Cervantes and the Spanish Baroque Aesthetics in the Novels of Graham Greene
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TESIS DOCTORAL Título Cervantes and the spanish baroque aesthetics in the novels of Graham Greene Autor/es Ismael Ibáñez Rosales Director/es Carlos Villar Flor Facultad Facultad de Letras y de la Educación Titulación Departamento Filologías Modernas Curso Académico Cervantes and the spanish baroque aesthetics in the novels of Graham Greene, tesis doctoral de Ismael Ibáñez Rosales, dirigida por Carlos Villar Flor (publicada por la Universidad de La Rioja), se difunde bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-SinObraDerivada 3.0 Unported. Permisos que vayan más allá de lo cubierto por esta licencia pueden solicitarse a los titulares del copyright. © El autor © Universidad de La Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2016 publicaciones.unirioja.es E-mail: [email protected] CERVANTES AND THE SPANISH BAROQUE AESTHETICS IN THE NOVELS OF GRAHAM GREENE By Ismael Ibáñez Rosales Supervised by Carlos Villar Flor Ph.D A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy At University of La Rioja, Spain. 2015 Ibáñez-Rosales 2 Ibáñez-Rosales CONTENTS Abbreviations ………………………………………………………………………….......5 INTRODUCTION ...…………………………………………………………...….7 METHODOLOGY AND STRUCTURE………………………………….……..12 STATE OF THE ART ..……….………………………………………………...31 PART I: SPAIN, CATHOLICISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN (CATHOLIC) NOVEL………………………………………38 I.1 A CATHOLIC NOVEL?......................................................................39 I.2 ENGLISH CATHOLICISM………………………………………….58 I.3 THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN NOVEL........................................71 I.4 FROM LA MANCHA TO THULE... AND BACK.............................91 I.5 FROM CATHOLIC CERVANTES TO PROTESTANT DEFOE ....119 I.6 CATHOLIC IMAGINATION AND BAROQUE AESTHETICS….134 I.7 CATHOLIC AESTHETICS IN CERVANTES'S NOVELS..............152 I.8 MODERN RECEPTION OF CATHOLIC AESTHETICS…............190 PART II: BAROQUE AESTHETICS AND THE INFLUENCE OF SPANISH CATHOLIC IMAGINATION IN GREENE’S NOVELS……………...222 II.1 GRAHAM GREENE'S UNFINISHED CONVERSION..................223 3 Ibáñez-Rosales II.2 THE PATTERN IN THE CARPET..................................................245 - THE MAN WITHIN AND THE NAME OF ACTION………………...249 - ENGLAND MADE ME………………………………………….…..261 - A GUN FOR SALE………………………………………………….279 - BRIGHTON ROCK……………………………………………….…300 - THE HEART OF THE MATTER………………...……………….…321 - A BURNT-OUT CASE……………………...……………………….338 II.3 SPAIN IN GREENE ..………………………………………….…..352 - RUMOUR AT NIGHTFALL……………………………………...…358 - THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT………………………………………....366 - THE POWER AND THE GLORY………...…………………………392 II.4 GREENE IN SPAIN………………………………………………..409 - MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE……………………...……………………420 CONCLUSIONS .................................................................................................455 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................478 APPENDIX .........................................................................................................519 4 Ibáñez-Rosales ABBREVIATIONS All references to quotations from works by Miguel de Cervantes and Graham Greene appear parenthetically in the text. - Miguel de Cervantes: PS Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda DQ Don Quijote de La Mancha - Graham Greene: B It’s a Battlefield BC A Burnt-Out Case BR Brighton Rock CA The Confidential Agent CE Collected Essays EA The End of the Affair EMM England Made Me GS A Gun for Sale HM The Heart of the Matter JWM Journey Without Maps LR The Lawless Roads 5 Ibáñez-Rosales MQ Monsignor Quixote MW The Man Within NA Name of Action PG The Power and the Glory RN Rumour at Nightfall SL A Sort of Life ST Stamboul Train YE Yours Etc. Letters to the Press WE Ways of Escape 6 Ibáñez-Rosales INTRODUCTION Peter Ackroyd, in his 2002 Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, opens chapter 17 with a suggestive and revelatory title: “Faith of Our Fathers”. The author begins with Thomas Malory’s words in his “Tale of the Sankgreal”, where Sir Galahad witnesses the miracle of transubstantiation during the holy communion of the Catholic Mass. The bishop took up a wafer “which was made in lyknesse of brede. And at the lyfftyng up there cam a figure in lyknesse of a chylde, and the visage was as rede and as bright os ony fyre, and smote hymselff into the brede, that all they saw hit that the brede was fourmed of a fleyshely man. And then he put hit into the holy vessel agayne”. (Ackroyd, 2002, 123) Ackroyd comments on the strangeness of the scene, where the wafer of bread is transformed into a child and a man before being dipped into the chalice. However, the image is perfectly consistent with the Catholic imagination of