Graham Greene - A Tribute

The invisible side of exoticism: Phuong's character in the Quiet American

Phuong's character in The Quiet American is one of the most difficult to define, as she holds no real leading part in the novel and her particular characteristics are shown to the reader through the eyes of Fowler, the narrator, that is through the deforming prism of both a male vision and a European spirit. Attempting thus an approach to Phuong's character, one should beware of a number of traps liable to mislead one's judgement - if it is ever possible to fully analyse a character whose only known aspects are those revealed to us by the author himself through the character mostly acting as his mouthpiece.

One of these traps, maybe the most dangerous, would be to take Phuong exclusively as a representative of Oriental civilisation and mentality. Phuong principally has to be considered as a woman, and not so much as a typical example illustrating the Vietnamese way of living and thinking. She is represented as a young woman invited - and challenged - to choose between a European journalist and an American spy. She, for her part, is only looking for a husband, someone with a safe, promising future in his carreer and and the impressive, exotic allure of foreign mystery. For it is not only Phuong and her people who are "exotic" to the Western eye. The Westerners themselves represent a somehow legendary world for the inhabitants of the Far East. So Phuong, pushed by her sister who proves to be even more pragmatic, almost cynical in her view of the world and seeking a concrete, material, practical form of happiness, shall try first Fowler's and then Pyle's ability to approach this sort of bliss. Which she will find in different forms in both, Fowler's European flexibility and intellectual depth promising the security and understanding of the moment, Pyle's American straightforwardness and loyalty, sometimes touching the limits of naivete, to principles and values he has - ironically - not only taken to, but also learnt by heart, guaranteeing a secure and morally unvulnerable future. The tragic irony here lies in the fact that Pyle's qualities are devoted to the service of the most immoral enterprises, while Fowler, son of a decayed continent and a dying empire, turns out to be standing for what is lucidity, in other words observation (for one needs light in order to see). Phuong's approach to the conflicting personalities of these two rival lovers is more or less instinctive. It is the woman in her who chooses, and not the Vietnamese. The racial features mostly determine her national identity without really affecting her feminine aspect. One might even see her as an out-of-towner facing the possibility of a metropolitan marriage (if we see Vietnam as a remote province, considering Europe and America as the great capitals of the world; anyway, a sad yet undeniable fact determining the novel's macrocosm, and practically denounced by Greene, is that many Oriental countries have actually been, for ages, either directly colonised by or financially and administratively dependent on the West). Although Phuong bears the special, otherwise defining, characteristics of her own world, she can generally be seen as merely a provincial girl contemplating a good, profitable marriage to some promising diplomat, businessman, journalist or army official.

I have already referred to the fact that Phuong is being sketched by a man's hand, and the view one is allowed to take of her is filtered through a European conception. Seen beside Fowler, in the nonchalant warmth of a small apartment, surrounded by falling blossoms and opium smoke, she clearly evokes one of those strange, ethereal, romanesque creatures the French, mainly, poets of the 19th century have devoted their art to. It is not by chance that our very first introduction to Phuong's environment is made through Greene's use of indicative lines from Baudelaire's Invitation au Voyage from Les Fleurs du Mal, the best part of which is dedicated to the poet's half-caste lover, Jeanne Duval. The first chapter of the novel gives a full account of the European mentality rather than the Oriental. The European's mental and psychological landscape is dreamy, poetic, haunted by ghosts and fantasies and slowly eaten by its own constant, paralysing yet surprisingly pleasant decay, much too easily adapted to the heavy perfumes and slow rhythms of the Orient. Phuong moves in there like some sort of sparkling shadow, rarely expressing herself in words, since her presence alone weighs infinitely more than speech; it gives the story its special "accent", like a musical key. Her influence on the environment is discreet yet quite effective, like the trace of some perfume lingering in the atmosphere.

Phuong also constitutes the center of Fowler and Pyle's intellectual conflict. She is the "tune" to their arguments and the aim of both. Her own position is indeed somewhat privileged, for she is, in fact, the third person in the story and can therefore see things from a, say, neutral angle. But she also has a choice in the sentimental field, and this is the most important. She has the possibility of choosing between two men, whereas Fowler, trapped in his wrecked marriage, is unable to take over his own future, and Pyle, victim to his "York Harding" type ideals, will be forced to death by circumstances. Phuong's privilege is exactly the fact that she has more than one option to decide from. The mentality instigated by her own country's civilisation and culture may affect some of her thoughts and feelings, but has finally no decisive effect upon them.

The theme of the hunted man: The element of fear in The Man Within & The Confidential Agent

In Greene's first published novel, entitled The Man Within, the main character, Francis Andrews, in a moment of despair, describes himself as "a hunted man pursued by worse than death". He is the first "hunted" character Greene has ever created, to be followed, in his novels written afterwards, by a number of others, victims of an equally merciless pursuit, such as Pinkie in Brighton Rock and, to a certain extent, D in The Confidential Agent. Each one of these "heroes" (although fairly anti-heroic) is the object of a different hunt: Andrews has to face a sophisticated system, a complex, as well as perplexing, combination of factors of which the principal one seems to be his own cowardice; D, for his part, is both a hunter and a hunted man, involved in a rather cinematographic game of espionnage and patriotic ideals; and Pinkie, finally, appears as an ame damnee running away from both the law and the phantom of a merciless post-mortem divine justice.

