois),
i1 me semblait bien que tout cela enlevait beaucoup de
sérieux a une telle décision. (160)

Tarrou’s reaction is more bitter and less ironical than Meur-
sault‘s, when he sees his father for the first time in the role of a judge.
He appears to his son as:

ni bonhomme ni affectueux, sa bouche grouillait des phrases
immenses, qui, sans arrét, en sortaient comme des ser-
pents. Et je compris qu'il demandait la mort de cet home
an nom de la société et qu'il demandait mane qu'on lui
coupa’t le con. 11 disait seulement, il est vrai: "Cette tE‘te
doit tomber." Mais, a la fin, 1a difference n'était pas
grande. Et cela revint au melne, en effet, puisqu’il obtint
cette tate. Simplement, ce n’est pas lui qui fit alors le
travail. (205)

In Camus' world view the Older Tarrou has sinned against life
(which is, it should be remembered, the only sin that Camus recognizes)
in two ways. Despite the apparent innocuousness of the railway guide
game he is guilty as a joueur of a lack Of seriousness toward life in
spending it on such meaningless activity. 56 In a footnote to the English
translation of Camus' Carnets, I, Thody related, "Camus was fascinated
by the words j_et_1, jouer, and joueur, with their different associations
with gambling, sports, and play-acting and deliberately exploited their

"57

ambiguity. Meursault in his ruminations over the newspaper clipping

 

56Clamence, the protagonist of La Chute who is deliberately per-
verse admits "je jouais le jeu"(L_a Chute, 71).

 

57Notebooks, 126 .

 

1‘

r\

64
found in his cell telling of the son who returned after twenty-five years,
hOping to be recognized without announcing himself, and who was instead
murdered by his mother and sister for the money he had intended in any
event, to give them, commented, "d'un cOté, elle était invraisemblable.
D'un autre, elle était naturelle. De toute facon, je trouvais que le
voyageur l'avait un peu mérite’ et qu'il ne faut jamais jouer" (118). The
reason why Meursault found Jan's death in such circumstances natural
is deduced from the word "to play" or "to trick" and the word "natural"
for to play tricks with a fate which plays with human life is to work in
death's favor. And Meursault had already learned that a world which
had once appeared natural - that is, in which he had felt at home --
could change its aspect in a moment, for as Viggiani recounts, "Every
insignificant thing, person, and act Of Part I returns . . . to condemn
Meursault. The ’Cela ne veut rien dire‘ theme of Part I is turned
upside down: everything that happens to him becomes supremely mean-
ingful . . . ." (885). It is then more prudent, admitting One's vulnerabil-
ity, to withhold gambles and gambits, allowing in this way fewer Open-
ings to fate.

It is when self-decepticn is joined in some way with murder or
death that the sin against life increases. TO judge, and to feel ordained
or justified in such a role, is not only a violation of modesty and of
mesure, but it is what Dr. Rieux termed "1e vice le plus désespérant,
celui de l'ignorance qui croit tout savoir et qui s'autorise alors a tuer"
(113). The judge is he who, in his presumption, fulfills the indictment

of Rieux' to the letter for: to sentence to death what is already destined

65
for death is no longer to defy, but to comply, with l'absurde; in a world
where only relative judgment is feasible, to condemn to death is to con-
demn with absolute standards —— standards which no one possesses; and,
last Of all, to judge another absolutely is to infer that one is oneself
above this universal human condition.

To offset the nihilism inherent in such forms of mauvaise f<_)_i_,
Tarrou devoted perhaps the greatest portion of his notes to those lives
which he saw as notably harmless -— an aggregate of habits or activities
which, while absurd in themselves (and what human activity subject to
unremitting death, Tarrou would ask himself, is not absurd!) are harm-
less. There are two absurd types, the old Spaniard and the military
gentleman, on whom Tarrou focused his attention, who are ironical
answers to Tarrou’s central concern: the problem Of sainthood. The Old
Spaniard, a retired draper, is, according to a suggestion made by Thody,

an ironical continuation Of the character Of Meursault, or
rather of one aspect of his character, his lack of interest
in the supposedly important things Of life. In his prison
cell, Meursault realizes that the simple act of being alive
is so important that he could, if given the chance, live
indefinitely in a tree trunk if such were his fate. The Old
draper is doing something very close to this. He is
Meursault such as Meursault would have been had not his
bad luck and absolute honesty made his death inevitable.
It is an ironical portrait, a corrective to the view of life
expressed in The tsider[British translation Of the title
W]. Meursault was unfortunate not to have had
the ability to keep himself alive, as did the draper whose
monotonous action was certainly the best remedy for his
asthma (39).

The monotonous action referred to above was the transference of

a canful Of dried peas from one can to another; the fifteenth transmission

marked the time for a meal. The Old man who hOped to live to a very

.
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66
Old age had retired at the age of fifty and according to Tarrou‘s note—
books "A en croire sa femme, d'ailleurs, i1 avait donné trés jeune des
signes de sa vocation. Rien, en effet, ne l'avait jamais intéressé, ni
son travail, ni les amis, ni 1e cafe’, ni la musique, ni les femmes, ni
les promenades . . . " (100). Interested, then, in nothing but the "pure
flame of life" the Old Spaniard enacting ironically Camus' dictum Of
"vivre leplus," is according to Carina Gadourek "celui qui en approche
le plus... . i1 n'espére rien de la vie, mais il a le courage de la main-
tenir le plus possible" (124).

According tO Adele King, the Old Spaniard "understands the nature
of life more clearly than many in active health."58 According to Richard
Leban, Camus uses Tarrou's comment and inclusions Of such types "to
suggest that these unusual pastimes are no more or less idiotic than the
functioning tasks of the peOple who make up society in general."59

Camus had included entries dealing with this Old Spaniard in his
Carnets. 60 These indicate that he, like his created character Tarrou,
sought evidences of l'absurde in the life around him. The following
information related by the Spaniard's wife concerning the Old man is to

be found both in his Carnets, I I, and his novel 1_a Peste: "i1 n'était

 

jamais sorti de sa ville, sauf un jour Oil Obligé de se rendre a Alger

 

58Albert Camus (New York, 1964), 67. Subsequent quotations from
this work are taken from this edition.

 

59"Levels of Reality in the Novels of Albert Camus," Modern Fic-
tion Studies, X (Autumn, 1964), 237.

60Compare Carnets, II, 18-19.

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67
pour des affaires de familie, i1 s’e’tait arrEté a la gare la plus proche
d’Oran, incapable de pousser plus loin l’aventure. I1 était revenu chez
lui par le premier train"(100). This account, showing the limits the old
man put to heroic action, when adjoined to Tarrou's other notes, points
up ironically Tarrou’s desire to be a saint which is, in its desire to
surpass ordinary men, also a desire for heroism. The account also
serves as a leit motif pointing up the realization that finally comes to
two Of Camus' absolutists: Caligula, who learns at the end, "je n'ai
pas pris la voie qu'il faillait, je n'aboutis a rien," and Tarrou, who
finally realizes that he was not on "la bonne voie" for, deepite the train
of thought released by his father, he has, like Mathieu, hero Of Sartre’s

Les Chemins d_e 1_a liberté, been on the wrong track since the word go!

 

Tarrou's other favorite absurdist type, the military gentleman,
routinely enacted the following scene on a balcony facing Tarrou's win-
dow:

Sa chambre donnait en effet sur une petite rue transversale
Oil des chats dormaient a 1'Ombre des murs. Mais tous les
jours, apr‘es déjeuner, aux heures Oil la ville tout enti‘ere
somnolait dans la chaleur, un petit vieux apparaissant sur
un balcon, de l'autre cO‘te’ de la rue, les cheveux blancs et
bien peignés, droit et sévére dans ses vatements de coupe
militaire, il appalait les chats d'un "Minet, minet," a la
fois distant et doux. Les chats levaient leurs yeux pales
de sommeil, sans encore se déranger. L'autre déchirait
des petit bouts de papier au-dessus de la rue et les betes,
attirées par cette pluie de papillons blancs avancaient au
milieu de la chaussée tendant une patte hésitante vers les
derniers morceaux de papier. Le petit vieux crachait alors
sur les chats avec force et précision. Si l'un des crachets
atteignait son but i1 riait." (23)

These oddities Of human life brought together in Tarrou's note-

books are first of all examples Of the possible ways in which men fulfill

68
the Sisyphean task of dominating the absurd, for occupied as they are,
their gestures and activities are ultimately not more meaningless in the
face of man's fate than any other. Each resembles Camus who, gen-
erally speaking, Opted for life: in backing up the contention that any kind
of life is preferable to no life, each shows, albeit in a very extreme way,
his endorsement Of Sisyphus' rock or of Raskolnikov's own type of rock,
an islet in a storm-tossed sea, or Meursault's trunk of a hollow tree.

For Tarrou, however, the most important feature discoverable in
these bizarre types is the fact that, disregarding the extremely low ebb
of their lives, they have solved a problem which continues to baffle Tar-
rou: how to live without adding to evil. The Old Spaniard and the man-
who-spits-on-cats are hurting no one. For this reason in his considera-
tion of the Old Spaniard as well as the military gentleman he asks "Est-
ce un saint?" and answers his own question in this way: "Oui, si la
sainteté est an ensemble d'habitudes." In the notebooks, Rieux reports,

On trouve. . .un petit rapport sur le vieux aux chats. . . .
Les chats étaient, se réchauffant dans les flaques de soleil,
fideles au rendez-vous. Mais a l'heure habituelle les volets
resterent obstinément fermés. Au cours des jours suivants,
Tarrou ne les vit plus jamais ouverts. 11 en avait conclu
curieusement que le petit vieux était vexe’ ou mort, que s'il
e’tait vexé, c'est qu’il p_ensait avoir raison et que 1_a peste
l_u_i avait fait tort, mais que s'il était mort, il fallait se

demander a son prOpos, comme pour le vieil asthmatique,
s'il avait été un saint. Tarrou ne 1e pensait pas, mais
estirnait q‘u'il avait dans le cas du vieillard une "indi-
cation." Peu -8tre," Observaient les carnets,"ne peut-on
aboutir qu'a des approximations de sainteté. Dans ce cas,
il faudrait se contenter d'un satanisme modeste gt chari-
table." (225; italics added)

 

In considering the pointers or "indications" to be deduced from

this study Of the Old man, Tarrou, who had a fair enough feeling for

1'4

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r
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69
l'absurde, is nevertheless unable to apply what he grasps intellectually
to his own life. In his realization that for these men at least, approxi-
mations tO sainthood were the only possibilities, he should then know
that he must remain content with approximations, that is, with relative
rather than absolute victories over evil and imperfection. He should
also have known that sainthood and satanism are terms which connote
good and evil in absolute rather than relative terms; and finally, in

speaking of satanisme in reference to these types (even when he modi-

 

fied it with "charitable" and "modeste") he alludes to whatever contrib-
utes to the forces of negation, Opposing those of life, to whatever is
anti-human and, in a word, nihilistic.

Of the "vieux aux chats" his last view is — and this is after the
cats disappear due to the plague -- of the Old man on his balcony without
his former military assurance, "moins bien peigné, moins vigoureux.
On le sent inquiet. Au bout d'un moment, il est rentré. Mais il avait
craché, un fois dans le vide" (24). If Tarrou is right, as he explains in
his diary, that the Old man is ve_x§ because he thought he was right and
the plague or life has proven him wrong, Tarrou comes to a similar
realization of the void. Rieux notes that Tarrou had, too, judging by
his last entries and his wavering handwriting, lost his grip on himself
and on life.

In reading these notebooks Rieux notes that Tarrou often refers
to RieuxI mother. When personal considerations begin to appear in the
material of the last pages, the reason also becomes apparent, for he

wrote that Mme. Rieux reminds him of his mother; of his own mother

-4

70
he adds the somewhat surprising statement, "c'est elle que j'ai toujours
voulu rejoindre" (226).

Both women, no doubt, interest him as "styles of life." What he
had loved in his mother, he writes, was her "dimness," her "self-
effacement." Of Mme. Rieux he admires the "lightness": "la légéreté
avec laquelle elle se deplacait d'une pi‘ece a l’autre," her goodness
reflected in a face where one feels "tant de bonte’" (99) shall always be
stronger than plague, and the fact that she as well as her son always
looks on life with courage and unwavering eyes: "Je suis heureuse de te
voir," she tells her son, "les rats ne peuvent rien contre ca" (14).

Rieux wrote that

Tarrou insistait surtout sur l'effacement de Mme. Rieux;
sur la fagon qu'elle avait de tout exprimer en phrases
simples; sur le gOut particulier qu‘elle montrait pour une
certaine fenetre, donnant sur la rue calme, et derriere
laquelle elle s'asseyait 1e soir, un peu droite, les mains
tranquilles et le regard attentif, jusqu'a ce que le cré-
puscule eat envahi la piéce, faisant d'elle une ombre noire
dans la lumiere grise qui foncait peu a peu et dissolvait
alors la silhouette immobile. . . (226)

Of his mother’s self-effacement and death Tarrou wrote, "11 y a
huit ans, je‘ ne peux plus dire qu'elle soit mort. Elle s'est seulement
effacée un peu plus que d'habitude et quand je me suis retourné, elle
n'était pas la"(226). "Dimness," "lightness," "self-effacement," and
"goodness" all convey Tarrou's concern with these two women. Is this
not a desire for a return to the womb, or for a regression to a former
state of existence -— what Freud would call a death instinct?

Tarrou‘s attraction toward other forms of nihilism is illustrated

by another personality who keeps reappearing in his notebook. This is

l
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71
Cottard, who has been referred to by Camus' critics as a collaboration-
ist, a black marketeer, even an anarchist. It is possible for Tarrou to
attract Cottard and to tolerate him in turn because of Tarrou's general
suspension of judgment, that is, his refusal to judge anyone. For judg-
ment Tarrou associates with his father's profession, the law. To a
greater extent, it is probable that death is the real bond between them.
For Cottard, who has committed some unknown crime, embodies asso-
ciations of violence and guilt: at the beginning of the plague year he tries
to hang himself; then, because he feels free for the time from police
investigations, he rejoices in the plague; and at the end of the epidemic,
no longer ilnmune from their visitation, he is killed in a skirmish with
these same police.

Camus points out in an entry in his Carnets, II, the nature of Cot-
tard's attachment to Tarrou and his friends in the sanitary unit, an
attachment devoid of any inclination to help others fight the piste:
"Ainsi ce coeur sauvage appelait ses prochains et mendia’it leur chaleur.
Ainsi cette arne ravine’, rabougie demandait aux deserts leur fratcheur et
faisait sa paix d'une maladie, d'un fléau et de catastroPhes. . . " (18).

Of Cottard, Carl A. Viggiani wrote: "This type of nihilism which
issues in indiscriminate murder is incarnated on the sOcial level in
Camus' work by Nada, Caligula, Stepan, and Cottard, whose final act
is meant to be an illustration of Breton’s declaration that the simplest
Surrealist act consists in going down into the street, revolver in hand,
and firing at random into a crowd" (883-884). Cottard's act (for Camus,

it should be remembered, feels that surrealism never went beyond nihilism)

72
and Tarrou's attempts at correcting creation never transcend disorder
and incoherence as do Camus' own creative efforts to transform chaos

into order and disorder into harmony.

PART VII

ORAN -- ENTRE OUI ET NON

For its geographical location and for the ugliness of the city
itself, Oran both fascinates and repells Camus. He sees its buildings
as ugly, its citizens somnolent and complacent, and nature, which is
excluded from the city, as beautiful and wild. Germaine Brée points
out that, for Camus, Oran illustrates a metaphysical situation: the
absurd confrontation Of man and nature, of the "monstrous ' beauty and
indifference of the land and the equally monstrous unconsciousness of
the inhabitants" (214).

Oran, besides being part Of Camus' spiritual geography, is also
part of his spiritual Odyssey, for the mind seeking solace demands
islands or deserts. Today these are rare, and even when found are
charged not only with the weight of p0pu1ation but with the weight of
memory, tradition, and history as well. For this reason Camus writes
in "Le Minotaure ou le halte d'Oran" that men must find their deserts
where their equivalent is needed; in order to understand the world, "11
faut parfois se détourner; pour mieux servir les hommes, les tenir un
moment a distance. Mais oil trouver la solitude necessaire a la force,
1a longue respiration Oil l'esprit se rassemble et le courage se mesure?
Il reste les grandes villes. Simplement, il y faut des conditions."61

Oran offers these conditions. Its ugliness itself is an advantage,

for ugliness claims no allegiance -- a boon to the mind-at-war—with-

 

61L'Eté, 13.

 

73

74
itself; it offers also the virtue of a certain kind of boredom which Camus
equates with the rnindlessness of the Minotaur, the restful monotony of
purely physical activity; it offers the anonymity of a hubbub combined
with the solitude needed for contemplation; and greatest of all the advan-
tages it offers is that of "those 'cities without a past! in which, accord-
ing to Camus, man, without a history, a tradition, or even a religion
to which he can refer, is face to face with the stark fact of his impla-
cable existence."62

According to Camus, Oran has, like Descartes' Amsterdam, the
advantage "for men with a purpose" of being commercial, anonymous,
and banal. As Descartes found in the leading mercantile city (it has
since become picturesque), his island or his desert, so Tarrou and
Camus find in Oran, "une ville ordinaire et rien de plus qu'un prefec-
ture frangaise de la cOte algérienne" (5), the place to put into practice
Descartes' dictum "to never accept anything as true unless I know it to
be Obviously so."

One of the "obvious truths" revealed in this region was for Tarrou
and Camus the absurd division between man and environment. Of the
Oranese deserts and beaches Camus writes: "Ce sont ici les terres de
l'innocence"(60).

Sur ces plages d'Oranie, tous les matins d'e’té ont l'air
d'étre les premiers du monde. Tous les crépiscules
semblent Etre les derniers, agonies solennelles annon-

cées au coucher de soleil par une derni‘ere lumi‘ere qui
fonce toutes le teintes.(58-59)

 

6ZBre’e, 213.

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75

Turning their back on innocence, the Oranais solved their prob-
lem in the following way:

Forcés de vivre devant un admirable paysage, les Oranais
ont triumphé de cette redoutable épreuve en se couvrant
de constructions bien laides. On s'attend a une ville
ouverte sur la mer, lave’e, rafraichie par la brise des
soirs. Et, mis 5 parte 1e quartier espagnol, on trouve une
cite’ qui présente 1e dos ‘a la mer, qui s'est construite en
tournant sur elle-mame, a la facon d'un escargot. Oran
est un gran mur circulaire et jaune, recouvert d'un ciel
dur. Au de’but, on erre dans le labyrinthe, on cherche la
mer comme 1e signe d’Ariane. Mais on tourne en rond
dans les rues fauves et pppressantes, et, a la fin, le
Minotaure dévore les Oranais: c'est l'ennui. Depuis long-
temps, les Oranais n'errent plus. Ils Ont accepté d'é‘tre
mangés.(28-29)

It is Obvious, then, that the natives of Oran were firm believers
in humanizing or anthrOpomorphizing the world for "comprendre le
monde pour un homme c'est 1e réduire a l'humaine, 1e marquer de son
sceau."63 To this purpose, they build behind their walls a town which
is, in regard to nature, thoroughly negative. No trees, no gardens, no
sound of wings or of leaves. Having turned their backs on the world
they turn them also on inquiry: ". . . on n'agite pas sur les boulevards
d'Oran 1e probléme de l'étre et l'on ne s'inquiete pas du chemin de la
pe rfection" (26).

To make their escape from the ontological more complete, the
Oranais have, in order to suppress any intimations they may have Of the
human condition, dedicated themselves to commerce and to the physical

exertions of boxing, bowling, and bathing. In the cultivation of habits

they find they can get through the days without thinking:

 

63Le Mythe de Sisyphe, 32.

 

sr

76

lever, tramway, quatre heures de bureau ou d'usine,

repas, tramway, quatre heures de travail, repas,

sornmeil et lundi mardi mercredi jeudi vendredi et

samedi 1e mé‘me rythme. 6‘4

Having gotten through the day so successfully, there are still the
evenings, when a recollection arises, however dim, of the innocent
world of sunsets and sunrises beyond the wall. This is disturbing to
those whose lives are usually as scheduled and predictable as their
streetcars, but it only occurs in the moments just before the street
lights are turned on. Once the lights are lit, eclipsing at last the
stars, "la rue de faubourg s'animait et une'exclamation sourde et sou-
lage’ salua au de dehors l'instant oil les lamps s'allumerait."65 With
the artificial illumination all of their "stupide confiance humaine" returns.
If the tendency of the Oranais to humanize the world demonstrates

the type of mauvaise f3_i_ or bad faith which turns its back on innocence,
Tarrou, on the other hand, takes the Opposite stand, for his nostalgia
for innocence turns him away from the human, toward the world of
nature. His is what Emily Zants designates as the "temptation of the
stranger to identify himself with the rocks" which she claims is the
"temptation to join up with the world and to forget about human beings
and life."66 It is also the temptation of one who, out Of contact with his

fellow men, is "tempted to construct arbitrary systems as absolute as

the terrain he is squatting on for "when ideologies become absolute,

 

64Mlthe. . ., 27.

 

65Peste, 52.

66"Deserts . . . ," 33.

77
they rule out the possibility of individual communication. Stone, as one
Of the relatively more enduring elements of the world, is consequently
symbolic of the temptation of the individual towards permanence and the
absolute, a temptation which postulates the cessation of dialogue and
the subsequent separation of the stranger."67

In his leanings toward absolutes, Tarrou engages in a "tragic
complicity" with nature. Of this type Of complicity Ben Stoltzfus writes,
"Such complicity. . . derives from the fact that man persists in attribut-
ing a. oneness to a relationship which can only exist in terms of duality. "68
The fact that the much desired unity or harmony that man seeks in the
universe'is an impossibility is seen in the two separate entities which
are Tarrou and his world: he seeks death for himself, which is compli-
city, yet seeks it precisely because death is a part of the world which
he cannot accept for others, which is rejection.

Meursault in this respect is closer to Camus and both are, in turn,
more realistic than Tarrou. Although "Meursault imprisoned" symbol-
izes "man caught in a hostile world," he does, however, achieve a "har-
mony with the universe that has condemned him. He arrives at a point
from which he can look back on his life as a completed entity. He
accepts his life as a value in itself; in accepting this value he accepts

his death."69

 

67"Deserts . . .," 31.

68"Camus and the Meaning of Revolt, " Modern Fiction Studies
(Autumn, 1964), 298.

 

69King, 55.

/‘

V

78

Adele King elaborates this idea:

Man could attain true happiness and individuality only by
giving up his impossible compulsion to change the world
and to avoid death. Meursault, on the eve of his execu-
tion, accepts death as the culmination of his own individu-
ality. He reached that peace of which Camus sometimes
Speaks, a point at which the tension of the rebel is no
longer felt,""a tranquil homeland where death itself is a
happy silence." This homeland is beyond the grasp of a
man who is in revolt against the universe. . . (56)

At this point she points out, "It may seem paradoxical to find a
quest for such peace at the heart Of Camus' work, but in an ultimate
sense Camus' experience confirms Freud's insight. Accepting the
natural world as the source of all happiness necessitates accepting
death. Man rebels, but he reaches a final consent. This is not a
betrayal of his desires, but an affirmation of his greatness when he no
longer attempts to be a god" (55-56).

While Tarrou turns his back. on the world Of men, giving his final
allegiance to the world of absolutes, the peOple of Oran have turned
theirs on the world of nature and ideals. Camus continues his own
attempt to reconcile them both. In this way Camus was more realistic
than either Tarrou or the majority of men, his realism being mani-
fested in his acceptance Of limits or mesure as a rule of life. Refusing
to play God, he accepts death as unavoidable, and happiness and recap-
tured innocence as provisional.

In his acknowledgment of limits he spurns Tarrou's absolute Of
innocence which was an aspiration to restore to the world "la fratcheur

de ses premiers matins," realizing too well that such a state of inno-

cence perished once and for all for each individual "1e jour Oi‘l notre

79
bonheur se trouve en lutte avec les deux seules puissances qui ont assez
de force pour le détuire: la morale et l'histoire." For that reason "la
chute n'est pas autre chose; c'est la découverte soudaine de la culpa-
bilité non pas originelle, mais historique, et par consequence morale."7o
Oran for Camus is merely a reprieve; for Tarrou it becomes a perma-
nent retreat. Boredom in Oran does not then resemble that of Meur-
sault's generation so little disturbed by the death of others, but for
those who feel guilt it offers forgetfulness. Camus left in 1939 to cre-
ate again among those men who had a history. His problem, the prob-
lem of the artist, became more explicit in his short story, "Jonas ou
l'artiste au travail" for

Jonas ne pouvait créer d’oeuvre d'art que dans la solitude,

mais il ne pouvait connaitre 1e bonheur, sans quoi l'art ne

peut nattre, que dans la solidarite’. La difficile balance

entre ces deux états, lorsqu'on la connait enfin, c'est 1e

"rapatriement," c'est l'accés au Royaume. C'est-a-dire

l'accés a un monde oil l'on ne refuse ni sOi-mEIne, ni les

autres, mais Oil une régle mesurée vous accorde, au sein

d’une solidarité chaleureuse, la part de solitude que

chaque homme est en droit d'exiger."71

It is after his sojourn in Oran that Camus finds one of those

moments of balance needed for further creative effort, for there the
Minotaur offers in the guise of a purely physical existence rest for the
spirit: "the call of the Minotaur is 'one of the rare invitations to sleep

that the earth grants us,’ it is the temptation to abandon that attribute

(in Camus’s idiom) of EurOpe as Opposed to Africa, the life of the mind.

 

70Bloch-Michel, 5.

7 lrbid. . 6.

’\

fa

80

For Camus the halt at Oran was a short one."72

In order to join the world of history and of morality, Camus bids
farewell to Oran and the Minotaur knowing "that a bond with nature need

not be tragic but that it may, on the contrary, be the source Of rebirth."73

 

72Brée, 214.

73Stoltfuz, 3o 2.

PART VIII
TARROU ON TRIAL

"C'est sur le chemin qui, par—dela l'innocence meurtri'ére, mene
a la sainteté sans Dieu que la peste a trouvé Tarrou,"74 Albert Maquet
writes. For if Meursault has "la sainte innocence de celui que se par-
donne a lui-meme,"75 Tarrou’s is that total guilt which, craving expla-
tion, leads him on toward self-annihilation. His guilt is revealed to
him, it will be remembered, after that period Of revolt in which he cuts
a trajectory across EurOpe, fighting injustice and capital punishment,
in the moment he learns his side is guilty Of using the measures of its
Opponents.

Because Tarrou cannot forgive himself for having been a murder-
er —- even an "innocent murderer" -- he chooses Oran as a place in which
to live as harmlessly as possible, where "on 1e rencontrait dans tous
les endroits publics. D‘es 1e début du printemps on l'avait beaucoup vu
sur les plages, nageant souvent et avec un plaisir manifeste." In these
activities Tarrou appears to be reliving those Of his early youth and to
be trying to wash away his guilt in bathing and in other innocent pas-
times: "Bon homme toujours souriant, il semblait atre l'ami de tous
les plaisirs normaux, sans en Etre l'esclave" (21). In enjoying what
Camus refers to as one of the boons granted by Oran, the "allure Of for-
getfulness," Tarrou seeks what he claims to be "la seule chose qui

m’intéresse. . . C'est de trouver la paix intérieure" (24).

 

7”‘Albert Camus o_1_1_ l'invincible €36 (Paris, 1955), 67.

 

 

75I_._._a Chute, 167.

81

82

All of Tarrou's physical traits reveal this determination. Rieux
describes him as having a square and muscular body, as being "un
homme jeune, a la silhouette lourde, au visage massif et creuse’, barré,
d'épais sourcils" (13), his head and forehead are frequently described as
heavy and stubborn ("une lourde tate," "un front dur”). The memory
Rieux is always to keep of him after his death is of one who fought an
all-out battle against life which he is destined to lose; Of one who in the

struggle against 13. peste has organized the formations sanitaires volon-

 

t3_i_1_'_e_s_; of one who, after the briefest of respites from plague, agrees
with Rieux that it is time to put their shoulders to the wheel again; and
most lasting of all, of either one "qui prenait le volant de son auto 2.
pleines mains pour le conduire" Or of "celle de ce corps épais, e’tendu
mantenant sans mouvement. Un chaleur de vie et une image de mort,
c'était cela 1a connaissance" (239).

During the unequal combat between men and microbes his ".égalité
d'hurneur," Carina Gadourek writes, was maintained "grace a un cer-
tain détachement" (123). Of this detachment Dr. Rieux, the narrator of
La Peste, comments that Tarrou's notebooks, although written in cha-
otic times, were an account of all that the usual historian passes over
for "11 s'agit d'une chronique trés particuliere qui sembler obéir a un
parti pris d'insignifiance," presenting many secondary details. Rieux,
incapable of much detachment where Tarrou is concerned, hopes that

the reader of such a collection of bizarrerie, Of which at first reading

 

at lease, "on pourrait croire que Tarrou s'est ingénie a considérer les

choses et les Etres par le gros bout de la lorgnette," will suspend his

\l

83
judgment and not accuse Tarrou of a complete "sécheresse du coeur"(22).

Tarrou, still seeking the way back to innocence, for the moment,
joins those of Oran, who in the first day of the plague continue to live on
the thin surface of matter:

Apparemlnent, rien n’était change. Les tramways étaient
toujours pleins aux heures de pointe, vides et sales dans la
journée. Tarrou Observait le petit vieux et le petit vieux
crachat sur les chats. Grand rentrait tous les soirs chez
lui son mystérieux travail. Cottard tournait en rond et M.
Othon, le juge d'instruction, conduisait toujours sa ména-
gerie. Le vieil asthmatique transvasait ses pois et l’on
encontrait parfois 1e journaliste Rambert, l'air tranquille
et intéressé. Le soir, la mama foule emplissait les rues
et les queues s'allongeait devant les cinémas. (55-56)

As these people hide behind their routines, which are among the
mo st successful blinds they have built up against the stark fact Of death,
the desultory Cottard appears and follows Tarrou, as both his parody
and shadow. For Cottard, who has been interrogated by the police after
his attempted suicide, echoes Tarrou's desire for peace exclaiming,
"qu'il désirait seulement qu'on lui laissat la paix" (30). In addition,
where so many are evading awareness, Cottard practices a different
type of evasion, for he is literally on the run, yet he rejoices in the
plague because the police now have their hands full with other concerns,
making Cottard's capture less imminent.

Behind Cottard's desire for peace is, Of course, a certain nihil-
ism. In a prison-like world in which each person awaits certain death,
Cottard's hiding behind the misfortunes and deaths of his fellow prison-
ers is both metaphysically and morally unsound. Describing a section

of the town in which there are for the moment no visible signs of plague,

Rieux couples its atmosphere with Cottard's fur'tive nihilism: he writes

’\

f‘

84
that the plague "ne se trahissait que par des signes négatifs. Cottard
qui avait des affinités avec elle, fit remarquer. . .l'absence des chiens"
(120). Elsewhere in La Peste, when the nihilism Of plague becomes
more apparent, Rieux describes the city in which all manifestations of
normal life are suspended:

Sous les ciels de lune, elle alignait ses murs blancha’tres
et ses rues rectilignes, jamais tachées par la masse noire
d’un arbre, jamais troublées par le pas d'un promeneur

ni le cri d'un chien. La grande cite’ silencieuse n'e’tait plus
alors qu'un assemblage de cubes massifs et inertes, entre
lesquels les effigies taciturnes de bienfaiteurs oubliés ou
d'anciens grands hommes étouffés a jamais dans le bronze
s'essayaient seules, avec leurs faux visages de pierre ou
de fer, a évoquer une ilnage dégrade’e de ce qui avait été
l'homme. Ces idoles médiocres trOnaient sous un ciel
épais, dans les carrefours sans vie, brutes insensibles
qui figuraient assez bien 1e regne immobile oil nous e’tions

entrés ou du moins son ordre ultime, celui d'une ne’cr0pole

Oil la peste et la nuit auraient fait taire enfin toute voix.
(142-143)

Tarrou and Cottard both remain as emotionally dep0pulated as the
midnight city described above. In each, evasion and detachment are
forms of nihilism, for each has turned his back on any close involve-
ment with mankind. Tarrou's friendship with Dr. Rieux is primarily
based on expedience, for it furthers the former's desire to defend the
victims against their Oppressors, while Cottard's interest in Tarrou
displays only his self-interest. Remaining emotionally unattached was
part of Tarrou’s determination to live without increasing the existent
sum of evil, for to love and to be loved is also to hurt and be hurt.
While Cottard proclaims "tout net qu'il ne s'intéressait pas au coeur et
que marne 1e coeur était le dernier de ces soucis" (228), Tarrou cau-

tiously confines his interests to man rather than individual men.

I

85
Remaining emotionally celibate is, of course, a manner of avoid-
ing "lapses" or distractions; such determinations manifested in Tarrou's

physical traits were outward revelations Of his inner entetement or

 

obstinacy. Although taking a different form from the absolutism Of his
father who believes that a human being could be so absolutely guilty as
to merit absolute punishment, Tarrou's absolutism, although turned in
another direction, still forces him to live without hOpe. In this he has
also "inherited" a trait of his mother's, for without hOpe she too had
lived "une vie de renoncement."

Tarrou's "aveuglement enteté" then replaces love. What Rieux
wrote of love between two individuals is also true of the individual's
relationship with l'absurde:

A la fin de tout, on s'apergoit que personne n'est capable
re’ellement de penser a personne, ffit-ce dans le pire de
malheurs, car penser re’ellement a quelqu’un, c‘est y
penser minute aprés minute, sans Etre distrait par rien,
ni la mouche qui vole, ni les repas, ni une démangeaison.
Mais il y a toujours des mouches et des démangeaisons.
C'est pourquoi la vie est difficile a vivre. (198)

TO be conscious of the absurd and to try to live accordingly is the
hardest thing, for to do so involves the supreme effort of trying to pre-
vent lapses in a world where distractions are the rule. Camus also
writes in his Carnets, H, of this difficulty:

ll s'apercoit ainsi que le vrai probléme, mame sans Dieu,
est le probléme de l'unité psychologique (1e travail de
l'absurde ne pose réellement que le probléme de l'unité
métaphysique du monde et de l‘esprit) et de la paix inté-
rieure. Il s'apercoit aussique celle-ci n'est pas possible
sans une discipline difficile a concilier avec le monde.

Le prObIEme est 1a. 11 faut justement la concilier avec

Ie_monde. (19:20)—

For Tarrou, because he has Opted to resist the world—as-it-is,

lJ

.' ~51.

.-
to

86
the problem of unity in a world Of diapersion is insurmountable. There-
fore, before he capitulates to the forces of nihilism or of plague within
himself by succumbing to the actual plague bacteria he sums up his
position: "Tout le monde se montre fatigue’, puisque tout le monde,
aujourd'hui se trouve un peu pestiféré.. Mais c'est pour cela que quel-
ques-un qui veulent cesser de l'étre connaissent une extremité de
fatigue dont rien ne les delivrera plus que la mort" (209).
The flaws of the absolutist -- whether he be a Tarrou, an Othello,
or any other tragic hero — are fatal flaws, for death becomes, as Tar-
rou knows, the inevitable end. Of such a tragic flaw A. C. Bradley
writes:
In almost all we observe a marked one-sidedness, a pre-
disposition in some particular direction; a fatal tendency
to identify the whole being with one interest, Object, pas-
sion, or habit of mind. . . . It is a fatal gift, but it car-
ries with it a touch of greatness; and when there is joined
to it nobility of mind, or genius, or immense force, we
realize the full power and reach of the soul, and the con-
flict in which it engages acquires that magnitude which
stirs not only sympathy and pity, but admiration, terror,
awe.

