“You must kneel, compañero”: The Making of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-709
Author(s):  
Carlos Villar Flor
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Georgetown University ◽  
Intimate Friendship

Abstract In the 1970 s and 1980s Graham Greene took up the habit of travelling around Spain to holiday in the company of his Spanish friend, the priest and professor Leopoldo Durán. The most outstanding fruit of these trips, almost always in summer, was the inspiration for Monsignor Quixote (1982), which Greene came to regard as his most accomplished novel (Cloetta 2004: 77). Centred around an idealistic, innocent, and somewhat foolish priest who establishes an intimate friendship with a communist ex-mayor, with whom he travels around Spain and talks about the divine and the human, the novel was initially conceived as a kind of friendly caricature of Father Durán, but it soon served as a vehicle to express various concerns that haunted the writer’s mind. The opening of the “Durán papers” collection at Georgetown University enables scholars to delve into unpublished material kept by Durán over the years, which may cast insights into the genesis of Monsignor Quixote from both textual and biographical perspectives. Taking as a major source Durán’s diaries, 16 notebooks recording his meetings and telephone conversations with Greene from 1976 to 1991, this paper aims to clarify some of the relevant background to the book’s inception, complementing the diaries with other accounts such as Greene’s letters to Durán and other friends, Durán’s letters to Greene, and testimonies by witnesses present at the events described.1

Saints and Miracles: The End of the Affair

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Hepburn
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Georg Lukacs ◽  
Dorothy Sayers ◽  
Theory Of The Novel ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Georg Lukács

Miracles rarely appear in novels, yet Graham Greene includes several of them in The End of the Affair. Sarah Miles heals a boy suffering from appendicitis and a man with a disfigured cheek. Like a saint, she seems to heal or revive through her compassionate touch, as when she raises her lover, who may or may not have died in a bomb blast, by touching his hand. This chapter locates Sarah’s interventions amidst debates about miracles, beginning with David Hume’s sceptical rejection of inexplicable phenomena, through such mid-century books as C. S. Lewis’s Miracles and Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker. The inherent godlessness of novels, as Georg Lukacs puts the matter in Theory of the Novel, would seem to ban mystical content altogether from novelistic discourse. Yet this chapter argues for the revaluation of mystical content—the ordeals of the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, for example—within the generic precincts of the novel.

Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan: Priest and Novelist

2012 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 397-422
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
Literary Revival ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Literary Canons ◽  
Modern Era

‘The primary object of a novelist is to please’, said Anthony Trollope, but he also wanted to show vice punished and virtue rewarded. More roundly, Somerset Maugham declared that pleasing is the sole purpose of art in general and of the novel in particular, although he granted that novels have been written for other reasons. Indeed, good novels usually embody a worldview, even if only an anarchic or atheist one, and the religious novel is not the only kind to have a dogma at its heart. There is the further issue of literary merit, which certain modern Catholic novelists such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene have achieved, giving the lie to Newman’s assertion that in an English Protestant culture, a Catholic literature is impossible. But Newman and his fellow cardinal Wiseman both wrote novels; Wiseman’s novel, Fabiola, with its many translations, had an enthusiastic readership in the College of Cardinals, and was described by the archbishop of Milan as ‘a good book with the success of a bad one’. Victorian Ireland was a predominantly anglophone Catholic country, and despite poor literacy rates into the modern era, the three thousand novels in 1940 in the Dublin Central Catholic Library indicate a sizeable literary culture, comparable to the cultures of other Churches. The ‘literary canons’ who contributed to this literature around 1900 included the Irishman Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, the subject of this essay; another Irishman, Canon Joseph Guinan, who wrote eight novels on Irish rural life; Canon William Barry, the son of Irish immigrants in London, whose masterpiece was the best-selling feminist novel, The New Antigone; Henry E. Dennehy, commended by Margaret Maison in her classic study of the Victorian religious novel; and the prolific Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, the convert son of an archbishop of Canterbury. Catholic writers were often ignored by the makers of the contemporary Irish literary revival, non-Catholics anxious to separate nationalism from Catholicism (sometimes by appealing to the nation’s pre-Christian past), but this Catholic subculture is now being studied.

scholarly journals The Performing Arts in Second Language Acquisition

2008 ◽  
Vol II (1) ◽  
pp. 17-39
Author(s):  
Mark Lauer
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Language Education ◽  
Black Box ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Georgetown University

