Community, Enquiry and Auto-Immunity in Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case

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Notes

The research for this paper was conducted in the framework of the research project “Community and Immunity in Contemporary Fiction in English,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant reference FFI2009-13244).

This body of work draws on his travels to different areas of Africa during his life: a three-month excursion through Sierra Leone, French Guinea, and Liberia in 1934, a convoy to West Africa starting in 1941 (during which he spent a year in Freetown and several months in Lagos), and a trip to the Belgian Congo in January 1959 in search of inspiration for the writing of A Burnt-Out Case (Search 7).

See Greene's autobiography Ways of Escape (1980): “We were a generation brought up on adventure stories who had missed the enormous disillusionment of the First World War, so we were looking for adventure” (Ways 37). For further discussion on this topic see Hynes’ The Auden Generation where he argues that Greene belongs to a group of English writers who were “increasingly aware of the presence and importance of the world-out-there” (Hynes 228).

Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case (London: Penguin, 1975 [1960]). All further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text.

The topos of Africa as “empty land” can be traced in the writings of nineteenth century European explorers such as William J. Burchell, whose Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (1822) inspired later literary representations, like Haggard's or Conrad's. They contributed to the Western representation of the African bush “as impenetrable and empty” (Darian-Smith et al 136). In the Conrad-Greene tradition, as it has often been denounced by postcolonial studies, Africa is often reduced “to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind” (Achebe 8). On Greene's debt to this myth of empty land, see Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (2005), 155–56.

In this novel, the identity of the community is enhanced by the colonial context. This phenomenon was discussed by Benedict Anderson in connection to creole communities in Imagined Communities (50, 58). Anderson argues that it is because of the inner incompatibility between nation and empire (93) that creole communities—simultaneously constituted as colonial and upper class communities (58)—overreact by developing an enhanced conception of their nation-ness (50).

Nancy argues that Western civilization has always given itself to the nostalgia of a more archaic and authentic community that has disappeared, and claims that “the true consciousness of the loss of community is Christian” (10). In A Burnt-Out Case, this notion is explicitly illustrated in the colonial community at Luc, where all its members seem to partake of the same feeling of fall from Grace, or from Faith. In the novel, this shared feeling is what actually constitutes the community's identity, and each of its members is defined as an individual in terms of distance from the religious ideal. Querry refuses to engage in this narrative of fall and redemption.

Although one of the key characters in the novel is the journalist Montague Parkinson, his disrespect for “truth” (106, 111, 114, 162) and the parasitic nature of his writing—feeding on other discourses such as the legal, the religious or the literary—prevent journalism from being the fourth source of enquiry in the text. Querry tells him: “you are someone who won't mind the truth, though I doubt whether you'll ever write it” (114).

The term “case” is used 16 times in the novel in the sense of “object of investigation or consideration.” It is used in connection to medicine, as an instance of disease (21, 27, 49, 121, 126); to judicial processes, as a suit or action in law (103, 112), and to spiritual matters, as a condition of the mind (178). It is directly used in connection to Querry on 9 occasions, the first of them by the character himself: “there's nothing of interest in my case” (29).

This device echoes a long lineage of stories adopting the logic of legal or medical investigation as narrative structure, such as Poe's “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), Stevenson's “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886) or Fitzgerald's “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922). The connection between narrative form and the procedure of official enquiry is a long-standing one in Western literature, from the Picaresque El Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)—answering to the demand of a full confession by an unknown recipient referred to in the text as “Vuesa Merced”—to postmodernist versions such as Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene Pereira (1994), written as a judicial statement, and Umberto Eco's Il nome della rosa (1980), which brings together the religious (heresy), judicial (murder) and medical (poisoning) facets of enquiry in its narrative structure.

See for instance Conrad's Almayer's Folly (1895) or Waugh's The Painted Veil (1925). A contemporary revision of the same topos can be found in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992).

On Greene's use of this narrative technique, see In Search of a Character, where he wrote that the author “should not penetrate into the thoughts of any character—which must be indicated only in action and dialogue” (Search 20).

Borrowing Peter Brooks’ use of Barthesian categories, we may read A Burnt-Out Case as a text in which “plot might best be thought of as an ‘overcoding’ of the proairetic by the hermeneutic” (Brooks Reading 19).

See Baldridge, 125; Bosco, 178; Couto, 90; Dobozy, 447–48; Nordlof, 471; Sinha, 67–68.

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Paula Martín Salván

Dr. Paula Martín Salván is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Córdoba (Spain). Her research focuses on Modernist and Postmodernist fiction and she is currently engaged in a research project entitled “Community and Immunity in Contemporary Fictions in English.”