Malory’s contemporaries that in the mysterious miracle of the mass the Word does indeed become flesh. That imagination, as Ackroyd states, is at the heart of Catholic England, at the centre of the culture which Catholic England manifested. England was at the centre of Catholic Europe, rivalled with the Catholic European South, and breathed in Catholic culture before the Reformation “extirpated [it] in 7 Ibáñez-Rosales the early sixteenth century” (245). Consequently, Ackroyd wonders “whether the legacy of the last five hundred years will outweigh or outlast a previous tradition of fifteen hundred years” (123). The location by Ackroyd of English cultural identity in the Catholic civilisation before the Reformation provides him with a cultural logic both tenable and productive, certainly one that creates a new frame of reference for the understanding of a set of dominants in English art forms. It was a shared civilisation of ceremony and spectacle, of drama, of ritual and display; life was only the beginning, not the end, of existence and thus could be celebrated or scorned as one station along the holy way. It was a world in which irony and parody of all kinds flourished, where excremental truth and holy vision were considered fundamentally compatible, where Aquinas could mount towards heaven with his divine dialectic and Rabelais stoop towards the earth with his gargantuan corporeality. It was a world of symbolic ceremony, with the processions of Palm Sunday, the rending of the veil in Holy Week and the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday. Doves were released at Pentecost in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Resurrection dramatised on Easter Day in Lichfield Cathedral. (Ackroyd, 2002, 124) Catholic rituals, especially the mass, did after all mould theatrical representation in incontestable measures, and the centrality of theatrical traditions in the shaping of English character cannot be overstated. In its celebratory and ritualistic practice, Catholicism is the true kindred spirit of the English, Ackroyd argues, because it inculcates in the individual the inclination for spectacle and 8 Ibáñez-Rosales play, manifest in the relish for performance arts, high in mimetic drive. He thus posits the native English tradition displaced by the Reformation as the expression of an archetypal form, a primal and recurrent image or prototype of the English imagination reverberating in the collective unconscious: We all know how the drama was in origin a form of religious ritual, how in this country its beginnings are to be found in Mysteries and the Miracle Plays and how its deepest source probably lies within the Catholic Mass itself. We also know how certain forms of Protestantism were as deeply opposed to drama as they were to Catholicism. (…) Catholicism is a religion of ritual, spectacle and symbolism, whereas Protestantism is more concerned with the exigencies of the solitary conscience and the individual's relationship to God. (Ackroyd, 2000, 337) In addition to its rich ritualistic and symbolical dimension, Ackroyd glorifies Catholic tradition for the communal feeling and publicness of faith that it cultivates. He polarises the Catholic and Protestant sensibilities, contrasting the restrained, individual-oriented theology of Protestant cultures to the collective ethos of Catholicism. The original aim of my research was the way Graham Greene’s novels negotiate and circulate Catholicism. In the middle of my study, however, I encountered two obstacles. Firstly, anything written by authors with a Catholic sensibility or imagination, such as Graham Greene, as well as fiction with implicit or explicit Catholic elements, had been labelled for more than a hundred years 9 Ibáñez-Rosales now as “Catholic fiction”. The term “Catholic novel”, apart from being disturbing for most of the authors involved, implies confusion. Secondly, critical works on Graham Greene have been many and exhaustive. I found myself in that wasteland of research where every single path had been trodden so many times before. Catholicism, politics, Faith, belief and unbelief were terms that led me to that place where some critic had already stayed. Sometimes, too many of them. Recalling Ackroyd’s ideas on the importance of the form of religious drama over the content and taking into account the possible Catholic origins of the novel, I found myself precisely in that place that Greene called “the tragicomic region of La Mancha”. In a sort of Eliotian April, I had found a starting point where the first ideas for this research flourished. Indeed, many studies have analysed Greene’s vision of Don Quixote’s world as a “tragicomic region”, which was undoubtedly inspired by the closing chapter of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, “Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragicomedy”, which discusses the knight’s quest as a “comic”