Opting absolutely for an ideal, the absolutist accepts what Emily Zants

refers to as the "fallacy of ideals taken in the absolute,"77 and death

becomes for him the inevitable but premature end.

A demonstration of the pitfalls that the absolutist, Tarrou, as the

aspiring saint, might have avoided, is presented in a crucial episode of

_I._._a Peste. Tarrou, overlooking the lesson which he might have gathered

 

 

768hakespearean Tragedy (New York, 1959), 26-27.

 

77"Deserts. , . ," 35.

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87
from the absurd "wisdom" compiled in his notebooks, has again (with
all the components included in Camus' notion of absurdity presented in
this scene) the Opportunity to put himself finally on the right track.

The episode is that of the "hour-off-for-friendship," a reapite
taken from the plague by Tarrou and Dr. Rieux. The time is early eve-
ning. They are on a roof-tap which provides a view of the distant
mountains and an uncustomary view of the sea which has been cordoned
off during the epidemic. The episode culminates in a swim which puts
a seal on their friendship. It is here that Tarrou abandons his habitual
reticence and comes closest to communion with another. As Emily
Zants claims, the sea is in part the catalyst, for "the silence of the sea
is different from that of the rocks; the latter is the silence of an impos-
sibility of communication whereas the former is that of a mutual under-
standing."78 But rocks will continue to be Tarrou's natural element.

The fact that this hour is only a reprieve from the plague is
emphasized by the remote sounds of the city where "quelques rues plus
loin, une auto sembler glisser longuement sur le pavé mouillé. Elle
s'e’loigna et, apres elle, des exclamations confuses, venues de loin,
rompirent encore le silence"(202). The incident is more than two-
dimensional in its implications. , Aside from the immediate foreground,
there is also a metaphysical backdrop with its reminder of the absurdity
of human fate. This background holds out three kinds of promises: that

of l'endroit, nature as the accomplice to a newly-founded friendship,

 

78"Deserts. . . , ” 33.

"

88
and nature as companion in the physical delight of the senses; but from
time to time it also reveals that other side of the coin, l'envers, nature's
hostile aspect.

Against the background which "retomba sur les deux hommes avec
tout son poids de ciel et d'e’toiles" (203), there is enacted the drama of
these two révoltés who rebel against the human condition in general and
in particular against that mass execution which the plague has decreed
for Oran. The conflict involved in this scene contains the Opposing
aspects of revolt represented by each of the participants -- in Rieux the
true rebel, in Tarrou the false. Whereas Rieux remains during what
was Tarrou's "profession de foi," "tassé au creux de sa chaise," Tarrou
is "levé pour se percher sur le parapet de la terrasse, face a Rieux."
Shown in this manner, Tarrou demonstrates his temptation to supercede
the human for "on ne voyait de lui qu'une forme massive découpe’ dans
le ciel." It is here that Tarrou confides to his new friend his ambition
to be a saint without God. Rieux, of course, rejects any transcendence
from the human.

Aided by the physical circumstances, for Tarrou notes, "11 fait
bon. C'est comme la peste n’était montée 13"(203), Tarrou is enabled
in a moment of rare confidence to reveal his aspiration and its cause:
he tells Rieux of that trial he had seen as a lamentable miscarriage of
justice in which his father triumphed; and how that trial had set the
course of his life, directing his career as an agitator or revolutionist
until he realizes that in adOpting the method of his adversaries, justice

is once again still-born. His confession also reveals that he knows that

!\

89
he carried within him the very este germs he tried to combat, that he
actually had the plague before coming to Oran, for he said, "C'est as sez
dire qui ne 1e savent pas, ou qui se trouvent bien dans cet état, et des
gens qui 1e savent et qui voudrait en sortir. Moi, j'ai toujours voulu
en sortir"(203).

Stressing his own difference from the rest of the world, which
prefers to sleep easily at night rather than face such issues, he knows
that "un instinct formidable" rose as a wave which "me portait a ses
cates avec une sorte d'aveuglement entete’" whereas "les autres ne sem-
blaient pas ganés par cela. . . . Moi, j'avais 1a gorge nouée" (207). At
this point Tarrou knows the hOpelessness involved in making his ideal
his motivating force in life — the difference which existed between him-
self and other men in their attitude toward evil. For he knows

qu'il faut se surveiller sans arrét pour ne pas Etre amené,
dans une minute de distraction, a respirer dans la figure
d'un autre et a lui coller l'infection. Ce qui est naturel,
c'est le microbe, 1e reste, la santé, l'intégrité, la pureté
si vous voulez, c'est un effet de la volonte’ et d’une volonté
qui ne doit jamais s'arré‘ter. L'honnéte homme, celui qui
n'infecte presque personne, c'est celui qui a le moins de
distractions possible. Et il en faut de la volonté et de la
tension pour ne jamais Etre distrait! (208)

Tarrou has recently decided that if sainthood is at all possible, it
must, in order to forestall the unforeseeable, or in order to prevent
the preventable, be nothing more than an aggregate of habits. The cli-
mactic moment in this interchange between two révolte’s comes when he
announces:

-— En somme. . . ce qui m'intéresse, c'est de savoir com-

ment on devient un saint.
— Mais vous ne croyez pas en Dieu.

90
— Justement. Peut-on Etre un saint sans Dieu, c'est
le seule probléme concret que je connaisse aujourd'hui. (201)
The scene points up the aspects of plague which are either outside
the precautionary power of man or seem to belong to an evil which is
part of the universe itself, for the serenity of that hour-off-for-friend-
ship is interrupted from time to time by the reminders of activities
which remain outside this temporary amnesty between men and men,
and men and nature:
Deux timbres d'ambulance résonnérent dans le lointain.
Les exclamations tout a l'heure confuses, se rassem-
blérent aux confins de la ville, prés de la colline pier-
reuse, on entendit en meme temps quelque chose qui

ressemblait a une détonation. Puis 1e silence revint.
{209-210)

The more universal aspect of evil, that of the uncertainty of the
natural world, also makes itself evident in this scene:

Rieux compta deux clignements de phare, la brise
sembla prendre plus de force, et du mEme coup, un
souffle venu de la mer apporta une odeur de sel. On
entendait maintenant de facon distincts la sourde res-
piration de vagues contre la falaise. (210)

The waves and the tides are an assurance that in a world of
chance and change there is comfort to be derived from the sea's stabil-
ity within fluctuation. But there is another lesson — that the sea also
conveys the notion of permanence, but in the sense of perpetual
renewal, that any friendship with the sea demands a constant rebirth of
its pleasures, and there is, moreover, a third aspect, for the sea is
"inquiétant" and "jamais reposé." The breeze that has been blowing in
from the sea and contributing to the physical delight of the hour

increases, bringing with its gathered impetus the threat of danger,

while those same wind-driven waves which break against the cliff's edge

-f

9 1
become signs of menace. That new friendship which the two men bap-
tised with a swim in the sea was cut short by a cold current causing
them to turn from the world of nature back to the world of men.

The world of men with its demands continues to impose its own
sense of urgency during the hour spent on the roof, for they hear from
time to time "une porte claqua dans la maison" or "un bruit de vaisSelle
choquée monta jusqu'a eux de profondeurs de la rue"(202). At the same
time the rhythm of the waves and the intermittent flashes from the light-
house recall the passage of time and the unrelenting demands of history
and morality.

Conscious of the dis sonances in the world of nature and of the con-
flicts in the world of men, Tarrou hurries on to explain his desire for
sainthood: "Oui j'ai continué d’avoir honte, j'ai perdu la paix" (208).
After making this statement, he hits upon, and immediately rejects, a
solution which, because it is relative and Opposes his absolutism, would

constitute the cure to his peste intérieure and the answer to his quest

 

 

 

for 13 paix intérieure, which is to "soulager les hommes et sinon les W
sauver du moins leur faire 1e moins de mal possible et meme parfois,

un peu de bien"(208). Instead, rejecting the relative, he opts for the /
absolute: "j'ai decide’ de refuser tout ce qui, de pres ou de loin, pour [I
de bonnes ou de mauvaises raisons, fait mourir ou justifie qu'on fasse/
mourir . . . . je sais seulement qu'il faut faire ce qu'il faut pour ne pluh
Etre un pestife’ré et que c'est 15. ce qui peut, seul, nous faire espére/r//

la paix, ou une bonne mort a son defaut" (208).

Brusquement, une grande lueur jaillit du cOte d'ou étaient
venues les cris et, remontant le fleuve du vent, une

Iv

92
clameur obscure parvint jusqu'aux deux hommes. La
lueur s'assombrit aussitdt et loin, au bord des terrasses,
i1 ne resta qu'un rougeoiement. Dans le bruit d'une
de’charge et la clameur d’une foule, Tarrou s'e’tait leve’
et e’coutait. On n'entendait plus rien.
— On s'est encore battu aux portes.
—- C'est fini maintenant, dit Rieux. (210)

Rieux means, of course, that the skirmish is literally over. He
also knows that even with the termination of 1_a peste there will be other
sources of strife and unhappiness, that the peste never dies, and the
bacillus

peut rester pendant des dizaines d'anne’es endormi dans
les meubles et le linge, qu‘il attend patiemment dans les
chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les
paperasses, et que, peut-étre, le jour viendrait 01‘1, pour
le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste
réveillerait ses rats et les enversait mourir dans une
cité heureuse. (254-255)

Tarrou, on the other hand, "murmura que ce n’était jamais fini
et qu'il y aurait encore des victimes, parce que c‘était dans l'ordre"
(210). Tarrou’s obsession compels him to regard the world with hostil-
ity and leads to his desire to break off relations with it. This is not
true, however, of all Camus' révolte’s, for rebellion in some leads to a
continuation of the struggle rather than to impasse. By such an identi-
fication Camus' true rebels are distinguished from the false.

Each, however, does undergo a period in which his metaphysical
anxiety takes the form of rebellion against creation. Of the false rebels

there is Cottard, of course, who shares Stepan's (an anarchist in Camus'

play Les Justes) desire to destroy the world. Cottard, not content with

 

the merely "half-way" measures of the plague epidemic on one occasion

"cria d'une voix pleines de larmes et de fureur" that what was needed

x)

93
was "un tremblement de terre. Un vrai! " (53) While Stepan claims
that "détuire, c'est ce qu'il faut. . . . i1 faut ruiner ce monde de fond en
comble."79 There is also the renegade missionary in the short story
"Le Renégat," who in his absolutism turns his back on a religion and a
world which accepts evil as a part of creation, to adOpt instead the
world and religion of absolute hate in a desert region called Taghaza.

In Camus’ adaptation for the stage of Dostoevsky's The Possessed there

 

is also Stavrogin who Speaks in the vein of Stepan and Cottard: "Moi je
hais affreusement tout ce qui existe en Russie, le peuple, le tsar, et
vous . . . je hais tout ce qui vit sur la terre et moi-meme au premier
rang. Alors, que la destruction régne, oui, et qu'elle les écrase et
avec tous les signes de Stavroguin et Stavroguin lui-meme."80 Calig-
ula's deeply-rooted quarrel with creation (and of all Camus' révoltés he
and Tarrou most closely resemble each other) causes him to emulate
the very absurde he Opposes. He, like Tarrou, cannot live with half-
measures and hence decides that "ce monde tel qu'il est fait, n‘est pas
supportable. J'ai donc besoin de la lune, ou de bonheur, ou de l'irn-
mortalité —, quelque chose qui soit de’ment peut-etre, mais qui ne soit
pas de ce monde."81

Of those who did not demand the moon, or immortality, or more

than a limited happiness or limited innocence, there are others (in

 

79L__e_s ustes (Paris, 1950), 127. Subsequent quotations from I_.Le_s
Justes are taken from this edition.

 

 

80Les Possede’s (Paris, 1959), 261.

8113 Malentendu, suivi gs Caligula (Paris, 1944), 111.

 

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94
addition to Camus himself, who wrote "Le monde 01‘1 je vis me répugne,
mais je me sens solidaire des hommes qui y souffrent.")82 Daru, the
protagonist of another short story "L'HOte," felt a considerable impa-
tience with the imperfection of the world, an imperfection inaugurated
by men themselves. "Un colére subite vint 3 Barn. . . contre tous les
hommes et leur sale méchanceté, leurs haines inlassables, leur folie
du sang."83 There is also Dr. Rieux who told Rambert that he Spoke
only the "langage d'un homme lasse du monde ou il vivait," and that
because of his esteem for his fellow-men "il avait décidé a refuser,
pour sa part, l'injustice et les concessions" (12). Such revolt against
the order of things, 84 Camus wrote, is born of the "spectacle de la
déraison, devant une condition injuste et incomprehensible. Mais son

'e’lan aveugle revendique l'ordre au milieu du chaos et l'unité au coeur

 

82% I (Paris, 1950), 249. Subsequent quotations from
Actuelles, I, are taken from this edition.

83L‘Exil e_t 1_e ro aume (Paris, 1957), 109.

84In writing of the hermit or of any man who seeks refuge from
the world, Freud said much that was pertinent to Camus' would-be
saint, for "the hermit turns his back on the world, " he wrote, "and will
have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to
recreate the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its
most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that
are in conformity with one's own wishes. But whoever, in desperate
defiance, sets out upon the path to happiness will as a rule attain
nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who
for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delu-
sion." ("Civilization and Its Discontents," The Complete Psychological
Works O_f Sigmund Freud, XXIL London, 1961], 81).

 

‘\

95
mane de ce qui fuit et disparait."85 And it is the injustice and the incom—
prehensibility of the world, and his own refusal to compromise, that
causes Tarrou to put the world on trial. 86 In so doing he closely resem-
bles Ivan Karamazov, who may be the prototype of this kind of révolte’.
Many of the themes which Camus utilizes in his thought and writing are
recognizable in Ivan's plaint:

I reCOgnize in all humility that I cannot understand why the
world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame,
I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom,
and they stole fire from heaven, though they knew they
would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them.
With my pitiful, earthly Euclidean understanding all I know
is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty. 87

As Promethean advocates and benefactors for mankind, both Tar-

rou and Ivan are interested in fighting for the victims against the

 

8SL'Homme révolté, 21.

 

86According to Germaine Brée, the trial, rather than the death
sentence, is the Overall symbol in Camus‘ writing. The theme of the
trial appears in L'Etranger, I._._a Peste, and _I._._a_ Chute, for in all there
are murderers, or those who consider themselves such. Each is
either put on trial, puts himself on trial, or puts creation on trial or a
combination of any two of the three.

87Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance
Garnett(New York, no date), 252. All subsequent quotations from this
work are taken from this edition.

A similar episode is found in Graham Greene's writing and binds
Camus' and Greene's saints together. Greene's potential saints in their
rejection of evil and in their rejection of much of the dogma of their
religion do not go beyond God to an ultimate of justice, but beyond
dogma, to what they think of as the inconceivable extent of God's mercy.
Greene's defense of his protagonists comes from this question of divine
mercy, for shouldn't God, in his turn, have at least as much compassion
for suffering innocents and the damned as his creatures do for each
other? All-or-nothingness — that harmony cannot include evil -- is taken
up in The Heart 9f the Matter, while all-or-no-oneness is included in
The Power a_ng th_e Glory, for the renegade priest proclaims that if any-
one in his territory is to be damned, he hOpes to be so too.

 

96

bourreaux. God in their eyes is one of the latter. For this reason

 

their idea is to go beyond God or the order of things to justice. Ivan’s
"It's Him I don't and cannot accept" is close in spirit to Tarrou’s moti-
vating nostalgia for justice or unity, echoed also in Stepan's assertion,
"Je n'aime pas la vie, mais la justice qui est au-dessus de la vie,"88
and later adds, "i1 faut toute 1a justice 01‘1 c'est 1e désespoir" (126).

Both Tarrou and Ivan increase the sum of evil in their desperate
nostalgia for unity but at least they are prOpelled by an evil which lies
at the roots of that disunity— the evil of human suffering. For this rea-
son their cases, as absolutists, against creation are two-fold. For each
accuses God of maintaining universal harmony on the basis of suffering
(their all-or-nothing brief) and each also complains that some achieve
salvation while others are damned (their all-or-no-one brief). Ivan will
refuse salvation and reject the Christian idea of harmony if it depends
on suffering -- especially the suffering of an innocent child. "Listen!
If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to
do with it, tell me please?. . . too high a price is asked for harmony;
it‘s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to
give back my entrance ticket" (254).

Ivan, rejecting a creation in which children suffer, also denies it
on the basis that some are to be damned while others saved. Tarrou,

whose mind is considerably more "earthly" and "Euclidean" than Ivan

claims his to be, reduces this conflict to the terrestrial, for Tarrou

 

88Les Justes, 41.

 

‘

97
states categorically that "i1 n'y a que des condamnés qui attendent la
plus arbitraires des graces et parmi eux les policiers eux-mEmes" (160).

The problem for each remains basically that of unity -- not only in
the world but in themselves. Once Ivan decides that logically "All is
permitted," his problem is to know if he canbe faithful to his logic,

si, parti d'une protestation indigne’e devant la souffrance
innocente, i1 acceptera le meurtre de son p‘ere avec
l'indifférence des hommes-dieux. On connait sa solution:
Ivan laissera tuer son pére. TrOp sensible pour agir, il
se contentera de laisser faire. Mais i1 deviendra fou.
L'homme qui ne comprenait pas comment on pouvait airner
son prochain ne comprend pas non plus comment on peut
1e tuer. Coincé entre une vertu injustifiable et un crime
inacceptable, devoré de pitié et incapable d'amour, soli-
taire privé du secourable cynicisme, la contradiction
tuera cette intelligence souveraine. 3
In general whatever Camus wrote above about Ivan pertains also to Tar-
rou: for the murder of the father performed by Ivan‘s surrogate, Smer-
dyakov, which is scientifically reasoned by Ivan but which he could not
condone emotionally, can be substituted for Tarrou's reasoned and
regretted murder -- by proxy -- of his fellow men.

Ivan's demand summed up in his "I must have justice, or I will
destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space,
but here on earth, and that I could see myself" (253), not only makes
him closer to Camus and his protagonists in their adherence to the
"here and now" and their rejection of "laters," but also foreshadows

his retreat into madness -- a form of suicide. For in Ivan's and Tarrou's

desire to change the world as it stands, each defeats himself. Tarrou

 

39L'Homme révolte’, 79-80.

 

V

 

98
in his long conversation on the roof informs Dr. Rieux that he has
already condemned himself either to death or inactivity, saying ”ce sont
les autres qui feront l'histoire" and in recognizing in himself one who is
a complete stranger to life, concludes "qu‘a partir du moment on j'ai
renoncer a tuer, je me sens condamné a un exil definitif" (209).

The absolutist state of mind is echoed in other Camusean protag-
onists -— in Stepan, in 1_e rené at, in Cottard, in Judge Othon, and most
notably in Father Paneloux, the Jesuit priest of I.._a Essie who joins the
sanitary squads shortly before his death. Paneloux' second sermon
delivered during the epidemic reflects the all-or-nothing quality of his
mind in its message and phraseology: "c'était tout ou ce n'était rien,"
"i1 faut tout croire ou tout nier," "i1 fallait admettre le scandale parce-
qu’il vous fallait choisir de hair Dieu ou de l'aimer," etc. Although
Tarrou is an absolutist against God, rather than for Him, on the side of

the condamnés and damne’s, yet he follows a phiIOSOphy of intransigence

 

and can at least understand the "logic" of Paneloux' argument recalling
in Paneloux' defence the anecdote of the priest who had lost his faith
when he saw the face of a young soldier destroyed by war and who
claimed "Quand l'innocence a les yeux crevés, un Chrétien doit perdre
1a foi ou accepter d'avoir les yeux crevés. Paneloux ne veut pas
perdre 1a foi, il ira jusqu'au bout. . . " (188)

Rieux also comments in his chronicle of the plague year on the
reaction of another intransigent, the early Judge Othon: "i1 avait trouvé
l'exposé du PEre Paneloux 'absolument irre’futable,‘ " Rieux added, how-

ever, "mais tout le monde n'avait pas d'opinion aussi catégorique.

99
Simplement 1e préche rendit plus sensible a certains l'idée, vague
jusque-la, qu‘ils étaient condamnés, pour un crime inconnu, a un
emprisonment inirnaginable" (85).

Faced for the fir st time (for Paneloux is a scholar rather than a
parish priest), with the death of a child, Paneloux falters at first, let-
ting escape a "Mon Dieu, sauvez cet enfant." He then proceeds to for-
tify his faith against such waverings by determining that evil is only
apparent to the imperfect human understanding. In the same episode in
which Othon's son dies of the plague in an agony so long even the expe-
rienced Dr. Rieux cannot endure it, muttering, "I1 faut que je m'en
aille. . . je ne peux plus 1e supporter," Rieux emerges as the partisan
of Ivan and Tarrou for he later shouts wrathfully to the priest, "Ah
celui-la, au moins, était innocent, vous le savez bien" (178). To
Paneloux' reply that Rieux should love God and a creation which cannot
be understood, Rieux reveals his state of rebellion, "Non mon Pere. . . .
Je me fais une autre idée de l'amour. Et je refuserais jusqu'a la mort
d'aimer cette création oh des enfants sont torturés" (179).

Camus and Rieux have replies to Father Paneloux, and less dras-
tic solutions for both Tarrou and Ivan: Camus wrote, "nous nous refu-
sons 5 désespérer de l'homme. Sans avoir l'ambition déraisonnable de
le sauver, nous tenons au moins a le servir." In the conference given
to the Dominicans of Latour-Maubourg, Camus seems to be speaking
directly for Rieux when he declaims, "Je ne partage pas votre espoir
et je continue a lutter contre cet univers 01‘1 des enfants souffrent et

meurent. . . . Nous ne pouvons pas empecher peut-etre que cette

100
cre’ation soit celle Oh des enfants sont torturés. Mais nous pouvons
diminuer 1e nombre des enfants torturés."90

Paneloux and Tarrou and Othon die of the plague. Ivan and Cot-
tard go mad. Each in his way has been on the side of death; therefore

each has carried within, in his absolutism, the germs of plague, a con-

dition which Tarrou referred to as his peste inte’rieure. Tarrou’s

 

death certificate might very well have been marked, as is Paneloux’,
-"cas douteux," for both on the literal level die of atypical forms of the
plague, showing symptoms of both pneurnonic and bubonic varieties.
"Car Rieux se trouvait devant un visage de la peste qui le déconcertait"
(233), indicates that this is more than a clear-cut example Of the

disease and that Rieux is mystified.

 

90"L'Incroyant et les chre’tiens," Actuelles, L 213. 217~

PART IX

SANTE OU SAINTETE

"Rebellion! I am sorry you call it that, " said Ivan earnestly. "One
can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live" (254). In his knowledge
of the impossibility of living in continued rebellion, Ivan employs the
term "rebellion" in a way which differs from Camus' studied usage.
Camus painstakingly differentiates in his use of the terms "revolution"
and "revolt" or "rebellion." The latter two words, as he defines them,
have nothing to do with the all-or-nothing attitude leading to murder,
massacre, or impasse. Revolt or rebellion, according to Camus,
comes about as a result of a frank confrontation of l'absurde and repre-
sents a sustained and salutary tension between man and world, which
includes both limits and lucidity. It is evident then, that the rebellion
of the true rebel or hero of l'absurde is never a single or definitive act
but a continued state of tension for "la valeur qui le tient debout ne lui

est jamais donnée une fois pour toutes, il doit 1a maintenir sans

The rebellion of Ivan and Tarrou, on the other hand, was akin to

what Camus calls revolution, for it includes "l'impatience des limites,

 

le refus de leur Etre double, 1e de’sespoir d'homme," all of which have
for these two false rebels "les ont jetés enfin dans une démesure inhu-

maine."92

 

91L'Homme révolté, 342.

 

92123. , 366.

101

’\

102

All of the inconsistencies found in the natures of these two révol-

 

t_é_s are drawn from their inordinate desire for unity in a world where
disparity is the rule. Camus likens their ambitious yearning to "cor-
rect creation" to a desire to play God. He writes, "si l'homme e’tait
capable d'introduire a lui seul, l‘unité dans le monde, s'il pouvait y
faire régner par son seul décret, la sincérité, 1'innocence et la jus-
tice, il serait Dieu lui-mane"?3 Unable to be God, yet unwilling to
accept the existence of injustice, each continues to nurture what was
for Camus an unjustifiable desire for virtue.

If Ivan's absolutism led to a series of insurmountable contradic-
tions, Tarrou's responses to the manifold nihilism at work in the world
and in his individual being lead also to a series of discrepancies. Tar-
rou, no more than Ivan, can escape what Germaine Brée refers to as
the judgments of the "double tribunal," "the subjective inner tribunal
and the outer objective tribunal," and she adds, "the two refuse to be
reconciled"(238).

Both the brief Tarrou held against the world, and that against

himself, lay in a single statement, the heart of his profession d_e foi

 

made to Dr. Rieux in the scene-on-the-roof: "c'est bien fatigant d'etre
un pestife’re’. Mais c'est encore plus fatigant de ne pas vouloir I'E‘tre"
(208). Behind this dilemma is marshalled the whole series of contra-
dictions which finally defeat Tarrou and lead him to his only alterna-

tive "c'est pour cela que quelques-uns, qui veulent cesser de l'étre,

 

93L’Homme révolte’, 342.

 

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103
connaissent une extremite’ de fatigue dont rien ne les delivrera plus que
la mort” (209).

The first of these contradictions to be noted is minor but may be
significant if it is taken as symbolic or symptomatic of all the other
discrepancies of Tarrou's position which lie behind the expression

saint-laique. For the term also embodies a certain fallacy of logic.

 

The saint tends to turn his back on life, as one dedicated to other-
worldly considerations, while the layman represents life and the con-
siderations of this world. The ideals of the saint go beyond the human
and temporal. The layman who Operates in the realm of history soils
his hands occasionally, if need be, and, in a world where there is no
evidence of divine responsibility, accepts complete responsibility and

a modicum of guilt. The saint, mortified by guilt, makes Kierkegaard‘s
"leap to God." Tarrou, refusing to outrage his intellect by making such
a leap and at the same time refusing not to be God, runs himself into a

cul-de-sac:

 

Quelle peut etre alors l'attitude du révolté? 11 ne peut se
détourner du monde et de l'histoire sans renier le prin-
cipe meme de sa révolte, choisir la vie éternelle sans se
résigner, en un sens, au mal. Non chrétien, par exem-
ple, i1 doit aller jusqu'au bout. Mais jusqu'au bout signi-
fie choisir l'histoire absolument et le meurtre est encore
renier ses origines. Si 1e révolté ne choisit pas, i1
choisit le silence et l'esclavage d'autri. Si, dans un
mouvement de désespoir, i1 déclare choisir a la fois
contre Dieu et l'histoire, il est témoin de la liberté pure,
c'est-a-dire de rien. Au stade historique qui est le
nOtre, dans l'impossibilité d'affirmer une raison supé-
rieure qui ne trouve sa limite dans le mal, son apparent
dilemme est le silence ou le meurtre. Dans les deux cas,
une démission. 94

 

94L'Homme révolté, 344.

 

104

There is further contradiction in Tarrou's roles as both aspiring
saint and révolté, for in aspiring to sainthood Tarrou indicates that he
must have a life of peace and purity, an ideal necessarily Opposed to the
hand-soiling and never-ending occupations of the rebel. The irony
involved in Tarrou's quest for "la paix intérieure" and the fact that the
rebel (and it can be assumed that Tarrou was such up until recession of
the plague) can never find peace, is apparent.

One of the sources of Tarrou’s brief against life was of course the
question of justice. He refused to recognize as did Camus, Rieux, and
Camus' other true rebels the simple fact that in this world "i1 n'y a pas
de justice, i1 n'y a que des limites."95 Hence justice, one of the fac-
tors tried in Tarrou's outer tribunal, involves the question of possibil-
ity vs. impossibility. Tarrou, who is at odds with the world, is conse-
quently at war with the limitations of possibility. This Opposition is
best illustrated in an early conversation held with Dr. Rieux in which
Rieux establishes himself as one who will fight continually for all vic-
times of injustice, whether the injustices stem from death, or society.
Tarrou replies, "oui. . . je peux comprendre. Mais vos victoires
seront toujours provisoires, voila tout" (109). Rieux' position, that Of

the true rebel, is well summed up in a chapter of L'Homme re’volte’.

 

entitled "Au-dela du nihilisme."

Aucune sagesse aujourd'hui ne peut prétendre a donner
plus. La révolté bute inlassablement contre le mal, a
partir duquel il ne lui reste qu'a prendre un nouvel e’lan.

 

95Carnets, I I, 236.

105
L'hOmme peut maitriser en lui tout qui doit l'etre. Il
doit réparer dans la création tout ce qui peut 1'6tre.
Apres quoi, les enfants mourront toujours injustement,
mEme dans la société parfaite. Dans son plus grand
effort, l'homme ne peut que se prOposer de diminuer
arithmétiquement la douleur du monde. Mais l'in-
justice et la souffrance demeureront et, si limitées
soient-elles, elles ne cesseront pas d'e‘tre 1e scandale.
Le "pourquoi?" de Dimitri Karamazov continuera de
retentir; l'art et la révolte ne mourront qu'avec 1e
dernier homme.” (363)

If the true rebel knows that his victories will always be provi-
sional, he also accepts the fact that in achieving these victories he will
sometimes have to use methods which he abhors. Tarrou as a révolté
during a combat he believes is utterly just, in which he fights germs
rather than men, learns to his grief that in fighting death or nihilism,
he has to use nihilism as a means to his end. For instance, in the
campaign against 1_a pe ste there is no certainty that the measures taken
have been effective against the disease; what is certain is that these
measures engender further evil. For the quarantine which forces the
separation of those who love leads to despondency, a poor antidote to
contagion; the isolating of the plague-ridden city leads to the outbreak
of nihilistic activities such as looting, profiteering, arson, and in some
cases, to the deliberate infection of others with the disease. In other
ways also, nihilism springs from the very means employed to combat
it: the formerly free citizens of Oran become prisoners in the combined
charnel-house and jail to which their city has been reduced, while those
who try to escape are shot in skirmishes at the gates or executed for

minor offenses as exemplary measures under the new peste régime.

Another contradiction which Tarrou puts on trial in the outer

106
objective tribunal concerns his relationship with others. When Rieux
asks him what has motivated his interest in serving the plague victims,

Tarrou responds that it was his morale d_e 1_a comprehension, his ideal

 

of sympathy. Such an ideal is, however, a mere abstraction of love
directed toward man, rather than toward individual men or women.
Tarrou's by-passing of love for LOVE, then, is an economy of emo-
tion?6 for he maintained that "l'honnéte homme, celui qui n'infecte pres—
que personne, c'est celui qui a le moins de distractions possible. Et i1
en faut de la volonte’ et de la tension pour ne jamais etre distrait! " (208)
This economy of emotion enables him not only to concentrate on his

goal of purity but eliminates what he considers to be an Opportunity for
further evil. He knew that human love, as Opposed to a saint's love,
often means hurting and being hurt -— conditions :avhich Tarrou wishes at

all cost to avoid.

Both Rambert and Rieux notice Tarrou's detachment. On one

 

96Tarrou behaves typically here for William James wrote in his
Yarieties gf Rciigious Experience that "the lives of saints are a history
of successful renunciation of complication, one form of contact with the
outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of the inner
tone"('[New York, 1928] , 349). George Orwell in his essay "Reflections
on Gandhi" also appeared to be in agreement with all that Camus implied
in respect to his saint and the subject of love. Orwell wrote, "The
essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. . . and that
one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life. . . this
is the price of fastening one's love upon other individuals." To this he
added, "to ordinary human beings, love means nothing, if it does not
mean loving some peOple more than others." Orwell also observed that
"it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never
felt much temptation to be human beings. . . . that the main motive for
’non-attachment' is a desire to escape from the pain of living and
above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work” ('I_‘_l_1_e
Orwell Reader [New York, 1949] , 328, 335).

 

 

‘

J

107
occasion for instance, when Rambert asks particularly to speak to
Dr. Rieux, Tarrou in giving Rambert permission to enter Rieux'
office replies with a knowing smile, "Je sais. Il est plus humain que
moi. Allons-y" (169). Rieux also notes Tarrou's detachment which he
feels has been manifested in his notebooks, and not only comments in

1:3. Pe ste that Tarrou's seems to be the point of view of one who looked

 

at life through the wrong end of a telescope, but Camus, in a commen-
tary in his own notebooks (Carnets, II), remarks, with Rieux again as
his mouthpiece: "Quand on écrit ce que vous écrivez, i1 semble que l'on
n'a rien a faire avec le service des homes" (122).

Even more important to Tarrou than his rebellion against the
world is his revolt against his own condition — the state of being a man -
and it is this aspect of his revolt which leads him to submit himself to
his own inner tribunal. In this subjective court of law he brings six
charges against himself:

1) That he, who was unable to change the world, was unable to
change himself, that he who lived in an imperfect world should also be
imperfect, for he was one who knew so well "1e bien et fait maigré lui
le mal‘fzg7 that he was not what Clamence would term "all of a piece,"
for he lacked as a human being the unity of purpose to be found only in
a god, a hero of legend, or in God himself, and hence lived a series of
contradictions.

2) That he, who had undoubtedly read with care works similar to

 

97L’Homme révolté, 342.

 

108
E m d_e Sisyphe, and who had been on his own absorbed in a study
of l'absurde, had failed to heed the implications of said studies.

3) That he had failed in regard to lucidité, one of the "natural
laws" resulting from consciousness of l'absurde, in making himself
responsible for that for which he never could be responsible — the acci-
dental or the inevitable. That he would in a world governed by death,
instead of resisting it consistently, eventually capitulate. That he
would (and lucidity not only includes knowledge Of good and evil, but
self-definition) succumb to self-deception or mauvaise f_o_i.

4) That he had failed in regard to mesure, another "truth"
derived from knowledge of l'absurde. For in preferring perfection, an
impossibility, he had turned his back on the possible; that he had in
by-passing the condition of men, tried to attain the condition of the
saint; that he had in his obsession with guilt, avoided responsibility,
concentrating not on what he could do but on what he could not do.

5) That he had in his extreme guilt finally abandoned his respon-
siblity as a man, refusing the burden of Sisyphus assumed by the other
heroes of l’absurde.

6) That he, who had begun his career fighting death and nihilism
on behalf of others, had learned that for himself, at least, annihilation
was a desired goal; that he who had fought the death sentence in socie-
ties would, having first put himself on trial, eventually condemn him-
self to death. »

For, as an aspiring saint, Tarrou is paradoxically a great sinner,

guilty of what is for Camus the only sin— the sin against life: for not

lJ

109
only has Tarrou, as an absolutist, aSpired to a goal only realizable, if
at all, in another life or world, but he has sinned against his only cer-
tainty, his own life, in choosing the wrong freedom.

Whatever Rambert says about heroism applies equally to saint—
hood, for in showing that he knows of the complicity between heroism
and death, he also implies that the same complicity exists between
death and sainthood. Rambert is undoubtedly thinking of both the hero
E 1_a Malraux and of his own experiences in the; Spanish Civil War when
he declaims for Tarrou's benefit, "je sais que l'homme est capable de
grands actions. Mais s'il n‘est pas capable d'un gran sentiment, i1 ne
m’intéresse pas." Insisting further he states, "j‘en ai assez des gens
qui meurent pour une ide’e. Je ne crois pas a l'heroi'sme, je sais que
c'est facile et'j'ai appris que c'était meurtrier. Ce qui m'intéresse,
c'est qu'on vive et qu'on meure de ce qu'on aime" (136-137).

