• 1 In David Lodge’s terms, this is envisaged as ‘erotic rivalry with God for the possession of Sarah’ (...)
• 2 I will make special reference to L’image peut-elle tuer? and Le commerce des regards. It seems to m (...)

2A statement forcibly made by the first-person narrator, Maurice Bendrix, late in the narrative, as he is watching his former lover Sarah Miles, at prayer in a heavily ornamented Roman Catholic Church, may also justify the necessity for a thorough investigation of the text-and-image relationship as exemplified in the novel. In this passage, the protagonist is led to examine an actualization of the time-honoured love triangle so current in stage melodrama, a topos with a difference, though, as his rival simply happens to be God: ‘She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win’ (Greene 128).1 ‘[A] conflict between an image and a man’, this does sound as a somewhat grandiloquent way of putting things that captures the general mood of the novel and, at the very same time, provides a key to the centrality of things not only visible but also visual in the novel’s economy, in other terms, not only things merely visible (corresponding to the represented content of the image) but also things visual (i.e., elements that problematise and blur interpretation, that present a force instead of merely representing a referential content [Didi-Huberman 25–27]). This is why I am going to address the problem of the visual, more than that of the visible, in relation with the modal categories of melodrama and romance in the following pages. I should also specify at this stage that my use of the word ‘image’ will owe much to French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain’s analyses.2 After briefly dealing with the poetics of the word-and-image dialogue as manifest in the novel, I shall move on to the modal and ethical aspects of the commerce of visibilities as present in The End of the Affair. This might allow me to put the debate around the reception of this novel in perspective and suggest the protean mode of romance as a way to re-contextualise it.

• 3 For a comparative analysis of the two novels, see Hynes’s ‘Two Affairs Revisited’ that tackles the (...)
• 4 See for example David Lodge’s analysis of the obsessive recurrence of motifs in the novel, with 298 (...)

3The End of the Affair has always been compared to another masterpiece of British Catholic melodrama, i.e. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.3 Both texts share a central concern with a hackneyed conversion structure (an adaptation of the quest motif to be found in secular romance) and stage the topoi of the converted agnostic and woman as the mediator of divine grace, while exalting the virtuous categories of sacrifice, suffering and heroism. More specifically, both novels are famous for their ekphrastic evocations of religious art of the Baroque (in Waugh’s case) or Sulpician (Greene’s version) type. Such ingredients, of course, are dependent on a predilection for the workings of narrative hyperbole, a fondness for Manichaeism and extreme situations (Burgess 93), together with ostentatious breaches of the decorum of the realistic idiom.4 Yet, from its publication, Greene’s novel met with varied responses that may be grouped under two headings: on the one hand, the novel was considered as a fairly unorthodox piece of religious literature, lashing at the basic tenets of Catholic orthodoxy in terms of sexual morality; on the other hand, some critics were apt to unearth a great deal of orthodoxy in Greene’s shameless handling of the staples of Catholic conversion stories of the nineteenth century (Hortmann 64, 71). Most confusing for early reviewers and critics was Greene’s treatment of Charles Péguy’s paradox according to which the sinner is at the heart of Christianity—or in more unorthodox terms, that the sinner and the saint are one and the same person—which The End of the Affair is generally recognised to be a narrative variation on (Wichert 99). Such ambiguity was commonly referred to in terms of ‘disloyalty’, a category which came to be very much associated with Greene’s production, from the 1950s onwards (Wichert 103). Now, the fortunes of Greene’s œuvre seem to have dwindled from planetary success to relative oblivion—except for a shudder of interest artificially generated by the centenary of Greene’s birth—and it might be high time to re-assess some of his works through prisms different from those wielded from the 1950s to the 1980s.

• 5 This is a direct translation from Liliane Louvel’s ‘effet tableau’, a phrase that might be said to (...)

5On top of that, what brings about the end of the affair is the melodramatic pact with God into which Sarah Miles willingly enters. The scene takes place in 1944, during the first days of the V1 raids over London. The lovers are in bed, in the narrator’s rooms, when a rocket explodes in a nearby street. This prompts him to go to the basement to check whether there might be other inmates around who could be suspicious of the adulterous relation that Bendrix and Sarah are entertaining. While he is walking down the stairs, a new bomb goes off, burying Bendrix under a door that has been blown off its hinges. Seeing and touching his hand that appears from under the door, Sarah becomes convinced that her lover is dead. She runs back into the room on the first floor, falls on her knees and starts praying: if Maurice is returned to life she will relinquish him. While she is on her knees, Bendrix appears at the door and hails her. After a brief conversation, she leaves both the room and her lover for good. It is only two years later that the two former lovers meet, at the beginning of the narrative—as commented on above. Bendrix will try to reclaim his lover, will hire a detective to find out why she will not yield to him, and will realise when reading her diary (stolen by the detective) that her rival is not human but divine. This discovery triggers off in turn a confrontation and reconciliation between the two lovers (staged in the aforementioned kitschy settings of a local Catholic church), which will be curtailed by Sarah catching her death of cold. The last part of the novel is devoted to a series of coincidences that strain the reader’s belief even further: the discovery that Sarah was secretly baptised as a Catholic as a child (unknown to her father and even herself), the disappearance of a birthmark on a man’s cheek after Sarah has kissed him out of pure sympathy, the curing of a child who was able to touch a book that had been Sarah’s property when she was a little girl. Implausibility is thus toppled over implausibility to suggest a string of miraculous coincidences, a device more associated with melodrama or romance than with the more pedestrian logic of the realistic text. The novel winds up on the narrator praying to a god he professed not to believe in to leave him alone, which constitutes an invitation to consider that the blasphemous agnostic has been converted (a structure that finds its inspiration in hagiographic literature, with obvious instances like Paul or Augustine). Interestingly, the melodramatic nature of such narrative choices is not accompanied with a great deal of visual emphasis. As suggested above, there are quite a few references to the visual, but they are generally of the implicit, flitting type, most of them belonging to the category of the ‘tableau effect’.5 There are very few explicit visual evocations (no tableaux vivants or aesthetic arrangements or pictorial descriptions as direct references to a represented image [Louvel 38–44]), but among the scarcity of ekphrastic passages disseminated throughout, one realises that a majority of them (three out of five, actually [109, 110–111, 119]) are devoted to the evocation of the statuary in the twice-mentioned Catholic church. Now, even if such passages are rather short, they have a crucial function in underlining the materiality of the religion that the female protagonist has espoused in paroxystic circumstances and in underscoring the compatibility between the divine and the carnal in a confession that has made incarnation the cornerstone of its doctrine (Mondzain 2002b, 22). Such passages, in their ostentatious display of the materially religious, do provide a vivid context for the drama of jealousy, sacrifice, suffering and conversion that gives the novel its substance.

