Graham Greene's Indirection

Extract

This article presents a parallel to my previous article entitled ‘Dante’s Indirection’. Both are attempts to study a certain method of achieving effects in a reader, a method to which Kierkegaard gave the title ‘Indirect Communication’. Both articles are concerned basically with Kierkegaard’s technique, due to the angle from which I approach indirect methods in other writers. The expression ‘Indirect Communication’ is ambiguous, as was its use in Kierkegaard’s own hands, and sometimes in studying it, in and for itself, one’s attention is drawn to parallel and much clearer uses of the principle, when one finds it in poets or novelists of less involved theoretical pretensions. Such a man is Graham Greene, novelist, Catholic, individual. It is to him that I turn for further illustration of the principle which seems to defy (in Kierkegaard’s case at least) all attempts at analysis and capture. Critics for over a century, from all countries in the world, have tried to solve the enigma of Kierkegaard’s use of Indirect Communication. Perhaps his Indirection can only be approached indirectly. This essay on three novels of Graham Greene is such an attempt.

What did Kierkegaard mean by ‘Indirect Communication’? This he sets forth in a book called The Point of View for my Work as an Author, a book about which he had such terrible doubts that its publication in complete form was eventually only undertaken by his brother after his death. In it he draws the distinction between the ‘aesthetic’ works and the ‘religious’ works in his output with such clarity that we would expect no problem. But he himself obviously felt, and any reader of his works feels immediately, that the explanation he gave in that work simply did not answer to the actual feel of his production, even contradicted its spirit. The later theory does not explain the former practice.