| Graham Greene is among the foremost ranks of modern English writers of the twentieth century. The critical consensus has tended to divide the Greene oeuvre into a tripartite divisions of thrillers/entertainments, Catholic novels, and political novels. Such divisions neglect the richness and diversity of Greene's authorship. In order to properly understand Greene's authorship, one must observe the cumulative, evolving developments in his body of work. Such developments qualify Greene's oeuvre as fluid, undergoing constant revision, borrowing aesthetically from some genres while simultaneously shedding others, but always consistently manifesting a fundamentally Catholic worldview. Graham Greene's work undergoes a consistent aesthetic development while presenting a remarkably constant presentation of Catholic ethics.;The process of Greene's development as a writer began with his work within the genre of the thriller. While the thriller does not seem conducive to Catholic ethics, Greene initiates his Catholic aesthetic from within this genre by introducing subliminally Catholic treatments of memory, ritual, and the sacraments rendered within action-oriented plots involving international intrigue, escape from adversaries, and the achievement of sanctuary.;While the sanctuaries to which a thriller protagonist aspires offers a spatial metaphor of transcendence, the structures of these sanctuaries undergo conceptual shifts throughout Greene's career as a novelist. Gradually, Greene's aesthetic manifestations of entrapment, liberation, and the divine are directed to the internal processes of his characters. Such paradigm shifts both concentrate upon and legitimize human psychological processes as reserves of Catholic mystical potential. Subsequently, former schemes of entrapment and liberation are assiduously developed by Greene throughout the medium of psychological realism, with God occupying the function of liberator of the enclosed or "trapped" mind. In works such as The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair, Greene emphasizes God's role as a psychic liberator in a manner which advances the conceptual development of his treatment of sanctuary and deliverance under more specifically Catholic auspices. This end is achieved through both plot and character developments drawing from specifically Catholic sources, such as the sacrament of confession or the invocation of Christ during the mass. Indeed, in Greene's late work, novels which most critics perceive as entirely political in scope, Greene's protagonists draw upon the specific performance of the Catholic Mass as a ritual invocation of an apocalyptic Christ to transform its political contexts. These late works stress the forms of active commitment generated through Greene's earliest work with the strong Catholic mysticism of his later novels in the interest of fostering a strikingly communal and eschatological Catholicism which generates transformation from within political bases. |
