Earth Imagery in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed

Earth Imagery in Graham Greene's The Potting Shed JOHN D. BOYD, S.J. • CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF GRAHAM GREENE'S The Potting Shed has, for the most part, centered on the search motif with its element of suspense, James Callifer's "miraculous" restoration to life, the nature and likelihood of Father William Callifer's "loss of faith," and the dramatic calibre of a play having such challenging hurdles to negotiate. In these pages I shall discuss what seems to be a neglected element in the play, namely its frequent use of earth imagery as a major factor in its thematic development. This discussion, in turn, may throw some light on the various critical interests just mentioned. Earth imagery has long and often been used to express man's origins in the soil and his natural kinship with it (humanus is readily linked with humus), from The Book of Genesis, where man is shown as being formed from the slime of the earth, through the various Greek and Asian Myths of Gaia, down to Eliot's East Coker in our own day.1 In another context the entire history of evolutionary anthropology, notably in recent years that of Teilhard de Chardin, reflects the same interest. It is reasonable, then, to consider, as significantly archetypal, imagery derived from the element of earth, that expresses man's origins in the earth and his consequent sense of intimately belonging to it as the context of his quest for self-understanding. I use "archetypal" here in the somewhat guarded sense that Philip Wheelwright does, namely of imagery that reflects a deep and searching level of perception and sensibility without making any Jungian judgment about its ultimate origin and manner of transmission.2 Further, looked at in this way, earth imagery becomes a kind of metonym for the entire material condition of man, with special stress on the dark, complex and stubborn quality of earth that peculiarly characterizes the texture of human life in its ongoing development. What we speak of colloquially these days as the "nitty-gritty" reflects in a light manner 69 70 JOHND.BOYD something of this all-pervasive density of the human condition. Greene's play can, I think, be more fully understood as developing, through its earth imagery, a theme that explores this complex yet fruitful density. Through the stubborn welter of his concrete, definite human condition, past and present, James Callifer seeks out his true self, a sense of his origins and the roots of the problem that has hitherto clouded and frustrated his search. His quest issues in his real, if somewhat twisted faith in God when he finds out what happened to him in the potting shed. His liberation, it is important to see, is not from the material condition of human life, but from the materialism that constitutes his parents' response to it, and in which they have submerged him by educating him in their tenets. Some have felt that Greene does not give fair dramatic treatment to the elder Callifers and their materialistic evolutionism. To be sure, he strongly rejects their values as less than negotiable, yet he seems more interested in presenting a full and positive sense of James's struggle to reach a solution. Indeed, if one sees this struggle as a dramatic conflict within James of the two ways of dealing with man's material condition, the one a part of his family inheritance, the other the fruit of coping with his complex condition (with the help of Anne and of Father Callifer), a stronger case can be made for the over-all dramatic success of the play. The evolutionism of the elder Callifers is a form of rationalistic materialism. Its method, we are led to believe, is relatively a priori, doctrinaire and, to this extent, escapist; yet it ironically submerges one in matter in a deterministic way. Rehearsing his eulogy for H. C. Callifer, Baston enthusiastically declares what awaits one of this persuasion: Now that the immense spaces of the empty universe, of uninhabited planets and cooling stellar systems have taken the place of the Christian God, we have Callifer to thank for a human life worthy of courageous Man. To the...