Tarrou, who can die for an idea or an abstraction, is incapable

of dying for love or of living for love. He who seeks his paix intéri-

 

eure which proves his geste intérieure, lives in a sort of limbo. "Il

 

était conscient" as is Rieux, "de ce qu'il y a de stérile dans une vie
sans illusions," and that "i1 n'y a pas de paix sans espérance" (239).
Living as aretthose condemned bythe plague epidemic to a life of inac—
tivity and hOpelessness, he lives "sans avenir" like they who are
"échoue’s a mi-distance de ces ab‘rmes et de ces sommets, ils flottaient
plutOt qu'ils ne vivaient, abandonne’s a des jours sans direction et a des

souvenirs stériles, ombres errantes qui n'auraient pu prendre force. . . "

(61)

’\

110

Tarrou admits in his long conversation with Dr. Rieux-—- his only
reprieve from the plague — that it is pointless to fight if one already
overlooks what one is fighting for: ”a la fin, c'est trOp bate de ne vivre
que dans la peste. Bien entendu, un homme doit se battre pour vic-
times. Mais s'il cesse de rien aimer, par ailleurs, e quoi sert qu'il
de batte?" (211) (Rambert, in contrast to Tarrou, while separated from
his mistress, still lives in hOpe because he loves.

Having that "obstination aveugle qui dans nos coeurs, remplacait
alors l'amour"(153), Tarrou resembles those people of Oran who during
the p£_s_t_e year supplant their'usual complacency with a habit of despair

more lethal than despair itself, for they have learned to live with des-

pair as they formerly lived with their mauvaise t_'_o_i. \

\‘

"It is not so curious," Emily Zants writes, that Tarrou "die at the
point of the plague where everyone else's hope for personal happiness
seems to be killing the plague itself.” She adds, "It was still effective
on Tarrou, however, who had no hOpe."98 It is, of course, the combi- if:
nation of Tarrou's guilt and his estrangement towards others which j
leads him to despair. Camus, in contrast to his protagonist, knows /
that "ceux qui s'aiment et qui sont séparés peuvent vivre dans la dou-
leur, mais ce n'est pas le désespoir: ils savent que l'amour existe."99

In refusing one of the few things that are possible to human

effort — "1a tendresse humaine," Tarrou fails, and as one of Camus'

 

98"The Relationship of Judge and Priest in La Peste,"The French
Review, XXXVII (February 1964), 421.

99L'Eté, 17o.

 

1 \

1 11
false rebels, chooses as have the peOple of Oran, mauvaise f__oi in place
of authenticity.

Seeing his own and the crux which has defeated Tarrou as identi-
cal, Camus, while reading the Odyssey, writes the following notation in
his Carnets, II: "Calypso offre a Ulysse de choisir entre 1'irnmortalité
et la terre de sa patrie. Il repousse l'irnmortalité. C'est peut-etre
tout le sens de 1'Odyssée" (22). It is also close to the complete mean-
ing of all of Camus' work which includes the world of beauty and the
world of suffering, as well as the acceptance of the human lot which is
to die, and the rejection of any transcendence beyond the human state.
Tarrou in his temptation toward sainthood chooses instead of this king-
dom in the sun, exile in the "ténébres d'Eurydice et le sommeil
d'Isis."100 For this reason Tarrou must in the matter of heroism cede
to the true heroes of 1'absurde, and in returning once again to the
scene-on-the-roof and to Tarrou's announcement that he would like to
be a saint without God, there is Rieux' reply which states very clearly
the stand of Rieux, of Camus, and of all true rebels against the absurd:
"mais vous savez, je me sens plus de solidarité avec les vaincus qu'avec
les saints. Je n'ai pas de gOut, je crois, pour l'héroisme et la sainteté.
Ce qui m'intéresse, c’est d'etre un home" (210).

In Rieux' aspiration to be no more than a man among men, inter-
ested, as he tells Father Paneloux, in their health, not their salvation,

Rieux reaches what Tarrou refers to as a third category, beyond that of

 

100L'Eté, 60.

 

112
the rational murderer and the innocent murderer, a position which Tar-
rou feels would be very hard to achieve, but might possibly lead to
peace: "1a troisiéme catégorie, celle des vrais médecins" (209). This
category is composed not only of professionals, but of whoever could,
by means of his n_i_t_=’:_t_i_e_r, his trade or Special experience, bring to bear
for the benefit of men his skill, his knowledge, and his compassion.
Tarrou no longer belongs in this category now that the struggle against
p_es_t_e is over, for Tarrou rejects mere possibilities. In "1a troisieme
categorie" are grouped Rieux with his medical experience; Rambert as
journalist and man of the heart; and Grand, the near-ridiculous munici-
pal clerk. For it is Grand who can never find the words to write his
book, but who, nevertheless, is able to express succinctly the most
valuable lesson to be learned from l'absurde: "11 y a la peste, il faut se
défendre, c'est clair. Ah! si tout était aussi simple! " (115) Outside the

covers of 1;.3‘ Peste there are other notables among Camus' true rebels:

 

Meursault who emerges, although in a purely individual process, an
absurd hero, because of his complete acceptance of life and of death as
a part of life; Daru of the short story "L'HOte," who learns that ”an
instinctive impulse of compassion for a fellow-being will lead to his
expulsion from the austere Eden of his solitude. A single involvement
of feeling will implicate him in a future of human involvements";101
and also d‘Arrast, of another short story, "La Pierre qui pousse."

D'Arrastarrives in the new world to apply his skill as an engineer to

 

101Lione1 Trilling, The Experience gt Literature (New York,
1967» 797.

 

 

f..-

.1

.14

’K

113

build better lives for men.

Such a group must also include Camus himself, the author of
these ideas placed in action, who has in both his journalism and his
creative writing forged "un art de vivre par temps de catastrOphe, pour
nattre une fois, et lutter ensuite. . . . contre l'instinct de mort a l'oeuvre
dans notre histoire."102

Emily Zants has borne Camus' task in mind when she writes:

The travels or experience of each individual must provide
him with the secret, the knowledge or link of solidarity
which will permit him as an individual to partake of men's
communion. His descent into the night is a kind of individ-
ual death whereby he acquires this knowledge. Much of
Camus' preoccupation with death is explained on this sym-
bolic level. By his use of murders, wars, and plagues he
restates in contemporary terms Odysseus' temptation on

' Calypso's island to remain either in perpetual confronta-
tion with the absurd or to succumb to one of its terms,
anything but the revolt which would carry the individual
away from her island of debauchery back to man. It is
the artistic attempt to bring the stranger back from such
islands to the harmonious seashores where the balance
prevails between men's ideals and their individual lives
that forms the nucleus of Camus' symbolic universe. 103

 

102Camus, Discours d_e Suéde, l7.

 

103"Deserts. . . ," 40.

BOOK TWO

GRAHAM GREENE: THE JOURNEY TOWARD SAINTHOOD

PART I

THE MAP: BITS AND PIECES

All of Graham Greene's writings are journeys of exploration.

Those made backward into time and recounted in his books Journey With-

 

out Maps: _A_ Travel Book, The Lawless Roads,1 The Lost Childhood and

 

 

 

Other Essays, and _12 Search of a Character: Two African Journals are

 

 

probings into "the heart of darkness" or "the heart of the matter." In

Journey Without Mais and in l_n Search of a Character, Greene explores

 

the region earlier exploited by Conrad in his 11333 of Darkness. Be-
cause Greene is aware, as was Conrad, of the dread foundation underly-
ing human life, Greene's search is for a resuscitation of spiritual val-
ues and for a more meaningful way of life. Greene's quest is indicated
in his choice of images and metaphors. Such is the case with the phrase
"the heart of the matter" which serves as both the title and the key

phrase in one of his major novels, The Heart of the Matter. "A hint of

 

 

1The British titles of Graham Greene's works will be used in this
study whenever there is a discrepancy between the British and Arneri-
can titles. The Ltawlese Rgds was published on this side of the Atlan-
tis as oth r Mexico; Stamboul Train as Orient Egress; England Made
Me as 'I_‘Le Shipwrecked; _A_ gin f9; Sale as This Qu_n f_o_r Hire. The
Power a_g_c_l t_l_1_e Glory was brought out first as The Labyrinthine Ways
and later as The Power a_nii gig Glory in the United States. Greene
deplored this policy of changing his original titles.

 

114

115

also serves as the title of one of his Twenty-One Stories.

 

Each of Greene's journeys was made precisely because there

were no available maps. For this reason Journey Without Maps, the

 

title of Greene's earliest travel account, also becomes a recurrent
metaphor in his writings. In this book he Offers with the image an expli-
cation of its use:

. . . I avoided ideas I didn't like, the idea of eternal life
and damnation. But in Africa one couldn't avoid the
supernatural. The method of psychoanalysis is to bring
the patient back to the idea which he is repressing: a
long journey backwards without maps, catching a clue
here and a clue there, as I caught the names of villages
from this man and that, until one has to face the general
idea, the pain or the memory. This is what you have
feared, Africa may be imagined as saying, you can’t
avoid it, there it is creeping round the wall, flying in at
the door, rustling the grass, you can't forget it, so

you may as well take a long look. 2

In his The Lost Childhood Greene indicates his provisional accep-

 

tance of an early map: "One had lived for fourteen years in a wild jungle
country without a map, but now the paths had been traced and naturally
one had to follow them. "3 Later, however, he writes on behalf of one
of his protagonists: "But he couldn‘t follow the plan; he'd lost the knack

"4

of map-reading, and still later another protagonist complains: "all

this talk of a man called Hitler. . . your files of wretched faces, the

 

ZJourney Without Maps: _a_ Travel Book (London, 1950), 109-110.
Subsequent quotations taken from this work will be from the same edi-
tion.

3The Lost Childhood egg Other Essays (New York, 1962), 16. Sub-
sequent quotations from this book will be taken from this edition.

4England Made Me (London, 1947), 248. Subsequent quotations
from this work will be taken from this edition.

‘r,

116
cruelty and meaninglessness. . . . It‘s as if one had been sent on a
journey with the wrong map."5
The map image is extended to include the journey without pass-
ports as well as the distress of being lost in a maze or forest: "He was

like a man without a passport, without a nationality; like a man who

could only speak Esperanto."6 And in Brighton Rock there is a similar

 

situation: "It was as if she were in a strange country: the typical English-
woman abroad. She hadn't even got the phrase book. She was as far

"7 "Did one turn

from either of them as she was from Hell or Heaven.
left or right?" another protagonist asks himself. "It was like being for-
gotten in a maze when the ticket man has gone home..... everyone existing

alone in his little personal maze."8 Again "the sense of unfamiliarity
deepened around him. It was as if he had started out from home on a
familiar walk, past the gas works, across the brick bridge, over the
Wimble, across two fields, and found himself not in the lane which ran
uphill to the new road and the bungalows, but on the threshold of a strange
wood, faced by a shaded path he had never taken, running God knows

where."9

 

5The Ministg 9f Fear (London, 1950), 194. Subsequent quotations
from this work will be taken from the same edition.

 

6England Made ME: 136.

 

7Brighton Rock (New York, 1953), 180. Subsequent quotations from
this work will be taken from the same edition.

 

81h; Lillie—3i Reggie (London, 1960), 55. Subsequent quotations
from The Lawless Roads will be taken from this edition.

 

9Stamboul Train (London, 19A7), 144. Subsequent quotations from
Stamboul Train will be taken from this edition.

 

\l

4 I

.F

V l

117
Doors, together with windows are important symbols in Greene’s

writing. The "green baize door" occurs more than once. In The Law-

 

less Roads he writes:

 

If you pushed Open a green baize door in a passage by my
father's study, you entered another passage deceptively
similar, but none the less you were on alien ground. There
would be a slight smell from the matron's room, of damp
towels from the changing rooms, of ink everywhere. Shut
the door behind you again, and the world smelt differently:
books and fruit and eau-de-Cologne" (3-4).

The "green baize door" image is more fully exploited in :3 Min-

 

istry of Fear where it becomes a more explicit division or "border"
between the state of innocence and the state of knowledge. Greene con-

tinues to write in The Lawless Roads of this particular door as a border:

 

One was an inhabitant-of both countries: on Saturday and

Sunday afternoons of one side of the baize door, the rest

of the week of the other. How can life on a border be

other than restless? You are pulled by different ties of

hate and love (4).
"The Other Side of the Border," a sketch of an incompleted work, and
"Across the Bridge," the title of a completed short story, encompass a
similar concept. Each reinforces Greene's conception of life as a
journey, a journey with all the discornforts and uncertainties of an
actual inroad into an unknown territory.

Whether actual expeditions into Africa, Mexico, or Indo-China,

or forays into the dead center of reckoning by way of the "basement

room," the Viennese sewers, or the hidden world "under the garden,"10

 

10The references are to the short story "The Basement Room" in
Twenty-One Stories, to the entertainment The Third Man, and to the
short story "Under the Garden" in the collection _A_ Sense o_f Reality.

 

118
each was a symbolic journey or descent into the remote regions of the
buried psyche. For the passage beyond the border of the known world
into an unknown territory, or through the green baize door which
divided the secure world of childhood from that other world of child-
hood terrors, was a passage from ignorance to knowledge, from inno-
cence to awareness, from chaos to order, from fatherlessness to the
recovery of the lost father, and from sinfulness to sanctity. Each
ingress was made in one of two ways, either via the primitive where,
in the childhood of the race, vestiges of responsible parenthood are still
to be uncovered, or via the "lost childhood" of the individual, where the
child is, of course, father to the man.

Greene is not, however, a romantic who looked in his journeys
back in time for delight in a lonely landscape or for nobility in the sav-
age. He rather endured the difficulties of the journey in order to reap
its benefits: the trip into Liberia and Sierra Leone was worth the rats
and the malaria in order to discover in the busha new vision of life, one
which included a gentleness, an instinctive friendliness, and a greater
candor, as well as a deeper cognizance of the supernatural. The dual
aspect in these ventures, the comfort derived from discomfort, is
reflected in Greene's writing, for if in "The Basement Room" the kit-
chen is the realm of Mrs. Baines, who is the equivalent in young Philip's
mind to the witch who haunts children's dreams, it is also the territory
of Baines who prOvides the Dundee cake, the tales of adventure, and the

companionship; if in The Third Man the garbage-fringed channels of

 

underground Vienna are the haunts of rats, these same sewers represent

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119
a natural order in contrast to humanlanarchy, for its waters still respond
to the law of its own tides; and if the under-garden world which Wilditch
explores is a seemingly capricious world permeated with the odor of
decaying cabbage leaves and whose silences are broken by Maria's dis-
cordant "Kwahks! " it is also the hiding place of secret jewels, the golden

po and the new ways of looking at the world above.

PART II

THE GREENE WOR LD

Returning from Africa in the middle 1930's, Greene felt that he
had heard in the cry of the wakeful slum child an instinctive longing for
a lost homeland. Such a homeland, he believed, had been found among
the primitive natives of West Africa. For there the men of the bush
still shared the purer terror and the purer joy of a life which continued
to take the supernatural into account. It was in the dance of the bush
witch that Greene saw both the acknowledgment and the exorcism of
man‘s fears -- an act performed by men too far removed from the urban
populations of EurOpe and America to exchange their joy for boredom or
their terror for nothingness. Nor had they yet exchanged their religious
sense for what Greene calls the "terrifying egoism of exclusion."

In leaving Africa Greene brought back to EurOpe a new wasteland
symbol — that of "the sinless graceless empty chromium world" -- as
well as his symbol of "the Coast" as the buffer state between the overly-
mechanized world and the primitive world of lost innocence. He may
have first realized these two worlds, or states of mind, "going out by
surfboat toward the bar, that thin line of white which divided this world
from the other," the chromium world which had come to meet him in the
guise of "the smokestack, the siren that called us impatiently on board,
the Officer on the captain's bridge who watched us through glasses."

The coastal town, on the other hand, which with its mud, its corrugated
iron roofs, and its vultures, was receding from view, was a reminder

to Greene of how much less separated the people of the coast were from

120

121
the true primitive. "The primitive," he wrote, "was at their back, it
wasn't centuries away. If they had taken the wrong road, they had only
to retrace their steps a very little distance in space and not in time."11

In choosing the Coast as a symbol, Greene accepted the "seedy"
as a reminder of how far fallen man in his pursuit of "the smart, the
new, the chic, the cerebral" had travelled from the Eden of his lost inno—
cence. The "seediness" of the coast being less distant from man's
beginnings is the point of confluence between the primitive world of
superstition and the chromium world of complete assurance; it is closer
to that point where man, in his false confidence in the thin surface of
matter, turned away from his knowledge of the abyss; it is the moment
when man hesitates before he joins, through progress or prosperity,
the new wasteland. "The coast," then, or "the border," for they are
often synonymous in Greene's thought, became the setting for much of
his writing. Lying between the purer world of the primitive and the
adulterated worlds of EurOpe or America, the Coast formed the gray
and neutral territory between the extremes of good and evil, of faith and
indifference. Because of its neutrality, Greene knew that life on the
border or the Coast could be nothing but restless -- a ravaged territory
whose pOpulace, torn by different ties of love and hate, became in them-
selves the battleground in Greene's drama for the two eternities.

Greene, having chosen "the Coast" as a symbol and in extending

these coasts to include the "seedy" everywhere, made claims in his

 

11Journey Without Maps, 309.

 

v‘

 

122
writing to a much vaster territory, known today as "Greeneland."
Because of its very "seediness" and "dinginess" Greeneland's service
to humanity is to keep alive the sense of "pity of what man has done with
his world" and of the discrepancy between what man was, what he is,

and what he could be.

A description of the Greene world must include its physical geog-
raphy, the people who populated it, and the norms which govern it.
Therefore space will be given to an enumeration of those regions which
Greene claims for his coasts and to the failures who, moving against a
background where isolation and betrayal are the rule, pOpulate it. In
such a description the fact will become clear that where hell is so obvi-
ous, heaven may be inferred; and that where pettiness, malice and sin
flourish, the failures provide the saints with their Opportunities. Some
of the regions (Greene has claimed for Greeneland are, in addition to the
Coast of West Africa, the desolate wastes and the border towns of Mex-
ico, war-torn Vietnam, the Congo and its tributaries, the smaller Eng-
lish cities such as Coventry, Brighton, and Nottingham (sometimes des-
ignated as Nottwich), as well as the more dismal districts of that great
metrOpolis, London. In Greeneland the smaller cities are recognized
by their invariable Moroccan cafés, Gothic hotels, Woolworths, super-
cinemas, and aging prostitutes. They are wintry backgrounds painted
in tones of gray. London, however, is most often seen from the van-
tages of its larger thoroughfares, each with its characteristic activity.
There is the Clapham Road, the Finchley Road, the Brighton Road.

There is the Tottenham Court Road with its "arty", furniture and its

123
bars, and there is the "smell of cooking greens just off the Tottenham
Court Road, as well as that special cinema known as "a little place off
the Edgeware Road. " Great Portland Street, on the other hand, is
known in Greeneland for its motor salesmen, the Euston Road for its
bicycle sh0ps; and while Carleton Myatt speeds toward Stamboul on the
Orient Express he dreams of a more familiar journey down the "long
straight Spaniards Road" which leads out of London with the heath fol-
lowing On either side, carrying with it a residue of the metrOpolitan
squalor in the "shOp girls offering themselves dangerously for a
drink."12

Once outside of London there is, of course, a switch from urban
"seediness" to a suburban variety. These are the true physical waste-
lands known as "Metroland." Metroland is usually described as a phe—
nomenon of the Midlands, wherever the "land is sold for building
estates and little villas go up on the wounded clay with garages like
tombs,"13 but Greene also described similar assaults made into the
downlands near Brighton. Here Rose Wilson, one of the protagonists

of Brighton Rock, exclairns to Pinkie Brown, the boy gang-leader: "It's

 

lovely. . .being out here in the country with you." The "country" to the
slum-bred Rose consists pathetically of a region where:

Little tarred bungalows with tin roofs paraded backwards,
gardens scratched in the chalk, dry flower beds like

 

IZStamhoul Train, 29.

 

13A 9.22 f_<_>_1_' Sale (London, 1947), 54. Subsequent quotations from
this work will be taken from the same edition.

124

Saxon emblems carved on the downs. Notices said: "Pull
in Here," "Mazawattee Tea," "Genuine Antiques"; and
hundreds of feet below, the pale green sea washed into the
scarred and shabby side of England. . . . there was nobody
about; one of the bungalows had broken windows, in another
the blinds were down for a death. 14

Insulation, isolation, loneliness are chronic aspects of the Greene
world. The insulation built up between one Greenelander and another is
revealed in the following description:

. . . in the morning, mist lay heavy. . Boards announc-
ing desirable building lots dripped on short grass. . . .
With visibility shut down to fifty yards you got no sense of
a world, of simultaneous existences: each thing was self-
contained like an image of private significance, standing

for something else -— Metroland loneliness. 15

In the entertainment The Ministry <_)_f Fear Greene's readers learn

 

that currently the "two great popular statements of faith are 'what a
small place the world is' and 'I'm a stranger here myself‘ " (102).16
Although geographical distances may appear to have contracted, a
greater sense of intimacy is not to be inferred. Coral Musker learns
this as she proceeds on her journey to Stamboul. At the very beginning

a ticket agent calls after her:

'Remember me. . . . I’ll see you again in a month or two.'

 

14Brighton. Rock, 124.

 

15The Lawless Roads, 9-10.

 

16Greene distinguished between his novels and what are considered
his lighter forms of fiction, referring to the latter as entertainments,
with the exception of Loser Takes All which he has termed a "frivolity."
A. A. de Vitis points out that in the novels "Greene expends more time
and energy on the characterization, " (53)that "what in the entertainment

is a religious sense, becomes in the novel a religious theme" (Graham
Greene[New York, 1964], 53, 65). In the entertainments there is, of

course, also a concession to the happy ending.

125

But he knew that he would not remember her; too many
faces would peer during the following weeks through the
window of his Office. '. . for him to remember an individual
and there was nothing remarkable about her. 17

Once again in Stamboul Train Carol was relegated to her role in

 

the lonely crowd, the impersonality of a lifetime of "Ivy and F10, of
Phil and Dick, all the affectionate peOple one kissed and called by their
front name and didn't know from Adam" (203).

In such a world of non-recognition, mere pathos can readily be

converted into tragedy. This was the case of D.'s wife in The Confiden-

 

1_:i_a_l_ £8211“ D. gives a laconic account of her execution which took place
some time earlier: "They took her as a hostage for the wrong man.
They had hundreds. I expect to the warders they all looked much
alike."18

The alienation existing between individuals in the Greene world is
carried to its nihilistic extreme in the adulterated penicillin racket in
post-World War II Vienna. The principal victims have been children
who died of spinal meningitis or who became permanently insane as a
result of this criminal adulteration. As they ride the Great Wheel in
the Prater, Harry Lime explains his point of view to Rollo Martins,
his erstwhile admirer:

Harry took a look at the toy landscape below. . . . "Victims?"

he asked. "Don't be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,"
he went on, pointing through the window at the pe0p1e moving

 

17Stamboul Train, 3.

 

 

18The Confidential Agent (New York, 1939), 212. Subsequent quo-
tations takenfromfilis work W111 be from the same edition.

126

like black flies at the base of the Wheel. "Would you really
feel any pity if one of those dots st0pped moving —- forever?
If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot
that st0ps, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my
money -— without hesitation? Or would you calculate how
many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax,
old man. Free of income tax." He gave a boyish conspira-
torial smile. "It's the only way to save nowadays."19

Harry Lime's large-scale betrayal of humanity is repeated more
often than not in the Greene world. There is Sir Marcus's (read
Zaharoff’s) scheme to bring about a world-wide war, the re are Eric
Krogh's (read Ivar Kreuger's) international financial manipulations and

there is Kate Farrant's recital in England Made 1113 of the vulpine code

 

she has learned to live by:
"We're all thieves. . . . Stealing a livelihood here
and there and everywhere and giving nothing back."
Minty sneered: "Socialism."
"Oh no," Kate said. "That's not for us. No brother-
hood in our boat. Only one who can cut the biggest dash
and who can swim."20
Betrayal in Greeneland is however as much a factor of the human
condition as it is the consequence of human acts. Raven, the harelipped
gunman offi (31122 Sale is rejected by society for his defect. Such a
rejection is emblematic of the world's corruption. Raven speaks for
the withdrawal of God, the Father, and for universal orphanhood when
he talks of the general irresponsibility of parents. When he asserts

"This isn't a world I'd bring children into" he speaks on behalf Of the

children who exist in the Greene world — Else, Rose Wilson, Pinkie

 

19The Thir:d_ Man (New York, 1950), 136-137. Subsequent quota-
tions from this work will be taken from the same edition.

ZOEngland Made 1143, 274.

 

127
Brown, and Philip of "The Basement Room" — "It's just their selfishness,"
Raven continues. "They have a good time and what do they mind if some-
one's born ugly: Three minutes in bed or against a wall, and then a life-
time for the one that‘s born" (156).

In Brighton Rock Pinkie Brown stresses the fact that pre-natal

 

betrayal is merely the prelude to further treachery. Pinkie, himself, is
permanently scarred by his memories of "the stuffy rooms, the wakeful
children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed" (130), for the
child knew that he was alone and forgotten for as long as the parents‘
weekly "game" lasted.

Life itself betrays, for it is the enemy of idealism and of all who
serve at its altars. In Greeneland the idealist is inevitably betrayed
either by his own mistaken idealism or by his own inadequacy in achiev-

ing his ends. Dr. Czinner, the futile revolutionist of Stamboul Train is

 

a case in point, for he is deceived by the faithlessness of others, by his
own belief in the revolution, and by his own disinclination to be more
Opportunistic. He is sacrificed in the end for having been "too faithful to
people who could have been served better by cunning," he recognizes him-
self as the agent of betrayal, a traitor to those "whom he had attended
and failed to save," to those "sad beautiful faces, thin from bad food, old
before their time, resigned to despair. . . ." "The world was in chaos,"
he knew, "to leave so much nobility unused while the great financiers and
the soldiers prospered" (199-200).

Dr. Czinner quailed no more than Raven at the idea of dying, for

" 'life,' he told himself, 'has not been so good as that' " (201). In the

 

\

128
moment preceding his execution he also realizes that treachery does not
end with life, that it outlives the moment of death and his "clearer mind
told him that the chances were few that his death would have any effect"
(202). At first he had promised himself that he might in death do more
for these peOple than in life, but now he knew he was to die as he had
lived, a futility rather than a sacrifice.

Borrowing his deeply- rooted conviction that the world is a world
of betrayal from the macrocosmic evidence around him, Greene surren-
dered himself for the time to empiricism. For in Nottingham he had
seen betrayal on a grand scale where

riding in trams in winter past the Gothic hotel, the super-
cinema, the sooty newspaper office where one worked at
night, passing the single professional prostitute trying to
keep the circulation going under the blue and powdered
skin, one began slowly, painfully, reluctantly to pOpulate
heaven.

In Nottingham he had seen the path cut out for him: "one began to
believe in heaven because one believed in hell" and because, as in Pink-
ie's case, the evidence lay all about him "for a long while it was only hell
that one could picture with a certain intimacy."22 Having gathered his
evidence for a hell in the world he lived in, Greene was also forced to fur-
nish heaven from the same stock. Anthony Burgess wrote in this respect

that

once a Catholic lays Open his soul to the corruptions of the
great world of commitment, he must accept a kind of

 

21The Lawless Roads, 5.

 

22The Lawless Roads, 5.

 

129
empiricism if he is not to be damned, drawing from the
natural order what may conceivably further the terres-
trial ends of the supernatural order. 23

Although Burgess denied that there was "little flavor of empiri-
cism" in Greene's work because he maintained Greene based all on para-
doxes and anomalies, there is still much evidence that it is by means of
empirical evidence that Greene derived his conviction of supernature,
that he had in his various types of journeys back into time divined in the
macrocosm the "somewhat confused indication" of a struggle between
good and evil, and an even more confused indication of a possible recon-
ciliation between these forces.

It was, then, in his efforts to populate, or believe in heaven, that
Greene brought into being his own microcosmic world made up of his
saints, his anti-saints, and his failures.

Among his failures Greene counted the innocent, the maimed and
the warped, the complacent, and the Opportunistic. Among these it is
only the innocent who have made any efforts to come to terms with life.
But such efforts as they exert are half-hearted, for these persons lack
conviction, knowing that they will never know success, happiness, or
encounter much goodness in life. Whenever an innocent should make a
concerted effort, it is usually misguided and, as such, constitutes a
lethal danger to himself, or to Others. Among such innocents are the
Coral Fellows, the Coral Muskers, the Elses, the Millie Drovers, the

Dr. Czinners, the Rose Wilsons, the Anthony Farrants and the Alden

 

23"The Politics of Graham Greene," The New York Times Book
Review, September 10, 1967, 2.

 

,\

‘l

130
Pyles of the Greene world. In many instances their loyalties will be
foils to the betrayals practiced in Greeneland.

Anthony Farrant, one of the protagonists of England Made 149,

 

may appear at first glance out of place among Greene's innocents, yet
Kate, his twin sister, indicates that he is correctly situated when she
exclainis "Tony, you're too innocent to live! "1(247). Limping along with
the outworn code of an Older England,24 Anthony is admirable in his loy-
alty to his code and in his bravado in meeting defeat. Refusing either to
kill for a living or to accept money from his sister's lover, Anthony ear-
ries the "wrong map" in Kate's wOrld. And despite his dodges, his lies,
and his fourflushing (his unmerited Harrovian tie is one instance),
which have barred him from clubs from Shanghai to Aden, he is barred,
in turn, from a larger association of those who honor a deeper dishonor.
Greene's most obvious failures carry in their physical bearing
the outer indications of their psychical failure. 7 Anthony's smile and his
lies are physical betrayals of his incompetence in coping with the sterile
and chromium world. "Behind the bright bonhomie of his glance, behind
the firm handclasp and the easy joke, lay a deep nihilism"(62). His
nihilism is born of his own self-knowledge which he admits to his sister,
stating "I haven't a future, Kate" (31).

Yet most of Greene's failures are more obviously maimed than

 

24England Made Me is translated into French as Mere Angleterre.
Both titles indicate that Anthony is an inadapté in the modern world
because he follows an outmoded code of honor. The American title, 'I_‘l_1_e
Shipwrecked, is similarly apt, for whereas Kate and Hall and Minty and
Eric Krogh are spiritually derelict, Anthony is completely "at sea" in the
world his sister has adapted to. His death appropriately enough comes
through drowning!

 

 

L

131
Anthony. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris are referring to these gro-
tesques or near-grotesques when they write that such characters derive
from the "same back places of the imaginations as Dickens! Quilp or
Krook" and added, significantly, that Greene "is more aware of their
origin and the serious use to be made of them."25 For Wilson, Henry
Wilcox, Acky, Harris, Condor, Drewitt, Jones, the detective killed in

The Ministry of Fear, Jones, the soldier of fortune in The Comedians,

 

 

 

Rennit of the Orthotex Detective Agency, Surrogate, Parkis, Parkison,
and Minty provide through their failures the Opportunities for the saints.
This is true because while the saints and the anti-saints occupy them-
selves with the larger issues, these grotesques content themselves with
"very small arrangements -— the settling of scores." Devoid of will and
of hOpe, "in the absence of wider human relationships," they constitute
the "sad agents of disaster."26

Notable among these "undeveIOped hearts" is Minty, one of the

protagonists of England Made lv_i_e, who like Harris, a minor character of

 

The Heart o_f t_hE Matter, grasps at straws of conviviality— Harris at his

 

name appearing in a list in a school yearbook, Minty at a letter "from
the family" which is actually a request for the payment of an old debt!
Petty and apathetic in the larger issues, each resembles Minty,

who in turn resembles his tortured spider. Minty has kept the spider

 

25111313511 9! @3111 Greene (New York, 1963), 22. Subsequent
quotations taken from this work will be from the same edition.

26David Pryce-Jones, Graham Greene (London, 1963), 11. Sub-
sequent quotations taken from this work will be from the same edition.

i
Q
a
l
g
1
Y.

1

’11

131
Anthony. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris are referring to these gro-
tesques or near-grotesques when they write that such characters derive
from the "same back places of the imaginations as Dickens! Quilp or
Krook" and added, significantly, that Greene "is more aware of their
origin and the serious use to be made of them."25 For Wilson, Henry
Wilcox, Acky, Harris, Condor, Drewitt, Jones, the detective killed in

The Ministgr o_f Fear, Jones, the soldier of fortune in The Comedians,

 

 

 

Rennit of the Orthotex Detective Agency, Surrogate, Parkis, Parkison,
and Minty provide through their failures the Opportunities for the saints.
This is true because while the saints and the anti-saints occupy them-
selves with the larger issues, these grotesques content themselves with
"very small arrangements -- the settling of scores." Devoid of will and
of hOpe, "in the absence of wider human relationships," they constitute
the "sad agents of disaster."26

Notable among these "undeveIOped hearts" is Minty, one of the

protagonists of England Made Mg, who like Harris, a minor character of

 

The Heart o_f t_h_e Matter, grasps at straws of conviviality— Harris at his

 

name appearing in a list in a school yearbook, Minty at a letter "from
the family" which is actually a request for the payment of an old debt!
Petty and apathetic in the larger issues, each resembles Minty,

who in turn resembles his tortured spider. Minty has kept the spider

 

25_1_1_e£._r_t_ 9_f Graham Greene (New York, 1963), 22. Subsequent
quotations taken from this work will be from the same edition.

26David Pryce-Jones, Graham Greene (London, 1963), 11. Sub-
sequent quotations taken from this work will be from the same edition.

132
imprisoned for days under his tooth-glass and he "like the Spider. . .
withered, his body stretched doggo in the attitude of death, he lay there
humbly tempting God to lift the glass" (147). But Minty, Greene would
maintain, dimly as he perceives this, is one who has taken God into
account, forming thus a feeble, but nonetheless adequate safeguard
against the threat that man may himself prevail, a danger of consider-
able concern to Greene.

It is for this reason that both the complacent and the Opportunistic
appear worse in the Greene canon. For both insist that they are hold-
ing the world by the tail. It is only by Greene's will, for he is, in a
sense, their Creator, that they are refused their final autonomy.

Of the compacent there are both the religiously and the secularly

oriented. Among the religiously self-satisfied there is Louise Scobie

 

in The Heart (if th__e Matter, Helen Browne in the play entitled The Liv-
i_ng Room, and the smug and bourgeois woman, chided by the anony-

mous priest in The Power 8E th___e Glory. Each of these women utilizes

 

religious dogma to fulfill her own purposes, while Ida Arnold in

Brighton Rock manipulates others from her own eye-for-an-eye, tooth-

 

for-a-tooth view of secular Right and Wrong.

Lenient where self is concerned, Ida maintains that "God doe sn't
frown on a bit of human nature," but where others are involved, she
plays GOd. For in her determination to "get justice" she insists that
she knows "what is what" whenever it comes to a question of Right and

Wrong. 27 With this motivation, and armored by her stupid and awful

 

2"(Ida is concerned with Puritan Good or Bad, Right or Wrong

133

confidence in her chromium world, she pursues Fred Hale’s murderer.
As she questions one who shares her world of bars and "fun" it
becomes evident that Ida, at least, does not share the near universal

estrangement of the Greene world.

"It seemed odd his dying like that. Must have made
a bit of gossip." ‘

"None I heard of," the barman said, "He wasn’t a
Brighton man. . . . He was a stranger."

