情事终结 End Of Affair (cont)

Knowing · Post by **Knowing** » 2004-10-11 8:21

好小说不用长，薄薄的一本，看完了叫人荡气回肠。<情事终结>不但做到了这一点，还叫人嫌它太长--只太长了一丁点儿。读着读着：啊，原来这不是情事终结，是圣人成长史(Becoming Saint)！顿时为自己在阅读过程中掉下三屉馒头(sentimental)的热泪而不值。
我对萨拉归依天主教并无意见。恰恰相反，作为鸿沟在男女主角的爱情中间横起，使强烈的感情挣扎翻滚，从而震撼读者，必须得让读者相信这鸿沟是不可逾越。第三章，萨拉的日记，非常精彩而有力的记叙了萨拉如何突然落入宗教信仰的心网( "I caught belief like a disease"), 苦苦挣扎，渐渐寻求到心灵的平静。当然啦，作为无神论者，谁喜欢看到女主角圣洁的超脱于肉欲之外呢？两年后再见男主角，她内心的平静全被打破，又开始对上帝苦苦憎恶哀求："我不要爱你，我渴望凡人的腐朽的肉体的爱”。读者都暗自欢喜赞叹，人性终于战胜了宗教，就是的，文艺复兴都那么多年了....然而萨拉从教堂回来，染了肺炎，拒绝看医生，很快死了。上帝在惩罚萨拉？还是萨拉惩罚自己？死前她明明已经决定不跟毛里斯私奔，上帝只会将她留下来继续考验折磨，哪里会轻松的许她超脱？作者非要置萨拉于死地，因为不愿看见她继续拒绝毛里斯，更无法让她不拒绝毛里斯。人性和宗教的交战到了难以分胜负的关口，只好将战场毁灭，留下了上帝胜而胜之不武的印象。
作者分很多种，杨绛简奥斯丁属于含蓄类，写小说都跟读者与人物保留观察距离。所以连写自传，杨绛都给人隔着一层的感觉。读完了有细心的读者问：咦，她的女婿，怎么在他们的家庭生活里毫无戏份？并不是他真的没有，而是作者下笔前打好了心稿，题目叫我们三，就没打算写他。写的绵密自然，不等于是随笔开河。Greene 写小说，用的是顶内心的材料，因为控制的非常好，没给读者喋喋不休的感觉，整篇故事激情四溢，悬念控制的不松不紧，我们跟着毛里斯爱恨萨拉，忌妒迷惑，简直忘了作者化身萨拉来倾诉自己与上帝的挣扎。

Jun · Post by **Jun** » 2004-10-11 12:56

It's not a story about romance. It's a novel about the author's religious struggle. Or perhaps it's a romance about the author's love-hate relationship with the Catholic God.

But I do not regret the tears I cried for this book. Come to think of it, I wasn't crying for the end of the affair or the fact that the two persons in love could not be together.

Knowing · Post by **Knowing** » 2004-10-11 13:22

I think the book is really about Sarah's religious struggle not Maurice's. The author pushed Maurice into it by throwing a serial of miracles into his face. I as a reader, don't feel convinced by his change(into belief), neither do I think that was the intention of author. He could have either stopped before the miracles to make it a complete story about Sarah, or continued on to a complete stroy about Maurice, but he just left it there. I felt deeply disturbed and unsettled. And it was not because my questions were not answered. It was because I wanted to see God conquered him slowly like he conquered Sarah, not a quick miracle battle.

Jun · Post by **Jun** » 2004-10-11 13:35

Of course there is more Greene himself in Sarah than in Maurice. That's why her struggles seem so heartbreaking -- the author does believe in Him, even though he hates Him and hates Him. Why else would the story be so painful and sad?

Knowing · Post by **Knowing** » 2004-10-11 14:03

Hmm...I don't know enough about Graham Greene's life to tell which part of the character comes from himself. I just thought this was a love-hate novel about his relationship with C and C's relationship with GOD. Of cause in real life C did not die then and miracles did not happen. So I would imagine his hatred of God mostly came from his own experience, not from C. I wonder if he also projected lots of the hatred for C towards God, or rather, finding an explanation for his jealousy. Because I did read that C was as unfaithful a lover as Greene was, if not more, and he complained constantly about her coldness.

