Graham Greene and the Necessity of Pessimism
The best thing to read in the still-young 21st-century is not something optimistic but pessimistic — specifically, Graham Greene.
We should all be reading Graham Greene.
I’m a member of a semester-long book club, which features discussions on books of all sorts: works of theology, philosophy, and, of course, novels. This time, we read Greene’s Catholic novels, which are Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair.
All of them were wonderfully dark. Greene, as a writer, was not afraid to encounter the abyss.
I wasn’t surprised when some members of the group called the books “depressing” — and they certainly are — and said they hoped for them to end well.
But that’s the thing: life doesn’t always end well. People die. We lose our jobs. We go bankrupt. We become addicted to drugs. Our relationships crumble. The list of calamities that can befall us is truly endless.
There’s a reason we fill our social media feeds with relentless cheer and stamp out anything we deem negative — and it’s also why we always keep our conversations at a sugary pitch. It’s because we wish to avoid darkness. And perhaps it’s easier to do today than in the past, because everything is so fractured. We’re each worlds unto ourselves.
But to avoid the bad means getting only one half of life. That, I think, is something Greene understood well, which is why William Golding labeled him the “ultimate chronicler” of the modern age. Let’s consider the ‘Whiskey Priest’ character in The Power and the Glory, a novel many say is Greene’s masterpiece. The priest, who remains unnamed, is deviant: he’s had sex and has fathered a child, is sometimes dismissive and arrogant, and, unsurprisingly, is a drunk. The novel chronicles his journey, which is, in a sense, his purgation. He is fleeing from anti-clerical Mexican soldiers who want to see him dead. Along the way, he begins to realize his mistakes and his sins, seeks repentance, but, at a crucial moment in the story, asks to receive confession. It never occurs.
Readers might look at this and think: “How horrible!” And it is horrible, yes. But it is also beautiful and moving and poignant, because we see him turning toward God — pleading with Him — and hoping he’ll get to heaven when he dies. Because, at that point, it was all but assured.
Greene made the correct artistic choice. If the priest had received his confession, was released from jail, and was sent on his way, then there would be no point in reading the novel at all. Nothing interesting would happen, and we would come away from the story utterly unaffected.
Also, what he details in The Power and the Glory is what would happen in reality. Unless the regime’s soldiers somehow had a last-minute change of heart — possible, yes, but unlikely — then the priest would have been denied confession before his execution.
Ultimately, what we can learn from the novel and from Green’s other works is that pessimism actually helps us see the beauty of being alive. If The Power and the Glory weren’t mostly dark, then we wouldn’t have been able to see the heroism and true courage of the Whiskey Priest.
Pessimism isn’t nihilism. It’s a recognition that the worst things can happen. And constantly seeing the best in everything means everything is good all the time, which means nothing is good, because we can only learn of the good when it is contrasted with the bad. Our relentless positivity, then, isn’t helping us. It’s harming us.
Perhaps this is hard to take. Perhaps Graham Greene is tough medicine. But he’s necessary medicine, because he can bring us out of ourselves. He can force us to face directly the darkness of human life — and without actually encountering it, mind you. And having faced this darkness, we can better appreciate the light.
