1. Crime Fiction Session Two: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

2. Agenda From Dickens to Greene Graham Greene and Brighton Rock

3. From Dickens to Greene Here is a standard way of mapping out the 100 years between Dickens and Greene: Realism, e.g. Charles Dickens Modernism, e.g. James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf Antimodernism (realism), e.g. George Orwell and Graham Greene

4. Examples of Modernist texts James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1927)

5. Modernism, Crime, and Narrative In contrast to realism, modernism departs from references to crime, criminals, and detectives and from the narrative paradigm associated with crime fiction. Famously, in Ulysses crime fiction is figured in a story Leopold Bloom reads at stool, the movement of the detective plot carefully mirroring the movement of his bowels!!!

6. Modernism, Crime, and Narrative Equally famously, crime in Mrs Dalloway is merely present in the failure of the medical profession to recognise symptoms of post traumatic stress in former WWI soldiers – a failure that leads one of the characters to commit suicide.

7. Modernism, Crime, and Narrative Modernism also attempts to escape the paradigm of crime fiction and the idea that a plot should unearth a story (or several stories in Dickens’ case). Instead, modernists developed the technique of stream of consciousness, focussing on what Woolf called ”an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”

8. Graham Greene and Modernism Greene’s relationship with modernism is ambivalent: He rejects Woolf’s project of examining ”an ordinary mind on an ordinary day” But he cannot just go back to Dickens and 19th century realism Instead, he tries out an approach to narrative that is best described as ”antimodernist.” This means that crime and the paradigm of crime fiction is back on the menu, but with a difference.

9. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock Greene’s stance is apparent in his plot (Look a the following outline of the plot (slides 10-12)). It is obvious that the plot carefully weaves in and out of the stories associated with the key characters. This is similar to Dickens. But the effect is to produce suspense rather than to offer up chronological sequences of events that explain why the characters behave the way they do. Dickens gave explanations for Oliver’s incorruptibility, while producing suspense at the same time.

10. I1Hale 2 (20)The Boy 3 (28)Ida Arnold II1 (47)The Boy 2 (63)The Boy III1 (73)Ida Arnold 2 (86)Spicer 3 (91)The Boy 4 (103)The Boy IV1 (107)The BoyThe Races 2 (129)Ida Arnold 3 (132)The BoySpicer dead

11. V1 (141)The BoyAfter inquest 2 (148)The BoySame 3 (153)The BoyVisiting Rose’s parents 4 (157)Ida Arnold 5 (160)The Boy 6 (164)Ida Arnold VI1 (169)CubittTalks to Crab and Ida 2 (180)The Boy

12. VII1 (207)Rose 2 (219)The Boy 3 (225)The BoyVisits Mr Prewitt 4 (231)The Boy 5 (234)The Boy 6 (241)Ida Arnold 7 (244)The Boy 8 (253)Dallow, Ida Arnold 9 (259)The Boy 10 (265) Ida Arnold 11 (267)Rose

13. The Characters The outline of the plot also emphasises Greene’s startling handling of the characters. Here Greene is also an antimodernist with realist impulses.

14. The Characters: Hale That a plot opens with a character (in this case Hale) only to kill him off is a typical whodunnit feature. However, we learn very little about the who, what, where, when, and why of his murder, only so much, in fact, that we can identify a pattern of cause and effect (he is somehow vaguely associated with the Colleoni gang – the gang that killed Kite).

15. Hale Not only is his death quite arbitrary in the sense of being a random gang killing. In his life, he is also deprived of agency and subjectivity as the Boy’s gang hunt him round Brighton And as Kolley Kibber he is similarly reduced to an object of detection, in this case orchestrated by his employer, The Messenger

16. Hale Hale, then, is almost a ”non-character” in the realist sense of the word. He is an object acted on by other people rather than an autonomous subject acting according to his own free will. But neither is he a modernist character – he is not interesting for the mental processes he dramatises.

17. The Boy, Rose, and Ida Arnold Consider the above characters and how they are figured in the plot.

18. Assignment for your exam portfolio Comment briefly (max 400 words) on one of the following characters: The Boy, Ida Arnold, Rose. More particularly, you must identify their status as subjects and / or objects in the text. To what extent are they autonomous agents? To what extent are they passive objects that react rather than act? You must use references to the text.