Time, Eternity, and the Novel in The End of the Affair. (8th January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hill, Nathaniel
• Is Part Of: Literature and theology. Volume 33:Number 2(2019)
• Page Start: 138
• Page End: 150
• Publication Date: 2019-01-08
• Subjects: Temporality -- Mysticism -- Selfhood -- Graham Greene -- The End of the Affair; Religion and literature -- Periodicals; Religion and literature; Periodicals; 809.9338205
• DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fry039
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0269-1205

Abstract

Abstract: Graham Greene wrestles with the counterintuitive project of writing mystical novels in a modern Britain in which scientific criteria are applied to other-worldly beliefs. Suspended, like Saint Augustine, between the secular temporality of the world and the mystical temporality—or non-temporality—of eternity, Greene ponders the ethical implications of the novel, insofar as it exemplifies a godlike power to arrange lives and distribute fates. In The End of the Affair (1951), Greene draws equally upon mystical resources within the tradition of Saint Augustine and Saint John of the Cross and the objective, interpersonal narrative form of the modern novel. In doing so, Greene explores the difficult ways in which mystical experience, in tune with God's timelessness, can be told in the time of narrative. By way of Greene, this article explores the fraught relationship between the proto-existentialist Heidegger's emphasis on being-in-the-world—a meaningful existence counterintuitively freed by the temporal constraints of finitude—and the eternity, however complexly conceived, of Catholicism. In juxtaposing mysticism and temporality, eternity and finitude, the article explores how temporality figures both in the formal experiments of this novel and in the forms-of-life of characters and author alike. Mysticism, often tossed aside as a leftover of fantasy or superstition, addresses issues at the core of modern identity itself.