The pursuer of Francis Andrews in The Man Within is, materially, Carlyon, the head of a gang of smugglers Andrews has informed against. But besides this actual hunter, Andrews also has to endure the constant reproach of his own inner critic, his "man within" whom it is impossible to silence as long as the moral fault, the treason he has committed, remains unpurged and as long as his constant anxiety of being unable to vanquish his cowardice overpowers him. This haunting interior voice of the "man within" is, of course, a kind of conscience, but also more than simply that. It is the powerful, physical almost, presence of the inner self, tormentingly sincere and with a transparent view of moral justice which comes into complete contrast with the actions of the "man without", the visible, outer self of Andrews. The ghost of fear both hunting and haunting him could be more or less seen as a spawn of the primal - in a way archetypal - awe and at the same time hatred he feels for his dead father, along with the plain consciousness of it: "You other people never seem to understand fear... It's not a man's fault whether he is brave or cowardly. It's all the way he's born. My father and mother made me. I didn't make myself".

Only due to the angelic presence of Elisabeth and through the "holy" love she inspires in him will Andrews be able to take a look beyond the borders of himself and dream of a certain kind of nobility; her death will, as Carlyon has already remarked, "show him up" and wake the romantic hero in his heart. His suicide in the end is but the spectacular ending of the desperate chase between him and his shadow, the almost sanctifying coup de grace after a pathetic hide-and-seek with his conscience and his memories.

The atmosphere changes in The Confidential Agent, where the theme of hunting is implied even by the title: "confidential" means "secret", and secrecy is in itself an agent of fervent intrigue. The main character of this novel, the confidential agent symbolically indicated as "D", is a hunter of injustice and pursued by an entire network of fellow agents, as well as by his own unfortunate past - a wife killed during the civil war in his country, horrifying images of destruction haunting him in the form of daymares (not nightmares, because his dreams are ones of dearly longed-for serenity). D's role as a victim of pursuit will change towards the end of the novel, where he becomes the avenging pursuer of the "traitor", K. But even then, he will not be transformed into a complete incarnation of ruthlessness: he will not finally be responsible for K's death, thus sparing himself an act which might degrade him in the reader's eyes. The hunting between secret and confidential agents will not end with the novel, but at least D will have found a companion in his mission, the faithful and determined Rose, ready to love him despite their wide difference of age and follow him in "this business" where "glamour doesn't enter".

The hunting theme in this novel appears in a more intrinsic form than in The Man Within, where the scheme of pursuit is more or less linear (the police are after Carlyon who is after Andrews who has denounced him and his partners): everyone here is spied on by somebody, and nobody can be trusted because in secret affairs where political as well as financial interests are involved, there can practically be no such thing as "agent's honor". But there is, up to a certain point, a similarity between the two novels in question, in what concerns the way Carlyon and D are presented: both these persecuted men are idealists, cultured, romantic in a sense, and both preserve a quality of suffering in style; though they are both partly outlaws (Carlyon, in fact, is one) they are portrayed with sympathy, presenting a considerable number of positive characteristics: Carlyon has a lovely voice, is interested in poetry and sensitive to "colours and scents", which makes up for his outward lack of beauty. D, for his part, philosophises his position in connection with the mediaeval Song of Roland, which returns now and then like a comforting and consoling obsession in the middle of all the hunting, hiding, spying and killing.

Another hunted character Greene has created is Pinkie in Brighton Rock. Pinkie is a boy gangster and a Catholic, pursued by enemy gangs and obsessed with the idea of damnation after death. He too has company in his flight, the innocent, virtuous Rose who agrees to become his wife in a "civil" (mock, in fact) marital ceremony. Like Elisabeth in The Man Within, she will try to "show up" whatever might be good (or, at least, not evil) in Pinkie, but in vain. The young criminal is so deeply absorbed in the consciousness of his self-hatred that he completely rejects the idea of the existence of Heaven (though he mentions somewhere that "there might be" a Heaven), in spite of his hope to be saved by repentance before he dies. Like Andrews, he too is pursued by himself, not by a merciless "man within", but by what has become of his old self (he was a choirboy with much better prospects in life than what he finally achieved).

Rose believes in Heaven, while Pinkie relies upon the fact that an opportunity is offered to him to save his soul from every possible evil deed committed, by repentance. The almost tragic irony in his case is that he will not even be awarded an honorable death, which would make up for his scarcely honorable life; his fall will be accidental, completing the long, gradual figurative fall of his life, submerging him abruptly, once and for all, into non-existence: "He was at the edge, he was over: they couldn't even hear a splash. It was as if he's been withdrawn suddenly by a hand out of any existence - past or present, whipped away into zero - nothing". This absolute extinction may be viewed as a kind of ultimate solution, a radical ending to Pinkie's blind run, sheltering him from his pursuers and maybe, in a way, giving him the time to reconsider his life while falling and repent before this inaudible, fatal and final "splash".

This idea of a man hunted conjures up the element not only of fear, but also of uncertainty and suspense. Besides the fact that it reveals the persons' characters by showing their innermost reactions under severe, demanding and even critical situations, thus sparing the author the pain of describing their deeper temperaments, it constitutes a rather cinematic artifice exploiting with admirable efficiency the possibilities of language to create visual and acoustic effects, and offering the author the opportunity to move an imaginary camera along and across landscapes and faces and describe in a breathless, heart-stopping rhythm the feeling of agony connected with or accompanying them.