Personal Salvation
Dienstfrey, Harris
Personal Salvation The Comedians, by Graham Greene. Viking Press. 309 pp. $5.75. Reviewed by Harris Dienstfrey Life, for many of Graham Greene's characters, is something they undergo. They do...
...In a letter the doctor writes just before his death (he is killed by the secret police as an indication to the American government that Haiti can be counted on as a "bulwark against Communism"), he passes on the lesson of his heritage to the narrator, who in his youth had almost become a Catholic priest...
...On the surface, what is offered in Greene's newest novel, The Comedians, seems far from this outlook...
...No part of the world is changed by his behavior, and his actions constitute no symbolic image of the future...
...A brilliant brain specialist, a Marxist, and a humanist, a Haitian who chooses to remain in his country even though it means almost certain death, he is the moral exemplar of the novel...
...By the end of the novel, he comes to believe that such a life amounts to nothing and that he must somehow involve himself in the world of men...
...The story is set in present-day Haiti, a land, as the novel describes it, of terror and violence...
...But the way the novel develops this theme serves to undercut and contradict it...
...But the unfolding is controlled by a careful design...
...They do not so much experience it as suffer it...
...Still, he has ended his detachment and indifference...
...It is Greene's ironic comment on the worth of this man after his life of waste that his involvement should take no more exalted a form than that of being an undertaker's assistant...
...The result is a novel blunted and cut to fit a meaning it cannot sustain...
...I implore you," the doctor writes, "do not abandon all faith...
...Or is it the same faith under another mask...
...There is always an alternative to the faith we lose...
...The heart of the narrator's change of perspective is effected through his contacts with four characters who represent different forms of involvement with the world...
...A third character represents roguish innocence...
...Life is not something one confronts, deals with, lives in...
...Magiot is meant to represent the involvement of the wise...
...What do the various forms of involvement matter, or the nature of the social imperatives that lead men of good will toward involvement, if the issue is basically a spiritual one relevant essentially to the individual...
...The essential meaning offered by The Comedians is that social involvement is a kind of personal salvation, a way to ward off the horrors of meaninglessness and despair...
...The novel often invokes the image of Nazi Germany as a parallel...
...and Mrs...
...But he is a figure in a void...
...Greene tells his story with graceful fluidity...
...By equating involvement with faith, The Comedians deadlocks itself between the themes of its events and the significance of its ultimate meaning...
...It is something one somehow learns to get through...
...It is in the last of the four that one begins to locate the faults and contradictions of The Comedians...
...The narrator and protagonist, a man nearing sixty, has led a life of total indifference to everything other than ¦what he has wanted—money mostly and occasionally love...
...The emphasis finally is not on engagement but rather on its necessity, a large difference...
...It contains little chance of lasting satisfaction and no more than momentary happiness...
...Vegetarians from Wisconsin who believe stomach acidity is the source of the violent passions, Mr...
...Only death seems to contain the promise of peace...
...His involvement is an end in itself—a method he uses to get through life...
...He is a master of construction and of the ability to provide his characters with exactly those responses which are appropriate both to them and the individual moment...
...The theme of The Comedians, in other words, is the necessity for engagement...
...Two of the characters—who, to Greene, represent the involvement of saint-like innocence— are superb creations...
...Smith, for all their foolishness, have the dignity and fearlessness of angels, and Greene depicts them with respect, humor, and even a modulated reverence...
...It's a valuable social service.' " one character explains...
...The action unfolds with an easy, almost nonchalant plausibility...
Vol. 30 • April 1966 • No. 4
