Increencia religiosa y literatura

Se describe el reflejo en la literatura actual del creciente problema de la increencia religiosa y sobre todo de uno de sus tipos, la indiferencia. Se compara con la literatura de mitad del siglo XX, y se analizan las novelas más significativas del escritor católico más relevante, Graham Greene, del que se cumple el 30 aniversario de su muerte. Se discuten las dificultades de la necesaria nueva evangelización para combatir la indiferencia religiosa y la estrategia de introducción en el amplio campo de la cultura y concretamente en el de la literatura.

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

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 The opening of the “Durán papers” collection at Georgetown University enables scholars to delve into unpublished material kept by Durán over the years, which may cast insights into the genesis of Monsignor Quixote from both textual and biographical perspectives.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

El papel del espía y la maleabilidad de la trama en Our Man in Havana, de Graham Greene

Tanto la novela Our Man in Havana (1958), de Graham Greene, como sus adaptaciones (cinematográfica en 1959, dirigida por Carol Reed; y teatral en 2009, escrita por Clive Francis) utilizan la sátira como medio para hacer una burla de la trama convencional de espías. El análisis de estas tres obras hará un estudio de la representación de la figura del espía en la novela y cómo el protagonista, Jim Wormold, es un móvil que enfatiza el aspecto histórico de La Habana en cuanto a la adaptación cinematográfica. El análisis de la representación teatral con respecto al protagonista y el espacio en el que se mueve expondrá qué cambios ocurren al nivel de la trama al suprimir aspectos importantes del contexto histórico. Así, se demostrará cómo las dos primeras obras exhiben, de forma remarcada, instancias diferentes que toman la sátira como base para hacer un comentario sobre los defectos de la sociedad inglesa en cuanto al espionaje y sobre cómo lo percibía la periferia. La tercera, aunque circunscrita en el mismo ambiente de la Guerra Fría, deliberadamente diluye el contexto para presentar una trama rápida que se acerca más a la farsa.

The Catholic Revival in English Literature

The article deals with research of the Catholic revival as a remarkable literary movement that amalgamated a number of authors who discussed problems of the Roman Catholicism in the works of various forms – from serious theological apologies to the popular genres like G.K. Chesterton's detective stories. Such Catholic novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene appeal to the wide readership and interpret the problem of faith in its complex ambivalence, actuality, psychological depth. Whilst Evelyn Waugh is in search for a solid ground in the Old Faith as an alternative to the modern anarchy and chaos, Graham Greene emphasizes on the faith's conflicting ambiguities and contradictions.

Registrations

From the beginning of the Second World War until 1952, the UK maintained a National Register and issued all citizens with identity cards (one of only two times in which this has occurred—the other being during the First World War). The National Registration Identity Card was an intrinsic part of the logic of classification which guided life on the home front and organized individuals into categories of usefulness, vulnerability, and risk. Mirroring the simplistic basis of these categories, the National Registration Identity Card was notable for the paucity of information it contained. Rather than working as an authentic token which served to validate identity in itself, when it came to security, the card only really worked when read alongside the more richly detailed register to which it referred. Cross-checking between card and register and, more importantly, opening conversations which rested upon the potential for cross-checking, thus animated attempts to identity individuals in wartime Britain. In retreating from the radical subjectivity of modernist prose, writers of the period, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, produced characterizations that were as similarly shorn of depth as the categories that the home front pushed individuals into and the cards that identified them. In playing upon the genre of the espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) thus narrate identities that are defined by social position and by plots which confirm individuals as often precisely what they initially appear to be.

Ferris Wheels, Faust, and Forms of Influence in Malcolm Lowry and Graham Greene

Ferris Wheels seem to fascinate film-directors – notably Carol Reed in The Third Man (1949), based on Graham Greene’s story and script. Though Ferris Wheels figure less conspicuously in twentieth-century novels, Malcolm Lowry provides an exception in Under the Volcano (1947), a novel also comparable to The Third Man in other ways. One explanation might be that Greene simply drew on Lowry’s example when developing his film-script (later published as a novella) – work begun very shortly after Under the Volcano had appeared. More plausibly, each writer might be understood to have responded separately, though similarly, to the unique pressures of their age. Identifying how these stresses were represented in their work, through cognate symbologies, may suggest some productive ways of reading historically.

The priest in the novels of Graham Greene

The priestly figure in Graham Greene’s fiction may or may not wear a clerical collar. But through such characters salvation may be glimpsed not only through faith but through doubt and human weakness. Saints and sinners are not far apart. Pascal’s ‘wager’ is also ever present in these novels that reflect the ambiguities of Greene’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.