• 6 In the older version, Bendrix’s hand appears from under the door, in full respect of the novel, but (...)
• 7 For an illuminating analysis of Didi-Huberman’s hypothesis, see Mathieu Duplay’s ‘Dire le visible/c (...)
• 8 For more details about this form of indirect presentation, see Mondzain’s analysis of the biblical (...)

10As may be surmised from the above, my contention is that this might well apply to the use of the iconotext in The End of the Affair. For one thing, the apprehension of the central diptych can be envisaged in different ways. Depending on the religious and political options favoured by the reader, the values will be contrasted, as suggested by the contradictory opinions prompted by the publication of the novel. The apprehension will be extremely context-sensitive too, witness the remarkably different presentations of the scenes to be found in the first cinematographic adaptation dating back from the 1950s and in the 1990s’ more recent one.6 At least, what is clear is that Greene takes the risk of either acceptance or rejection of this critical tapping of the iconotext, and perhaps courts a more ambivalent response in which oscillation between acceptance and rejection could appear as yet another, more dynamic and paroxystic option. What I am trying to explain is that the central diptych acts both as a place and a moment of crisis in which a pathic event can lead in turn to epistemological destabilisation. In this critical moment, knowledge and certainty are suspended. The ‘decision’ aspect of the crisis is turned into indecision. The function of the iconotext is thus critical, in that it both buttresses and warps the melodramatic programme. In this sense, the iconotext has no epistemological or moral certainty to offer: its function is simply to perform a critical locus half way between the invisible and the visible, appearance and disappearance, presence and absence (Mondzain 2002b, 171–172). This of course is not without reminding us of Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the visual (as opposed to the visible) as a power that delays and blurs interpretation, of something that is less represented than presented (Didi-Huberman 27).7 And ultimately this takes us far away from the authoritative model of interpretation of the incorporative type to let us contemplate the liberating possibilities of incarnation. And possibilities or potentialities, this is what the iconotext in The End of the Affair, despite appearances, asks us to be content with envisaging. For in fact, the reader remains free to invest the symmetrically presented images of crucified Bendrix and of kneeling Sarah with a variety of valences as nothing, ultimately, is made visible. The iconotext thus works as a screen on which what is shown, in some kind of negative presentation, is that there might be something outside the screen or frame, and what the iconotext shows is that it does not show, precisely (Mondzain 2002b, 130).8 This is why, for Mondzain, the nature of the true image is to keep up the viewer’s desire to see God without ever satisfying it, thereby providing an endless tension that cannot ever be resolved (contrary to a pseudo-image in which the reader is allowed no distance from the visible and is thus the victim of identification and, later, incorporation). Such an analysis leads Mondzain to see the image as the daughter of desire (Mondzain 2002b, 42–44). I would ultimately suggest that this applies to the iconotextual economy of The End of the Affair—once again notwithstanding appearances—in which images provide room for some sort of élan or impulse out of the aesthetic, epistemological and, presumably, ontological presuppositions of the narrative without ever completing the impulse or at least letting it move beyond the phase of inchoation. The iconotext becomes some sort of operator of projection or departure used to refract or prise open what would appear otherwise as a univocally melodramatic text. Contrary to all expectations, the iconotext becomes an instrument of distance and resistance that blurs, displaces and extends the implications of the more constrictive linear prescriptions of genre and mode.

• 9 This might help prolong David Lodge’s intuition that Greene’s œuvre is saved from melodrama by iron (...)

11What I would like to pinpoint, ultimately, is the remarkable fact that Greene, on the eve of a period that is universally considered to have ushered in the tyranny of visibilities of all sorts, is intent on presenting us with images in The End of the Affair. I would then see his use of the iconotext as a means to undermine the univocal diction of melodrama and to refract the canon of the traditional British Catholic novel, with its edifying agenda. Said differently, the critical use of the iconotext introduces a moment of crisis into the linear logic of both melodrama and the realistic idiom that the novel is also steeped in.9 By pointing to another potential truth beyond that mediated by the narrative, the descriptive, iconotextual snatches are used as operators to suggest the existence of another, tentative possibility that remains infigurable. What the iconotext does to the more traditional forms of narrative exemplified in the novel is multiply the possibilities of the actual world, in true romantic fashion (and by ‘romantic’, I do not mean just ‘belonging to the Romantic movement’ but rather ‘characteristic of romance’). Greene’s use of the iconotext is thus designed not only to refract generic and modal boundaries but also to perform an operation on mimesis that he seems to consider as too limiting an option. Once again, Greene’s handling of the iconotextual image is not meant to provide a simulation, a duplicate or a representation but to perform a presentation that there is something else, true to the ethical agenda of romance.