Emotional Warfare in Graham Greene`s "The Heart of the Matter"

 

Emotional Warfare: the Torn Self in Graham Greene' s 

“The Heart of the Matter” (1948)

"No Man is an Island" by John Donne, Methaphysical Poet (1624)

In spite of the physical distance of turbulence in Europe during World War II, suffering and misunderstanding are felt in the colonial outpost of Sierra Leone, the setting for Graham Greene’s novel, described as a Babel tower of conflicting sides: the French shipwreck from Vichy, the Japanese name dropping, the natives, the Syrian, the British, or the German (the owner of the searched for Portuguese “Esperança” alleges the hidden letter is due for his German daughter). This parade of misunderstanding and concocting cauldron of subplotting sides becomes sublimated in Scobie’s internal warfare: crumbling Catholicism and emotional havoc.

“...Robinson was exhibiting the most enviable position a man can own—a happy death. This tour would bear a high proportion of deaths—or perhaps not so high when you counted them and remembered Europe.” (154).

An atemporal nod to menacing, inhumane and devastating warfare to illustrate how suffering touches all: our petty world of comfortability is minimized in the face of dire pain somewhere else: “no one is an island.”

Aimee Liu in “Reaching for The Heart of the Matter” article, click here, mentions the underlying invisible ink beyond the historical trenches of detail:

“I turned to this novel in search of information and insight, to get a sense of the war as it was experienced far from the major battlefields and concentration camps of Europe and Asia. Greene’s work is indeed rich in precise period details. I learned, for instance, that a used Morris sedan in the colonies of the early forties could be purchased for between £150 and 400; that Brits in the tropics wore mosquito boots inside and out; that Band-Aids of that era were called Elastoplasts; and that “native saboteurs” in the colonies were both employed and feared as wartime mercenaries. But there was more. Much more. “

It is this “much more” which Aimee Liu describes as the invisible ink in “The Heart of the Matter”: “the theological, the philosophical, the political being a prism of personal choice” (rephrased from Aimee Liu’s article). The physical and tangible phenomena become, for example, explanatory notes for internal havoc. From the start, emotions, disbelief, chaos are attributed to the stifling climate of humid heat and downpours: Wilson needs a hat to think straight and control his scarlet flushes; a crisis of faith (Father Rank,Scobie) is attributed to the heavy rains or the heat; love is described as “Coast Fever” (137). Scobie’s diary gathers the factual accounts but hides the real “Roman foundations” that constitute that invisible ink which Aimee Liu describes in her article and to which Scobie alludes himself:

“Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the day October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life—bare and undisturbed and built of facts—lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead: no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy…” (261)

The invisible ink curlicues of “A Bishop among the Bantus, “ a story that he reads to a little boy from the Vichy shipwreck at the infirmary,  may be deconstructed in a story of forbidden love, colonial reconciliation, secrecy, a crisis in faith ….some of the seedling Scobie sows across his interactions with the characters in the novel. “Of course, the book may sound a bit different when Mrs Bowles reads it,” he tells the boy (135).

a Bishop who is called first “Bishop,” then, Arthur, “a soppy hero”, “the real heroes are the Bantus”, it is a kind of “detective story, a secret agent, a merchantman, who discovers the secret passwords and hidden places, he falls in love with the daughter of the Bantus...” (rephrased page 136)

Rampant personal debacle approaches, after mass, on his way out with Louise: “He rose and followed her and knelt by her side like a spy in a foreign land who has been taught the customs and to speak the language like a native.” (249). A converted Bantu.

Scobie unfolds an institutional apathy in the novel that strikes as an attempt to make other’s happy, to fulfil duties, to be a quiet man that records the facts but, who, internally struggles with a torn self.