A stranger; the word meant nothing to her; there was
no place in the world where she felt a stranger. . . . "It‘s
a good life." There was nothing with which she didn't
claim kinship. (102)

Of the Opportunistic, Harry Lime and Cholmondeley, Sir Mar-
cus’s second in command, are outstanding. Cholmondeley holds the
strings that control not only Raven's destiny, but possibly that of the
entire world. Although Raven, the hired gunman, is far from innocent,
he, as David Pryce-Jones reminded his readers, was relatively so, for

compared to the gross self-interest of the armaments
manufacturers, manipulating even man and emotion in
order to maximize profits, Raven has the excuse that he
is not cold-blooded. He murders because he must live:
they murder because they have calculated the net finan-
cial gain. 28

Harry Lime, emulating the philOSOphy of totalitarian govern-
ments, insists he is merely "in fashion" for he explains again:

In these days. . . nobody thinks in terms of human

beings. Governments don’t so why should we? They
talk of the peOple and the proletariat, and I talk of the

 

27(cont.)rather than moral Good and Evil. Jacques Madaule pointed
out that Greene's Catholic novels show his consciousness that he is
living in a country oriented towards Calvinism.

28Pryce-Jone S, 63.

v

(x

134

mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year
plans and so have I. 29

In terms of pure human malice Cholmondeley and Lime can well

join hands with Pinkie Brown, the boy gang-leader of Brighton Rock.

 

Yet in this reSpect Barbara Seward revealed an idiosyncracy of Greene's
mental processes, for she points out that Greene's tolerance is on the
side of the sinners rather than the sanctimonious: "If," she writes,
"Greene makes up in charity for the sinful what he loses in uncharityfor
the complacent, it is because the former experience what is to him the

truth about our world, while the latter exist in an unreal, blind, smug,

 

 

alien condition."30 The complacent live as does Ida Arnold, "cette

 

grosse femme qui vit a la surface des choses comme une mouche a
viande."31
After remarking Greene's prejudice for the sinner, Barbara

Seward did add, however: "But he does not go as far as to exonerate
Pinkie; more is needed for salvation than a knowledge of life's hor-
rors." Pinkie's knowledge of these horrors is rather exhaustive as is
apparent in his rebuttal to Rose‘s Ida-like assertion: "Life's not so bad."

"Don't you believe it," he said. "I'll tell you what it is.

It's jail, it's not knowing where to get some money.

Worms, cataract, cancer. You hear 'em shrieking
from the upper windows — children being born. It's

 

29The Third Man, 139.

 

30”Graham Greene: A Hint of an Explanation," The We stern
Review, XXII (Winter, 1958), 89.

 

31Jacques Madaule Graham Greene (Paris, 1949), 148.

 

135
dying slowly."32
Ida's terrible light-heartedness "is deplored by the cognizant
Pinkie and Rose, for they "know." Their Catholicism has provided for
that, and whether for better or worse each was providing for his partic-

ular eternity. Pinkie Opted for a certainty, for where "Heaven was a
word; Hell was something he could trust. A brain was capable only of
what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never expe-
rienced" (331).

It is not only the sense of backing the surest horse, however, that

causes Pinkie to choose damnation; it was also his Lucifer-like pride

which forced him to defy God with his credo e_r_1 unum Satanum. This is

 

 

the same pride that, on the temporal plane, forced him to avenge all
real and imagined slights to his person and to attempt ingress into the
chromium world of Colleoni, the rival gang-leader.

Because the world of the anti-saint is the mirror image of the
world seen by the saints, these worlds have features in common: they
are well-mapped and known tracks for both the saint and anti-saint.
The anti-saints, like the saints, have "known the story when they came
in" and for that reason cannot "take the agonies seriously."33

With the advent of Kite, Pinkie, the boy gang-leader of Bri hton

Rock, has found a father inlage which serves his own purpose better

than Anthony's public school code serves him. For Kite, the gangster,

 

32Brighton Rock, 329.

 

33The Confidential Agent, 89.

 

 

 

 

H

(t

136
became Pinkie's deputy-father, rescuing him from the world of sexu-
ality which he hated. Kite also provided another simplification —
Pinkie's pattern for existence. While Kite lived "everything had been
of a piece" and when Kite died34 Pinkie saw to it that "nothing had
really changed; Kite had died, but he had prolonged Kite’s existence --
not touching liquor, biting his nails in the Kite way" (318). When, out
of expedience, Pinkie marries Rose, he dreads the modification in his
pattern for living. He thinks with nostalgia of his room where "he knew
exactly where to put his hand for money on the soap dish; everything
was familiar; nothing strange there, it shared his bitter virginity"(249).

Pinkie, while making revenge his raison d'etre, finds yet another

 

simplification, for such a pattern of commitment hardly calls for the
full emotional gamut. By excluding love — the closest he comes to pas-
sion is cruelty -- or joy or sorrow, Pinkie economizes on emotions,
retaining only the jungle emotions of fear and hate and envy.

His ultimate simplification is his rejection of hOpe; in choosing
damnation he merely follows the pattern of evil that lay around him, for
to Pinkie, as to another Greene protagonist, "the whole world lay in the

shadow of abandonment. Perhaps it was still propped up by ten just

 

34Proof that the Greene world is a small world indeed is the fact
that the gangster Kite spans two of Greene’s books, the entertainment
A (lull. f2}: Sale and the novel Bgighton Rock. Raven recounts in the
entertainment: "I was doing the races then. Kite had a rival gang.
There wasn't anything else to do. He tried to bump my boss off the
course. . . I cut his throat and the others held him till we were all
through the barrier in a bunch" (176). Fred Hale’s murder at the
beginning of Brighton Rock is an act of revenge for Kite's death.

 

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136
became Pinkie's deputy-father, rescuing him from the world of sexu-
ality which he hated. Kite also provided another simplification —-
Pinkie's pattern for existence. While Kite lived "everything had been
of a piece" and when Kite died34 Pinkie saw to it that "nothing had
really changed; Kite had died, but he had prolonged Kite’s existence --
not touching liquor, biting his nails in the Kite way" (318). When, out
of expedience, Pinkie marries Rose, he dreads the modification in his
pattern for living. He thinks with nostalgia of his room where "he knew
exactly where to put his hand for money on the soap dish; everything
was familiar; nothing strange there, it shared his bitter virginity"(249).

Pinkie, while making revenge his raison d'étre, finds yet another

 

simplification, for such a pattern of commitment hardly calls for the
full emotional gamut. By excluding love —- the closest he comes to pas-
sion is cruelty - or joy or sorrow, Pinkie economizes on emotions,
retaining only the jungle emotions of fear andhate and envy.

His ultimate simplification is his rejection of hOpe; in choosing
damnation he merely follows the pattern of evil that lay around him, for
to Pinkie, as to another Greene protagonist, "the whole world lay in the

shadow of abandomnent. Perhaps it was still prOpped up by ten just

 

34Proof that the Greene world is a small world indeed is the fact
that the gangster Kite spans two of Greene's books, the entertainment
A G_1_1_n {93 Sale and the novel Brighton Rock. Raven recounts in the
entertainment: "1 was doing the races then. Kite had a rival gang.
There wasn't anything else to do. He tried to bump my boss off the
course. . . I cut his throat and the others held him till we were all
through the barrier in a bunch" (176). Fred Hale's murder at the
beginning of Brighton Rock is an act of revenge for Kite’s death.

 

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137
men— that was a pity: better scrap it and begin again with newts."35
In watching some children play in the ruins of his native slum, Pinkie
noticed "a wind blew from the sea across the site of his home. A dim
desire for annihilation stretched in him, the vast superiority of
36

vacancy. "

Both "nihilism" and "annihilation" derive from the Latin nihil

 

(nothing), and yet paradoxically Greene saw both the saint and the anti-
saint as the mo st deeply committed in his microcosm: the saint opting
for an eternity of bliss, the anti-saint for one of perdition. The uncom-
mitted, the "dull shabby human mediocrity," those "comic peOple,

futile peOple, little suburban natures and the maimed and the warped"37
who are Greene's failures, become the supernumeraries who provide

the Opportunities for the saints and the anti-saints in their dramas of

eternal damnation or salvation.

Greene's journeys were not without promise for in Africa he
found "indications" of a lost innocence and in Mexico of a lost godliness,
and in Saigon of an ignorance which became the first step to a deeper
knowledge.

In Africa, Greene learned that he had discovered the region that

"will always be the Africa of the Victorian atlas, the black unexplored

 

35The Confidential Agent, 87.

 

36Brighton Rock, 203.

 

3"The Ministry <_>_f Fear, 30-31.

 

 

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138

38

continent the shape of the human heart"; in Saigon, through his pro-

tagonist Fowler, Greene learned that when man must himself prevail,

he does in fact rely on a deeper commitment, to his moral sense which
is his God. For Fowler declares in the end "Everything had gone right
with me since he [Pyle] had died, but how I wished there existed some-
one to whom I could say that I was sorry."39 And on the "lawless" roads
of Mexico Greene learned that

the luck of the road was not so bad. . . . the rats were
there, of course, for the old man's but was a storehouse
for corn, but contained what you seldom find in Mexico,

the feel of human goodness. . . . The old man gave up his
bed to me, a dais of earth. . . . I lay on the hard earth bed
almost happy. The fanged me stizo slipped away— reading
out the President's message --- all the blarney and the evil
will of Mexican townsman, the decaying church, the vul-
tures, the rubble in Villahermosa. . .; all that was left was
an old man on the edge of starvation living in a but with the
rats, welcoming the strangers without a word of payment,
gossiping gently in the dark. I felt myself back with the
pOpulation of heaven. 40

 

3813 Search 9f 3 Character: Two African Journals (London, 1961),

 

 

123.

39The Quiet Americag (New York, 1957), 183. Subsequent quota-
tions from this work will be taken from the same edition.

40The Lawless Roads, 208-209.

 

PART III

SOME GR EENELANDERS

It is difficult to trace a hierarchy or scheme of achievement in
the Greene world. But if such a scheme were drawn up in the form of
an imagined pyramid, there would be little doubt that the saints would
occupy the apex and that their lofty isolation would be supported by the
enormous weight of the failures. With the failed themselves, however,
it is more difficult to assign gradations. For at this point the situation
dissolves into paradox: for there is in Greene's writing the adulteress
who will become a saint, the sinner who already is one, the benefactor
who in reality is the malefactor. In the Greene world there are also
the permanent innocents, those who, because they are guilty, guilty of
never having entered the fray, are, for this reason, no better than the
insidious and the Opportunistic; while the complacent because they, too,
never come to grips with the "heart of the matter" are more despised
and rejected than the truly maimed and warped. Greene always prefers
a knowing lack of confidence to an unknowing overconfidence. And then,
there is the anti-saint, who instead of forming the very base of the pyr-
amid, as Inight be expected, cuts in Greene's view a rather creditable

d41

figure against the gray and apathetic non-committe who refuse to Opt

 

41Deploring apathy in regard to metaphysical concerns, Greene
reCOgnized a type of heroism in any wholehearted commitment. In his
essay "Frederick Rolfe: Edwardian Inferno," he wrote: "Satan as well
as sanctity demands an apron stage" (The Lost Childhood, 93). Greene,
of course, is contending that the greatest saints have been men with a
more than normal capacity for evil, and that inversely, evil men have
sometimes barely escaped sanctity.

139

 

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140
for either good or evil.

However, whether the efforts of one of Greene's characters car-
ries him as far as sainthood or not, anyone of his protagonists who
enjoys any measure of autonomy passes through certain set stages.
These stages correspond to the drama of the Fortunate Fall. That is,
the protagonists pass from a state of innocence or ignorance, through
the Fall or awakening, to the state of knowledge. Such a trajectory is
certainly true of Major Scobie, the assistant police commissioner of

The Heart O_f th__e Matter, of the renegade priest in The Power a_nll th_e

 

 

Glory, and of Sarah Miles, the adulteress who burgeons into possible

Rowe, of the more secular works, The Confidential Agent and 'I_‘h_e Min-

 

 

The fall from innocence to knowledge leads to frustrations and
complications. With knowledge come the qualitieSwhich are needed in
order that the protagonist reaches a higher moral plane: responsibility,
love, and the realization of the impossibility of the blameless act, all
leading, ultimately, to a sense of guilt. Once committed to any or all
of these involvements, the deeper the involvement the greater will be
the anguish and the longing for peace in death on the part of the protagon-
ist. Speaking for those who have awakened, Barbara Seward wrote:
"Conscious of guilt wherever they turn and faced with inescapable
choices between corruption and corruption the truly good men in Graham

Greene's world are men sufficiently close to God to be appalled by their

.8

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141
distance from Him."42 These are the protagonists who long for both
peace and purity, and unable to find either in life, succumb to a death
wish.

Not only do Greene's protagonists trace in their decisions the con-
sequences of those decisions, the pattern of the Fortunate Fall, but
Greene's plots whenever they concern his autonomous characters are
movements both from life to death and from death to life. The trajec-
tory from life to death is presented in some instances as eminently
desirable because, of course, in Greene’s thinking, across the thresh-
old of life lies eternal life. While the trajectory which is directed
toward eternity moves from life to death, the trajectory which is tem-
porally oriented moves from death to life because it represents on the
protagonist's part a rebirth, the awakening from ignorance to knowledge
in one of the truest senses, to self-knowledge.

Of innocence itself, the first stage of existence, the most impor-
tant thing that can be said is that it is in no way synonymous with good-
ness. It is simply that first stage of conscious or unconscious rapport
between the existent and his existence where either the presence of evil
is completely unknown, or 'if known, deliberately overlooked, or regarded
as merely "incidental." For, in the latter case, if evil constitutes a
threat, 'it is a threat not to the individual or individuals in question, but
to others.

To that innocent being who still remains unaware of the possibility

 

42Seward, 93.

“. .rwlr 11..

I\

5

142
of evil, the world has remained essentially purposeful and well-designed;
it is not only the "best of all possible worlds," but it appears complete
and all-Of-a-piece. On the other hand, to those who have lost their inno-
cence this conviction of an ordered and purposeful world is now rele-
gated to the realm of dreams, those induced by sleep or by drugs or by
anaesthesia. Coral Musker a protagonist of Greene’s entertainment

Stamboul Train envisions such a synthesis:

 

She dreamed first that she was a child and everything was
very simple and very certain and everything had an explan-
ation and a moral. And then she dreamed that she was
very old and was looking back on her life and she knew
everything and she knew what was right and what was wrong
and why this and that had happened and everything was very
simple and had a moral. (195)

The second, and certainly more egotistical type of innocence,
wherein the child or the irmnature adult enjoys a sense of security
despite his knowledge that others are threatened, is in keeping with that
nearly universal state of mind in the half-century preceding World War
I, that world which continued to enjoy the state of innocence of the child
or the childlike adult immured in the righteousness of his cause. For
this reason Greene criticized the values of this late Victorian world
through its reading material which lauded this type of insulated ignor-
ance through

"the stories of Captain Scott writing his last letters
home, Oates walking into the blizzard. . . Damien among
the lepers." The Little Duke by Charlotte Yonge, and the
African adventure yarns. His heroes were brave, pure,
and truthful, and life was simple and grand. "None of the

books of adventure one read as a boy had an unhappy end-
ing and none of them was disturbed by a sense of pity for

 

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143
the beaten side."43

In either the innocence of the egoist or of the egotist, immediate
comert is derived from a type of "nursery peace," undisturbed by the
suffering of others, or by the necessity of descents into the basement
room where strange revelations are made and where the first glimpse
is caught of the witch who had heretOfore appeared to the protagonist
only in dreams.

Although innocence is not a positive factor in the Greene world,
Greene nevertheless acknowledges that its loss is somehow regrettable.
For one reason, whether it is seen in the child, the childlike adult, or
in the recaptured innocence of a work of art, innocence does serve as a
witness to "the pity of it all," of how far man has strayed from his
prelapsarian state. Greene saw such a loss embodied in an infant girl
in Vera Cruz whose tiny ears already bore earrings and who was, he
felt, with a "gold bangle around the bony wrist," already "handcuffed
to SOPhistication at birth."44 From this and other indications, it seems
certain that to be alive in the Greene world is to be doomed. Perhaps
in order to find innocence, Greene suggested, it is necessary to go
back further for innocence may be only a "slobbering mouth, a tooth-

less gum pulling at the teats, perhaps not even that," for it might only

be found in the "ugly cry of birth."45

 

435Francis L. Kunkel, 'I_‘he Labyrinthine Ways o_f Graham Greene
(New York, 1960), 91. Subsequent quotations from this work will be taken
from this edition.

44The Lawless Roads, 119.

 

45Iwenty-One Stories (New York, 1966), 13, 8, 9. Subsequent quo-
tations taken from this collection will be from the same edition.

 

144

Rather than representing a composite of positive virtues, inno-
cence at its best is no more than a neutral element in the Greene world.
For whenever innocence does survive childhood or adolescence it serves
only as a gauge to measure good and evil in those around them. On this
aspect of innocence as a neutral factor, Barbara Seward wrote: "Those
capable of good do respond to innocence with a mingled sense of pity and
protective, if often tragically misdirected, duty towards an evanescent,
rare, and vulnerable condition, " while "those incapable of good respond
with anything from callous exploitation to unmitigated sadism." They
do serve, however, she adds, "an important, but nonetheless secondary
role, the role of agent in exposing the forces of good and evil which are
the primary subject of Graham Greene's novels" (86).

When no longer neutral, innocence becomes lethal. If the inno-
cent resembles Philip in Greene's short story "The Basement Room,"
it is enough that the witch remains safely outside the nursery door.
"Why," Philip asks, "did you wake me up so early?" And his re Sponse
to his early trauma will be suppression. Feeling "less sheltered than
he had ever been," because "other peOple's lives for the first time
touched and pressed and moulded," he decides in regard to Mrs. Baines,
the nursery witch, "to suppress the thought of her, ram it down deep."46

For the involved protagonist, on the other hand, the fact that the
witch exists at all is a call to action. The danger, however, emerges

when that invOlved person remains innocent. Then the situation becomes

 

46Twenty-One Stories (New York, 1966), 13, 8, 9. Subsequent quo-
tations taken from this collection will be from the same edition.

 

145
increasingly serious for uninformed action is dangerous: mere good
intentions are not a valid excuse, nor are they the guarantee of good
results. Because he constitutes a menace, the innocent do-gooder
resembles i-n Greene's words the "dumb leper who has lost his bell,"
who without this warning to others and this reminder to himself, wan-
ders "the world meaning no harm." The involved innocent, then, no
longer a neutral, constitutes a negative element in the Greene world.

In such a way Alden Pyle, one of the protagonists of The Quiet Ameri-

 

 

c_a_r_l_, becomes an active, and hence, destructive force. He also bears
out Greene's idea that "too much treachery is always nourished in the
little over-worked centres of somebody else's idealism."47 More ideal-
istic than intelligent, more romantic than realistic, Pyle, with a tour-
ist's eye-view of Vietnam, follows his impulse to rescue Phuong from
Fowler, by upgrading her from native mistress to Beacon Hill wife (158),
and, more seriously still, to interfere in the political and military life
of the country. 48 For Pyle is another Greene character who is journey-

ing with the "wrong map." Fowler tries to convince Pyle that General

 

47The Confidential Agent, 100.

 

 

48Fowler, less hypocritical than Pyle, states that as far as
Phuong is concerned he refuses to be governed by good intentions:
"Suddenly," he narrates, "I couldn't bear his boyishness any more. I
said, ’I don't care that for her interests. You can have her interests.
I only want her body. I want her in bed with me. I'll rather ruin her
and sleep with her than, than -- look after her damned interests! " (52).
Less emotional at other times, Fowler knows that Phuong at any rate
has a designing sister who does nothing but look after her interests.
Significantly "Phuong" means "Phoenix" and Fowler predicts that when
he and Pyle no longer exist, Phuong will be ensconced between her
native husband and child, her interests having then been settled once
and for all.

146

Thé, a warlord with a few thousand bandits, is not the answer to Pyle's
dream of a Third Force, untainted by communism or colonialism.
Relentlessly, stubbornly, Pyle mounts his little white charger,
"armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance" (158), undeterred
by Fowler's greater experience. Fowler, the European and d_égjgé
journalist, exhorts Pyle:49

I hOpe to God you know what you are doing. . . I know

your motives are good; they always are. . . I wish some-

times you had a few bad motives; you might understand a

little more about human beings. And that applies to your

country too, Pyle. (126)

Pyle's failure to foresee the unfortunate results of his course
points up that where innocence is ignorance it is, as much as anything,
ignorance of consequences. For in choosing to be a factor, yet without
knowing the facts, Pyle mistakenly hits a crowded civilian market
rather than a military Objective. Yet when Fowler looks for signs of
contrition in this erring enthusiast (whose blundering mission is to
save-the-world-from-communism), Pyle replies that these civilians
had merely been "war casualties" who had, after all, "died in the right
cause." It is here that Fowler points out the egotistical aspect of inno-
cence at work in Pyle. For Pyle, like others of his type, remains undis-
turbed as long as his physical comfort enables him to carry his "nursery

peace" into adulthood. To Pyle's facile reasoning, Fowler counters

"Would you have said the same, if it had been your old nurse with her

 

49 The so often pointed-out dichotomy in Jame 3‘ work -— that
between the innocent American and the corrupt and SOphisticated Euro-
pean— is given another twist in The Quiet American, for it is Fowler
who is ultimmely involved and Pyle who is ultimately corrupt.

147
blueberry pie ?" (173)

Innocence is doubly negative. It is not only ignorant of conse-
quences, it is also ignorant of suffering. They who do emerge from
behind the nursery door and who, finding themselves in the middle of
life with its injustice, its responsibilities, and its pain, may like Philip
in "The Basement Room" be anxious to forget. "Having received
already a larger dose of life than he had bargained for. . . he was

<1."50 Philip emerged and retreated; Pyle refused to emerge. In

scare
both cases the heart has become atrOphied. For as Leon Bloy wrote,
"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them

enters suffering, in order that they may have existence." This passage

used by Greene as the epigraph to his novel The End of the Affair illus-

 

trates the necessity of crossing the threshold from innocence to knowl-
edge. Pyle, Fowler points out, was, on the other hand, "as incapable
of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiv-
ing the pain he might cause others"(54). If sensibility is a passage to
another stage of moral being, Pyle remains on very much the same
plane as Pinkie and James Raven and Harry Lime. The reader learns
that Raven, the gunman in _A Gun for §_a_l_e_,

would never realize other peOple; they didn't seem to
live in the same way as he lived; and though he bore a
grudge against Cholmondeley, hated him enough to kill
him, he couldn't imagine Mr. Cholmondeley's own fears
and motives. (39)

Pinkie is also described as one who cannot see through other

 

50Twenty-One Stories, 12.

 

 

\

148
people's eyes or feel with their nerves. It was only music, which
Pinkie dreaded, that caused certain rudimentary emotions to start to
awaken. Fowler relates Pyle to the emotionally atrOphied, when he
claims that whenever Pyle sees a dead body he cannot even see the
wounds for it represents to him only a "Red menace, or a soldier of
democracy." Completely insulated against another’s pain each sacri-
fices others to his own ends: Pyle to a benighted idealism; Pinkie to a
lucid Satanism.

Anthony Farrant has already demonstrated the danger of inno-
cence living in a rapacious world. For innocence in the end becomes
self-destructive. Hence it is not merely negative in the sense that it is
dangerous to those who find themselves in its path —being ignorance
both of consequences and of another’s pain — but, it becomes in the end
a double-edged weapon, turning finally against the innocent person him-
self. In this way Pyle’s innocence becomes an agent for his own undo-
ing. Fowler assures the French Sflreté:

he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant

and silly and got involved. He had no more of a notion

than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you

gave him money and York Harding's book on the East

and said, "Go ahead. Win the East for democracy! "

He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture hall,

and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. (24)
Although Fowler has come East to die, he will survive Pyle. For

Fowler in the end must provide for Pyle‘s demise rather than his! own.

Having built himself a cocon douillet with Opium and Phuong's passion-

 

less presence, Fowler insists that he is dégage’. In so insisting, he

denies his true’motivating principle which has been, rather than

149
indifference to another's pain, what might be termed a superfluity of
sensibility.

His reaction to Pyle's market-day massacre is typical rather
than exceptional for he is no mere witness of events, as he tries to
declare
"I’m not involved. Not involved," I repeated. It had
been an article of my creed. The human condition
being what it was, let them love, let them murder, I
would not be involved. My fellow journalists called
themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of
reporter. I wrote what I saw; I took no action -- even
Opinion is a kind of action. (27)
Yet after Pyle's massacre, which Fowler happens to witness, Fowler
is compelled to petition his assistant to report the catastrophe, stating
that he is too shocked to think of the event in "terms of a cable."
Although Fowler shows more than a usual degree of self-aware-
ness, he continues to deny his involvement with humanity. " 'I know my-
self,‘ " he expounds to Pyle, " ‘and I know the depth of my selfishness.
I cannot be at ease (and to be at ease is my chief wish) if someone else
is in pain, visibly or audibly or tactually.‘ " Continuing to bruit his
emotional bankruptcy, he adds: "sometimes this is mistaken by the inno-
cent for unselfishness, when all I am doing is sacrificing a small good. . .
for the sake of a far greater good, a peace of mind, when I need think
only of myself" (107).
His very inability to suffer another's pain, however, causes Fow-
ler, in contrast to Pyle, to accept responsibility. This is particularly

apparent in an episode in which Pyle and Fowler have taken shelter for

the night in a watch tower manned by two Vietnamese soldiers. One is

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150

wounded in a cross fire:
I thought, poor devil, if we hadn't broken down outside
h_i_s post, he could have surrendered as they nearly all
surrendered, or fled at the fir st call from the megaphone.
But we were here -- two white men -— and we had the sten
and they didn't dare to move. When we left, it was too
late. I was responsible for that voice crying in the dark.
I had prided myself on detachment, on not belonging to
this war, but those wounds had been inflicted by me just
as though I had used the sten, as Pyle had wanted to. (106)

With his refusal to shield himself from pain, Fowler further
recounts: "I made an effort to get over the bank into the road. I wanted
to join him. It was the only thing I could do, to share his pain. . . ."
(106) Unable to crawl to the soldier's side because of his own injured
leg, Fowler, finally, felt vast relief when he was told the boy was
‘ dead. "I was happy. . . . I didn't even have to suffer much pain after
the hypodermic of morphia had bitten my leg" (107).

Later events proved both Fowler and Pyle wrong when Pyle
asserts, "'You kept it up all right; even after your leg was smashed
you stayed neutral.’ " Fowler reveals his wisdom in his answer:

" 'There's always a point of change. . . . some moment of emotion' "
(173). Fowler, of course, has never been deaf to the call of pain, and
in his forthcoming active involvement he proves that he also knows that
" 'one has to take sides - if one is to remain hurnan' " (168).

It is Pyle's market-day massacre that becomes the cue for Fow-
ler's commitment for he realizes the intractability of innocence, that
"all you can do is control or eliminate the innocent," fOr you can't

51

blame the innocent, they are guiltless." Having tried to control Pyle,

 

51A Burnt-Out Case (New York, 1962), 182,

 

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151
and having failed, Fowler is forced to eliminate him. As a last expe-
dient, he arranges that Pyle be found dead in a canal.

Just as Fowler acknowledges the guiltlessness of the innocent, so

Querry, the protagonist of _é Burnt-Out Case, is similarly aware.

 

Querry remarks of Mme. Rycker: "Oh innocent. . . I daresay you are
right. God preserve us from all innocence. At least the guilty know
what they are about" (89-90). Querry's awareness that innocence must
be sacrificed so that guilt may come into being shows up innocence as
a negative factor, not only on the plane of empirical experience, but
according to Greene's canon, on the metaphysical plane as well.
Working from the assumption that innocence in respect to human

experience is at best a neutral factor, at worst a negative factor,
Greene further damned innocence as negative in the man-universe rela-
tionship. It is reprehensible in this sphere as well, for it is evil, and
not innocence, which becomes the agent for good in a fallen and corrupt
world. While innocence must cede to evil that good can emerge, guilt
forms the transitional link. Guilt which has risen from the knowledge
of evil induces an additional knowledge: the knowledge that one is rarely
without blame and that the blameless act is an almost complete impossi-
bility. With these ideas in mind, Barbara Seward wrote:

A sense of guilt is then the prerequisite to the attainment

of true virtue. Just as the innocent and happy fall short

because they lack real awareness of evil and the wholly

sinful fall short because they are blinded by pride to

their own blame for evil, those characters in Greene

who attain some measure of stature attain it because

they accept their share in the universal taint. . . .

She then elaborates:

152

Greene once suggested that "all we can really demand
is the divided mind, the uneasy conscience, the sense
of personal failure (speech to the "Grand Conference
Catholique" at Brussels, 1947) and in his novels he has
given to each of his sympathetic protagonists a sharply
divided mind, a more than uneasy conscience. (89-90)

An illustration of how guilt becomes the prerequisite to good can

be found in the renegade priest in The Power ail-(l £13 Glory. He demon-

 

 

strates in his flight from the Mexican government which has outlawed
religion, just how one can, through one's personal suffering, come to
an understanding of another's pain; of how one can through one's own
sinning become tolerant of the sins of others. In this way the priest
differs radically from Pinkie. For as Barbara Seward pointed out
above, it is those who are blinded by pride who can never feel another's
pain nor feel more than contempt for his shortcomings. The sinning
priest reflects on the changes he recognizes in himself when he remem-
bers how‘he had formerly lived, immured in his comfortable parish:
"What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days," he
ponders, "and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent."
He realizes the difference himself, however, for he knows that "then
in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone, now in his corruption
he had learnt."52 It is, then, through the loss of innocence, that the
possibility develOps -- that of moving toward a higher moral plane, for
without the loss of innocence, the so-called heroic virtues, those of

the saints -— their patience, their moral and physical fortitude, and

 

52111.2 Power and 1113 Glory (New York, 1958), 187. Subsequent
quotations from this work will be taken from this edition.

153

their love — could never come into being. 53

 

53Along with the burgeoning of guilt and of love from the branch
of withered innocence, come two other concepts closely related to the
loss of innocence --vicarious suffering and vicarious sin. One exam-
ple of the former concept comes from Greene's novel Ih_e Heart of 1_:_1_1_e
Matter, where the Portuguese captain remains convinced that his
daughter's goodness will counteract his own sins. In the case of the
renegade priest in The Power and ’_c_l_1_e Glory who prays for his own dam—
nation in exchange for his natural daughter's salvation, there is some-
one else who will in turn intercede for the sinning priest: for Coral
Fellows, who has vowed to protect him, has become his daughter in the
Spirit who will intercede for him in heaven. Pinkie likewise depends
on the principle of vicarious suffering. Believing that Rose will be a
willing sacrifice to his transgressions, Pinkie analyzes the situation:
"She was good. . . and he was damned; they were made for each other"
(Brighton Rock, 180). It is after Pinkie's suicide that Rose's real mis-
sion begins. It begins with her query: "And if there's a baby?" The
priest whom she addresses replies: "With your simplicity and your
force. . . . Make him a saint to pray for his father" (Brighton 39315,
317).

The principle of vicarious sin which is explored as a minor note
in Greene's writing is an extension of the conception of vicarious suffer-
ing. Such nefarious beings as Pinkie, Raven, and Harry Lime appear
to sin that others may be saved. Greene comes close to Dostoevsky
here, with Dostoevsky's thesis that the sinner or the murderer is
really the benefactor because he exonerates others from guilt. When,
for instance, the elder Dostoevsky is killed by his serfs, the son who
had desired his father's death is relieved of the necessity for murder.
In Freud's study, "Dostoevsky and Parricide," Freud claims that such
vicarious innocence produced a positive sense of gratitude in Dostoevsky,
that: "Dostoevsky‘s sympathy for the criminal is, in fact boundless, it
goes far beyond the pity which the unhappy wretch has a right to. . . .

A criminal is to him almost a Redeemer, who has taken on himself the
guilt which must else have been borne by others. There is no longer
any need for one to murder, since h_e has already murdered; and one
must be grateful to him, for except for him, one would have been
obliged oneself to murder. . ." (The Comglete Psychological Works 9_f
Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI, 190). Dostoevsky himself, like his created
character Ivan, is able to remain legally, if not morally, guiltless of
the father's murder.

The theme of vicarious sin is brought out in Greene's entertain-
ment _A GE {23 Sale where Raven, sacrificed to society for his harelip,
plays the role of scapegoat. A. A. DeVitis pointed out Raven's role as
the evil, yet innocent scapegoat:

The action of the book moves against the Christmas season,

 

 

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154

To have lost innocence is tantamount to having entered the world
of love, suffering, and reSpcnsibility— the world of experience. Rose
had lived in the world of the Brighton slums where, although she had
lost innocence, she had, by some miracle of personality, retained her
goodness. But according to Greene this impoverished world of Nelson
Place is part of "the coast" or "the border" and is, for this reason, a
less treacherous world than the sinless and empty chromium world
where Rose must confront Ida Arnold. For Rose's is the world of expe-
rience: "in the hole were murder, copulation, extreme poverty, fidelity,
and the love and fear of God" (175).

Experience calls for involvement. Brown, the protagonist of the

recent novel The Comedians has given the term "comedian" to himself

 

and to others to indicate their lack of involvement. Martha Pineda can-

not protest that others "were only a sub-plot affording a little light

 

53(cont.) against the cheap religious images, "the plaster mother
and child, the wise men and the shepherds," against the
betrayal of Christ by Herod —- and by Judas. Raven, the
hero, makes an association with himself and the holy
family for whom there had been no room at the inn. He
is angered that the myth of the Birth of Christ, the god
who died for sinners, is perpetuated by a godless nation."
("Allegory in Brighton Rock," Modern Fiction Studies, 111,
3[Autumn, 1957], 217). Like Christ, Raven also suffers
a double betrayal: betrayed by Herod, for as an infant,
Raven too is marked, and betrayed by Judas, in the person
of Anne Crowder and by his birth defect which becomes a
mark of recognition to his pursuers and persecutors.

Pinkie also shows traces of alignment with Christ for

he too is excluded from the in. There is no room at the
hotel for Rose and Pinkie on their wedding night and at clos-
ing hours "they stood on the pavement and heard the door of
the Crown closed and locked behind them -- a bolt grind into
place. . . ." (Brighton Rock, 249).

 

155
relief," but that she should be included goes against the grain:
"For Christ's sake," Martha said in English, as though
she were addressing me directly, ”I'm no comedian."
We had forgotten her. She beat with her hands on the
back of the sofa and cried to them in French now. "You
talk so much. Such rubbish. My child vomited just now.
You can smell it still on my hands. He was crying with
pain. You talk about acting parts, I'm not acting any
part. I do something. I fetch a basin. I fetch aspirin.
I wipe his mouth. I take him into my bed. "54
Detachment in so many of Greene's characters comes from either
the blind pride of the Opportunistic or of the insidious, fear, or in Fow-
ler's case, his hypersensitivity to pain. When once involved, other
protagonists yearn for the peace and passivity of their former state.
Fowler, although involved in other s' pain, has also tried to maintain a
kind of "nursery peace." As Miriam Allott pointed out: "he identifies
Phuong with 'peace' and loves her for her stillness and serenity, while
death seems to him to be 'the only absolute value' because it puts a
st0p to despair."55 In a former and more turbulent love, peace was
completely lacking because his foremost fear was for the death of love:
I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her
changing -— I don't know if she really was, but I
couldn‘t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran
towards the finish just like a coward runs toward

the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death
over.

 

54The Comedian; (New York, 1966), 141. Subsequent quotations
taken from The Comedians will be from this same edition.

 

' 55"The Moral Situation in The Quiet American," Graham Greene:
Some Critical Considerations, ed. a Robert 0. Evans (Lexington, Ky. ,
1963), 200.

