Greene and the Polemics of Canonical Reading

Abstract

When Robert Murray Davis argued in 1973 that ‘unless a better case can be made for [Greene], the Collected Edition may have to be the slab over his reputation instead of a monument to it’ he did not imply that Greene would simply disappear, or that the public would stop reading his novels, or even that Hollywood would stop acquiring the rights to adapt those novels for the cinema.¹ On the contrary, public acclaim and demand for Greene’s work had rarely been as high.² Davis’s concern was limited to a more specific institutional context. Unless scholars began assessing Greene from different perspectives than had hitherto been brought to bear on the writer’s work, his significance within the academy would likely wane. Specifically, he suggested the need for scholars to move away from emphasis on the ‘incredibly dated’ dogmatic issues that had virtually monopolized Greene criticism throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Davis reflected: ‘One wonders what college-age readers make of [Greene] behind the polite, bland, notetaking façade ....’³ As Davis conceived it, the problem stemmed less from Greene’s texts than from teachers and scholars who continued to insist that understanding the dogmatic issues in the texts was tantamount to understanding the texts themselves. Nothing, of course, was more understandable than the parochialism of critical interest: two decades of criticism had struggled to assert that an obsession with matters of faith was the factor that distinguished Greene from other popular novelists and that made his work stand apart from more conventional material.