| The Power and the Glory was Graham Greene's most brilliant Catholic novel. Based on the theory of New Historicism, the paper explores the Catholic theme of the novel—the contradictory philosophy and its textual representation—in order to argue that the Catholic philosophy of the book which appears self-contradictory and deconstructed, is in essence an integration of thoughts fashioned by inheritance and revision.Those who advocate New Historicism believe that inheritance is an ineluctable aspect of the text production. Therefore, an examination of the Catholic view beneath the text inevitably involves an exploration of the inheritance in the text, that is, the ideological tradition of English Catholicism. Catholic philosophy in England suffered a long-term suppression and a tardy reestablishment for centuries. It took shape and became an influential ideology at the turn of the early 20th century.Catholic inheritance, manifested in the text of The Power and the Glory at least in two aspects—the fallen nature of human beings and the affliction as the trial of God's grace. In the novel, both the wicked mestizo and the benevolent priest were in the battle with the ingrained malice. Apart from that, the text indicates, in the harsh process of wrestling with the inward evil, human beings capable of holding affliction won the glory of salvation.According to the theory of New Historicism, the exchanges between texts and powers of different kinds indicate a wrestling between the tracks of inheritance and the tendency of revision. In the text of The Power and the Glory, the tradition Catholic ideas, the protestant values and other contemporary thoughts jostled against each other and made the theoretical revision of the inherited philosophy more a crucial and credible procedure than a self-contradictory deconstruction. Therefore, Greene's Catholic philosophy in The Power and the Glory was in effect a dynamic integration of inheritance and revision. |
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