Graham Greene's pattern in the carpet: A 20th century Catholic imagination

Much has been written about Greene's relationship to his Catholic faith and its privileged place within his texts, especially what has been called his early “Catholic Cycle.” These novels usually fall under the historical rubric of the “Catholic Novel,” a genre that used Catholic belief not only to frame the issues of modernity, but also to offer Catholicism's vision and doctrine as a remedy to the present crisis in Western civilization. If Greene's early work is discussed in terms of the Catholic Novel, his later work is often classified into political and detective genres, where secular concerns seem to dominate his themes and plots. This inherent dichotomy between his “Catholic” and his “post-Catholic” novels, or his early “religious” and his later “political” or “secular” ones exposes the problem of too narrowly prescriptive an understanding of both the Catholic genre and the impact of Greene's own developing religious imagination on his literary art.; This study explores the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Greene's artistic imagination. Chapter One charts ways to investigate Greene's life and work in terms of an ongoing dialogue with theological developments in Catholic discourse before and after Vatican Council II. Chapter Two examines Greene's creative appropriation of the historically fixed notions of the Catholic literary revival in the early part of the century and considers two novels from this period, The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951). Chapter Three discusses the theological contexts and developments of Vatican II that continued to engage Greene, especially as articulated in the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Küng, and Edward Schillebeeckx. Chapter Four assesses Greene's growing support of liberation theology in Latin America and then traces how this and other post-Vatican II discourses are embodied in The Honorary Consul (1973) and The Human Factor (1978). Chapter Five considers two of Greene's final works, Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Parry (1980) and Monsignor Quixote (1982) as culminating expressions of Greene's Catholic imagination.