 

56The Quiet American, 96.

 

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156

Just as Fowler’s was a quest for peace, so it was with other pron
tagonists of the Greene world. Dr. Czinner, Scobie, Arthur Rowe, and
Sarah Miles seek, as does the Mexican priest, an escape from the strug-
gle embodied in existence. Czinner in having failed to bring off his
coup d‘état, accusing himself of having betrayed his people, feels dis-
appointment, rather than relief, that he may still survive. He realizes
that only death would be his true security, yet it is "his distasteful duty

to escape if he could."57 Similarly D. , the revolutionary of The Confi-

 

dential Agent, instead of fleeing when he had the chance, "went stub-

 

bornly back up the street; he had to go on trying until they shut him up,
hanged him, shot him, st0pped his mouth somehow and relieved him of
loyalty and let him rest" (244). The Mexican priest realizes "now that
the immediate fear was over, he felt only regret. God had decided.
He had to go on with life, go on making decisions, acting on his own
advice, making plans," for he was, he knew "like the King of a West
African tribe, the slave of his peOple, who may not even lie down in
case the winds should fail." "Let me be caught soon. . . . Let me be
caught," he prays. For he like many would rather die, but he also
knows that "we have to go on living."58
The death wish which these protagonists evince is not only mani-

fested in a desire for peace but, as is the case with Fowler as well as

other Greene protagonists, in a desire for purity. This is vouched for

 

57Stamboul Train, 217.

 

53The Power 115-i th___e Glory, 186, 25.

 

 

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157
in Fowler's nostalgia for the blameless act. Miriam Allott wrote that
at the end

his job is secure; his divorce will come through; he will
be able to marry Phuong; she will stay with him now that
Pyle is dead. But the shadow of Pyle remains. Even
when the wonderful telegram arrives and Phuong knows
that she is to have security which she had earlier sought
with Pyle, the shadow is still there. (204)

Even though Fowler is forced to move against violence and stupid-
ity, his sensitivity impels him to regret his liquidation of Pyle. There-
fore he is left reflecting at the end of the novel the problem that "every-
thing had gone right with me since he died, but now I wished there
existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry" (183).

The death wish in Fowler also takes another form, as is true with
other Greene protagonists, the desire that life be seen not as a state of
flux, but all-of—a-piece —- that is, patterned and permanent, for he

states:
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and
yet I longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happi-
ness. This month, next year, in three years. Death
was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and
one would lose nothing again forever. I envied those who
could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they
were keeping their courage up with a fable of the change-
less and the permanent. Death was far more certain
than God, and with death there would be no longer the
daily possibility of love dying. (49-50)

There is yet another aspect of existence which will continue to
torment Fowler. In a conversation with Pyle, Pyle had declared his
belief in God, for without God, he asserts, life wouldn't make sense.

Fowler's rejoinder to this statement is that to him it didn't make any

sense with Him. It is to this end, too, that death is attractive to

158

Fowler: for if life is impermanent and chaotic, it is also meaningless,
a mockery to man's reasoning powers. Fowler narrates his views on
the "absurdity" of death. He describes a stream he has crossed in
Vietnam clogged with corpses:

I too took my eyes away; we didn't want to be reminded

of how little we counted, how quickly, simply, and anony-

mously death came. Even though my reason wanted the

state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I

would have liked death to come with due warning, so that

I could prepare myself. For what? I didn't know, nor

how, except for taking a look around at the little I would

be leaving. (44)

Not only does Fowler desire the state of death, but more nihilis—
tically still he desires, in lieu of that unattainable sense of purpose, a
manifestation of a complete meaninglessness — a state of illusionless-
ness, a state redolent of Gatsby's final view which Nick Carraway sup-
poses when he may have looked on an "unfamiliar sky through frighten-
ing leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is
and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass."59

Such a courting of death and a mockery of its own mockery is seen
in Greene's protagonist Wilditch of "Under the Garden," who entertains
a similar desire to strip away all illusion:

Why then go back now and see it in other bands? Was it
that at the approach of death one must get rid of every-
thing?. . . . Perhaps the man who had ridden the horse
around the countryside had not been saying good-bye, as
his biographers imagined, to what he valued most: he

had been ridding himself of illusions by seeing them again
with clear and moribund eyes, so that he might be quite

 

59F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby(New York, 1953), 162.

 

 

159

bankrupt when death came. He had the will to possess
at that absolute moment nothing but his wound. 0

 

60The Sense 9_f Reality (New York, 1963), 8-9. Subsequent quo-
tations from this work will be taken from this edition.

PART IV

BEYOND THE GREENE BAIZE DOOR

The stages traveled by Greene's saints as well as his other
autonomous characters are both consistently and vividly represented
in Arthur Rowe's progress. This protagonist of Greene's entertain-

ment The Ministry (if Fear not only completes symbolically, as Pinkie

 

Brown does literally, the trajectory from life to death, but he also
makes the more complex and hazardous journey back from death to life.

Additionally, Rowe brings out in his journey toward self-fulfill-
ment the fact that even though Greene's protagonists are living in a fal-
len world, what the reader confronts could be more correctly desig-
nated as "falling man" rather than fallen man. For each undergoes a
series of falls, rather than a definitive fall. Arthur Rowe has suffered
one of his falls before the story begins. His stages, beginning with
this fall, are indicated by the titles of the individual books and chapters.
The first of the series encompased is treated in "Book One: The Unhap-
py Man." This fall from innocence is further explicated by the sub-
titles: "Between Sleeping and Waking" and "Out of Touch." Here Rowe
suffers a sense of exile from his earlier innocence, for although
legally acquitted, he continues to judge himself guilty of the me rcy-
killing of his wife. He continues to ask himself: "Mercy for whom?"
Was it mercy for her, who perhaps could not bear her pain, or for him-
self, who could not bear to see her suffer?

Isolated by his sense of guilt, Rowe severs contact with all those

who may know of his "crime," and hOpes that while he continues to live

160

16 l
in wartime London, either he, or the world which knew his guilt, will
be destroyed by the blitz. While longing to return to the lost Eden of
his childhood, innocence is ironically restored to Rowe through amnesia.
The book entitled ''The Happy Man" and the chapter "Conversations in
Arcady" show his figurative. return to his former innocence, for Arthur
Rowe quite literally awakes in a new nursery world —- the nursing home
of a Dr. Forester. The process of regaining memory which is a pro-
cess of rebirth, an effort to regain a foothold on life, is told in "Book
.Three: Bits and Pieces," while his victory, which includes his full
realization that any reintegration into life will include the renewal of
pain and responsibility and love, is recounted in "Book Four: The
Whole Man" in the chapter entitled "Journey's End."

Retreating from a world in which his own act led to his self-
indictment, Rowe resembles his author's potential saints. For Rowe,
like Major Scobie and Sarah Miles and the Mexican priest, as well as
Pinkie, his anti-saint, has gone in for simplification. Rowe's means
of simplification, like theirs, is an effort to return to that stage of life
where the advantages of a "nursery peace" are still enjoyed. In order
to achieve this elemental peace Rowe strives to remove twenty years
from his consciousness. To this end he has taken furnished rooms and
had "simply not bothered to make any alterations. There he managed

to build up a certain womb-like atmosphere rereading The Old Curios-

 

i_t_y ShOp and David COpperfield "which he read as peOple used to read

 

 

the Bible, over and over again, till he could have quoted chapter and

verse, not so much because he liked them as because he had read them

7‘ ‘

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.,
b

 

 

162
as a child, and they carried no adult memories" (15). At night this room
becomes even more completely a deputy-nursery for it is then that his
landlady's furnishings fade and the "little light that went on behind the
radio dial had a homely effect like a night light in a child's nursery—-

a child who is afraid of the dark," and over the air a "voice said with
hollow cheeriness, 'Good night, children, good night' "(17).

Otherwise Arthur Rowe was like a "man camping in a desert" for
in his nostalgia for simplification, he desires the removal of the irnme-
diate scene. The fact that buildings t0ppled, that familiar scenes dis-
appeared in the air raids was a real source of satisfaction to Arthur,

for he reasoned:

Perhaps if every street with which he had association
were destroyed, he would be free to go -— he would

find a factory near Trumpington. After a raid he used
to sally out and note with a kind of hOpe that this res-
taurant or that sh0p existed no longer — it was like loos-
ening the bars of a prison cell one by one. (16)

And although Arthur never goes back to Trurnpington in his native
Cambridgeshire, he stumbles on his childhood in miniature one Sunday
afternoon. Walking through a wartime and familiar London, recogniza-
ble by the "untide gaps between the Bloomsbury houses -— a flat fire-
place halfway up a wall, like the painted fireplace in a cheap doll’s
house" and the commonplace "sound of glass being swept up" (1), Arthur
Rowe turns a "corner of the sunny afternoon" and runs headlong into life.

It is a f8te which precipitates him into life, for it

called him like innocence: it was entangled in childhood,

with Vicarage gardens and girls in white summer frocks,
and the smell of herbaceous borders and security. (I)

 

 

 

 

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s«

 

163
This call to innocence proves a siren's call for "pacing round the
railings he came toward his doom." In the white elephant stall he finds

with an "ache of the heart" a dingy c0py of The Little Duke. 61 There

 

 

was indeed, Rowe decided, "something threatening, it seemed to him in
the very perfection of the day," and when he gives by the purest chance
the signal which entitles hizn to the cake, suddenly "the bunting and good
cheer," "the inevitable clergyman," the "bustling lady in the print dress
and the fl0ppy hat," all the smiling faces, turn sinister. For the cake
conceals microfilm plans for the enemy. Rowe's refusal to surrender
the cake does not end the unpleasantness. He is pursued by one of

their agents and his lodgings are destroyed in the night's air raid,

either by chance or purpose.

Another attempt at eliminating Arthur Rowe is also perpetrated
through his "fatal flaw," his attraction toward innocence, for any sus-
picion which he might have entertained regarding the Austrian "refugee"
siblings is dispelled by their appearance. To Rowe, Willi and Anna
Hilfe looked more like "two children who liked stories" than like enemy
agents.

In this second attempt, Rowe is saddled with another "murder"

 

61Quotations from Charlotte Yonge's work of juvenile fiction, The
Little Duke have been effectively used as epigraphs to each chapter of
The Ministry 9f Fear. Other echoes of the childhood world of innocence
reflected in juvenile fiction can be detected in the frequent reiteration of
the hero's full name and the simplicity of the syntax: "Arthur Rowe
looked wistfully over the railings. . . ," "Arthur Rowe's eyes filled with
tears. . . ," "Arthur Rowe stepped joyfully back into adolescence," "the
treasure-hunt was being hastily concluded, but this time there was
nothing for Arthur Rowe."

164
faked at a séance and soon afterwards Rowe himself dies figuratively

in a third attempt to eliminate him. The bomb which explodes, how-

62

ever, causes him to lose his memory —- not his life.
Rowe awakens, not to the disintegrating world of war-torn London,

but to the sunlight and the springtime of another Eden. The Garden is

set somewhere in remotest England where the war has not penetrated:

The garden was a rambling kind which should have belonged
to childhood and only belonged to childish men. The apple
trees were old apple trees and gave the effect of growing
wild; they sprang unexpectedly up in the middle of a rose-
bed, trespassed on a tennis-court, shaded the window of a
little outside lavatory like a potting shed 3which was used
by the gardener — an old man who could always be located
from far away by the sound of the scythe or the trundle of

a wheelbarrow. (143)

 

62The site of this would-be assassination is an excellent example
of the empty and graceless chromium world -- the world which has cre-
ated the "separation of body and spirit" which Greene hates.
This was a modern building; the silence was admirable and
disquieting. Instead of bells ringing, lights went off and
on. One got the impression that all the time peOple were
signalling news of great importance that couldn't wait.
This silence -— now that they were out of earshot of the
whistle and sigh — was like that of a stranded liner; the
engines had stOpped and in the sinister silence you listened
for the faint depressing sound of lapping water The Min-
istry 9f Fear, 113).
The complexity of the building and the analogy with a liner becomes
a forewarning of the fate of another liner, the relic of a lost world
depicted in "A Discovery in the Woods," a short story whose closing
lines "Why aren't there any giants now?. . . . He's six feet tall and he
has beautiful straight legs,"(A Sense <_>_f Reality, 119), bears Greene's
adrnonishment concerning the pity of what man has already done to him-
self, out, to its logical conclusion.

63Although the potting shed here does not have the characteristic
use it holdsrin other Greene works, a "symbolic cul-de-sac in which
the individual is placed to work out his own redemption," (Catharine
Hughes, ”Innocence Revisited," Renascence XII [Fall, 1959]), it is yet
a recurrent image in the Greene microcosm. Pinkie's "epiphany"
occurs in a garage for it is in a Metroland garage which had never been

165

It is from this garden that Rowe, who is now known, even to him-
self, as Digby, must dig his way out.

As even the garden of Eden had its serpent, this garden too be-
comes a setting for treachery. For where the ”garden faded gradually
out into paddocks and a stream and a big untidy pond" (143-144) there is
an island, and more centrally located there is the "sick bay." Despite
. these settings for evil, Rowe or Digby, is encouraged to retain his new
innocence. A feather-bed atmosphere of "nursery peace" is accumu-
lated around him. He is told "the great thing, you see, is not to worry.
You've had your share Of the war for the time being. . . . You can lie
back with an easy conscience" (124).

But Digby begins to sense that all is not well in his artificial
paradise. Refusing to keep the nursery door closed to the voice of pain,
Digby heeds the appeals of Major Stone, kept in the "sick bay" for his

supposed violence. Digby-Rowe now grOpes for truth in the pond and

 

63(cont.)used for a garage," it had become a kind of potting shed"
(Brighton Rock, 154) that he realizes the fallacy of his "between the stir-
rup and the ground" last-minute act-of-contrition policy. The potting
shed in Greene's play of that name is the scene of all the mystery which
lay around James Callifer's rejection by his parents.

Catharine Hughes stated that "the cul-de-sac has been a deserted
railway car, a Mexican prison, a jungle hut, a mud tower, a living
room, a garden shed. The walls and furniture all differ, but the prob-
lem within the walls is always the same" (47). To Hughes' list, the
following "sheds" might also be added: the cubicle in the Pitt Street
brothel visited by Wilson; the Indian fortune-teller's "revelations" in a
hotel bathroom. Arthur Rowe's visit to the fortune-teller's tent at the
fate with his somewhat prOphetic request "Don't tell me the past. Tell
me the future," which happens to be the signal for the deliverance of the
fated cake which plunges Arthur into life in The Ministry (if Fear; Dr.
Czinner acknowledges the sterility of his wasted life in a railroad shed
at Subotica, etc.

 

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166
the "sick bay." They were, he reflects, like the "underside of a stone:
you turned up the bright polished nursery home and found beneath it
this" (163-164).

The wrench away from a happy state of oblivion is heroic. Reluc-
tantly Digby descends into the "sick bay'L-his own unconsciousness in
one sense, the world of another's pain in another sense — to reunite
himself with the living. While he makes the descent as Digby, the
ascent is Rowe's:

As he quietly closed each door behind him he felt as
though he were cutting off his own retreat. . . . Ahead
of him was the green baize door he had never seen
Opened. . . . he was back in his own childhood, break-
ing out of dormitory, daring more than he really wanted
to dare, proving himself. He hOped the door would be
bolted on the other side; then there would be nothing he
could do but creep back to bed, honour satisfied. . . .
But that door, too, had been left unlocked, unbolted.
As he passed into the passage beyond, the green baize
swung to with a long sigh. (161-162)

Whether the sigh is for regret over Rowe's second-time-lost
innocence or whether it is a sigh of relief that ignorance will once
again be thrust way back into the past where it belongs, Rowe is none-
theless delivered anew ‘into the world of experience. He will not
remain like Philip of "The Basement Room," who surrenders his
responsibility once and for all. "Let grown-up people," Philip decided,
"keep to their world and he would keep to his, safe in the small garden
between the plane-trees. . . . you could almost see the small unformed

face hardening into the deep dilettante selfishness of age.“>4

 

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167

Rowe accepts the world even though he learns that it will never
be all-of-a-piece, that his books -— on Captain Scott, Oates, and
Damien — had lied. He learns that "adventure didn't follow the literary
pattern, that there weren't always happy endings" (218). Thrown back
with a jolt into the world of experience, "Rowe was growing up; every-
thing was bringing him nearer to hailing distance of his real age" (226).
He is, looking through the Open door, undergoing the trajectory from
ignorance to knowledge which must be made through suffering or guilt.
It was his compassion for Major Stone which had prOpelled him through
the green baize door — the borderland between innocence and knowledge
and he now thought of Digby as a stranger, a "rather gross, compla-
cent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignor-
ance." He knows now that "happiness should always be qualified by a
knowledge of misery" (163).

At the same time the journey into the "sick bay" marks a return
to the seedy world of experience for this hidden aspect of the nursing
home was:

at the end of the passage where the tap dripped, a large,
square, comfortless room with a stone floor divided in
half by a curtain — it had probably once been a kitchen. . . .
there were ends of cigarettes upon the floor and nothing
was used for its right purpose. A clock and a cheap
brown teapot served as book-ends. . . . The tap dripped
into a fixed basin and a sponge-bag dangled from a bed-
post. A used tin which had once held lobster paste now
held old razor-blades. The place was as comfortless as
a transit camp; the owner might have been someone who
was just passing on and couldn't be bothered to change
so much as a stain on the wall. An Open suitcase full of

soiled underclothes gave the impression that he hadn't
even troubled to unpack. (194)

168

Asking himself if it is possible that real life be like this, a
minor character answers for him: "this is rather a dingy hole," but
"we've come to terms with it of course" (194).

Now as he emerges from his nursing home or nursery into the
world, he confirms that he had for a while no longer understood suffer-
ing because he had forgotten that he had ever suffered. Now he must
learn his way again in the world of experience and suffering:

It's as if one had been sent on a journey with the wrong
map. I'm ready to do everything you want, but remem-
ber I don't know my way about. Everybody else has
changed gradually and learnt. The whole business of
war and hate — even that’s strange. I haven't be en
worked up to it. I expect much the best thing would be
to hang me. (194)

Arthur Rowe is not permitted to yield to this last vestige of the
death wish, for acquitted of the second "murder" which was foisted on
him, he is awakened not only to the world of guilt, pity, and responsi-
bility through Major Stone, but to the world of love and further pain
with Anna Hilfe. For Anna has abandoned her brother and his political
fantasies to share the world with Arthur Rowe. Rowe "had hOped that
wherever Anna was there would be peace; yet coming up the stairs a

second time he knew that there would never be peace again while they

lived" (266-267).

PART V
WHO WOULD BE A FATHER ?

Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of
peOple you loved, if it was necessary to hate as

they did, and if that were the end of everything

suffer 2amnation with them, rather than be saved
alone? 5

This excerpt taken from Graham Greene‘s entertainment The

Ministry of Fear could well serve as an epigraph to the present sec—

tions which deal primarily with his novel The Heart of th__e Matter. For

 

while each was written with Africa in view, The Ministry of Fear, writ-

 

ten as a sort of escape from Africa, was merely pervaded by its influ-

ence; The Heart o_f t_1_1_e Matter, on the other hand, written five years

 

later, is a return to, rather than an escape from, the African milieu.
Additionally, while both works were set against the background of

World War II, The Ministry o_f Fear, more immediately concerned

 

with the home front during the Battle of Britain, is a plea, among other

things, for wartime solidarity. The Heart o_f th___e Matter, far removed

 

from the front, is concerned with the private struggles of a certain
Major Henry Scobie, Deputy Police Commissioner in a British West
66

African colony.

In both works Greene explored two of the lesser known aspects of

 

65The Ministry of Fear, 155.

 

Leone, where Greene had a wartime tour of duty with the Foreign Office
during the year 1942-43. It was written "in what spare time from work
I could allow myself in Freetown," Greene writes in his introduction to
l_n Search of _a_ Character: Two African Journals (8).

 

169

170
the heart: the emotion of pity and the psychology of betrayal. Here
Greene's emphasis on the relationship he saw between the map of

Africa and the human heart should be recalled. His Journey Without

 

Maps is the account of his fir st trip to Africa when he travelled through

Liberia and Sierra Leone. £11 Search O_fa Character: Two African

 

Journalsis the record of a later trip made to the Congo region. In
both he wrote that Africa was always for him the continent that most
resembled the human heart — both for its contour and for its enormous
unexplored interior.

Scobie, the protagonist of T_l_1_e Heart o_f th__e Matter, indeed pene-
trates farther than most into these unknown regions, for in setting him-
self an impossible goal, that of trying to get through life without hurt-
ing those he loves, he runs into insuperable difficulties. Of these, his
protective feeling toward Louise, his wife, is an example. He keeps
trying against his own judgment to arrange for her happiness, knowing
"what experience had taught him - that no human being can really under-
stand another and no one can arrange another's happiness."67 Yet at
the same time unable to deny solace to those for whom he feels respon-
sible, Scobie will move from an almost complete contentment and an
almc st complete rectitude, through the territory of lies, misdemeanors,
illegal practices, sin, and despair, to possible damnation.

But in violating religious and legal codes, Scobie will illustrate

one of the paradoxes of the Greene world, a paradox which is stated in

 

6711;: Heart of 1_:_l_1_e Matter (New York, 1960), 84. Subsequent ref-
erences to The Heart of the Matter are taken from this edition.

171

the epigraph to The Heart of th_e Matter. The quotation is from Péguy and

 

it states that "Le pe’cheur est au coeur méme de chrétiente’. Nul n'est
aussi compétent que le pécheur en matiére de chre’tienté. Nul, si ce n'est
pas le saint." Scobie will prove the thesis that he who sins is in fact closest
to redemption. Barbara Seward explains this paradox, writing that

the whole journey from guilt through retribution, which is
commonly reserved for the doers of evil, becomes in
Greene's novels the prerogative of good men and the chief
differential between the good and the deficient. Assuming
that corruption is inescapable and that suffering is man's
sole means of expiation, Greene repeatedly favors his
redeemable characters with a sense of guilt so overwhelm-
ing that it exists with or without precipitating situations and
demands for its appeasement an appalling price of pain. (84)

Pity in Greene's thought is a corollary of guilt, as Barbara
Seward explains further:

Pity then, being compounded with pain, not only evolves
from guilt but serves as a form of atonement. Reflecting
in a small way Christ's great act of atonement, pity is the
one virtue that still can save us from damnation. But sal-
vation is not simple. In fact, Greene's pity at first glance
seems to pull its possessor around full circle, swinging
him from guilt through a suffering arc to a new-old start-
ing point in guilt. (92)

The fact that good must logically emerge, whenever it does
emerge, from evil, in a world as corrupt and continually falling as
Greene’s, is also supported by Marie-Beatrice Mesnet. Miss Mesnet
claims that it is through God that "a new meaning is given to every-
thing: natural signs are inverted, so that what was negative can be made

positive. "Human failures," she adds, "as well as human potentialities

are turned to good use."68

 

68Marie-Beatrice Mesnet, Graham Greene and 'I_‘hg Heart c_>_f t_t_1_e
Matter: _A_n Essay(London, 1954), 79. Subsequent quotations from this
work will be taken from this edition.

 

 

 

172
It is therefore in respect to his human potentialities that Greene‘s
sinner must be considered; and it is for this reason that sin has become
on more occasions than one the path to sainthood in Greene‘s novels.
There is in Sarah Miles, for instance, another Greene protagonist, a
tery to possible sanctity. It was in corrupt human love that Sarah first
yearned for divine love. The proximity of sin to sanctity is also encoun-

tered in the case of the anonymous Mexican priest of The Power 3.251 the

 

G_lp_r_y who is treated by Greene as another candidate for beatification.
For although the priest never succeeds in abjuring his sins, although he
suffers because he is aware of these sins, he never in his modesty rec-
ognizes the truly saintly qualities he does possess. Another critic,

A. A. De Vitis, also confirms Greene's contention that the greatest
saints have been men with a more than normal capacity for evil, cites
both Mary Magdalene and St. Augustine as obvious examples.69 Dr.
Fithatrick, a dentist, whom Greene encounters in Mexico, relates in

The Lawless Roads the story of a priest who is the prototype for the

 

priest in The Power a_n_<_i tire Glory. The dentist claims that the priest

 

in his death was "little loss, poor man"but, he adds, "who can judge
what terror and hardship and isolation may have excused him in the
eyes of God?" (150)

Just as the drama which involves the Mexican priest and the Eng-

lish adulteress must be understood in order. to realize their potentiality

 

69Mentioned in his work Graham Greene (New York, 1964), 105.

 

 

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173
for sainthood, so the conflict which enmeshes Scobie must be taken into
consideration to see, in him, another candidate for sainthood. In its
briefest terms his drama is the following: Although Scobie is singularly
content in his career and his post in a West African colony, Louise has
always disliked the colony. But it is when Scobie is by-passed for pro-
motion that she decides she must leave. She plans to remain in South
Africa until Scobie’s retirement. In order to send her there, Scobie
is forced to borrow money from a highly disreputable source, from
Yusef, a Syrian trader. Yusef is suspected of trafficking with the
Vichy French territories across the border.

Scobie, who is very susceptible to the weak and the childlike,
especially since the death of his only child, a nine-year-old daughter,
becomes entangled by pity when the victims of a torpedoing arrive in

the colony. There are two who especially evoke this emotion: a dying
. child and the childlike nineteen-year-old widow, Helen Rolt. Forced
to watch the child die, Scobie is unable to endure her pain and prays
that. God will take away his peace forever in exchange for the child's
peace. It appears that God immediately sets the terms of Scobie's bar-
gain into operation: for through pity for the young widow Scobie finds
hiznself involved in an adulterous and stormy affair with Helen Rolt.

The Opportunistic Yusef who admires Scobie and desires his
friendship intercepts a note from Scobie to Helen which he will use for
blackmail purposes. For Louise, alerted by the gossips of the colony,
is now on her way home. Yusef will hand the incriminating note over

to her unless Scobie helps him smuggle some diamonds out of the colony.

 

 

174
Failing to realize that Louise already knows of his liaison with Helen,
Scobie complies with Yusef‘s demands in order, he hOpes, to protect
Louise's happiness.

The fact, however, that Scobie, whenever he betrays those he
loves and those for whom he feels responsible, betrays because he him-
self has been seduced by sentiment, is brought out clearly in the epi-
sode of the Portuguese captain. For this episode reveals in miniature
the book-long struggle that Scobie sustains with God, and it is not the
promise of an actual reward but the captain’s love for his daughter that
tempts Scobie into a betrayal of his trust as an official of the Colonial
Police, The captain as a neutral has gone against the wartime navicert
regulations in concealing on his ship a letter addressed to his daughter
in Leipzig. It is the daughter, Scobie realizes, who is the turning point
in this situation, for in reading the letter Scobie is convinced that the

captain loves her with complete commitment -— mais que a vida — as

 

Scobie loves Louise, Helen, and God. Betrayed or bribed by love,
Scobie protects the captain by burning the letter rather than turning it
over to the authorities.70

Louise's heart, however, never betrays her. "Kindness and pity

 

70The episode of the Portuguese captain is one example of the
unity established between the text, theme, and title, The Heart 9f the
Matter. They are organically united through the repetition of the word
"heart." The captain says ". . . for the English I feel in the heart an
enormous admiration"; "My heart. . . is full of admiration for your
great. struggle"; Scobie reflects that "the man kept on speaking of his
heart" (45). The captain professes reliability with an"on my honour,
gentlemen, my hand upon my heart" (46). The same image has also
crept into his letter to his daughter: "my heart bleeds" (53). [Italics
have been added.]

175
had no power with her: she would never have pretended an emotion she
didn’t feel." (15) It is she who is most responsible for pushing Scobie
toward suicide. Her strategy has been to use their Catholicism as a
weapon to separate Scobie and Helen. She does this by forcing Scobie
into a dilemma: to either renounce his mistress or take communion in
a state of sin. In choosing, Scobie must decide either to break his vow
made on behalf of Louise's happiness, betray his responsibility to
Helen, or betray God. He chooses the two women— for he cannot
desert Helen and does not realize that Louise is aware of the affair.

He chooses against God because he feels his responsibility for the two
women is the more immediate. Yet, in taking God at communion in a
state of sin, he suffers in seeing God as his victim. God appears to
him as a picture of "a bleeding face, of eyes closed by the continuous
shower of blows: the punch-drunk head of God reeling sideways" (264).

Because of his "betrayals" Scobie has learned to distrust others
as well as himself. He sees himself as the police officer who has
betrayed his trust, as the adulterer, and finally as the violator of yet
another commandment. For in allowing Ali, his faithful servant, to be
killed, Scobie becomes, he is certain, a type of Judas. In betraying
one of His creatures, he has betrayed God himself. It is from this
act — the worst of Scobie's career —- that he is led into committing the
greatest sin for a Catholic — suicide.

Despite his transgressions, Barbara Seward also brings support
to the hypothesis that Scobie, too, may belong with the other potential

saints in Greene's pantheon. To this effect she presents her argument

176

which she has taken from The Power and th__e Glory: "We were made in

 

God's image — God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the
criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge" (93). And Scobie fills
all of these roles: as policeman he feels he has a case against God
because as a responsible man he is sure the job chose him as much as
he chose it; in the very act of putting the case to God, Scobie shows
himself as the judge — a role which he also fills on the temporal level;
as priest Scobie is a servant of God, whether he serves Him directly
through prayer and ritual, or indirectly through his service to his crea-
tures; as maniac, he is one who follows, even to his own destruction,
his policy of responsibility; and as criminal — one who has accepted
bribes and tacitly agreed to murder — he indeed encompasses the
terms of Péguy‘s paradox which may be paraphrased as "the closer to
hell, the nearer to heaven."

Deepite Scobie's own certitude, some of Greene's critics are less

certain than Scobie that he will suffer eternal damnation. 71 For

 

71Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris (whom A. A. De Vitis has
referred to as Greene' 8 ablest critics) in their book- -length study T_h_e
Lrt O_f Graham Greene (published in 1951 and reissued in 1963), written
in the first person singular, have this to say about Greene' 8 critics:
"Morton Zabel and Walter Allen are in my Opinion the only English-
speaking critics of Greene whom the reader will find it very profitable
to consult" (14).

The writer would like to increase the roster of respectable
Greene critics to include A. A. De Vitis, Barbara Seward, Herbert R.
Haber, Carolyn D. Scott, Anthony Burgess, David Pryce-Jones, and
Gwen R. Boardrnan. Too many, however, have gone completely over-
board either because of hostility to the author's religion or, in the case
of co-religionists, over the subject of Scobie's suicide. Among those
"heresy-hunters," who cannot see beyond his suicide, are Lynette Kohn
and Francis L. Kunkel. Each overlooks the fact that Greene sometimes
allows his protagonists to condemn themselves when he, the author, is

 

 

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176

which she has taken from The Power and the Glory: "We were made in

 

God's image —— God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the
criminal, the priest, the maniac, and the judge" (93). And Scobie fills
all of these roles: as policeman he feels he has a case against God
because as a responsible man he is sure the job chose him as much as
he chose it; in the very act of putting the case to God, Scobie shows
himself as the judge — a role which he also fills on the temporal level;
as priest Scobie is a servant of God, whether he serves Him directly
through prayer and ritual, or indirectly through his service to his crea-
tures; as maniac, he is one who follows, even to his own destruction,
his policy of responsibility; and as criminal -— one who has accepted
bribes and tacitly agreed to murder -— he indeed encompasses the
terms of Péguy‘s paradox which may be paraphrased as "the closer to
hell, the nearer to heaven."

Despite Scobie's own certitude, some of Greene's critics are less

certain than Scobie that he will suffer eternal damnation. 71 For

 

71Kenneth Allott and Miriam Farris (whom A. A. De Vitis has
referred to as Greene' 8 ablest critics) in their book- -1ength study T___he
Ar___t_ of Graham Greene (published in 1951 and reissued in 1963), written
in the first person singular, have this to say about Greene' 3 critics:
"Morton Zabel and Walter Allen are in my Opinion the only English-
speaking critics of Greene whom the reader will find it very profitable
to consult"(l4).

The writer would like to increase the roster of respectable
Greene critics to include A. A. De Vitis, Barbara Seward, Herbert R.
Haber, Carolyn D. Scott, Anthony Burgess, David Pryce-Jones, and
Gwen R. Boardman. Too many, however, have gone completely over—
board either because of hostility to the author's religion or, in the case
of co-religionists, over the subject of Scobie's suicide. Among those
"heresy-hunters," who cannot see beyond his suicide, are Lynette Kohn
and Francis L. Kunkel. Each overlooks the fact that Greene sometimes
allows his protagonists to condemn themselves when he, the author, is

 

 

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although he was accessory to Ali's murder, and although he has in his

 

71(cont.)not condemning them. Kunkel goes on to declare "Neurotic
Scobie mixes religion with pity to make the combination sound noble to
himself. . . . The Church’s mandate to perform charitable deeds is con-
strued by Scobie as sufficient reason not to put his own soul first"
(Francis L. Kunkel, The Labyrinthine Ways of Graham Greene, 126-127).

John Atkins reports in his book Graham Greene: A Biographical
ing Literag Study (London, 1957) that "Catholics were worried by The
Heart Elf th___e Matter. Waugh said it was a ’mad blasphemy.’ Greene
was puzzled: 'I wrote a book about a man who goes to hell — Brighton
Rock — another about a man who goes to heaven —- The Power ang th__e
Glory. Now I've simply written one about a man who goes to purgatory.
I don't know what all the fuss is about' " (193).

Greene is again quoted by Francis L. Kunkel in answer to those
who were shocked by the suicide motive. In an interview with Henry
Hewes, Greene is quoted as saying "Of course, suicide is a mortal sin.
But who is to say that a person committing suicide is in a state of mor-
tal sin just because he dies without having confessed his mortal sin?"
('I_‘_h_e Labyrinthine Ways 9f Graham Greene, 160).

 

 

 

 

Greene's sense of a novel written by a Catholic) and its
theological implications have been teased out at great
length by many amateur theologians and anti-theologians,
not to mention a few professionals, most of whom too
readily forget that they are dealing with a piece of fiction,
not an actual case-history. If Scobie's fate is ambiguous,
it is because the facts given in the novel admit of several
interpretations. In life there would be the hOpe of unearth-
ing further facts already known. But in dealing with a
character in a novel there can be no new facts to discover;
and for this reason most of the exercises in casuistry are
as irrelevant to a valuation of 'I_'_h_e Heart 9_f th__e Matter as
a Victorian essay on Hamlet's obesity to literary criti-
cism of the play. Similarly, the attempts to transform
Scobie into the hero of an Existentialist novel seem to
me beside the point. Discussing the meaning of T__h_e Heart
of the Matter is doomed in advance to sterility if it does
not take into account that the words composing the book
have been organized primarily with an artistic, rather
than a philosoPhical or theological intention.

Certainly one of the aims in his novel is to make
Scobie's goodness and fall equally convincing: without
this his fable must lack tragic intensity. He writes as a
sensitive and intelligent Catholic, that is, as a man for
whom the moral law exists, but who does not find its
application easy. . . . Greene has not worked out the

 

 

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178
despair committed, for a Catholic, the greatest sin of all —for his sui-
cide might logically reveal the greatest alienation from God — he does,
nevertheless, reveal, instead, a sacrifice made for others: for the
dying child, for his wife, for his mistress, and for God. Such critics
believe that God will accept, rather than the words of the bargain made
on behalf of the dying child, the spirit of sacrifice entailed in this bar-
gain made with God. His suicide is also committed in the spirit of sac-

rifice for he has already told God "You don't need me as they need me.

