Brighton Rock by Graham Greene

In 1947 Donat ODonnell wrote that far more than the left-hand(a)-wing mi literatureancy of such poets as Auden and Spender the thrillers of Mr. Greene reflect the state of the due west European mind in the thirties. (25). For ODonnell, Greene is the most re completelyy characteristic writer of the thirties ir England, and the lead unusedist of that time and puzzle (28). What Greene draws attention to in his saucys from the flow rate is, as McEwen notes, the condition of violence and savagery crush beneath a seeming peace.Greenes take a shit such as B dutyon tilt apply the appliance of the thriller to expose and investigate contemporary affectionate problems these novels argon vehicles for social commentary particularly in the unuttered equation they make betwixt the violence and hardness of their protagonists, pig and little finger, and the background of poverty against which they be presented. This idea analyses B remedyon joust finished a prism of recital the ory. In tag onition nigh socio-philosophical implications ar discussed.Analysis In Brighton thrill Pinkies gang finish offs pressure but tho aft(prenominal) he has make the acquaintance of Ida Arnold, a fun-loving pragmatist who repeatedly insists on her chicaneledge of the difference amidst right and wrong. Responding to an irrational compulsionshe calls herself a hood whither rights concerned (16)she investigates Hales death, seeking to bring Pinkie to arbiter and to save arise the indorseing that Pinkie go forth inflict upon her.Like Mather, Ida, despite fulfilling the role of the re essayer, is mocked by the figment her in cogency to see beneath the surface of issues gravely limits her understanding of the case and of the domain of a single-valued function she inhabits. Brighton for her is a taper of fun and excitement, and life is al agencys good (19, 72) I al styles say its fun to be bouncy (17). The dark side, twain of life and of the city with its b eggars and its crime, is notwithstanding alien to her (73)Death shocked her, life was so important. She wasnt spiritual. She didnt believe in heaven or hell, however in ghosts, ouija boards, tables which rapped . . . but to her death was the end of eitherthing. . . . livelihood was sunlight on brass bed conducts, Ruby port, the jump prohibited of the heart when the outsider you have back passes the post and the colours go bobbing up. Life was poor Freds communicate pressed down on hers in the taxi, vibrating with the locomotive engine along the parade. . .. she took life with deadly secureness she was prep ared to cause whatever amount of unhappiness to some(prenominal) ane in order to defend the totally thing she believed in. (36) both her naive optimism, which has something dangerous and remorseless (36) in it, and her phantasmal blindness prevent her from understanding Pinkie and Rose and account for the ironic t mavin that dominates many of the descriptions of I da Ida Arnold was on the right side. She was cheery, she was healthy, she could get a bit lit with the outmatch of them.She standardizedd a good time, her unsound breasts bore their carnality frankly down the senior Steyne, but you had provided to look at her to chicane that you could rely on her. She wouldnt tell tales to your wife, she wouldnt remind you adjacent morning of what you wanted to forget, she was honest, she was kindly, she belonged to the great middle law-abiding class, her amusements were their amusements, her superstitions their superstitions (the planchette scratching the French polish on the cursory table, and salt over the shoulder), she had no more go to bed for anyone than they had. (80)This kind of mockery has led numerous critics to smirch Ida for her lack of spiritual awareness (she boasts to Rose that Its the initiation we got to deal with 198) and to elevate Pinkie to tragic tallness because he professes a belief in a divine order (its the onl y thing that fits 52, he says) wherein the crucial difference is not between right and wrong but between Good and Evil. In that Rose shares Pinkies cognition, she and Pinkie are presented both in the school text and in critical discussions as virtuously superior to Ida and new(prenominal)wise characters like her such as Dallow, Cubitt, Colleoni, and Phil Corkery.The point is made particularly make it in comments made by Rose to Pinkie and in exchanges between Ida and Rose I only came here for your sake. I wouldnt have troubled to see you front, only I dont want to let the Innocent sufferthe aphorism came clicking out like a tatter from a slot machine. Why, wont you lift a experience to stop him killing you? He wouldnt do me any harm. Youre young. You dont know things like I do. Theres things you dont know. she brooded darkly by the bed while the woman argued on a God wept in a garden and cried out upon a cross Molly Carthew went to everlasting fire.I know one thing you do nt. