quiet americans avoiding action, like the narrator’s Baudelairean opium?). The notion of reportage
ismore historically specific than that. For by the time Greene wrote his novel, it
suggested a very American take on the world: the plain laconic diction of writers
schooled in the dramatic conjunction of war, photography, and journalism, the
legend of the foreign correspondent. Ernest Hemingway was the master (though the
novel makes a sarcastic reference to Stephen Crane—who wrote about war without
ever seeing one). The ‘quiet American’ himself may even have been named after
one of the most renowned American correspondents—Ernie Pyle, who like the
fictional Pyle, died ‘in action’ in the Far East. Fowler tries to distance himself from
the notion of the ‘foreign correspondent’—just as he tries to distance himself from
the conflict. But neither position is entirely convincing, as the novel demonstrates.
And then Greene’s writing, for all its debts to Conrad, had learned something from
the directness, the unfussiness, even, on occasion, the hard-boiled worldliness, of
Hollywood-inflected English.
It is important that the quibbling power of the novel’s title be permitted to
resonate a little. For Greene invites us to consider the quietness of his American
alongside the more subtle quietness of his English narrator: a quietness composed of
quietism on the one hand (this determination not to be ‘involved’) and a complex
dishonesty on the other. The problem with quietism, as Greene knows, is that it
allows us to end up on the right side of history anyway, alongside the victors,
without having to declare ourselves (the problem with declaring ourselves, on the
other hand, is where it allows us to imagine that we could step free of our historical
complicity and cross to the other side).
In an essay about the position of the narrator in the contemporary novel, which
is really an essay about modernism generally, Theodor Adorno wrote: ‘Just as
painting lost many of its traditional tasks to photography, the novel has lost them
to reportage and the media of the culture industry, especially film.’^3 Greene’s
novel records this shift in power, just as it shrewdly accommodates it. Following
Adorno, we may think of modernism as an attack not just on realism (where we
share ‘aesthetic distance’ from a shared real world), but also on the notion of
the meaningfulness of plain speech: the Wordsworthian situation of one person
communicating straightforwardly and realistically with another. The two World
Wars compounded and confirmed this faithlessness. ‘One need only note’, Adorno
writes, ‘how impossible it would be for someone who participated in the war to
tell stories about it the way people used to tell stories about their adventures.’^4
Experience is too complicated, the individual subject too divided and attenuated.
Writing that wants to ‘tell how things really are’, Adorno argues, ‘must abandon a
realism that only aids the fac ̧ade in its work of camouflage by reproducing it’.^5
(^3) Theodor Adorno, ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’, inNotes to
Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, i (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), 31. 4
Ibid.^5 Ibid. 32.