On Graham Greene's Pseudo-Dichotomy Of Novel Writing And Its Significance

Graham Greene, one of the important British novelists in the twentieth century, is academically conceived as a religious, political, and social writer of the realist school. He is at once a consummate artist of narration and a successful writer of thrillers. His free use of various subgenres of fiction makes him a most welcome writer among readers from all walks of life and of all status. He divides his fictional works into two kinds, i.e. "novels" and "entertainments", following the traditional dichotomy between the highbrow and the lowbrow. But his division turns out to be irrelevant and insignificant, for in all his writings, the excitement brought about in thrillers (his "entertainments") and the serious concerns for important issues of life evoked in mainstream novels (his "novels") are fused to make them both entertaining and thought-provoking. As an outstanding feature of his fiction, the fusing of the highbrow and the lowbrow makes him immensely popular and provokes continuing dispute about his positioning in contemporary British literature. With more and more critics exploring both aspects in many of his novels, the significance of his popularity invites further reevaluations.His popularity should be attributed mainly to the textual strategy he employs in achieving such a simultaneous effect of entertaining and thought-provoking, which constitutes the crucial element of his art of novel.Greene's principle textual strategy is amply demonstrated in the two works discussed in this thesis: one is his representative religious novel Brighton Rock;the other is the masterpiece of his so-called entertainment The Ministry of Fear. The author of this thesis, through minute analysis, shows that in Brighton Rock, in the form of the hard-boiled detective fiction, Greene tries to convey the serious concerns about the human predicament in modern society;while in The Ministry of Fear, in the form of a spy novel, Greene raises the question of what should be the psychological interest and moral of people living in a world of violence and crime.By adopting such a textual strategy of employing and undercutting the formulaeof the detective fiction and the spy novel as vehicles to express crucial concerns of modern men, Greene actually subverts the traditional dichotomy between the highbrow and the lowbrow by pretending to follow it. His novels admit multilayered interpretation. For instance, Brighton Rock may be read as a detective fiction, a religious novel, a psychological or a sociological novel, while The Ministry of Fear can be read as a thriller, a psychological novel or a social novel.Based on her close reading of the texts and the application of relevant theoretical approaches, the author of this thesis draws the conclusion that Greene is innovational in fiction writing by disregarding the bourgeois bias against some so-called "popular forms" of fiction. In his writings he eliminates the distinction between the highbrow and the lowbrow, and his practice anticipates the postmodern literary ideal of closing the gap between the two, as displayed in fictional writings loosely labeled as a variety of metafictional writings. In the light of the related theories on postmodern fictional writings and the peculiarities in Greene's writings one may even assert that Greene is one of the forerunners of postmodernism in the literary world.