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didnt teach you that at school. Rose didnt answer the woman was quite right the twain words meant slide fastener to her. Their taste was extinguish by stronger foodsGood and Evil. The woman could tell her nothing she didnt know round theseshe knew by tests as clear as mathematics that Pinkie was evilwhat did it theme in that case whether he was right or wrong? (198) As is illustrated here, the write up frequently contrasts ii distinct views of the worldthe secular outlook of Ida and others and the religious intuition of Rose and Pinkie.From a social aspect there is no escaping the point that Pinkies evil makes him a criminal. However, as with Raven, Pinkies guilt is mitigated by a background of poverty (Man is made by the places in which he lives, the text tells us 37) and by the forepart of Colleoni, a self-described business man (64), who, though the leader of a vast criminal organization, is in addition well re garded by the Brighton police and by the buttoned-down party which seeks to persuade him into politics (159).As for Ida, whatever her shortcomings, she succeeds in her task of ridding society of Pinkies menace, although the conditions that produced Pinkie, the source of the evil, remain. On one level, then, Ida is the instrument of law and order who brings about the socially desirable end, the social good, that Rose, representative of a religious or spiritual Good, cannot. Ida is, in this respect, a direct of the law defending a secular conservative vision of society that relies on human legal expert which, as we have noted, Greene sees as both special and limiting.On the other hand, criticism of Ida often seems to have at its root a prejudice against the scout account because it is a best-selling(predicate) form of literature. Ida, herself, is strongly secure to popular nuance, and in many respects she represents a populist spirit. The text tells us that She was of the p eople, she cried in cinemas at David Copper dramatic art, when she was drunk all the old ballads her mother had cognise came easily to her lips, her homely heart was touched by the word tragedy (32). Similarly, her bed-sitting manner contains the trappings of popular culture and an assortment of popular literaturepieces of china bought at the seaside, a photograph of Tom, an Edgar Wallace, a Netta Syrett from a second-hand stall, some sheets of music, The Good Companions, her mothers picture, more china, a few fit animals made of wood and elastic, trinkets given her by this, that and the other, Sorrell and Son, the Board. (42) In one sense then, her success represents the triumph, albeit limited, of the popular. However, for critics like R. W. B. Lewis, Idas popular heart (34) and her role as the investigating investigator underpin the condemnation of her character and the neglect of her function in the book.In Lewiss eye, the Ida Arnold plot threatens Brighton with the disaster of being two different books under the analogous cover (244) The amusement is Idas it begins with the first sentence . . . The tragedy is Pinkies it begins more subtly in the atmosphere of place (243). As these remarks imply, not to condemn Ida is to elevate in their importance the books tec- chronicle aspects-something Lewis cannot and volition not do. We can see in Brighton inclination how the research worker point complements and underscores the narrative of Pinkies religious struggle.To be fair, however, Lewis does recognize the interdependence of the two stories, despite his perception of generic confusion in the novel (239) the tattle between the detective news reveal and the tragedy expresses scarce what Brighton Hock is finally all about. It is a copulation between modes of narrative discourse that reflects a coition between two kinds or levels of reality a relation between incompatible worlds between the clean-living world of right and wrong, to which Ida con stantly and confidently appeals, and the theological world of good and evil inhabited by Pinkie and Rose.(244) However, we might add to these remarks that the relation between the two modes of narrative discourse can overly be study as an inscription of the alliance between popular discourse and serious discourse. In the pure true detective flooring that Todorov describes, the horizontal surface of the crime becomes present in the text only done the write up of the investigating that is, the crime takes place outside the frame of the narrative and all its inside information are weakened only in the course of the investigation.The events ahead(p) to the crime make up a tale that is seen only through its periodic intrusion by means of clues, or ciphers, into the written written report of the investigation which we read we find out about the one story in the telling of the other. As Todorov figures it, this pattern reveals the two aspects that the Russian formalists ident ify as part of any storyfabula and sjuzhetwhere the fabula is revealed only through the sjuzhet while til now providing the sjuzhet with the material of its own existence.However, as we have noted, to fit which of these two precedes the other is a task fraught(p) with am freeuity, and this ambiguity is reflected in Brighton Rocks departures from the paradigm of the classical detective story. This ambiguity emerges in the novels handling of the mechanics of the classical detective storys structure Ida explicitly begins her pursuit at the place from which Hale disappeared (81) and then works to speculate the crime which, as even Pinkie realizes (86), is the trite investigative process.In a general sense, Ida traces over the antecedently laid path of Pinkie and his gangan body process that is consistent with the structural dynamics of the classical detective story plotand so figures the saves of the sjuzhet (the discourse) upon the material of the fabula (the story). As well, he r retracing figures the act of writing that produces narrative as a rewriting of a prior narrative which is keep down in the later narrative although its existence is revealed in the later narrativethe narrative of the investigationthrough the presence of clues which are the tactual signs marking the put across of the repressed.However, in Brighton Rock Idas pursuit of Pinkie intensifies the story of Pinkies efforts to avoid capture. As Ida proceeds in her drill or eventsexplicitly linked to her study of an occult arts text (Fresuicilleye)she uncovers indications of Pinkies story marked in the narratives pointednesss, which in more orthodox detective fiction are formalized as clues things such as Hales disapproval of Bass beer and his confession that he was going to transcend (18) arouse Idas instincts so that she senses that there is something odd about Hales death (31).Late details that come out after his death, such as the fact that he used a false name (31), had bruises on his coat of arms (79), and left a restaurant without eating despite telling Ida he was hungry (33), confirm Idas suspicions that something is discombobulate about the death while, at the same time, they reveal details of Pinkies story. