Modernism's Shell-Shocked History: Amnesia, Repetition, and the War in Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear

[T]he 1930s quickly became associated with the rejection of high modernism as it had developed after the war and with a renewed dedication to realism and political commitment.

Brian Diemert (23)

[T]o fight against forgetting means to fight to remember that one forgets as soon as one believes, draws conclusions, and holds for certain.

Jean-Francois Lyotard (10)

In his timely study of Greene's early "entertainments" and their use of the thriller format, [1] Diemert argues convincingly for the seriousness of these works and of The Ministry of Fear, "one of [Greene's] most skillful and complex novels" (151), in particular. Further, as my first epigraph testifies, Diemert sees much of the complexity of this novel as stemming from Greene's attempt, through his adoption of such a popular narrative form, to repudiate the aesthetic elitism and dubious politics of that generation of high modernist writers that preceded his own (28, 35). Indeed, in so situating Greene's early works, Diemert concurs with the standard critical wisdom on British writers of the 1930s and their relationship to the modernists who went before them. [2] Yet it is my contention that Greene's work, and The Ministry of Fear especially, cannot be so neatly disentangled from the project of Anglo-American modernism. Indeed, Greene's sole novel written during the war years [3] remains an essentially moderni st one, in that the Second World War is made comprehensible here by taking its place in that history of repetition that was the touchstone of those modernists whom Orwell saw as "temperamentally hostile to the notion of 'progress"' (507). That is to say, the war, as Greene figures it, is both understandable and inevitable precisely as it is mandated by a Western history conceived, in modernist terms, as the ceaseless rehearsal of past atrocity. Greene, in The Ministry of Fear's "attempt to find a discourse to make a sense of the world of the blitz" (R. Smith 115), thus extends the modernists' own repudiation of the meliorist historiography of liberal thought, presenting instead a history that inexorably reenacts past rituals of violence.

This bloody repetition, moreover, perpetuates itself, for Greene, through a process of forgetting akin to that which Lyotard decries in my second epigraph. Central to the story of Arthur Rowe is not only the shellshock amnesia that disrupts the narrative but also his persistent forgetting, not, significantly, of the past but of the present real condition of self and others. Greene's novel, in its treatment of Rowe's steady adherence to the adventure-tale ethics learned in childhood and of his resulting susceptibility to pity as a destructive emotion, shows both Rowe and his war-torn world more generally to be repeating their respective pasts in the form of deadly force. While the engine of such dire repetition is thus revealed as a kind of remembering, this memory acts also as a forgetting in Lyotard's sense, a holding for certain of an inherited ethos that is oblivious both to the actual character of the self and to the very selfhood of others. In this way, Greene's text, in its presentation of the war as r ehearsal, repeats, in its turn, the modernists' antiliberal sense of history, but does so by diagnosing Western history as the necessary, if slaughterous, result of a refusal to grant the other particularity and autonomy, to grant her, in other words, selfhood in liberal terms.

Yet before proceeding to examine Greene's explication of the war as an instance of modernist thinking on history, I want first to proffer some defense for my claim that Anglo-American modernism centers on this sense of history as tragic repetition. To be sure, current formulations of modernism tend to paint a rather different picture, with many critics, indeed, reading modernism as nothing other than a retreat from questions of history. [4] Thus Marianne DeKoven sees modernist fiction as deliberately suppressing the historical referent, seeking instead "to save the world through an art purified of history" (138), [5] though, on her account, this suppression is doomed to the happiest of failures, such strategies only serving "to render those [historical] facts with greater power than direct representation would give" (151). When, moreover, critics do acknowledge how "the problematic of time occupies a central place" in modernist thought (Nicholls 165), they tend to cast this problematic in terms of rupture ra ther than repetition. Thus, for Paul Fussell, modernist literature adheres to "[t]he image of strict division [which] dominates the Great War conception of Time Before and Time After" (80). As this claim would suggest, the notion of history thus ascribed to modernism is one not only of discontinuity but of decline as well, and perhaps the most prevalent understanding of modernism in recent scholarship is one that sees it as essentially nostalgic or elegiac, driven, in Frank Lentricchia's words, by a "need to turn back the clock" (8). Thus many critics agree with Surette that modernism is an articulation of "the antique view of history as a decline from some pure origin" (253). Art Berman, for example, proclaims this elegiac sense of history's course the very sine qua non of Anglo-American modernism: "this decline is modernism's subject: there would be no modernism without it" (212). Likewise, Meisel argues that what he deems the Eliotic assumption of "a lost golden age in the Renaissance" constitutes a "cruci al myth of the modern" (77, 78). Even Levenson, while he insists that Anglo-American modernism was "anti-traditional before it was traditional" (79), nonetheless claims that the very seeds of modernism in Conrad are already moving "toward the undermining of the sovereign individual and toward nostalgia for more traditional, precapitalist values" (34).