 

71(cont) precise worth of his characters by a kind of moral cal-
culus; he has simply seen them. He has presented a
story, presented it, perhaps he would feel, 3% specie
aeternitatus. (214-215)
A. A. De Vitis believes that it is "equally wrong for Allott and
Farris to minimize the importance of the religious theme, for it is the
frame of reference within which the narrative develOps:
Neglecting the spiritual conflict within Scobie reduces the
novel to a spiritual t_glr d_e force; these critics do not fully
appreciate the intense spiritual drama which is the novel's
reason for being. They diminish the aspect of recognition
and misunderstand the theme of betrayal, interwoven with
Scobie’s intense love of God, which are fundamental to the
comprehension of the book. It is more nearly correct to
accept Scobie's Catholicism as something akin to the
Fatality of Greek drama. (Graham Greene, 98)

De Vitis further claims that
the point to consider in a discussion of The Heart o__f t__he
Matter is not why Greene uses a religious theme but how;
it is 11nportant to decide whether or not his use of a
religious theme invalidates the novel as a work of art.
The problem then of whether Major Scobie is "saved"
or not according to the teaching of the Catholic Church
becomes a minor consideration; for the novel presents
a personal moral — Scobie's moral - which may not
coincide with that of orthodox Catholicism. (97-98)

It is the Frenchman Marcel Moré who believes, along with the
present writer, that Scobie was a saint who offered himself for others

 

 

*———

how a man who offers himself for others may, even when he appears to
be a criminal and a sinner, be, instead, a saint ("The Two Holocausts
of Scobie," Cross Currents, 2 [1951]).

 

 

 

 

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179
You have your good peOple, your Saints, all the company of the blessed.

You can do without me" (259-260).

PART VI

THE COAS T

The particular West African colony which forms the setting for

The Heartgf the Matter is truly representative of Greene's conception

 

of "the Coast" or even "the border." For like other examples he has
given of these two territories, it is a region where corruption is never
concealed but always candidly revealed. And Scobie is unique in the
Greene world, as well as in this novel, in being one of the few EurOpe-
ans who truly loves the Coast. He loves it for the truth it tells about
human nature, for there he reminds himself "you didn't love a pose, a
pretty dress, or a sentiment artfully assumed."

Thus the question which he addresses to himself is purely rhe-
torical, for he already knows the answer when he asks:

Why. . . do I love this place so much? Is it because here
human nature hasn't had time to disguise itself? Nobody
here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven
remained rigidly in its prOper place on the other side of
death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cru-
elties, the meannesses that elsewhere peOple so cleverly
hush up. Here you could love human beings nearly as
God loved them, knowing the worst. (32)

Scobie's detractors, of course, hate the Coast for the very rea-
son Scobie loves it. Harris, a cable clerk, complains among other
things of the Negroes who have taken on a thin veneer of EurOpean cul-
ture. He compares them to the natives of the bush:

A man's boy’s always all right. He's a real nigger —
but these, look at 'em, look at that one with a feather
boa down there. They aren't real niggers. Just West
Indians, and they rule the Coast. Clerks in stores, city

council, magistrates, lawyers --my God. (5-6)

Harris's admission that it's all right up in the Protectorate, but

180

181
that the Negroes on the Coast are becoming pseudo-white men, is
merely voicing in a cruder way Greene's own contention that "the Coast"
everywhere stands midway between the chromium world and the bush,
serving, in a sense, as a warning of the separation of body and soul,
matter and spirit, and of how far men have strayed away from their
original innocence toward the metallic world of spiritual sterility.

Yet it is the prigs themselves, those such as Harris, who bring
with them into the Coast the a8pirations of their "empty graceless chro-
mium world." And one of the methods they import is exclusion. Fel-
lowes, who fingers "his Lancing tie for confidence," is one of the mem-
bers of the Cape Station Club who knows how to play such a game, as
does another, Reith, who once had been completely successful in
Nigeria where he had excluded everyone from his solitary table!

"There are limits" is their password effectively used to exclude new
applicants.

Another device for maintaining their immunity to any values
which-go beyond the surface is a status-game played with housing.
Louise, who takes such a game seriously, has nonetheless been
defeated. She can only look up at the reflected glories of Cape Station
where

on a low ridge of hills. . . the bungalows of the station
lay among the low clouds; lamps burned all day in the
cupboards, mould gathered on the books -- neverthe-
less these were the houses for men of his rank (15).
Scobie, who realizes how much it has meant to Louise to remain in the

flats below even though their billet has advantages over those in the

beclouded heights, reflects that "women depended so much on pride. . .

182
pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were
seldom prOud, it seemed to him, of the invisible" (15). Having brought
whatever emphasis the chromium world makes on the superficial into
the colony, each remains comfortably blinded to whatever lies either
above or below the surface of matter.

An episode in which Scobie tears his hand on a splinter is an
example of this desire to live only on the surface. Here Louise, who
"cannot bear the sight of blood," refuses to see the hand until it is ban-
daged, yet once rendered sterile, and hence innocuous, she can now
readily take

the bandaged hand tenderly in hers. . . . She was not
afraid of the clean white bandage; it was like a patient

in a hospital with the sheets drawn tidily up to the chin.
One could bring grapes and never know the details of

the scalpel wound out of sight. She put her lips to the
bandage and left a little smear of orange lipstick. (38-39)

The employment of protocol, cant, custom, and creed is another
commonly used method which Louise has adOpted as a buffer against
life, and because her purpose is to gloss over existence, even her lit-
erary tastes are only a cover-up to conceal an otherwise commonplace
mind. In this respect she closely resembles another one of Greene's

immature and shallow women, Trixy Fellows, a minor character in

The Power 11311 t_hf: Glory. For neither has gained through her experi-

 

ence either compassion or a deepened world view.

Louise demonstrates this fact in a scene in which she reluctantly
scans her child's photograph and comes up with only a sadly extro-
verted solution to her unhappiness. Yet she believes that she can

write of experience: "I’m sure," she tells Scobie, "I could make alittle

183
money writing. Mrs. Castles says I ought to be a professional. With
all this experience." Ironically when Louise adds "with all this experi-
ence" she gazes "through the white muslin tent as far as her dressing
table." There her eyes meet the portrait of her dead daughter taken in
the white muslin of her confirmation. Louise looks away, adding: "If
only we could go to South Africa. I can't bear the pecple here"(l8).

But Scobie dreads the idea of retirement in Louise’s artificial
world -- whether in a South African bungalow or an English cottage, it
would be a surrender to Louise's world of art curtains, pretty tiled
baths, the no-longer-so-young "pylon" poets and Virginia Woolf’s
novels. 72

Scobie is drawn to the Coast too much to wish to leave it, for he
knows it employs no cover-up. Here the wounds festered in the damp,
they never healed. Scratch your finger and in a few hours there would
be a little coating of green skin" (96); here the sky "wept endlessly
around him" during the rainy season, in the knowledge "that this world
is undoubtedly one of God’s failures; here the dead pye-dog "lay in the
gutter with the rain running over its white swollen belly"; here the sea
itself takes on some of the corruption of the land it washes for "across
the black slow water he could just make out the naval depot ship, a dis-

used liner, where she lay, so it was believed, on a reef of empty

 

72Greene has written of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster that
their characters "wandered like cardboard symbols through a world
that was paper thin." He saw Tr0110pe's world, on the contrary, as
three dimensional. Of one of his characters Greene wrote: "His unim-
portance in the world of the senses is only matched by his enormous
importance in another world" (The Lost Childhood, 69).

 

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184
whisky bottles" (33).

Standing on the jetty with two of his native policemen, Scobie
comes across human corruption in a very concentrated form, the bottle
of voodoo medicine being as potent and as foul as the gossip of the

colony:

They shone their torches with self-conscious assiduity
from one side to another, lighting the abandoned chassis
of a car, an empty truck, the corner of a tarpaulin, a
bottle standing at the corner of a warehouse with palm
leaves stuffed in for a cork. Scobie said, "What's that?"
One of his official nightmares was an incendiary bomb:
it was so easy to prepare. . . . "Let me see it," he said,
but neither of the policemen moved to touch it. "'Only
native rmedicine, sah," one of them said with a skin-deep
sneer.

Scobie picked the bottle up. It was a dimpled Haig

and when he drew out the palm leaves the stench of dogs'
pizzle and nameless decay blew out like a gas escape.

Associating the odor of corruption with the cruelty and snobbery
and assorted humanpettinesses he has recently seen at the Club, "a
nerve beat in his head with sudden irritation. For no reason at all he
remembered Frazer‘s flushed face and Thimblerigg's giggle." They
had just treated Louise, who could sometimes be the worst snob in the
station, to. some of her own medicine.

The stench from the bottle moved him with nausea, and
he felt his fingers polluted by the palm leaves. He threw
the bottle over the wharf, and the hungry mouth of the
water received it with a single belch, but the contents
were scattered on the air, and the whole windless place
smelt sour and ammoniac. The policemen were silent:
Scobie was aware of their mute disapproval. He should
have left the bottle where it stood: it had been placed
there for one purpose, directed at one person, but now
that its contents had been released it was as if the evil
thought were left to wander blindly through the air, to
settle maybe on the innocent. (34-35)

Scobie is always attracted toward the innocent because he so fully

M

 

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185
recognizes "the pity'of it," the pity that innocence is always imperilled
in a world where even the "scandalmongers at the Secretariat fulfilled
a useful purpose" for "they kept alive the idea that no one was to be
trusted." And that "was better," Scobie reminds himself, "than com-
placence" (35). In also taking the "pity of it" into consideration, Barbara
Seward reminds her readers that not only pity but the horror and the ter-
ror which always threatens innocence is "not an end in Greene's writings
but a beginning," because "just as in the lives of his characters aware-
ness of guilt is the first step towards glory, so in his novels awareness
of nightmare is the first step towards affirmation" (95).

It is his search for affirmation that leads Scobie to find the truest
representation of a world made up of mingled strands of good and evil
right on the Coast, and it is for that reason that the "magic of the
place never failed him" because it is here that "he kept his foothold on

the very edge of a strange continent"(35).

PART VII

NOT POPPY, NOR MANDRAGORA

When one approaches closer to "the heart of the matter" it
becomes apparent that Scobie does not, as do other protagonists in the
Greene world —— Sarah Miles and the renegade Mexican priest are exam-
ples -— commence with evil as a prelude to good. For Scobie's sense of
guilt which will set him on the path to possible sainthood begins not with
adultery or fornication or the betrayals of a priest's obligations, but
from the generosity of his own nature. His goals, which are never to
hurt those whom he loves and to love God's creatures as God does Him-
self, lead Scobie, however, because of the complete irnpossibility of
their fulfillment, into sin, and from sin and guilt, to ultimae good.

Thus Scobie is enacting the first paradox of the Greene world:
that Scobie, who has sinned because of the absolutism of his nature and
his goals, may end triumphant. As both policeman and judge, Scobie
has the reputation of a good and honest man. As an absolutist for jus-
tice he has acquired a relativist approach: in court he knows that "no
one could be adequate to so rhetorical a concept," a concept which is no
more than the "grandiloquent boast of weak men" (7-8). He has learned
to step flinging himself into investigations with the ardor of a partisan;
to stop seeking the heroic role of supporter of the meek and the down-
trodden. Earlier he learned that those whom he had believed to be the
poor and innocent had succeeded in entirely upsetting the scales of jus-
tice, for it was they who proved, in turn, to be the wealthy and hence,

guilty capitalists. Scobie had known other men in the past who, having

186

’4

 

187
failed to perceive this, had, in trying to winnow from the evidence "one
grain of incontestable truth," been invalided out of the service. But
Scobie has learned that "the guilt and the innocence are as relative as
their wealth. . The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capi-
talist, making a, profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living
rent-free herself" (148).

His acute sense of justice, however, has gained him ill will.

This does not come from the animosity of the natives but from the
British colony. For Scobie is regarded as both a challenge and a tor-
ment to both the British and the amoral Yusef, one of the rival leaders
of the Syrian community. To the British it is undoubtedly the "daily
beauty" in his life which makes theirs appear ugly; to Yusef, it is both
the need to believe in Scobie's rectitude and the need to test it that
goads him into harrassing Scobie.

Scobie realizes that he has been a wonderful hand at picking up
enemies. He also realizes, now that he is turned down for the commis-
sioner ship, that Louise would have been more successful in avoiding
the "snakes" and in climbing the ladder to success.

Having arrived at a concept of justice which is relative in his
public life Séobie reverses the procedure in his private life. Here his
philosophy tends toward the relative too, but it is his acts which are
absolute. If in his actions he must be the responsible man, he yet
knows that the truth "has never been of any real value to any human
being" but, is rather "a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers

to pursue." Scobie knows that in most "human relationships kindness

 

 

 

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188
and lies are worth a thousand truths" (59). Knowing this, he also knows
that "no human being understood another," that "love was the wish to
understand," and that "presently with constant failure the wish died, and
love died too," or changed into that "painful affection, loyalty, pity"(83)
which he now feels for Louise. For "in human love there is never such
a thing as victory: only a few minor tactical successes before the final
defeat of death or indifference" (241).

It is here, however, that Scobie‘s relativist approach breaks
down, for he cannot put his intellectual realization into practice. His
mind embraces the relative concept that "no man can guarantee love
forever," but his behavior continually denies it. He must act instead
according to the promise he made during his wedding "fourteen years
ago at Ealing, silently during the horrible little elegant ceremony
among the lace and candles that he would at least always see to it that
she was happy" (59).

In his faithfulness to so absolute a goal as the responsibility for
another's happiness, Scobie has assumed the impossible; and in his
determination to remain responsible regardless of circumstances, he
has always been "half aware too, from the time he made his 'terrible‘
private vow that Louise should be happy, how far th_i_§ action might

carry him" (61). 73

 

73The obsession with responsibility in The Heart g_f the Matter
has been given comic relief in the episode in which the victims of the
torpedoed ship are brought to a temporary infirmary. There is the
Scottish engineer who keeps reiterating "ma reSponsibilit'y'L— responsi-
bility to the owner of the sunken ship is the only thing that occupies his
mind after forty days in a lifeboat and a five-day journey on foot to the

 

I

189

Because of the impossibility of the ideal Scobie has set for him-
self, Greene employs the image of the bearer or carrier taken from
his own experiences of treks in Africa. For beginning with Scobie's
earliest vow made on Louise's behalf, Scobie began to assume burdens
which will later cause him to stagger and to fall. A relativist in his
dealings with others, Scobie is an absolutist with himself. He knows
that the load he has accepted will cause him to despair in the end; he
knows that despair must be the price one pays for setting oneself an
impossible aim, and he knows that he will follow the aim to its logical
conclusion. If despair is the unforgivable sin, it is yet a sin "the cor-
rupt man or evil man never practices"; for the corrupt or evil man,
unlike Scobie, "never reaches the freezing point of knowing absolute
failure." It is "only the man of good will" who "carries always in his
heart the capacity for damnation"(6 l). .

Such an inversion of values also underlines Greene‘s contention
that guilt in a corrupted world leads to good and Péguy's view that "the
sinner is closest only to the saint for depth of spiritual vision and
Eliot's Opinion that the most contemptible of all men are those not big

enough to be damned, those spiritually unconscious who peOple the

 

73(cont.)hospital. There is also the even madder Miss Malcott who
thinks only of her mission in another colony who, when invited to rest,
replies:
"It's the last thing I want to do. . . I am not in the least
tired." She shut her mouth between every sentence.
"I am not hungry. I am not nervous. I want to get on. . . .
I've been delayed two months. I can't stand delay. Work
won't wait." Suddenly she lifted her face towards the sky
and howled like a dog (121).

190
wasteland of the world."74
Adding the guilt of not being present at his daughter’s death to his
failure to fulfill his vow to protect Louise's happiness, Scobie adds con-
siderably to his load of guilt when he must borrow the money from
Yusef to send Louise to South Africa.

It is here that he begins to risk his own salvation, replying to her
tearful entreaties with, " 'Yes dear, I'll manage somehow.’ He was sur-
prised how quickly she went to sleep: she was like a tired carrier who
has slipped his load. The load lay beside him now, and he prepared to
lift it" (41).

After Louise‘s departure Helen Rolt is able to appeal to Scobie's

76 At the

sense of pity and responsibility in very much the same way.
very beginning of their liaison, for instance, she tightens the bonds of
responsibility by declaring: "My God, how good you are. . . . I have a

feeling that you'd never let me down." The words came to Scobie as a

command that he would have to obey no matter how difficult" (172). For

the responsibility as well as the guilt was his. . . . he

 

75Quoted by Seward, 88.

76Scobie can never be said to be guilty of the sin which was anath-

ema to Hawthorne -- Hawthorne's sin of pride, with which one feels free
to convert another into an object for manipulation. For this reason
Scobie rejects the Church as a carrier of his burden because he refuses
to reduce a human being to an abstraction:

to hear Fath er Rank telling me to avoid the occasion:

never see the woman alone (speaking in those terrible

abstract terms: Helen — the woman, the occasion, no

longer the bewildered child clutching the stamp album. . .

that moment of peace and darkness and tenderness and

pity "adultery" (242-243).

 

 

191
knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve
Louise's happiness, and now he had accepted another and
contradictory responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies
he would sometimes have to tell: he felt the wounds of
those victims who had not yet bled. . . . Somewhere on the
face of those obscure waters moved the sense of another
wrong and another victim, not Louise, not Helen. Away
in the town the cocks began to crow for the false dawn. (175)

The cocks are undoubtedly a reference to Christ's betrayal and
Scobie sees himself as one who has betrayed God.75 Scobie will, in
fact, see himself rather than as a carrier as the Cross which God
must carry on His Own back:

God would never work a miracle to save Himself. I am
the Cross, he thought: He will never speak the word to
save Himself from the Cross, but if only Wood were
made so that it didn't feel, if only the nails were sense-
less as people believe. (249)

And in his responsibility for Ali's death, Scobie knows that he has
also betrayed God. This, the worst event in Scobie's life, truly shows
his moral deterioration for here, due to his own increasing self-distrust,
Scobie begins to distrust one who has been faithful to him for fifteen
years. In fearing that Ali may be erring, Scobie appeals to Yusef to
make him "reliable." To Yusef, Scobie

had told all his worries now — all except the worst. He
had the odd sense of having for the first time in his life
shifted a burden elsewhere. And Yusef carried it -- he

obviously carried it. . . . He made the startling claim,
"I will look after you." (270-271)

Shifting his burden onto Yusef's shoulders is Scobie's most seri-

ous fall. The theme of falling is stated overtly in The Heart (if th__e

 

 

75Betraya1 of course is a norm of the Greene world, one which
has already been pointed out.

 

(.11., Ill

192

Matter through Greene's use of Rilke's poem "Herbst" or "Autumn,"
a poem which Louise reads to Scobie just prior to his suicide:

We are all falling. This band’s falling too —

all have this falling sickness none withstands.

And yet the re's always One whose gentle hands

this universal falling can't fall through. (296-297)
The poem underlines Greene's belief in "falling man" as Opposed to

"fallen man," as does this satirically stated comment on the same

theme:
The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went
on and on: at lunch he laid down his fork for yet another
"crack." "Dear Henry," she said, "I've never known
you so cheerful." The ground had given way beneath
his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation
of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathlessness,
the despair — because you couldn‘t fall as far as this
and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a
crevasse. (298-299)

Because original sin had left in its wake only the proclivity for
corruption rather than its certainty, the loss of innocence is often
desirable. It is desirable when it is a necessary sacrifice made for
others in a corrupted world. Yet Scobie, in his self-effacement, has
overlooked the fact that his own sacrifices have been necessary ones,
made on behalf of others.

By way of résumé, Scobie has fallen six times through sacrifice:
once, in the episode of the Portuguese captain; two, in his borrowing
money from a source he knows to be unreliable in order to send Louise
to South Africa; three, in allowing his sympathy for Helen Rolt to turn
into adulterous love; four, in allowing himself to be bribed by Yusef in

order to protect Louise's happiness; five, in his tacit consent to Ali's

murder in order to protect Louise's and Helen's peace of mind; and

193
six, in his taking God's body in communion without absolution. He sums
the situation up for himself: '

If Louise had stayed I should never have loved Helen:
I would never have been blackmailed by Yusef, never
have committed that act of despair [Ali's murder], I
would have been myself still — the same self that lay
stacked in fifteen diaries; not this broken cast. (253)

Yet in his first as well as his subsequent falls sentiment has been
the catalytic agent. It is only through sentiment that Scobie can be
bribed, can join the "ranks of the corrupt police officers." Yet "they
had been corrupted by money" whereas "he had been corrupted by sen-
timent. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn't
name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a
certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a
photograph, even a smell remembered"(55). This was certainly true
in the episode of the Portuguese captain; in borrowing from Yusef to
cure Louise's unhappiness; in his involvement with Helen when in a
moment which "they had both thought was safety proved to have been
the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust,
and pity" (173); even in his betrayal of Ali and of God, Scobie has been
seduced by sentiment. He tries to argue with God for those who need
his more immediate help: "You can look after yourself. You survive
the Cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost.
Admit that you must come second to these others" (248).

Scobie's exaggerated sense of guilt leads him also to an obsessed

longing for peace and for innocence. His longing to escape into inno-

cence is not so much a desire to return to an earlier stage of his

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194
existence as it is for a simplification of his present existence. This
type of simplification was available to Scobie in his treks into the bush
with Ali. It is here also that Scobie has another Opportunity to "slip
his load" for Ali becomes the temporary carrier and even the nurse:

He could see in the driver's mirror Ali nodding and.
beaming. It seemed to him that this was all he needed
of love and friendship. He could be happy with no more
in the world but this — the grinding van, the hot tea
against his lips, the heavy weight Of the forest, even
the aching head. . . . (84)

It is especially on those occasions when Scobie suffers from
malaria in the bush that Ali becomes the true carrier. Here Scobie
truly enjoys a nursery peace, for

when he Opened his eyes Ali was standing beside him
waiting for him to awake. "Massa like bed," he stated
gently, firmly, pointing to the camp bed he had made
up. Scobie obeyed and lay down and was immediately
back in that peaceful meadow where nothing ever hap-
pened.(83)

The meadow which reappears in his dream seemed to be a part
of an Eden before the Fall, where

When he slept he went smoothly back into a dream of
perfect happiness and freedom. He was walking
through a cool meadow with Ali at his heels: there was
nobody else anywhere in his dream and Ali never spoke.
Birds went by overhead, and once when he sat down the
grass was parted by a small green snake which passed
on to his hand and up his arm without fear and before it

 

77Greene experienced the same sense of innocence in the bush for
he wrote in Journey Without Maps: "I remember wandering around the
village listening to the laughter and the music among the little glowing
fires and thinking that after all, the whole journey was worth while: it
did reawaken a kind of hOpe in human nature. If one could go back to
this bareness, simplicity, instinctive friendliness, feeling rather than
thought and start again" (234).

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195

slid down into the grass again touched his cheek with a
cold friendly remote tongue. (83)78

Scobie's dreams and daydreams as well as his simplifications are
projections Of his great longing for peace, whether he seeks it in his
office, which was furnished by a process Of reduction of things to a
"firm, friendly, unchanging minimum," or in the Mass. Here he
resembles Arthur Rowe who recalls longingly the words: " ’My peace I
give unto you. Not as the world knoweth peace' and his eyes filled with
tears."79 To Scobie

Peace seemed. . . the most beautiful word in the lan-

guage: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with

you: 0 Lamb Of God, who takest away the sins of the

world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass be pressed

his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of long-
' ing in. (61)

Such peace is almost attained by Scobie in the bush, but returning
home, his desire for peace projects itself occasionally into a longing
for complete nullity, for

he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep
it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder
of the moon heaving across the window like an iceberg,

arctic and destructive in the moment before the world
was struck. (61)

 

78There is an insistence on snake images in this novel. Perhaps
Greene here compares the snake of Eden before Eve's temptation,
while the other images belong to the post-lapsarian world. "Louise
could have steered agilely. . . and left the snakes alone" (10); Wilson's
cummerbund behaved like "an angry snake"; in India he believed a "tur-
baned native held the coil," etc. (62); Ali's dead body "lay coiled" (276);
the image of God coiled at the end of it(277); and "sentiment might
uncoil in the heart" (55).

79The Ministry of Fear, 2.

 

196

In his desire for annihilation Scobie shows a similarity to most
canonized saints: a basic dislike Of life. In Scobie’s case this dissatis-
faction goes back to his absolutism and his choice of impossible goals.
For with these aims

it seems to Scobie that life was immeasurably long.
Couldn't the test of man have been carried out in fewer
years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major
sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at
ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old
death bed? (52)

He also reflected "what an absurd thing it was to expect happiness
in a world so full ofmisery. . . Point me out the happy man and I will
point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil — or else an absolute
ignorance" (128).

The wish for annihilation, for peace, for simplification in Scobie
is, of course, a manifestation of the death instinct which Scobie states
explicitly when he says "we are all resigned to death. It's life we
aren't resigned to" (290).

And in entertaining a death wish —- here the wish or instinct is
directed towards others, as well as self— the desire is motivated by
compassion for others, as well as by a yearning for simplification for
himself. In a conversation with Helen he admits "when they are dead
our responsibility ends. There's nothing more we can do about it. We
can rest in peace." And he adds:

"I had a child. . . who died. I was out here. My wife sent
me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and
one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she
meant to break the thing gently.". . . He had never men-

tioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he
brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully.

197

"The cable said, Catherine died this afternoon n_9

p_ain God bless you. The second cable came at

lunch time. It said, Catherine seriously _i_l_l_. Doc-

tor his hop . . . . the terrible thing was that when I

got the second telegram, I was so muddled in my

head, I thought: The re's been a mistake. She must

be alive. For a moment, until I realized what had hap-
pened, I was — disappointed. That was the terrible
thing. I thought: Now the anxiety begins, and the pain,
but when I realized what had happened, then it was all
right, she was dead, I could begin to forget her." (167-168)

:. I‘ll

PART VIII

THE TERROR AND THE PITY

In It‘s a Battlefield, which is, along with another early entertain-

 

 

 

ment, The Ministry o_f gear, a thematic forerunner of The Heart of the
Matter, there is an exchange Of Opinion on two subjects which Greene
considers Of foremost importance -- the subject of God's justice and the
subject of His mercy. These two themes are more fully develOped in

the central drama of The Heart of the Matter which is the brief that

 

Scobie sustains against God.

 

In the earlier It‘s 3 Battlefield, the prison chaplain is speaking
with the Assistant Commissioner and states:
"I can't stand human justice any longer. It‘s arbi-
trariness. It's incomprehensibility."
"I don't mean to be blasphemous, but isn't that very
like, this is to say, isn't divine justice much the same?"
"Perhaps. But one can't hand ina resignation to God."
The Chaplain adds, however, "And I have no complaint
against his mercy."80
In approaching Scobie as a potential saint these concepts —- that
of justice and that Of the incalculable extent Of God‘s mercy-- are cru-
cial. Moreover, while Scobie entertains reservations concerning the
application Of these divine attributes in regard to himself, it is essen-
tial to note that he always argues for, and sometimes even expects jus-
tice and mercy for, others. Even when it becomes a matter of suicide,

which is, for the Church, the unforgivable sin, Scobie holds out argu-

ments of hOpe for others which he never considers for himself.

 

80131; 3 Battlefield (New York, 1962), 211.

 

198

 

kl

111.-II I]

199

Theoretically Scobie's thesis is that nothing should be impossible,
even the unforgivable sin of suicide, for a God who is omnipotent:

The priest's told you that it was the unforgivable sin,
the final expression Of an unrepentant despair, and of
course one accepted the Church's teaching. But they
taught also that God had sometimes broken his own
laws, and was it more impossible for him to put out
a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness and
chaos than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind
the stone? (206-207)

The final point which Scobie makes in this argument is that
"Christ had not been murdered," because "you couldn't murder God:
Christ had killed himself, and hanged himself on the Cross as surely
as Pemberton from the picture rail"(206-207).

The young Official's suicide becomes a forerunner for Scobie's

own, yet in his defense of Pemberton's act he shows his belief in divine
mercy only where others are concerned. For he admonishes Louise
with a "Don't talk nonsense dear. We'd forgive most things if we knew
the facts" implying that God should have as much love for His crea-
tures as Scobie has himself. Yet a priest who was Pemberton's neigh-
bor views his act with the usual pessimism, forcing Scobie to reply,
" 'Poor Child,‘ " (for it seemed unquestionable to Scobie that there must
be mercy for someone so unformed), " 'Even the Church' Scobie adds,
'Can't teach me that God doesn't pity the young. . .' " (89)

A. A. De Vitis points out that it is often a priest who restores, in

Greene's writing, the "balance and order in the world after the passions

of men have spent themselves." 'Just as Ludovico at the end Of Othello

 

"reéstablishes law on the island of Cyprus and returns to Venice to

relate with sorry heart the heavy deed that loads the tragic

200
bed,"81 Father Rank defends Scobie. Opposing Louise's bitter argu-
ments, the priest makes a defense for Scobie similar to the one Scobie
made for Pemberton. Louise protests:

"And at the end, this -— horror. He must have known
that he was damning himself."

"Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust
in mercy — except for other peOple."

"It's no good even praying. . ."

Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and
said furiously, "For Goodness' sake, Mrs. Scobie,
don't imagine that you — or I—know a thing about
God's mercy.

"The Church says. . ."

"I know the Church says. The Church knows all the
rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single
human heart."

This last remark of Father Rank's points up the theme of the
novel which, stated succinctly, is "Who knows?" —- for men, regard-
less Of the attempts of religious thinkers and philosophers, are still in
the dark about what God desires for man. The dialog continues for
Louise and Father Rank:

"You think there's some hope then?" she wearily
asked.

"Are you so bitter against him?"

"I haven't any bitterness left."

"And do you think God's likely to be more bitter
than a woman?"82 he said with harsh insistence,
but she winced away from arguments of hOpe.

"Oh why, why did he have to make such a mess
of things?"

Father Rank said, "It may seem an odd thing to
say—when a Man's as wrong as he was —- but I think,
from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.

 

31De Vitis, 103.

82A situation which closely parallels this occurs in Greene's play
1133 Living Room where the priest, a Father Browne, reminds his
maiden sister: "StOp it, Helen. We've had enough Of this foolishness.
God isn't unmerciful like a woman can be. . ." (126).

 

an
I\

201

Louise has denied that she feels any bitterness, but her words
betray her: "He certainly loved no one else," she said. To which Father
Rank replies, "And you may be in the right of it there, too" (305-306).

In this respect Ali, Scobie's native servant, may serve, where
Scobie's love for God is concerned, as God's surrogate --for what
Father Rank is implying is that Scobie has, in his love for God, been
both exclusive as well as inclusive, for in centering his love on God
he has incorporated a concern and a love and a responsibility for His
creatures as well. Louise querulously pointed out this love of Scobie's
for Ali in two early conversations with Scobie. In one in which she
complains: "You've never never loved anyone since Catherine died,"
Scobie replies, "Except myself, Of course. You always say I love
myself." Here Louise perceptively notes, "NO, I don't think you do"
(59). Yet earlier, in insisting that he does love himself above others
she blunders on another truth. Scobie hOpes that his bantering reply
will be conciliatory. "NO, I just love myself, that's all. And Ali, I
forgot Ali. Of course I love him too. . . ."(19)

'While Scobie truly loves Ali, it is fear and distrust — particu-
larly self-distrust — that leads to his betrayal of Ali. For when he
realizes how far he has himself fallen short Of the trust expected Of a
police Official, and Of his own vow to preserve Louise‘s happiness, he
demands of himself, "If I can lie and betray, so can others. Wouldn't
many people gamble on my honesty and lose their stake?" and fearing
that Ali may now be in the pay Of his enemies he argues, "Why should

I lose my stake on Ali?"(255)

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202
Ali in truth has been faithful tO Scobie for fifteen years, always
waiting to resume his position on Scobie's return from leave in England.
In this way, Scobie's final loss of faith in his servant parallels his loss
Of faith in God's justice and mercy, for Scobie has preferred, where
God is concerned, to act according to his own sense Of responsibility.
The guilt resulting from Ali's death will be the last straw for
Scobie. For he, like the proverbial camel, has been carrying too
great a load. Death has always induced a sense of guilt in Greene's
positive protagonists and Ali's death added to the guilt for his dead
child serves the same function as it does in Greene's other books.
There is Arthur Rowe's guilt for his wife's death and D.'s guilt for his.
Francis L. Kunkel points out that "D.'s near self-hatred is rooted in
the delusion that he was somehow responsible for his wife's death,
even though he was in a military prison at the time she was taken hos-

d."83 D. continues to feel that he brings bad luck to

tage and execute
others.

When Scobie hears Ali's final "discarded finished cry," he knows
then that one must drain the cup: "I missed that one death," he tells
himself, "and now I must have them all" (286). The images bear him
out for in response to Ali‘s cry he precipitately leaves behind in Yusef‘s
Office, "the moonlight shining on the siphon and the two drained
glasses" (276).

Scobie's desire for reduction has left his own office furnished

 

83Kunkel, 66.

203
with little more than a pair of rusty handcuffs and a broken rosary.
The rusty handcuffs will remain to be cleared away for they are the
symbol Of his imperfect but humanely human judgment; the broken
rosary which had been sent as an article of faith to lure Ali onto the
wharves at night is not only a symbol of betrayal but, when juxtaposed
with the handcuffs, indicate the relationship between God's role and
Scobie's in their relative spheres, or Scobie's role as it is Opposed to
God's. The broken rosary was never found among the debris where
Ali lay. Searching for it, Scobie
looked down at the body. . . . and for a moment he saw
the body as something very small and dark and a long
way away — like a broken piece of rosary he looked for:
a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at
the end Of it.
Scobie appears to be now directing his thoughts to God while he in
fact directs them to Ali, one Of God's creatures;
Oh God, he thought; I've killed you: you've served me
all these years and I've killed you at the end Of them.
God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt
the tears in his mouth. . . You were faithful to me, and
I couldn't trust you.
"What is it, sah?" the corporal whispered, kneeling
by the body.
"I loved hiln," Scobie said. (277)
That Ali, Scobie's native servant, and God merge at this point, as

84

they will later at Scobie's death, is no accident. For in another of

Greene’s works, The Power and the Glory, the renegade priest reflects

 

that "loving God isn't any different from loving a man - or a child.

 

84Ali is, as his name indicates, a Mohammedan. His name is,
of course, distinct from, but redolent of another name for God -- Allah.

 

 

 

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204

It's wanting to be with Him, to be near'Him. . . . It's wanting to protect
Him from yourself" (233). It is credible, then, that in loving Ali,
Scobie loved God; and it is also believable that his faithfulness to Lou-
ise and to Helen, to the point of sacrificing his own life, also proves
his love for God through His creatures.

That Scobie's love goes to these extremes is indicated again near
the end of The Heart of the Matter when Scobie, dying, continues to ful-

fill his role as carrier. Here, like the renegade priest in The Power

 

and th__e Glory, he realizes that responsibility only terminates with life.
For the priest, who also longs for death, realizes that while it is the
duty of the anti-clerical government to catch him, it is his own duty not
to be caught, for he must continue to serve as long as he lives. Even
after Scobie has taken the lethal dose Of evipan, he still remains alerted
by his sense Of responsibility, for

sometinles far away he thought he heard the sound of
pain. . . . "Ali," he called, "Ali." It seemed to him as
though someone Outside the room were seeking him,
calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that
he was there. . . all the time outside the house, Out-
side the world that drummed like hammer blows
within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in,
someone appealing for help“, someone in need of him.
And automatically at the call of need, at the cry Of a
victim, Scobie strung himself to act. He dredged his
consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to
make some reply. He said aloud, "Dear God, I love. . ."