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Idas investigation of Hales death forces Pinkies follow throughs.Since the official investigators agree that Hale died of immanent causes, they have closed the case (78-80), which means that it is only Ida whom Pinkie has to fear. In an odd way, then, Idas search originates, develops, and validates all of Pinkies actions from his courtship of Rose to his strike of Spicer to his attempt to plant Roses self-annihilation as Dallow accuses Ida late in the novel, this is your doing. You made him marry her, you made him . . . (236).To be sure, Pinkie fears that the police may ask disbeliefs about the man who left the card at Snows, but, as we realize, they do not and will not reopen their inquiry. In their place, though, is Ida. In this sense, the detective story plot determines the course of Pinkies story although, conversely, it is Pinkies story that gives rise to the detective narrative. The two specifys of action are entangled in each other with each standing as the origin of the other.Indeed, the question of origin is complicated further by the fact that the disturbance that excites the narrative of Brighton Rock into beingthe murder of Haleis considered an act of revenge the initial action occurs in response to an earlier actionthe murder of Kitethe story of which, though sporadically erupting into Pinkies story (63, 218-19), lies in another narrative, another text as the text explicitly remarks, The whole origin of the thing was lost (217).As a model of narrative mechanics, then, Brighton Rock, figures narratives ability to perpetuate itself by inscribing within itself two consort narrative strands that generate and then feed on each other. Since Pinkies storythe sto ry of the crimesparks Idas story into life and since her investigation determines the content of Pinkies story, each story can be seen as the origin of the other as each lies behind the other. Idas investigation uncovers the content of Pinkies story, but his narrative also becomes the means by which Idas story is discovered.To illustrate with just one drill of how this works one can look at part 4, section 1 (99-120), where Pinkie and Spicer are at the race track. Although the storyline in the cozy up involves Pinkies betrayal of Spicer to Colleonis men, one glimpses the other narrative line involving Ida. Spicer tells Pinkie about a woman who backed Black Boy for a pony (103). peerless then finds out that Black Boy won the race, and again Spicer mentions the woman who now has won so much money (104) the narrative goes on to report that Pinkie heard a laugh, a womanish laugh which is attributed to the same woman (104-105).She is, of course, Ida, who bets on Hales leading and so wins enough money to persist in the investigation. In this example one sees how the story of maculation is revealed in the telling of Pinkies story. Another way for us to see the relationship between the two narratives of Ida and Pinkie, of investigation and crime, is to think of either narrative strand as the repressed content of the other each reveals its presence in intermittent clues that surface into the respective narrative.However, whichever way one chooses to view Brighton Rock again depends on ones point of view, but ultimately one is expression at the same thing. Greene reflects the inconclusive nature of narrative origins in his handling of the classical detective storys structure. As Brighton Rock stands, the story of the detection is interrupted by the story of the criminal, which reveals details of the crime the two stories are presented in roughly alternating chapters occurring more or less along a shared timeline.The lector, then, gains knowledge of the circumst ances of Hales death from two sources, the chapters relations with Ida and the chapters dealing with Pinkie. The two stories of the investigation and the crime become blear in the novel as each begins to acknowledge the other. As if to underscore this blending of narrative, it is notable that the novels first scene places Pinkie, Ida and Hale in the same room murderer, detective, and victim have their stories begin at the same time in the same place. The novel figures, then, the indeterminate nature of narrative origin from its outset.Because Idas investigation of events, metaphorically figured in her drill material of an occult text, both reveals and determines the text she reads, we also see in Brighton Rock how the perceiving subject personal effects what it perceives, and in price of knowledge the implications of this action are complex. On one level, reading a text actualizes that text for the reader by inscribing it in the readers consciousness where it previously did n ot exist. At the same time, the reader sees in the text what he or she is, in a sense, programmed to see through his or her experience of the already-read.This phenomenon lies behind the differing judgments on Brighton Rock probable or improbable plot, proletarian novel or moral allegory, detective story or religious drama, light fiction or serious literature, entertainment or tragedy, and so on. However it is seen, the novel is the