This paper is a report on the experience of dramatizing Hans Peter Richter’s novel Damals war es Friedrich (1961). Subsequent to the discussion of the novel in an upper division German class, students and I worked on a dramatized version of the text. The play was performed in the Black Box Theater at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., on April 11, 2006. The first part of the report will illustrate how the work on the play was embedded within the context of a literacy approach towards teaching German as a foreign language. In addition to outlining the benefits of including a theater performance in language education, as experienced during the rehearsals and the performance of the play, the second part of the report will discuss how the project was carried out. This paper is a report on the experience of dramatizing Hans Peter Richter’s novel Damals war es Friedrich (1961). Subsequent to the discussion of the novel in an upper division German class, students and I worked on a dramatized version of the text. The play was performed in the Black Box Theater at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., on April 11, 2006. The first part of the report will illustrate how the work on the play was embedded within the context of a literacy approach towards teaching German as a foreign language. In addition to outlining the benefits of including a theater performance in language education, as experienced during the rehearsals and the performance of the play, the second part of the report will discuss how the project was carried out.

scholarly journals Graham Greene and Cuba: Our man in Havana?

2008 ◽  
Vol 82 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 185-209
Author(s):  
Peter Hulme
Keyword(s):  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
Cuban Revolution ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Fidel Castro ◽  
Political Novel ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Eastern Cuba ◽  
The Military ◽  
Che Guevara

[First paragraph]Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana was published on October 6, 1958. Seven days later Greene arrived in Havana with Carol Reed to arrange for the filming of the script of the novel, on which they had both been working. Meanwhile, after his defeat of the summer offensive mounted by the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in the mountains of eastern Cuba, just south of Bayamo, Fidel Castro had recently taken the military initiative: the day after Greene and Reed’s arrival on the island, Che Guevara reached Las Villas, moving westwards towards Havana. Six weeks later, on January 1, 1959, after Batista had fled the island, Castro and his Cuban Revolution took power. In April 1959 Greene and Reed were back in Havana with a film crew to film Our Man in Havana. The film was released in January 1960. A note at the beginning of the film says that it is “set before the recent revolution.” In terms of timing, Our Man in Havana could therefore hardly be more closely associated with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. But is that association merely accidental, or does it involve any deeper implications? On the fiftieth anniversary of novel, film, and Revolution, that seems a question worth investigating, not with a view to turning Our Man in Havana into a serious political novel, but rather to exploring the complexities of the genre of comedy thriller and to bringing back into view some of the local contexts which might be less visible now than they were when the novel was published and the film released.

Inverse Intimacy: Reconfiguring ‘Personal Relations’ in Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-56
Author(s):  
Joseph Bristow
Keyword(s):  
Single Women ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Relationships ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Middle Aged ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Female Homosexuality ◽  
Intimate Friendship

Ever since its publication in 1927, Elizabeth Bowen's first novel, The Hotel, has prompted critical responses that have tried to gauge the ways in which the narrative represents intimacy between women. Although one of its earliest reviewers sensed that the ‘dark, forlorn spirit of inversion is all through it’, modern critics have acknowledged that The Hotel is not engaged with the sexological models of inversion that inform Radclyffe Hall's contemporaneous novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928). At the same time, commentators have recognized that The Hotel forms part of a group of 1920s fictions that address female homosexuality with increasing openness. For the most part, readers have focused close attention on the intimate friendship that develops between the young Sydney Warren and the middle-aged widow Mrs. Kerr. This bond, even if it is fraught with tension, remains a source of prurient fascination among the other English residents enjoying a wintertime dolce far niente on the Italian Riviera. Still, the sustained critical focus on the attachment that develops between these two characters has tended to ignore the significance of the partnership between the two single women, Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald, that places the whole span of the novel in parentheses. Although recent studies by Elizabeth Cullingford and Maud Ellmann have drawn attention to Bowen's interest in what it means to be a ‘singleton’ or part of stadial series of personal relationships (single, couple, and triad), little has been said about the two spinsters, each of whom is ‘half of a duality’. The present essay concentrates attention on the ways in which the enumerative turn in Bowen studies broadens in scope when we look at how Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald appear as both two in one and one in two: a narrative formula that reminds us not of sexual inversion but the inverse number in mathematics. It is this type of inverse intimacy between woman and woman that triumphs at the end of The Hotel.

scholarly journals War, Sin and Justice in the Novel “The Quiet American”

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Liridonë Bislimi
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Research Paper ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Graham Greene ◽  
Key Features ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Love Triangle

This research paper focuses on one of the literature works of 20th century. A work of one of the most famous English novelists, Graham Greene, “The Quiet American’’. In this novel, the writer mirrored the war in Vietnam. The key features of this novel are touching and frightening, seen only from the narrator’s point of view during the Vietnam War. The major characters are tangled in a love triangle that leads to death and sorrow.

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