(298-299)
With Ali's death the full terror and pity of life present themselves and
areamong the precipitating circumstances that lead to Scobie‘s suicide.
Yet because Of the "pity of it" Scobie must continue to act, and while he

does fill his role of active responsibility, there are two minor

 

 

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205
characters who do as God does on a higher level, that is, pursue Scobie
in order to track him down. Of these two it is expedient to associate
Wilson, the simpler, or the flat character, with the terror of life while
Yusef, the more complex character, can be associated with the more
complex emotion of pity.

It is Wilson who has been sent surreptitiously by the government
to investigate the smuggling of diamonds out of the colony, and it is
Wilson who, because of his self-loathing, must prove Scobie not only
professionally dishonest but also personally a sham. For Wilson, like
many of the British in the colony, considers Scobie's goodness a per-
sonal reproach. Hence it is envy which causes Wilson to explode:

"Oh you are unbearable. You are too damned honest to live! " At the
same time Wilson‘s "face was aflame, even his knees seemed to blush
with rage, shame, self-depreciation" (139).

In addition to serving as a contrapuntal device to God's pursuit of
Scobie, Wilson also becomes an ironic comment on the theme of love -—
not only God's love for Scobie and Scobie's love for God, but Scobie's
love and responsibility for Louise and Helen. For Wilson's pseudo-
romantic courting of Louise — he believes he can address another poem
to her after he visits the brothel on Pitt Street - parodies the genuine
emotion. Therefore his declaration that he loves her more than any-
thing in the world, and Louise's rejoinder that no one loves in that way,
anemically echoes Scobie‘s love which is truly mais 1‘33 _a v_i_d_a.

Yusef, who is merely amoral where Wilson is immoral, is

described by Greene at one time as "untrustworthy and sincere," at

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206
another as both "sincere and shallow,” and when Scobie comes to him
at last to slip his load, he is greeted, Greene claims, with a combined
"hope and apprehension." For Yusef, in his complexity, resembles the
Portuguese captain in that each tests Scobie's integrity and regrets its
final loss. Significantly the name of the captain's boat is the ESEeranza,
or H0pe, and Scobie is, for both of them, a kind of last-ditch hOpe for
an absolute of good and justice in the realm of human affairs.

In this way Yusef is as much an absolutist as Scobie himself; for
in demanding the best in another he fears so much to find less than the
best that he must constantly test its quality. Yusef relates how he
first came to marvel at Scobie’s goodness:

You nearly caught me, Major Scobie, that time. It
was a matter of import duties, you remember. You
could have caught me if you had told your policemen

to say something a little different. I was quite over-
come with astonishment, Major Scobie, to sit in a
police court and hear true facts from the mouths of
policemen. You must have taken a lot of trouble to
find out what was true and to make them say it. I

said to myself, Yusef, a Daniel has come to the Colon-
ial Police. (192)

Yusef desires Scobie's friendship and yet because his position in
the colony is dubious must at the same time use him. Yusef, the
entrepreneur, like Wilson, the spy, knows that intelligence is more
valuable than honesty: "honesty was a double-edged weapon, but intelli-
gence looked after number one" (184). Therefore, with the rationalism
of an Iago, Yusef continues to play Iago to Scobie's Othello. Finding
the "ocular proofm— not Othello's handkerchief, but in this case a let-

ter which Scobie wrote as an all-or-nothing sacrifice to Helen — Yusef

is able to completely undermine Scobie. Among the images that persist

207
in reinforcing the Othello analogy are the pillow episodes. These
occur near the beginning of Yusef's campaign to find the weak spot in
Scobie‘s defense. He visits Scobie who is suffering from malaria and
says, "Sit up a moment, Major, and let me beat your pillows"(91);
later he repeats his offer with "Let me pat your pillow, Major Scobie"
(94). The allusions to the pillow with which Othello smothers Desde-
mona become even mOre insistent when Yusef‘s boy, questioned by I
Wilson, reveals: "My master he think Major Scobie very good man,
sah. . . . Last time they have big palaver. . . . When Major Scobie go
away one time he put pillow right on his face. . . . His eyes make pil-
low wet" (185).

The scene in which Scobie visits Yusef and in which his house is
compared to a brothel recalls, of course, the Brothel Scene in Othello
and serves to indicate the illicit affair they have engaged upon:

the bungalow was divided into a succession of small
rooms identically furnished with sofas and cushions and
low tables for drinks like the rooms in a brothel. He
passed from one to another, pulling the curtains aside,
till he reached the little room where nearly two months
ago now he had lost his integrity. On the sofa Yusef lay
asleep. Like a woman who has made a loveless mar-
riage, he recognized in a room as anonymous as a hotel
bedroom the, memory of an adultery. (159)

Like adultery, marriage is also an apprOpriate image in this epi-
sode, for Scobie "had trapped Yusef as effectively as Yusef had trapped
him. The marriage had been made by both of them" (159). Some crit-

ics see these two characters so closely mated as to be doubles, Yusef

the i_<_l_, Scobie the e_gg of a single being. 85

 

8E‘Marie-Béatrice Mesnet also sees Yusef as a double who

208

Pity is, of course, an integral part of both Othello and The Heart

 

 

3f t_h_e Matter, and Scobie who has given so much of it to others asks
himself, after he has lost his integrity, "Am I really one of those whom
peOple pity?" (163) To Scobie this is almost as incredible as the idea
that he would one day come to Yusef for help. Here again he resembles
Othello who supplicates his tormentor Iago. In coming to Yusef in
order to "slip his load"

he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The

little white building magnetized him as though con-

cealed there was his only companionship, the only

man he could trust. At least his blackmailer knew

him as no one else did. . . (266)

But when Yusef goes too far in fulfilling Scobie's wish to rid him-
self of an Ali he no longer trusts, Allott and Farris remind their read-
ers that "Yusef is complicated enough to know his success," his suc-
cess in having Scobie come to him at last "is also a failure" (233).
Yusef's earlier voiced lament might well be his final word:

". . . formerly I was your friend."

"You very nearly were," Scobie reluctantly admitted.
"I am the base Indian."

"The base Indian?"

"Who threw away a pearl," Yusef sadly said. "That

was the play by Shakespeare the Ordnance Corps gave in
the Memorial Hall. I have always remembered it." (220)

 

85(cont.)"impersonates the dark side of Scobie, as Scobie admits in his
own words and with apprOpriate imagery when. . . he speaks of 'the dark
furnishings of hell' " (30). Greene has worked with the theme of the
double, it should be noted, in his earliest novel, The Man Within,
where he used the passage from Sir Thomas Browne, "There's another
man within me that's angry with me" as his epigraph.

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PART IX

FOR NAUGHT DID I IN HATE

In answer to Yusef's desire to hear the philosoPhy of his life,

Scobie responds:
"I have none."
"The piece of cotton you hold in your hand in the forest."
"I've lost my way." (274)

The uncharted heart of the dark continent has been consistently
employed by Greene to depict the ambiguous world in which his saints
and lesser men must wander and make their moral choices. For this
is a world where, despite the efforts the Church has made to provide
explanations, continues to withhold meaning. Even where Greene hizn-
self believes in a sentient and loving God, both he as well as his pro-
tagonists feel lost in their conflicts between man's own desires and
what man imagines to be God's desires for man. "A hint of an explan-

ation," both as a phrase used rather centrally in The Heart of the Mat-

t_e_r, and as the title of one of Greene's Twenty-One Stories, and as a

 

remark made within that same short story— "Our view is so limited. .
. . Of course there is no answer here. We catch hints" (119), underlines

the theme of The Heart of the Matter as well as other of Greene's

 

works. The theme more concisely stated can be reduced to "Who

knows ?"86

 

86Such a theme becomes more obviously Kafkaesque when it is
parodied in the same novel. When Wilson "had decoded the telegram
he would hand it to the long-suffering Commissioner, who had already
probably received the same information or contradictory information
from M. I. 5 or one of the secret organizations which took root on the

209

210
A large portion of such a question involves the problem of human

suffering. This theme was approached in .The Ministry of Fear and

 

treated more exhaustively in The Heart of th___e Matter. For Scobie

 

feels more acutely than others the enigma of the existence of suffering
and the presence of an omnipotent and merciful God.

Allott and Farris have described the episode in which the torpedo
victims arrive at the field hospital as the emotional center of The

Heart of th__e Matter. Here Scobie ponders the theme:

 

The lights inside would have given an extraordinary
impression of peace if one hadn't known, just as the
stars on this clear night gave also an impression of
remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he won-
dered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for
the planets? if you reached what they called the heart
of the matter? (128)

This passage also involves an unstated question, for why, Scobie
also wonders, if man can conceive a pity for the planets as well as for
all earthly things, can't God Himself be capable of the same pity for
His own creation? It is here that the reader is confronted with yet
another paradox: that of a creature who is seemingly more compassion-

ate than his Creator. Yet Scobie "could not believe in a God who was

not human enough to love what he had created" (12.5).

 

86(cont.)coast like mangroves. _L_eave alone l_>_u_t d_g not repeat not pi_n_-
point P. Ferreira passenger 1st Class. Ferreira was presumably an
agent his organization had recruited on board. It was quite possible
that the Commissioner would receive simultaneously a message from
Colonel Wright that P. Ferreira was suspected of carrying diamonds
and should be rigourously searched. 72391 / 87052 / 63847 / 92034.
How did one simultaneously leave alone, not repeat not pinpoint, and
rigourously search Mr. Ferreira? That luckily was not his worry.
Perhaps it was Scobie who would suffer any headache there was" ('I_'l_1_e
Heart of th__e Matter, 186-187).

 

211

It is the problem of suffering in what is usually considered its
most acute form — that of a child— which comes into consideration
here. For although Scobie is left with a dying child who is one of the
torpedo victims, he knows that it is not

that the child would die: that needed no explanation.
Even the pagans realized that the love of God might
mean an early death. . .but that the child should have
been allowed to survive the forty days and nights in
an open boat — that was the mystery -- to reconcile
that with the love of God. (128)

And while Scobie listened to the child‘s labored breathing, it
seemed to him "it was as if she were carrying a weight with great
effort up a long hill" (130), and when he heard the small voice say
"Father," he knew that it seemed "inhuman" for him not to try to carry
the burden of her suffering. It is here that Scobie becomes more
clearly a father Opposed to God, the Father, and it is here that he
beseeches God to "look after her. Give her peace. Take away my
peace forever but give her peace" (130).

Scobie, like Ivan Karamazov, the Mexican priest, and Greene
himself, accepts reluctantly, if at all, the idea of vicarious suffering.
The priest, like Ivan and Scobie, prefers to refuse salvation if what
Ivan refers to as the "harmony" of the universe depends on the suffer-
ing of the innocent, or on damnation. The priest says:

"I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't
know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I
do know this — that if there's ever been a single man in
this state damned, then I'll be damned too." He said

slowly: "I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just
want justice, that's all."87

 

87The Power and t_:_l_i_e Glory, 269.

 

212

Like Ivan,' Scobie also comes to an impasse with God. "There
was bitterness between them," not because God had failed to give the
child peace but because Scobie's sacrifice of his own peace in behalf of
the child has also involved and destroyed the happiness of the women he
loves. The following dialog takes place between Scobie and God:

. . . If you live you will come back to me sooner or

later. One of them will suffer, but can't you trust me

to see that the suffering isn't too great?

. . ‘. No, I don't trust you. I love you, but I've never
trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of
responsibility that I've always carried about like a sack
of bricks. I'm not a policeman for nothing -— responsible
for order, for seeing justice done. There was no other
profession for a man of my kind, I can't shift my re spon-
sibility to you. If I could, I would be someone else. . . .

So long as ,you live. . . I have hOpe. The re's no human
hOpelessness like the hOpelessness of God. Can't you just
go on, as you are doing now? The voice pleaded, lowering
the terms every time it Spoke, like a dealer in a mar-
ket. . . .

No, he said, No. That's impossible. I love you and I
won't go on insulting you at your own altar. You see, it's
an impasse, God, an impass . . . (290)

This dialog occurs shortly before Scobie's suicide. Scobie feels
that he can no longer defraud God at His own altar by taking communion
in a state of sin. Additionally, he can never abide by the Church's
teaching that "One should look after one's own soul at whatever cost to
another, that's what I can't do, what I shall never be able to do" (199),
he says. As parent, policeman, judge, maniac, and criminal, Scobie
responds to anyone who needs his pity. "I can't make them suffer so
as to save myself. I‘m responsible and I'll see it through the only way
I can" (199). The problem arises again when Scobie speaks to Yusef

and Yusef gives his advice on how to handle problems —- especially

women problems:

 

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213
"I have had much woman trouble in my life. Now it is
better because I have learned the way. The way is not
to care a damn, Major Scobie. You say to each of them,
’I do not care a damn. I sleep with whom I please. You
take me or leave me. I do not care a damn.‘ They
always take you, Major Scobie." He sighed into his
whisky. "Sometimes I wish they would not take me" (270).
Scobie cannot accept "the way" Yusef points out, "the piece of
cotton he holds in the forest," for earlier when Scobie fell into Yusef's
trap through his letter of complete surrender to Helen, he replies to
Yusef’s demand, "Oh, Major Scobie, what made you write such a let-
ter? It was asking for trouble," by "One can't be wise all the time,
Yusef. One would die of disgust"(219).
The problem is, of course, that Scobie does "give a damn." For
unlike some of Greene‘s protagonists — Pinkie is a striking example —
Scobie, rather than being in search of a father, i_s one. "Pity is a

88 It is a

mature passion," one of Greene‘s minor protagonists warns.
mature passion particularly when it becomes the motivating force for
responsibility and involvement. Because Scobie and Arthur Rowe of

The Ministry (if Fear are both "engaged," they are both launched on the

 

same enterprise — life. Rowe will have to relearn what Scobie has
always known, for on leaving the nursing home

a phrase of Johns' came back to mind about a Min-
istry of Fear.. He felt now that he had joined the
permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry
to which Johns referred, with limited aims like win-
ning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Min-
istry as large as life to which all who love belonged.

 

88Mr. Prentice of Scotland Yard tells Arthur Rowe "Adolescents
don‘t feel pity. It's a mature passion"(The Ministflt of Fear, 207).

 

214
If one loved one feared. . . . (267)

In the same way Anna Hilfe reminds Rowe that his killing his wife
was really an act of mercy and that pity is a positive, not a negative
factor in life: " 'You think you are so bad,"she chides, 'but it was only
because you couldn't bear the pain. But the)" " -— she refers here to the
Nazi organization of her nihilistic brother, Willi Hilfe -— " 'can bear
pain -—- other peOple's pain — endlessly’ " (155).

During his amnesia Rowe has picked up a volume of Tolstoy in
the nursing home. Knowing Tolstoy only by means of his portrait,
referring to him as "the old man in the beard," Rowe concludes that
Tolstoy was wrong when he wrote, "I cannot acknowledge any State or

nations. . . . I cannot take part." Perhaps because The Ministry (if

 

Fear is written during wartime, or perhaps because Greene always

 

writes Eli) specie aeternitas, Rowe concluded that Tolstoy was wrong,

 

that the man was too interested in saving his own soul to help others.

Although Rowe concludes that he is not interested in saving his
own soul, Scobie i_s. If Scobie longs so avidly for peace, it is not just
the solitary quarter hours that can be stolen in his office or on the treks
with Ali into the bush, but it is mainly for eternal peace. Yet, because
he must try to set things right in this world first, his felicity, whether
temporal or eternal, will be his greatest sacrifice made to God and His
creatures.

Because peace and action, as well as purity and action, are irrec-
oncilable Opposites, Scobie has had to forego his primary goal, peace,

in his efforts to fulfill his secondary aims, to love God's creatures as

215
God does Himself and to never fail in his responsibility toward them.
It is, of course, the impossibility of these aspirations which leads Sco-
bie to ultirnate despair. In this way he gambles his right to heaven
jeopardizing the salvation of his own soul, he forfeits his hOpe for hea-
ven and an eternity of peace on the basis that he cannot do as he has
been taught to do, think only of himself.

Scobie, nevertheless, always assumes in his actions and his atti—
tudes that "there was only one person in the world who was unpitiable -
himself" (192). Yet God, it would seem, must be less absolute in his
demands on Scobie than Scobie .is in his self-demands. For a man who
excuses others' shortcomings, realizing that "human beings couldn't be
heroic all the time: those who surrender everything — for God or love —
must be allowed some times in thought to take back their surrender,"
there should also exist a God who is no less compassionate or absolute
in His own demands. Such a God must also realize, as does Scobie,
that "so many had never committed the heroic act however rashly. It

was the act that counted"(257). For this reason it is expected that God

must surely forgive him as Donne also hoped for forgiveness when he
argued:
Thou knowest this man's fall, but Thou knowest not his
wrastling; which perchance was such that almost his
very fall is justified and accepted of God. 89

Barbara Seward comes again to Scobie's defense, maintaining

that his final despair derives from charity and from a "conviction that

 

89Quoted by Allott and Farris, 215.

216
one must love weakness and ugliness and failure because in all human
existence there can be no real purity, beauty, success." And she'adds,
"While Dante was led to heaven by those qualities in Beatrice that
reflected the light of ultimate Good, Greene's heroes are led by pity
for man’s loss of so much of that heavenly light." Here she implies
that Scobie exceeds Dante in charity because where Dante began not
with the baser Florentines, but with Beatrice, Scobie began with the
dwellers of the Coast and of the chromium world. Where in "Dante
love grows from admiration for the Godliness of Beatrice to a vaster
admiration for the essence of God Himself, in Greene love grows from
pity for man in suffering the loss of God to a vaster pity for God in suf-
fering the loss of man"(93).

If Scobie has been tortured by the idea that he has been bribed by
sentiment, it seems apparent that God has been suborned in the same
way. If Sc'obie was seduced by pity for the Portuguese captain's love
for his daughter, so is God swayed on behalf of one who sacrifices his
peace, even his eternal peace, because he truly loves r_x_12._i_s age _a_ v_i_d_a_.
In this respect it may be recalled that in return for Scobie's sacrifice
of integrity the captain had brought him back a religious medal saying,
"I have brought you this. It was all that I could find for you in Lobito.
She is a very obscure Saint. . . . Santa. . . I don’t remember her name. _
She had something to do with Angola, I think. . ."(220-221)

The last defense for Scobie lies, of course, in his humility: for
Scobie, like the whisky priest, is humbled by his sense of inadequacy.

Not only does Scobie die feeling that he has failed completely, but he

217

dies contrite for "he dredged his unconsciousness up from an infinite
distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, ’Dear God, I
love. . . , ' "(90), but the phrase is never finished. Perhaps what he
was unable to put into words were ideas similar to the dying thoughts
of the Mexican priest who felt

only an immense disappointment because he had to go

to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It

seemed to him at that moment that it would have been

quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have

needed a little self-restraint and a little courage. He

felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds

at an appointed place. He knew now at the endthe re

was only one thing that counted -— to be a saint. 9
The last that is known of Scobie is that "he did not feel his body when
it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like
a coin under the ice-box— the saint whose name nobody could remem-

ber" (299).

Is it not possible that Scobie may also be, like the unnamed Mexi-

can priest, an unknown saint?

 

90The Power a_rgi th___e Glory, 284.

 

PART X
THE MAP: NEW PIECES COMING INTO PLACE
I

Wonder

Despite the danger involved in such a state or aspiration, Graham
Greene has not completely rejected innocence. Innocence as a negative,
even a deadly, quality was most apparent in the protagonist Alden Pyle

in Greene's novel The Quiet American. But the unspoiled quality which

 

Greene comes to endorse in his later work is quite different from the
false innocence of that American who directed affairs in Vietnam from
the basis of his ignorance. The innocence which Greene knows is still
needed, while other forms must be rejected, ”is that which embraces a
kind of power — "A quality of darkness. . . of the inexplicable, some-
thing which has to be taken as a symbol because it has no meaning for
the conscious brain."91 Such innocence is needed because service needs
faith; art, a sense of wonder.

The sense of wonder is a response to true innocence. For wonder
stems from what Herbert Read calls a "virgin sensibility" or the "inno-
cent eye." Knowing that the creative spirit depends on this early view,
Greene quotes Read, in his study devoted to this critic, as saying:

"The only real experiences in life" are those "lived with a virgin sensi-

bility— so that we hear a tone once, only see a colour once, see, hear,

 

91From an early essay by Greene, "Analysis of a Journey,‘'
quoted by Gwenn R. Boardxnan in a study entitled "Greene's 'Under the
Garden: Aesthetic Explorations,‘ " Renascence, XVII, 4(Summer 1965),
183.

 

218

219

touch, taste and smell, everything but once, the first time."92

As a phenomenon of childhood, the seven-year-old Wilditch in
Greene‘s short story, "Under the Garden," also experiences this pris-
tine type of vision. It is, however, a much older Wilditch who realizes
what he“ has lost in the experience of living; it is the impact of the pri-
mal vision that he returns to recapture. It is only then that Wilditch
recognizes the significance of the treasure which has been revealed to
him underground. He now knows that "that was a sparkling mass of
jewellery such as I had never seen before." In his effort to recapture
the early experience he notes a fallacy in his recollection: for he was
going to describe them as being "in all the colours of the rainbow, but
the colours of the stones have not that pale girlish simplicity." The
experience has been greater than the tags he had immediately begun to
place upon it, for "there were reds almost as deep as raw liver,
stormy blues, greens like a shadow in snow, and stones without colour
at all that sparkled brighter than all the rest. I say I've seen nothing
like it," Wilditch continues, now recognizing that a jaded perception,
born almost in the act of viewing, had, nourished by time and experi-
ence, increased until "the scepticism of middle age. . . leads me now to
compare the treasure trove with caskets overflowing with artificial
jewellery which you sometimes see in the shOp windows of Italian tour-

"93

ist resorts. It is only in these late efforts to unbury his early

 

92"Herbert Read," The Lost Childhood. a_n_c_l Other Essays, 138.

 

 

 

93The Sense qf Reality, 51.

 

220
response to experience that Wilditch recovers a part of his virgin sen-
sibility, a sensibility to which he can now add the power of adult judg-
ment. This is the closest possible return to the innocent vision.

In seeking to regain this innocent vision, Wilditch returns to the
scene of the adventure, Winton Hall. For it is there that he encountered
those two ancient repositories of Power, Javitt and Maria, who live
under the garden. In rereading his schoolboy account, which he has
always assumed to be based on the experience, he discovers that he
had not only omitted the external truth but the internal Truth as well.
This adventure, which he can never assign with any degree of certainty
to dream or actuality, while revealing more in the line of treasure than
the actual hoard, appears to have been deliberately falsified in his
youthful effort. The question which now plagues him in regard to the
indistinctly recalled dream or happening is: "bad he forgotten or was he
afraid to remember?"

The distortion or falsification of facts has obviously crept into
Wilditch's account as a result of the artificial world in which he grows
up. Such a world is Greene's "sinless graceless empty" world which
he designates as "chromium." To what extent, then, has truth been
buried under a layer of s0phistication? To what extent has early read-

ing -— The Romance of Australian Exploration, or even Treasure Island,

 

 

 

lain between his narration and the facts?
On the other hand, how much guilt or responsibility is attribu-
table to the more direct influence of this world? For his mother,

trained in the school of the early Fabians, leans toward statistics,

221
eschewing all mysteries, even Wilditch’s youthful "explorations" and
the region of the garden known as the Dark Walk. His brother, con-
cerned with problems in plumbing and management, has, despite his
being in occupation all these years, found Winton Hall "a bit of a disap-
pointment," and has no idea of what may lie under the garden.

Like other Greenelanders, Wilditch is fatherless. He admits,
however, that in his dream or bona fide adventure, he listened to Javitt
"as I could have listened to my own father if I possessed one" (31). In
learning from such a deputy father that it is only "under the earth or
over the earth, it‘s there you'll find all that matters" (30), Wilditch
rejects the chrome-plated world for one of greater intensity:

I could sit here now for hours, remembering the
things he said —- I haven't made out the sense of
them all yet; they are stored in my memory like a

code uncoded which waits for a clue or an inspira-
tion. (33)

Gwen R. Boardxnan, writing perceptively of "Under the Garden,"
clairns that Javitt, the old man born with one leg, and Maria, a dirty
old woman who quacks, "are prototypes of Power, that supernatural or
spiritual force whose loss from the modern world Greene has so fre-
quently mourned."94 And it is in the sense of Power that Javitt can be
equated with a father, or even an archetypal Father, for he is both the
repository and transmitter of wisdom. Maria, on the other hand, is a
force to be prOpitiated, the witch of the primitive bushland who still

haunts, in their dreams, the children of the metallic world.

 

94Greene’s "Under the Garden: Aesthetic Explorations," Renas-
cence, XVII, 4(Sum1ner 1965), 183.

 

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222
Both Javitt and Maria represent that Power which Greene insists
is manifest in the devils or witches who initiate the young peOple of the
African bush into life. He claims that their potency emerges from
their simultaneous qualities of good and evil, as well as an element of
black magic. Civilized man, Greene argues, need only find and recog-
nize this synthesis of good and evil, because "to triumph over such
forces we need only to find and recognize this power; flight is a weak-
ness."95
This is, then, a portion of the innocent vision which is lacking in
the civilized world. And this vision, in its loss, incorporates other
losses — two auxiliary senses which Wilditch also experienced below
the garden— a greater joy and a greater terror. For this he recog-
nized in
the strange balance -— to and fro — of those days; half
the time I was frightened as though I were caged in a
nightmare and half the time I only wanted to laugh freely
and happily at the strangeness of his speech and the nov-
elty of his ideas. It was as if, for those hours, the only
important things in life were two, laughter and fear. (34)
Although it was some time after writing his early account of his
visit to Javitt and Maria that Wilditch finally escaped from the world of

the surface and of surface values, it was, however, during the under-

ground visit that he acquired the resolution that would change his life's

 

95This is what Greene insists is lacking in the watered-down reli-
gion of the chrome world. He wrote that "the Anglican Church almost
relinquished Hell. It smoked and burned on Sundays only in obscure
provincial pulpits, but no day passed in a Catholic Church without pray-
ers for deliverance from evil spirits 'wandering through the world for
the ruin of souls.‘ " (The Lost Childhood, 36)

 

 

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223

course. For if Querry, the protagonist of _A_ Burnt-Out Case, and

 

Greene, in his Journej Without Maps and his I_1_1 Search of a Character:

 

 

 

Two African Journals, had made excursions into the "heart of dark-

 

ness," Wilditch had early shown his penchant for a deeper exploration
of life, using the Dark Walk -- whose overgrown laurels were festooned
with cobwebs — as his point of departure. While Wilditch journeyed in
pursuit of Beauty, Querry in search of Peace, Greene found in his voy-
ages, a vestige of Innocence. He found

in the childhood of Africa what. . .was not a prelap-

sarian Eden, but the Eden at the moment the apple

is to be plucked: neither guilty nor innocent of the

forces of evil. There the childhood of the race is

indeed acquainted intimately with the devil, the witch

of our dreams; yet in that intimacy it has still not

lost the instinctive ritualistic terror, the imagination

that comprehends the supernatural. 9

Again, the awareness of terror and joy was not the only reward

issuing from Wilditch‘s underground adventure, for there below-ground
Wilditch also encountered his life’s goal. His purpose or goal was as
meaningful and as undefinable as Querry's Pende’lé. When Javitt showed
him a picture of perfect Beauty— the daughter of those two grotesques —
Wilditch knew he would search for her in every part of the world. As
an early explorer in the garden, Wilditch had fallen on his me’tier, for
he later comments: ,"It was as though the purpose of life had suddenly

come tome as it must have come often enough to some future explorer

when he noticed on a map for the fir st time an empty space in the heart

 

96Carolyn D. Scott, "The Witch at the Corner," Graham Greene:

Some Critical Considerations, ed. Robert 0. Evans (mxington, Ky. ,
19635, 233.

 

 

I

224
of a continent" (48). Javitt and Maria's daughter must also have had
some such intangible aspiration for Javitt said: "She went away, our
daughter did, with a want looking for a want — and not a want you can
measure in inches either or calculate in numbers by the week" (43).

In regard to Wilditch's quest and the possibility of its fulfillment,
J avitt advised:

Good luck to you, then. . . . You'll have to travel a long
way, you'll have to forget all your schoolmasters try to
teach you; you must be like a horse-trader and not be
tied up with loyalties any more than you are here and
who knows? I doubt it, but you might, you just might.
(54-55)

Javitt's "who knows?. . . you might, you just might" is vastly
important in the search for an aspiration, for whether it is a search
for Beauty or any other absolute, it implies at least the possibility of
its attainment.

The most important lesson Wilditch learns from Javitt, however,
is another - disloyalty. And because Javitt and Maria are rogues --
not only because of their unusual ugliness, their near-eternal lives,
and their extraordinary manner of living them below-ground — but in
their fresh view of things above-ground -— they transmitted some of
their roguery to their adOpted son:

Be disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The
human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man
who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork.
If you have to earn a living boy, and the price they
make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent — and
never let either of the two sides know your real
name. (44)

Wilditch is a rogue for he is one of the few who recover, at

least in part, the "innocent eye"; he is again a rogue because in his

/\

\4

 

 

225
rejection of the chrome-world he wanders apart from the herd. The
wisdom that Javitt and Maria have imparted to him is innocence, a
quality needed not only by the artist but by the creative person in any
walk of life. Such innocence has been lost by the chromium world.
Javitt relates those who pOpulate that world to

peOple who keep nursery-gardens. who look around
all the time at the seedlings and. . . throw away any
oddities like weeds. They call them rogues. . . .
But sometimes you find someone who wants things
different, who's tired of all the plus signs and wants
to find zero, and he starts breeding away with the
differences. . . . (42)

"And only when you get back to zero, to the base of things,
there's a chance to start again free and independent"(4l). While
Wilditch's has been an aesthetic exploration, the same base, the same
"zero" is needed for other types of creative endeavor. This "zero" is
the true innocence, the blank page. It is not the innocence which is
ignorance, but the innocence of knowledge, of the knowledge which

comes from disloyalty of the saint or the rogue —— the knowledge which

indicates that it is time to begin again.

II

Faith

In Graham Greene's latest novel, The Comedians, there is a

 

 

strange series of communications coming from a protagonist, gener-
ally known as "Jones" or "Major Jones." They concern a Mr. Smith,
while Brown is the recipient:

"There's something about him. . . " He added sur-
prisingly, "He reminded me of my father. Not physic-
ally, I mean, but. . .well, a sort of goodness."

"Yes I know what you mean. I don't remember my
father."

"To tell you the truth my memory's a bit dim too."

"Let's say the father we would have liked to have."

"That's it, old man, exactly. . . . I always felt that
Mr. Smith and I had a bit in common. Horses out of
the same stable."

I listened with astonishment. What could a saint
possibly have in common with a rogue? (209)

Innocence is the only parallel that Brown can discover between
Mr. Smith, the presidential candidate running against Truman on the
vegetarian ticket in 1948, and Jones who brought, wherever he wan-
dered, his suspect name and rank and his talisman, a stolen Asprey
cocktail- shaker.

Each is quixotic. Although Mr. Smith failed to win the election
he appears two decades later in Haiti in order to establish a vegetarian
center in Duvalier's land of terror. His theory is that by reducing
acidity he can reduce passion in the human organism. Jones, Brown
has begun to realize, entertains behind his apparent spiritual bank-

ruptcy a deep commitment to an absolute. For where Mr. Smith recog-

nized such ideals as Mankind, Justice, and the Pursuit of Happiness,

226

.I'Iqlu’l

227
Brown speculates about Jones' commitment:
I wondered whether perhaps in all his devious life he
had been engaged in a secret and hopeless love-affair
with virtue, watching virtue from a distance, h0ping
to be noticed, perhaps, like a child doing wrong in
order to attract the attention of virtue. (286)

Therefore innocence in both Jones and Smith leads them into a
commitment larger than themselves, a commitment which is a form of
faith. In this respect Brown learns from Smith:

"You were talking about yourmission just now."

”Was I? You must excuse me, talking about my-
self like that. Mission is too big a word."

”I'm interested."

"Call it hope." (16)

The quality of 110138 is the equivalent of faith —- a faith without a
religious belief perhaps — which in Mr. Smith fails to die even in the
face of evidence. This is proven, because when his dream of a vege-
tarian center fails to materialize in Haiti he moves to Santo Domingo
with the same purpose in mind. On the off-chance, however, he leaves
capies of his vegetarian handbook — like a Gideon Bible — behind him.
Jones, too, has faith in the lucky break, the off-chance. "One never
knows," which is almost a parody of Greene's prevailing theme "Who
knows?" is, as Brown suspects, "Jones' deepest research into the
meaning of life" (12). It serves to indicate Jones' faith that he will
someday achieve his dream — his own Never-Never-Land— a hotel on
some lonely Caribbean island with a bar at the eighteenth hole. How-
ever, when he reaches his point of no return at the Haitian- Dominican

border, the reader learns that Smith's brand of hOpe is transportable,

Jones' is not. Hearing Jones' remark, which is related to him by

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228
another, that "there is no room for me outside of Haiti," Brown remem-
bers "the captain's cable from the office in Philadelphia and the mes-
sage that the chargé had received. There was more in his past," he
realizes, ”than a cocktail-shaker stolen from Asprey's, that was
certain" (304).

Another resemblance between this saint and this rogue is the sat-
isfaction each achieves through service. By chance alone Jones becomes
committed to Haitian liberty, a lucky break, too, in that he meets his
Never-Never-Land in another form, in the form of virtue or respecta-
bility, and sooner than he expects. Brown relates, "He hadn't found
his golf-course, but I really believe he was happy" (295). For once on
learning of another's death Jones had commented: " 'Poor bugger. . . .
That makes him sort of respectable, doesn't it?‘ he added with a kind
of yearning" (226). Before he joins the guerillas he senses his end and
in his pursuit of virtue, his desire to "come clean" is manifested. Mak-
ing an end of dissembling, he says, "I don't fancy a lot of lies after I’m
dead. I've lied enough before" (283).

It is when Brown learns through another protagonist more of the
fantasy Jones lives by that he sees still more clearly the similarity

97

between Smith and Jones.

 

97While Jones and Smith incorporate some traits of Greene's
potential saints, so does Querry, the protagonist of the novel _A_ Burnt-
O_gt C2_a_s_e. While Querry travels away from civilization and success
to find peace or death in the Congo, he learns from his native boy, Deo
Gratias, of a Never-Never-land, Pendélé. All Deo Gratias can com-
municate of Pende’lé is that it was a place he remembers from his
childhood where, he recalls, "nous e’tions heureux."

 

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229
"He asked me to lend him back his cocktail-shaker.
He said it's a mascot. . . . He says he'll return it when
the guerillas enter Port-au-Prince."

"He certainly has his dreams," I said. ”Perhaps
he's an innocent too.’' (263)

This, then, is the bond which Jones had intuited between Smith
and himself — the rogue and the saint -— for both are innocent. Theirs,

like that of another character in The Comedians, the Haitian, Doctor

 

Magiot, who had committed himself to yet another mystique, Cornmun-
ism, is the innocence of faith. For if dreams are a form of faith, faith
is a form of innocence.

It is only those who are without dreams who are neither loyal nor

disloyal. They are the non-committed. They are the Browns who know

that

the rootless have experienced, like all the others, the
temptation of sharing the security of a religious creed
or a political faith, and for some reason we have turned
the temptation down. We are the faithless; we admire
the dedicated, the Doctor Magiots and the Mr. Smiths,
for their courage and their integrity, for their fidelity
to a cause. . . ."(300)

In an earlier novel, The End o_f the Affair, Greene's author-nar-
rator, Maurice Bendrix, speaks of both the saints and those "comic

peOple, futile people, little suburban natures" already mentioned else-

where by Greene. It is the latter whom Bendrix maintains are, in the

 

97(cont.) In serving others Querry has found, unknown to him-
self, his Pendélé. For he has announced several times, "I am content
here."

