The quiet Americans are not the problem
While k-punk was writing about the ‘reality-based community’, I was reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I read it many years ago, but I’d forgotten how good it is. It’s often portrayed as being a book about the conflict between realism and idealism; with realism, on this conventional interpretation, declared the winner. Zadie (”Call her Zadie”) Smith, in her interesting introduction to the edition I was reading, ultimately comes to this conclusion. She praises Greene as “the greatest journalist there ever was,” because “he defends us with details, and the details fight the good fight against big, featureless, impersonal ideas like Pyle’s.”
But, to it’s credit, I don’t think the book can be reduced to this rather conservative (not to say trite) point. It’s a mistake to see the story as detailing a simple binary opposition between Pyle and Fowler. Pyle is an idealist and an abstracter, certainly, forever substituting the messy details of the present for an imagined, perfect, future, and Fowler attacks him for it:
> ‘I suppose you’ll offer her a deep freeze and a car for herself and the newest
> television set and…’
>
> ‘And children,’ he said.
>
> ‘Bright young American citizens ready to testify.’
But Fowler is an idealist in his own way, too. He likewise thinks in terms of imagined futures, and just because his imaginings are negative shouldn’t make us think they are any more ‘realistic’.
> ‘We’ve made it,’ Pyle said, and even in my pain I wondered what we’d made:
> for me, old age, an editor’s chair, loneliness; and as for him, I know now
> that he spoke prematurely.
Furthermore Fowler, for all his claims to be a dispassionate, direct observer, is well aware that ‘realism’ is just the name for a particular sort of idealism, an abstraction using the ready-to-hand categories of ‘direct experience’:
> Up the street came the lovely flat figures — the white silk trousers, the long
> tight jackets in pink and mauve patterns slit up the thigh. I watched them
> with the nostalgia I knew I would feel when I had left these regions for ever.
Besides which, the whole premise of the book is that Fowler _is_ engaged. Setting up a binary opposition between Fowler and Pyle writes Phuong out of the picture; tellingly, I think. Fowler and Pyle both idealize and orientalize Phuong, of course; but Pyle’s idealization elides her agency, while Fowler’s orientalization also hints at a proper understanding of _independence_, perhaps the closest the book gets to an anti-colonial perspective:
> ‘She’s a human being, Pyle. She’s capable of deciding.’
>
> ‘On faked evidence. And a child at that.’
>
> ‘She’s no child. She’s tougher than you’ll ever be. Do you know the kind of
> polish that doesn’t take scratches? That’s Phuong. She can survive a dozen
> of us. She’ll get old, that’s all.’
(Of course, the rest of this speech is orientalization of a straightforwardly racist sort). Phuong represents a Third Force, as it were, in opposition to the naive idealism of Pyle and the cynical idealism of Fowler which presents itself as realism. Greene gets little further than merely showing the possibility of such a subject-position, but that is itself not insignificant. Particularly today, when it is tempting to draw direct analogies between events in the book and in the news, it is valuable to be reminded that, if we are to combat our modern-day Pyle’s, a commitment to ‘reality’ is not going to be sufficient.
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Good post Tim. I think Fowler’s realism is at it’s worst when he says that the Vietnamese simply “want one day to be the same as the next” (I can’t remember the exact quote).
Comment by rachel @ 9/2/2005 4:41 pm