product of an interpretive act. Brighton Rock shows us both how these differences are generated and how they coexist within the textual field of the novel. The question of how texts are read is one of the issues at the heart of Brighton Rock.Perhaps more than in other detective stories, Brighton Rock foregrounds the reading process as a concern from the first page when we find Hale as Kolley Kibber following a route (itself prescribed by a text) through Brighton in search of someone with a copy of The Daily courier in hand who can repeat a prepared text You are Mr. Kolley Kibber. I direct the Daily Messenger prize (5). Language is, thus, explicitly figured as a code. The text stresses that the carry must be made in the proper(ip) form of words (5), and hence the contingency of arriving at a correct, univocal reading of a text, of fully understanding the code, is implied.However, since the challenge Hale receives ultimately results in his death, we see figured in Brighton Rock the inadequacy of such a simple method of reading. This possibility is confirmed in the larger investigation of reading that is enacted in the novel. As the detective, Ida is the reader of the fictions that Pinkie creates to explain Hales, Spicers, and, though it does not occur, Roses deaths. In producing these fictions, Pinkie uses tangible signs, which are meant to mislead their reader. The cards he has Spicer adjust along Hales route are meant to stand as the visible traces of Hales presence, as Hales signature.Similarly, in preparing the story of R oses suicide, Pinkie uses a note that Rose herself has written and insists that she add a piece to explain her death (231) for Rose, this involves sign away more than her life (227) because in committing suicide she commits a mortal sin which will, according to her belief, anathematise her. But in both instances, and particularly in the latter, the creation of a fiction is explicitly tie to the production of a written text, and in this way the act of detection that involves the reading of Pinkies texts mirrors the activity of Greenes reader and of reading in general.Conclusion If Brighton Rock demonstrates the limitations of reading, it also insists upon the exigency of reading. Just as Chesterton described every detail within the urban landscape as a sign to be read by the detective in his or her search for truth, so is every detail within a detective story of potential significance to the readers interpretation of the narrative. In Brighton Rock the experience of the world is figured in terms of reading the world of Brighton is explicitly a world of text.Roses fathers face is marked deeply with the hieroglyphics of pain and forbearance and suspicion (142) the edge of the sea is like a line of writing in whitewash big sprawling letters (152) and Ida, herself, is likened by the narrative to an equivocal text that insists it be read she stood there like a wall at the end of an road scrawled with the obscene chalk messages of an enemy (196). In this context, reading becomes an unavoidable activity linked to military unit those best able to read or even to prolong convincing and authoritative readings are those who exercise power in this world.Both Ida and the police are confident in their interpretations of clues and events. The police, assigned the task of interpreting evidence in order to determine whether or not a crime has been committed, produce their own reading of Hales death. Their report presents a univocal interpretation of the details of the d eath and so preserves their power because in their eyes and in the eyes of the society the case is solved.The end of the case thus maintains an impression of efficiency, which, in turn, justifies the liberty conferred upon the police. As Edwin Muir wrote of Pinkie in a go over of Brighton Rock, he is an evil product of an evil environment, a living criticism of society, and on that plane accredited (76). Muirs remarks could just as easily apply to Raven, who is give tongue to to be made by hatred (66). Indeed, because one of his obsessive boasts is Im educated (15, 46), the social system that shapes Raven is severely criticized.In Brighton Rock there are hints of a repressed rely for goodness and peace in Pinkie that are seen in his senseal reactions to music, his commemoration of his days in the church choir and his desire to be a priest, his faint stirring of ticker for Rose and pity for Prewitt, and his sense of an enormous emotion beating on him . . . the pressure of gi gantic wing against the glass as he drives Rose to what he assumes will be her death (242)all of which sign that Pinkies evil arises out of the corruption of his innocence.In his case, the crippling effects of his environment destroy a natural aim to goodness. The three entertainments that follow Brighton Rock, while not abandoning the social critique of the books from the thirties, become more obvious than Greenes text was in the interrogations of the thriller form and of the structures of authoritywhether political, literary or textualthat exist within society. Bibliography Greene, Graham. Brighton Rock. 1938. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1988._____________. Our Man in Havana. 1958. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1977. Lewis, R. W. B. Graham Greene The Religious Affair. The Picaresque Saint part Figures in Contemporary Fiction. Philadelphia and New York Lipponcott, 1959. 220-74. McEwen, Neil. Graham Greene. Macmillan modern-day Novelists. London Macmillan, 1988. ODonnell, Donat. Graham Gr eene. Chimera 5. 4 (Summer 1947) 18-30. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. 1971. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca Cornell UP, 1977.