Jun · Post by **Jun** » 2004-10-12 6:46

Greene一生都在抱怨上帝, 我直觉他是信的, 虽然他屡屡痛斥上帝. 那时候有不少英国文人都是经过深思熟虑后

helenClaire · Post by **helenClaire** » 2004-10-12 12:26

In Graham Greene's own words:

Graham Greene on The End of the Affair:
Many a time I regretted pursuing "I" along his dismal road and contemplated beginning The End of the Affair all over again with Bendrix, my leading character, seen from outside in the third person. I had never previously had to struggle so hard to lend the narrative interest. For example how could I vary the all-important "tone" when it was one character who was always commenting? The tone had been set on the first page by Bendrix ― "This is a record of hate far more than of love" ― and I dreaded to see the whole book smoked dry like a fish with his hatred. Dickens had somehow miraculously varied his tone [in Great Expectations], but when I tried to analyze his success, I felt like a colourblind man trying intellectually to distinguish one colour from another. For my book there were two shades of the same colour ― obsessive love and obsessive hate; Mr. Parkis, the private detective, and his boy were my attempt to introduce two more tones, the humorous and the pathetic.

The story…which now began to itch at my mind ― of a man who was to be driven and overwhelmed by the accumulation of natural coincidences, until he broke and began to accept the incredible ―
the possibility of a God. Alas! It was an intention I betrayed.There is much that I like in the book ― it seems to me more simply and clearly written than its predecessors and ingeniously constructed to avoid the tedium of the time sequence (I had learned something from my continual rereading of that remarkable novel The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford), but until I reached the final part I did not realize the formidable problem I had set myself.
Sarah, the chief character, was dead, the book should have continued at least as long after her death as before, and yet, like her lover, Bendrix, I found I had no great appetite to continue now she was gone beyond recall and only a philosophic theme was left behind. I begin to hurry to the end, and although, in the last part, there are scenes, especially those which express the growth of tenderness between Bendrix and Sarah's husband, which seem to me successful enough, I realized too late how I had been cheating the reader…The incident of the atheist Smythe's strawberry mark (apparently cured by Sarah after her death) should have had no place in the book; every so-called miracle, like the curing of Parkis's boy, ought to have had a completely natural explanation. The coincidences should have continued over the years, battering the mind of Bendrix, forcing on him a reluctant doubt of his own atheism. The last pages would have remained much as they were written (indeed I very much like the last pages), but I had spurred myself too quickly to the end.
So it was that in a later edition I tried to return nearer to my original intention. Smythe's strawberry mark gave place to a disease of the skin which might have had a nervous origin and be susceptible to faith healing.

…The End of the Affair was a greater success with readers than with critics. I felt such doubt of it that I sent the typescript to my friend Edward Sackville-West and asked his advice. Should I put the book in a drawer and forget it? He answered me frankly that he didn't care for the novel but nonetheless I should publish ― we ought to have the vitality of the Victorians who never hesitated to publish the bad as well as the good. So publish I did. I was much comforted by words of praise from William Faulkner, and I was later grateful for the two years' practice I had had in the use of the first person or I might have been afraid to use it in The Quiet American, a novel which imperatively demanded it, and which is, technically at least, perhaps a more successful book.

from Ways of Escape, pp.114-115

Graham Greene on writing:

The main character in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.
― from Ways of Escape, p.8

Other writers' comments

[Greene] appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only.
― George Orwell

...Catholicism as a public system of laws and dogmas is far from being an adequate key to Greene's fiction. There is a good deal of evidence, internal and external, that in Greene's fiction Catholicism is not a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent, but a system of concepts, a source of situations, and a reservoir of symbols with which he can order and dramatize certain intuitions about the nature of human experience ― intuitions which were gained prior to and independently of his formal adoption of the Catholic faith. Regarded in this light, Greene's Catholicism may be seen not as a crippling burden on his artistic freedom, but as a positive artistic asset.
― David Lodge

It is, in fact, the ultimate strength of Greene's books that he shows us the hazards of compassion. We all know, from works like Hamlet, how analysis is paralysis and the ability to see every side of every issue prevents us from taking any side at all. The tragic import of Greene's work is that understanding can do the same: he could so easily see the pain of the people he was supposed to punish that he could not bear to come down hard on them. He became hostage to his own sympathies and railed at pity with the fury of one who was its captive. The most sobering lesson of Greene's fiction is that sleeping with the enemy is most with us when we're sleeping alone; and that even God, faced with a wounded murderer, might sometimes feel himself agnostic.
― Pico Iyer