Querry also underlines the concept of faith derived from inno-
cence — a credo quia absurdum. For as he dies he-exclaims,
" 'Absurd. . .this is absurd or else. . . ‘ but what alternative, philo-
sOphical or psychological, he had in mind they never knew" (A Burnt-
(2111: Case, 192). _-

ex

 

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230
problem of artistic creation, those who "obstinately will not come
alive." For sometimes, as in life, there is one character "who sticks,
he has to be pushed around. . . And yet one cannot do without him. I
can imagine a God," Bendrix continues, "feeling in just that way about
some of us." The saints, however, differ, for:

the saints one would suppose, in a sense create them-
selves. They come alive. They are capable of the
surprising act or word. They stand outside the plot,
unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around.
We have the obstinacy of:non-existence. . . Wearily
God forces us, here and there, according to his inten-
tions, characters without poetry, without free will,
whose only importance is that somewhere, at some
time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living
character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the
saints with the Opportunities for their free will. 93

It is the committed, Mr. Smith, Doctor Magiot, and even Jones,
who have abided by the words of the sermon delivered at the funeral of
the Haitian guerillas:

Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him. . . . The
Church is in the world, it is part of the suffering in
the world, and though Christ condemned the disciple
who struck off the ear of the high priest's servant,
our hearts go out in sympathy to all who are moved to
violence by the suffering of others.

They have committed disloyalties because:

the Church condemns violence, but it condemn[sic]
indifference more harshly. Violence can be the
expression of love, indifference never. One is the
imperfection of charity, the other the perfection of
egoism.

They have at the same time remained loyal because:

 

231
In the days of fear, doubt and confusion the simplicity
and loyalty of one apostle advocated a political solu-
tion. He was wrong but I would rather be wrong with
Saint Thomas than right with the cold and the craven.
Let us go up to Jerusalem and die with him. (304—305)

Brown had learned in school from his earlier deputy fathers -- the
Fathers of the Visitation — that the proof of any faith was the willingness
to die for it. While Jones had seen a father in Mr. Smith, Brown had
unconsciously thought of Magiot in terms of a father. For Magiot had
not only loved Brown's mother, but Brown realizes with Magiot's death,
too late, that never knowing "the day when my father died, if he had
died. . . I experienced for the first time the sense of sudden separation
from someone on whom as alast resort Icould depend" (306). Father-
less and rootless, Brown remains among those who have chosen nothing
except to go on living. It is significant then, that he who considers
himself among those "rolled round on Earth's diurnal course, With
rocks and stones and trees," drives a hearse and erects monuments
after those ‘he admired have died!

In the last analysis, it is those who have a true sense of disloy-

99

alty, who have come to the true "sense of reality,"that is, have seen

 

99Greene's disloyalty has served him in this respect for he
wrote: "If I may be personal, I belong to a group, the Catholic Church,
which would present me with grave problems as a writer were I not
saved by my disloyalty. . . . You remember the black and white squares
of Bishop Blougram's chess board. As a novelist, I must be allowed to
write from the point of view of the black square as well as of the white:
doubt and even denial must be given their chance of self-expression, or
how is one freer than the Leningrad group?" (Quoted by De Vitis in his
Graham Greene [New York, 1964], 44).

His disloyalty has also been an effort to get back to innocence
even in religion. The Catholic Church was not only to him an active

 

232

the world as "all-of-a-piece." For they are those who in their return
to innocence have recaptured the sense of wonder and offaith.

0n the other hand, it is those who are so afraid of an innocence
which may be ignorance that they live instead in ignorance of an inno-
cence that is knowledge, who resemble Wilditch's mother. For even
though the chromium world continues to make greater inroads, while
the factory chimneys begin to appear beyond the garden at Wild Grove
and council-houses appear outside the garden wall at Winton Hall,

Wilditch realizes: '"Poor Mother — she had reason to fear" (6 l).

 

99(cont.)force in the world which offered a "hint of an explanation" for
the inquiring mind; it also represents a point of reference or a salient
point from which he can diverge, for Greene felt as Mauriac who
writes, "Above all I liked to be persuaded by Pascal that a search was
always possible, that there could always be a voyage of discovery
within revealed truth" (De Vitis, 139).

CONCLUSION

In the develOpment of this study "Concepts of Sainthood in the
Novels of Albert Camus and Graham Greene," each author has first
been treated separately. In the individual treatments each has been
studied in regard to his world view, the universe he has himself cre-
ated, the hierarchy of values which he has depicted through the presen-
tation of human types or "careers," and his delineation of the saints
themselves. At this point, however, the two authors and their views
will be treated in relation to each other, and it will be revealed that
there are, among their differences, many similarities.

Of the similarities, the mo st basic is the concern which both
authors feel for the damned, or the damnés. In this respect Camus
has written: "Sens de mon oeuvre: Tant d'hommes sont prive’s de la
grace. Comment vivre sans grace? Il faut bien s'y mettre et faire
ce que le Christianisme n'a jamais fait: s'occuper des damnés."100
The study shows how Meursault of Camus' L'Etranger is a type of

Everyman, living under a sentence of death no more certain than that

of the plague-stricken condamne’s immured in the city of Oran.

 

Greene's concern with the damned has also been illustrated.
Resorting to Péguy's pronouncements, Greene demonstrates that the
sinner can be on a par with the saint in matters of Christianity. The

study therefore shows how Scobie and the anonymous Mexican priest of

 

looCarnets, II, pp. 129-130(Paris, 1964), 129-130. Subsequent
quotations taken from this volume of Carnets will be taken from this
edition.

233

234

The Heart o_f the Matter and The Power a_n_<_i th___e Glory, respectively,

 

 

 

have sinned, yet in sinning have, perhaps, achieved sanctity. It also
shows how Greene‘s protagonists again follow Péguy in their refusal
to accept salvation when others are damned. Péguy's philos0phy in
regard to his own life is also used as the basis for incidents in Greene's
novels and is expressed explicitly in Brighton Rock:101

There was a man, a Frenchman. . . . He was a good man,

a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life,

because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suf-

fer damnation. . . . This man decided that if any soul

was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He

never took the sacraments, he never married his wife

in the church. I don't know mar child, but some peOple

think he was — well, a saint. 1 2

The episode in which the Mexican priest claims that if anyone is

to be damned in his state he wishes damnation for himself, is cited in
the study to illustrate this concept. The same type of concern for
others is shown in the priest's offer to accept, damnation in exchange
for his illegitimate daughter's salvation and in Scobie's willing sacri-

fice of his eternal peace for an unknown child. The study also shows

how such sacrifices are made on the secular as well as the religious

 

101Although Camus' Carnets contain the following citation without

annotations, he appears to have read Brighton Rock as he certainly
read The Heart 9f th__e Matter in French translation:

Un homme (un Frangais?) saint homme qui a vécu toute

sa vie dans le péché (n‘approchant pas la Table Sainte,

n'épousant pas la femme avec qu'il vivait) parce que ne

pouvant souffrir l'ide’e qu‘une seule Eme ffit damné, il

voulait é‘tre damne’ aussi.
Camus adds: "11 s'agissait de cet amour plus grand que tous: celui de
l'homme qui donne son Sme pour un ami" (Carnets, II, 211).

 

102Brighton Rock (New York, 1938), 356.

 

234

The Heart o_f th__e Matter and The Power a_n_c_l 1113 Glory, respectively,

 

 

 

have sinned, yet in sinning have, perhaps, achieved sanctity. It also
shows how Greene's protagonists again follow Péguy in their refusal
to accept salvation when others are damned. Pe’guy's philosoPhy in

regard to his own life is also used as the basis for incidents in Greene's

novels and is expressed explicitly in Brighton Rock:101

There was a man, a Frenchman. . . . He was a good man,
a holy man, and he lived in sin all through his life,
because he couldn't bear the idea that any soul could suf-
fer damnation. . . . This man decided that if any soul

was going to be damned, he would be damned too. He
never took the sacraments, he never. married his wife

in the church. I don't know mg child, but some peOple
think he was — well, a saint.1 2

 

The episode in which the Mexican priest claims that if anyone is
to be damned in his state he wishes damnation for himself, is cited in
the study to illustrate this concept. The same type of concern for
others is shown in the priest's offer to accept damnation in exchange
for his illegitimate daughter's salvation and in Scobie's willing sacri-
fice of his eternal peace for an unknown child. The study also shows

how such sacrifices are made on the secular as well as the religious

 

101Although Camus' Carnets contain the following citation without

annotations, he appears to have read Brighton Rock as he certainly
read The Heart g_f th_e Matter in French translation:

Un homme (un Francais?) saint homme qui a vécu toute

sa vie dans le péché (n'approchant pas 1a Table Sainte,

n‘épousant pas la femme avec qu'il vivait) parce que ne

pouvant souffrir l'idée qu'une seule Sme ffit damné, i1

voulait Etre damné aussi.
Camus adds: "11 s'agissait de cet amour plus grand que tous: celui de
l'homme qui donne son Sme pour un ami" (Carnets, II, 211).

102Brighton Rock (New York, 1938), 356.

 

235

level. From the entertainment, The Ministry o_f Fear, for instance, a

 

citation stating that it is better to sin with those you love than be saved

alone is used as an epigraph to the section on Scobie and The Heart of

 

th__e Matter; while Arthur Rowe, the protagonist of the same entertain-
ment, in criticising Tolstoy for being too interested in saving his own
soul, inadvertently reveals the altruism of his own act — the mercy

killing of his wife — an act for which he, nevertheless, condemns hini-

self.

 

Whatever examples Camus and Greene offer in illustration of
their concern for the damned also reveal another concern— their deep-
rooted dissatisfaction with justice as it is administered on the physical
plane, and as it is assumed to be administered on the metaphysical
plane. The critic Carina Gadourek is among those who equate the sense
of Camus' work with his interest in justice, for she writes: "L‘oeuvre
est concue comme une acte de révolte visant a remplacer 1e christian—
isme que Camus qualifia de 'doctrine de 1'injustice.’ "103 Camus, in
his Carnets, H, includes this entry: "Nous devons servir la justice
parce que cet univers est malheureux. De meme, nous ne devons pas
condamner a mort puisqu'on a fait de nous des condamnés de mortf' (129).

To illustrate Greene’s and Camus' concern with justice, there
are two parallel court scenes which show the scepticism of these
authors regarding temporal, and on the symbolic level, eternal justice.

The first is from Greene's The Ministry if Fear and presents Arthur

 

Rowe's reactions to his trial:

 

lo3Les Innocents g. le__s coupables (The Hague, 1963). 226-

 

r
5

. .’

 

236

. . ._i_t might 1w 3 bearing. That's something I dis-
covered when they tried me - that everythirg may
have a bearing. The fact that I had lunch on a certain
day alone at the Holborn Restaurant. Why was I
alone, they asked me. I said I liked being alone
sometimes, and you should have seen the way they
nodded at the jury. g had _a bearing. . . . As if I
really wanted to be alone for life. . . . Even the fact
that my wife kept love-birds. . . . They just had to
find an excuse. [italics added] 104

 

In Camus' L'Etranger the court must find in Meursault's case

 

une relation profonde, or "the vital link," as it is translated into Eng-

 

lish. Such a term replaces the "it may have a bearing" in Rowe's case,
for Meursault finally realizes: "Je lui ai fait remarquer que cette his-
toire n'avait pas de rapport avec mon affaire, mais il m'a répondu
seulement qu'il était visible que je n'avais jamais eu de rapports avec
la justice."105 Meursault then learns how his performance at his
mother's funeral counts against him:

Enfin est-il accuse’ d'avoir enterré sa mére ou d'avoir
tué un homme? Le public a ri. Mais 1e procureur s'est
redressé encore, s'est drapé dans sa robe et a declare’
qu'il fallait avoir l'ingenuité de l'honorable défenseur
pour ne pas sentir qu'il y avait entre ces deux ordres
de fait up; relation profonde, pathétique, essentielle.
"Oui, s'est-il écrié avec force, j'accuse cet homme
d'avoir enterre’ une mére avec un coeur de crimenel."
Cette de’claration a paru faire un effet conside’rable sur
le public, . . . et j'ai compris que les choses n'attaient
pas bien pour moi. [italics added] (142)

The study also demonstrates how each author constructs a

 

104The Ministry 93 Fear (London, 1950), 35.

 

105L'Etranger (Paris, 1942), 99. Subsequent quotations from
L'Etranger will be taken from this edition.

 

237
universe patterned to his philos0phical view. These parallels are
revealed within their created worlds. In considering Camus' creation,
the first aspect that comes to mind is undoubtedly his lyrical writing,

celebrating the mer, terre, soleil of his native Algeria. Yet Camus’

 

use of such landscapes is two-fold. Algeria is depicted as a land of
relative innocence which he compares with a EurOpe fully imbued with
the knowledge of evil. This symbolic division is made between the
Mediterranean (which both Camus and E. M. Forster equate with the
human norm) and the darker EurOpe beyond its littoral. The EurOpe of

snow, fog, and rain is described in If Malentendu, Les Justes, and in

 

the Amsterdam of If Chute. It is the EurOpe of nihilistic excess, the

 

land of Stavrogin, of Stepan, of Marthe, and of Jean-Baptiste Clamence.
Here the circular canals of Amsterdam recall the concentric circles of

Dante’s Inferno and here Clamence as a juge-penitent excels Camus'

 

other robes rouggs in the matter of human treachery.

 

In addition to contrasting EurOpean experience with African inno-
cence, Camus makes use of a further symbolic division. In his North
African landscapes he points out a duality existent in the world of
nature itself. For nature, he insists, is two-faceted, containing both
l’envers e_t l'endroit. Knowledge of this dichotomy cautions that man
must stand in relation to this world of nature midway between £1319}
I_1_o_n - acceptance and rejection. The study has pointed out that while
the African sun offsets the poverty and misery of Camus' early life, it

also reveals itself as being the "black sun of death." Meursault relates

his experience of this sun: "Je me sentais plus que les cymbales du

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238
soleil sur mon front. . . . C'est alors que tout a vacillé. La m'a
semblé que le ciel s'ouvrait sur toute son étendue pour laisser pleuvoir
du feu"(90). Meursault illustrates the danger of complicity with nature
for the four additional shots which he fires into the lifeless Arab show

106 Tarrou, whom Camus

his consent and surrender to an absolute.
presents as his saint, and who occupies a central position in the chap-
ter ”Albert Camus: The Temptation Toward Sainthood," also illustrates
the danger of capitulating to nature. For Tarrou, in his death, which
is no more than a higher form of suicide, in forsaking men and their

tribulations, yields to his chronic desire for the "peace of stones.”

A study of Greene's symbolic division of the world is made in the

 

106Even the sea, an aspect of nature which in Camus represents
in turn a source of sensory delight, the catalyst for rare and transitory
moments of recaptured innocence, and a symbol for freedom, is sus-
pect. The darker aspect of the sea has been indicated in this study in
the episode in which Tarrou and Rieux swim together. When they run
into a cold current, "fouettés par cette surprise de la mer," they has-
ten their return to the world of men. (I_.._a Peste [Paris, 1947], 212)

In Greene's novels, however, the sea is invariably a hostile ele-
ment, corrupted by "the coasts" it washes. In England Made Mg (Lon-
don, 1947), for instance, Anthony Farrant, commenting on Pericles,
Prince 9f Tyre, exclairns: "What a wet play it is. . . the sea. And
ooze" (225). (Anthony drowns in the sea he has always feared.) In
Brighton Rock (New York, 1938), there are many examples to cite:
below the pier, for instance, "on the bottom step between the mud
marks stared up the tawny face of Violet Crow violated and buried
under the West Pier in 1936" (205); again, "you could hear the sea pound-
ing at the piles, like a boxer's fist at punchball in training for the
human jaw" (324). The critics Allott and Farris write of the sea in
Brighton Rock: "The blare of seaside music with sex as its main theme
is the world's 'wet mouth‘ (a frequent image in the book)wailing its per-
verted longings" (0p. cit. , 159). And again in Brighton Rock, "The boy
was staring over the side where the green tide sucked and slid like a
wet mouth round the piles" (132). Camus oddly enough has used the
same image: ". . . la baie tremblante de lumiére comme une levre
humide" (L’Envers e_t l'endroit [Paris, 1958], 54).

 

 

 

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34

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239
chapter, "Graham Greene: The Journey Toward Sainthood." While
Camus' world has been seen as bi-partite, Greene's is tri-partite;
where Camus', in more ways than one, is a two-dimensional world,
Greene's is consistently three-dimensional. For Greene distinguishes
on one plane -—the lateral — between a "chromium world, " a brittle
artificial realm where custom and comfort conceal the evil which flour-
ishes unconcealed in his seedy regions. The latter are "the coasts" or
"borders," sectors which also include Greene's "abandoned" Mexican

states of The Lawless Roads and The Power an_d t_hf Glory. The Greene

 

 

 

world also includes the still primitive world of the African bush.
Where the chromium world is farthest removed, the coasts stand mid-
way, the bush remains closest to true innocence, for it is, Greene
claims, an Eden, not yet fallen but seen in the moment the apple is to
be plucked.

In presenting a three-tiered world Greene also presents a three-
tiered universe. Seen vertically this universe includes, in addition to
the world itself as proving ground, the Opposing eternities of Heaven

and Hell.

The study has also shown how both Camus and Greene fear inno-
cence. [For in most cases innocence represents ignorance. Therefore
in eschewing an innocence which is ignorance, each dreads what he
thinks of as a "stupid human confidence." Particularly in ILa 133833,
Camus shows the passive mass who are still, in the face of the epi-

demic ”enfoncés dans la stupide confiance humaine, a peine distraits

,\

 

 

240
par 1e départ de leurs preoccupations habituelles."107 Such a false con-
fidence is also shown in Meursault's trial and in the trial the youthful
Tarrou (who was another "stranger" to legal procedure) attends where
men in their self-importance and their "false seriousness" condemn to
death one who is, along with themselves, already destined for death.
Greene's Ida Arnold, concerned with what she considers Right and

Wrong rather than Good and Evil (truer values in the Greene world),

 

also tracks down a human victim in her "game" of vengeance. Alden

Pyle goes further, instigating in The Quiet American, on the basis of

 

his far from perfect human understanding, a course of action designed

to destroy men in the mass. Camus and Greene present such types to

point out the lethal aspect of an innocence which is ignorance.108 To

 

107143 peste (Paris, 1947),, 57.

108m illustrating the fearfulness of _l_a stupide confiance humaine
Greene and Camus have again used parallel images:

Ida broke her way across the Strand; she couldn't be
bothered to wait for the signals. . . . She made her way
under the radiators of the buses; the drivers ground
their brakes and glared at her, and she grinned back
at them (Brighton Rock, 37):.

Leon S. Roudiez writes of the automatic woman in L'Etranger

whose behavior in crossing a street resembles Ida's:

Ritualistic life can thus lead to a safe, well-adjusted
pattern of automatic reactions, and Man is naturally
grateful ". . . on comprend que la cére’monie, la fonc-
tion, le costume, la mode soient les dieux de ce monde"
. . . . These, of course, are false gods, or devils at
best, in the world of Meursault. It is precisely such a
devil who appears in the first part of L'Etranger and
proceeds to tempt the Christ-Stranger; he sits, in the
guise of the small woman, at a table in Ce’leste's
restaurant and does everything with the precise ges—
tures of an automaton. When the woman is through,
the Stranger, intrigued, follows her into the street and

 

241
this end, both authors have posited the fact of death as a reminder that
men ultimately cannot prevail.

In depicting his world view, Greene has been accused of a nostal-

&e (le l_a_. boue. But his interest in the squalor encountered on his

 

"coasts" is judicious. Both Greene and Camus, in their concern with

the damned, see, in the darker view of life, a truth. In Brighton Rock,

 

for example, Rose Wilson's slum, which is peripheral to Ida's chromi-
um world, does, if nothing else, graduate its children in the knowledge
of evil. For this reason, if Greene sees a truer revelation of life in
his border regions, Camus sees in his dark and war-torn EurOpe a
region which, while it has lost innocence, has at least gained in acquir—
ing a knowledge of evil.

In his concern with the damned each author is not only involved
with the question of justice but with a factor that lies behind that ques-
tion - evil. Camus, the non- Christian, is sufficiently at home in this
subject for he wrote for his licencié _e_s lett_r_e_s (philosophic) a disserta-
tion entitled "Hellenisme et Christianisme: Saint Augustin et Plotin."
With St. Augustine and the problem of evil in mind, he told the Domini-
cans of Latour-Maubourg: "Nous sommes devant le mal. Et pour moi
il est vrai que je me sens un peu comme cet Augustin d'avant 1e

christianisme que disait: ’Je cherchais d'oii vient 1e mal et je n'en

 

108(cont.) watches her as she moves away with unbelievable speed
and sureness. But he does not succumb, and the world
of ritual remains foreign to him" ("The Literary Cli-
mate of L'Etranger: Samples of a Twentieth-century
Atmosphere," Symposium, XII [Spring-Fall, 1958], 21).

 

 

242
sortais pas.' "109 Louis R. Rossi, in a remark already cited in this
study, asserts that "Camus proceeds by way of negation," for while
"death defines liberty and gives meaning to life," he also states that in
Camus' thought "the acceptance of guilt leads to innocence."110

The critic Barbara Seward, who has been cited frequently in this
study, shows how Greene also follows St. Augustine: "In Greene," she
writes, "atonement is important because it makes possible positive
beauty wrung from the rag of human pain."111 In the same way Lynette
Kohn writes of Greene's "ultimate acceptance of St. Augustine's view
that the recognition of evil is the first step toward grace."112

In Camus, because man is without God, and in Greene, because
man is unsure concerning God's desires for man, man should himself,
because he is capable of pity, assume responsibility as far as evil
(death) and the happiness of others (life) is concerned. In regard to
pity as morality, where Greene's protagonists are concerned, Barbara
Seward writes:

Neither the innocent nor the complacent nor the evil can
approach it. Without a knowledge both of sin and one's
own terrible fallibility, one cannot feel the responsibility

for the unhappiness of others that forms a great part of
Fowler's pity for war’s innocent victims, of Scobie's for

 

109Aotue11es, I(Paris, 1950), 217.

110"Albert Camus: The Plague of Absurdity” The Kenyon Review,
XX (Summer 1958), 414-415.

111"Graham Greene: A Hint of an Explanation," The Western
Review, XXII (Winter 1958). 90.

 

112Graham Greene: The Major Novels (Stanford, Calif. , 1961), 13.

 

 

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243
Louise and Helen, or the priest's for his tainted
daughter, of Rowe's for his dying wife. Without a
knowledge both of anguish and one's own appalling
inadequacy, one cannot feel the enormous sympathy
for the world's brothers in failure that forms the
remaining part of pity in Greene's conscience-stricken
men." (9 l)
The sense of guilt leading to pity and responsibility brings forth
another benefit, a pity for man in general, which induces solidarity.
@his has been seen in the sense of community experienced in L_a Peste,
where not only Tarrou, Rieux, Grand, and Rambert join forces, but
many of the otherwise passive mass rise to the occasion realizing that
under the scourge of plague they are brothers together. Among
Greene's protagonists it is the renegade priest who experiences most
fully the sense of solidarity. When imprisoned, but stilI unrecognized,
he tells the other prisoners of the price on his head:
"Nobody here," a voice said, "wants their blood money."
Again he was touched by an extraordinary affection. He
was just one criminal among a herd of criminals. . . He
had a sense of companionship which he had never received
in the old days when pious peOple came kissing his black
cotton glove. 11
Greene's hero Scobie is also shown in the study to be led by his sense
of pity to responsibility or commitment. Scobie cannot assume a pas-
sive role or trust only to God to do the right thing. In this way— in
that he does not trust God to do what he himself feels is right for men --
(Scobie comes closer than any of Greene’s characters to Camus'

révoltés. [Therefore both Greene and Camus recognize that in their

sense of abandonment all are responsible, for all are criminals among

 

113The Power 3:351 t3! Glory (New York, 1958), 173-174.

 

244

0 -un ~ ‘ I I I I
criminals‘ condamnes among condamnes, or damnes among damnes.

 

 

Ultimately, however, in the matter of justice, Greene depends on
the question of God's mercy, which he assumes is infinite. In Camus"
Carnets, II, there are two entries concerned with metaphysical justice.
One is a quotation from G. K. Chesterton: "La justice est un mystére,
non une illusion" (284); the other, presumably Camus' own, is "11 n'y a
pas do justice, i1 n'y a que des limites" (236). The former citation can
be said to express Greene's view, the latter, Camus'.

If a concept of sin is to be expected in the world of a Catholic
writer, it is surprising, on the other hand, to encounter such a concept
in the world of a non-believer. Sin does exist in Camus' world. It con-
sists of a lack of lucidity. Absence of lucidity can be seen in disloyalty
to the world or to men, in the by-passing of this world, of this present,
which is man's only certainty, for a prOposed eternity of peace or a
future utopia. Either manifestation involves the sacrifice of certain-
ties for a future which may prove illusory. Camusean sin also
embraces the sacrifice of self in a failure of the individual to push back
veils of hypocrisy, layers of self-deception. Rachel Bespaloff in a
line already quoted in this study includes all aspects of Camusean sin
for she states, "Sin without God is nothing but the choice of the wrong

freedom" (106).

This study also shows how each author establishes a hierarchy of
values. These values are displayed in human types. In Greene's nov-

els the saints, as well as the anti-saint Pinkie of Brighton Rock, and

 

245

some of the positive secular characters such as Arthur Rowe, D. ,

 

Fowler, even Rollo Martins in The Third Man loom above the "maimed
and the warped," the complacent, and the permanently innocent. In
Camus' novels his hierarchy is demonstrated in his study of various
"careers." Camus utilizes these careers symbolically because he
believes as he wrote in 1945 in his Carnets, II, that: "La pente la plus
naturelle de l'homme c'est de se ruiner et tout le monde avec lui."
While insisting that man fight this impulse first in himself, he admits
the difficulty: "Que d'efforts démesurés pour $tre seulement normal!
Et quel plus grand effort encore pour qui a l'ambition de se dominer
et de dominer l'esprit." He continues:

L'homme n'est rien de lui-mEme. 11 n'est qu'une chance

infinie. Mais il est le responsable infini de cette chance

. . . . Personne ne peut dire qu'il a atteint le limite de

l'homrne. Les cinq années que nous venons de passer

m'ont appris cela. De la béte au martyre, de l'esprit du

mal au sacrifice sans e8poir, pas un témoignage qui n'ait

été bouleversant. A chacun de nous revient d'exploiter

en lui-méme la plus grande chance de l'homme, sa

vertu definitive. (152-153)
In order to discover man's definitive virtue the priest, doctor, teacher,
judge, saint, hero are considered. The study shows how some are
accepted as symbols of viable ways of life, others rejected. Of the
hero and the saint, however, Camus writes in his notebooks: "L'héro-
'isme et la sainteté, vertus secondaires. Mais i1 faut avoir fait ses
s."114

preuve

Antithetical as Greene's and Camus' views on sainthood will

 

114Carnets, 11, 128.

 

 

 

246
prove to be, many basic similarities have been pointed out in the
study:
1) Each saint is an absolutist, demanding (although never achieving)
perfection for himself, yet relative in his demands on others. (An

example presented in the study is Tarrou, for his code d_e 1_a compré-

 

hension is based on the fact that "Tarrou est l'homme qui peut tout
comprendre — et qui en souffre. Il ne peut rien juger.")115

2) Each saint has lost innocence and because he feels exiled is long-
ing for reintegration into that former kingdom.

3) Yet while each is homesick for a lost realm, his nostalgia is
based on a longing for the peace he has formerly known as an innocent,
rather than for the ignorance this state implies. (The Mexican priest
is one of the examples discussed in the study, for he recognizes the
moral superiority of his role as sinner over his former complacent
role as parish priest. )

4) In the case of each protagonist it is evil, in the form of death,
which is responsible for his awakening from innocence.

5) This awakening to the knowledge of evil promotes a sense of guilt
and pity which leads to the assumption of responsibility toward others.

6) In commitment (as in any kind of action) each protagonist learns

the necessity of "soiling his hands." Yet in having to do so, each is

appalled, for he longs for a lutte juste e_t sans violence. (Tarrou's

 

 

realization that his saving men from governments founded on the

 

115Carnets, H, 70-

247
death sentence led to his being both directly and indirectly reSponsible
for cormnitting men to death is a case in point.)

7) Because each fears the impossibility of achieving perfection
each fears what he refers to as "lapses" or "falls." To avoid these,
each is tempted to ad0pt a passive role.

8) Nevertheless, in accepting commitment he struggles for a time,
and it is when his "rocks" or "burdens" become unbearable that each
arrives at an overt longing for death; his nostalgias for peace and pure—
ity become more acute and are then recognized as explicit death
instincts.

9) Each saint's death, if not an actual suicide as in Scobie's case,
is, nevertheless, a higher form of suicide, as in the case of Tarrou
and the Mexican priest.

Although there are numerous similarities in the saints of these
two authors, the dissimilarities are of great'importance. Perhaps the
greatest difference between Camus' and Greene's saints is the greater
. renunciation of ego in the latter. For although Scobie and the anony-
mous Mexican priest have been taught by their Church that they must
think primarily of their own souls, their attitudes and their actions
prove that they cannot think in egotistical terms. They prefer to sin
for others rather than be saved alone. Even though Greene's saints
will their death, each nevertheless responds to the call of others as
long as life remains: in the condemned cell the priest still works for
others; Scobie, dying, hears, or imagines he hears, voices calling to

him for help and stirs himself to respond. Therefore the Mexican

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248
priest and Scobie, deSpite their longings for peace and purity, not only
act up to the moment of their death for others but die believing they
have forfeited their eternal peace as well. If Greene's saints move
closer to God in serving men, Tarrou does not, as might be expected,
move closer to men but does, in his effort to supercede the human,
move in the other direction, away from men. Thus leading a life with-
out h0pe because it is without love, and not believing in an afterlife,
Tarrou has always held out death as his trump card. He hopes to find
his impossible ideal of peace and purity in annihilation.

In Camus' world his aspiring saint is paradoxically a sinner
rather than a saint. As a révolté Tarrou's protest does not go far
enough. He revolts only up to the time when he realizes that he cannot
revolt and remain pure. Barring a clear-cut situation like the plague,
where a man may believe for the time that he is fighting microbes and
not men, Tarrou cannot revolt. Yet if evil exists and revolt is an
expression of man's sense of injustice (as Camus asserts in L'Homme
révolte’), Tarrou's capitulations to evil or l'absurde are betrayals of
the values for which his revolt was undertaken.

In an epoch where the lay saint has become a t0pic of wide interest
(witness the interest taken in Albert Schweitzer, Simone Weil, Gandhi,
even Camus himself), Tarrou fails as a candidate to sainthood. Inacti-

vated by guilt —- his peste intérieure -- Tarrou sins against his own con-

 

victions born of lucidity. Marie-Beatrice Mesnet, although writing of
Greene's protagonists, could also be speaking for Tarrou, for she

states: "The yearning for peace, however, can sometimes disguise the

 

 

 

249
unheroic desire to avoid the effort to create our true self. . . for person-

"116 Tarrou

ality implies pain, and its realization brings suffering.
shows in his excesses that he is ultimately more concerned with guilt
than authenticity.

But to despair of Tarrou is not to despair of Camus. Where the
saint is the hero of the piece for Greene, he is not the hero of Camus'
writing. Ironically it is Tarrou's desire to be exceptional, that is, to
be a hero of mankind that keeps him from being either a saint or ahero
of the absurd. Rieux tells Tarrou that in order to be a saint it is neces-
sary to live. It is Camus' heroes of the absurd, those who struggle as
long as they live, who come closer than Tarrou to Greene's saints.

And in their emphasis on good will, happiness, health, and human ten-
derness, they not only embrace the positive values Of Camus' and
Greene's worlds, 'but employ these values to fight nihilism in a world
which includes both lo_lr_e and hits.

Additionally both Greene's saints and Camus' heroes of the
absurd pass beyond an innocence which they reject, knowing its base is

ignorance, to what may be termed a new or higher innocence. Observ—

ing limits by rejecting Tarrou's divided mind or peste intérieure, each

 

learns to live with his own "appalling inadequacy." The acceptance of

reasonable, rather than complete culpability, leaves the way Open for

a new innocence found in a connnitment larger than the self. Such com

mitments include the search for a new vision reached when man in his

 

116Graham Greene and the Heart of the Matter: An Essay(London,
1954), 10. — "" _ — _—

 

250
"disloyalty," rejects the outworn for the new and viable; or when in the
field of artistic creation, the virgin view Of the child merging with
adult judgment is synthesized into a new creation; or when man, reach-
ing a sense of community or solidarity while working, struggling, cre-

ating, or playing, recaptures the joy of being human together.

fl-

10.

ll.
12.
l3.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

19.

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Allott, Miriam. "The Moral Situation in The Quiet American,"
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Atkins, John. Graham Greene. London, 1957.

 

Bespaloff, Rachel. "The World of the Man Condemned to Death,"
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Bloch—Michel, Jean. "Albert Camus et la tentation de l'innocence,"
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Boardman, Gwenn R. "Greene's 'Under the Garden': Aesthetic
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Burgess, Anthony. "The Politics of Graham Greene," New York
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Camus, Albert. L'Envers gt l'endroit. Paris, l958[first pub-
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Noces. Paris, 1950 [first published 1938].

 

L'Etranger.. paris, 1957 [first published 1942].

 

 

If Mflhe d_e Sisyphe. Paris, 1942.

 

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. . t t . u o . e r .
.
.
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. . . s
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. p. .
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\
. . . .
.I . l, .1
. . .
. .
. a
t
. r
, .
n. . I ,
.
~
. V .
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. s .. s
. s . .
. . . . H x
e
.
4 C\ s
. 'x . rt
s. e .
. o \ I
. I.
t
. . r
. . s
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V
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. . . (
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,
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y t
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II ‘ I
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.
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. \
1
..
t
e
O .o
.
i 1
v.
. U
r
Y
e
.1
t
(
.
t
O
.

 

252

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21. . 1_e Chute. Paris, 1956.

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30. Chiaromonte, Nicola. "Albert Camus: In Memoriam," Camus: A
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31. Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and th_e Literature of Revolt.
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32. . "Albert Camus," The Novelist a_l_s Philosgpher:
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33. De Vitis, A. A. "Allegory in Brighton Rock," Modern Fiction
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35. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, trans., Constance
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37. Douillet, Jacques. What Is a Saint? Twentieth Century Encyclo-
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39. Fiedler, Leslie. "No, In Thunder! " Esquire, LIV (September,
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41. Fowler, Austin. Albert Camus's 'I_Le Stranger, Tie Plague a_n_<_i
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44. . "Dostoevsky and Parricide," The Standard Edition

9f th__e Com lete ngchological Works o_f Sigmund Freud,
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45. Gadourek, Carina. Les Innocents (_a_t le_s coupables: essai d'exégése
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46. Greene, Graham. The Man Within. New York, 1964 [first pub-
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47. . Stamboul Train. London, 1949 [first publishedl932].

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19 39T

X
2 54

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

55. Greene, Graham. The Power alt-iii th_e Glory. New York, 1967
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56. . The Ministry of Fear. London, 1950 [first published
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58. . The Third Man. New York, 1950.

59. . The Lost Childhood 341351 Other Essays. New York,
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