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154 Chapter 9 Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote A Pilgrimage of Doubt and Reason toward Faith and Belief Michael G. Brennan “It was only by tilting at windmills that Don Quixote found the truth on his deathbed.” —Graham Greene, Monsignor Quixote The 1978 Christmas issue of the British Catholic journal The Tablet included a short story, “How Father Quixote Became a Monsignor,” subsequently revised to become the first chapter of Graham Greene’s last major novel, Monsignor Quixote, published in 1982. Set in post-Franco Spain, both short story and novel mischievously play with their readers’ expectations of the traditional distinctions between fiction and reality by making the monsignor a direct descendant of his renowned fictional namesake in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. A sense of amiable comedy pervades Greene’s novel, which derives much of its scenic descriptions, theological discussions, and incidental details from his own leisurely summer peregrinations, replete with hampers of cheese and choice Galician wines, through the Spanish countryside with a close friend of his later years, Father Leopoldo Durán, a Catholic priest and former lecturer in English literature at the University of Madrid.1 In Greene’s novel the unworldly Father Quixote of El Toboso is unexpectedly elevated to the rank of monsignor through the good offices of a visiting curial bishop from Rome, whose favor he gains by rescuing him from a car breakdown. Quixote hospitably shares his lunch with him (horsemeat masquerading as steak) and easily fixes his car (by filling the empty gas tank). Unimpressed by what he regards as an undeserved promotion, his local bish1 . See The Tablet, 23/30 (Dec. 1978): 1238–41; Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 3: 1955–1991 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 661–81; and Leopoldo Durán, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, trans. Euan Cameron (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 212–30. 155 Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote op pressures him into taking some leave from his parish. Quixote sets out in the company of the communist ex-mayor of the town, Enrique Zancas, whom he affectionately calls Sancho, the only other man in the village who has read Cervantes’ novel. They travel around the Spanish countryside in Quixote’s battered old Seat 600 car, fondly known to both of them as Rocinante after the trusty steed of Don Quixote. Drawing upon his still vibrant comedic narrative skills—honed over the preceding decades in such works as Our Man in Havana (1958), Travels with My Aunt (1969), and numerous wry short stories— Greene constructs a lively picaresque narrative based upon the traditional comic device of the innocent abroad. Replete in its dialogues with intellectual tilting at windmills, the narrative regularly leads the monsignor into potentially threatening situations, involving farcical events in a brothel and a pornographic film, hearing a confession in a public toilet, and even a police chase in which they help an escaping criminal. But, simultaneously, Quixote is protected from any detrimental moral consequences by his unwavering innocence and his firm trust in the essential decency of humanity. Published when Greene was in his late seventies, Monsignor Quixote puzzled several of its earliest critics who could readily applaud its gently elegiac sense of incidental comedy and its endearing central characters but at the same time suspected that it was the work of a once great writer no longer able to grapple with the sustained intellectual and physical demands of novel writing. Given that its central protagonist is a Catholic priest, the intense skeptical questioning of issues relating to religious doubt and belief— so prominent in earlier novels such as The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951)—seems almost entirely absent in Monsignor Quixote. Certainly, its plot continually touches upon matters of ecclesiastical authority, theological problems, and Catholic religious practices, but always, it seems, in a lighthearted tone. Yet, this essay argues, it is misleading to overlook the culminating personal and spiritual significance of this late novel to Greene’s longstanding reputation as a writer fascinated by issues of Catholic doctrine and liturgy in favor of simply enjoying its picaresque narrative and likeable characters. Such a narrow perspective effectively strips away elements that seem to have steadily grown in their creator’s mind to become one of the novel’s most potent levels of significance . Developing, ultimately, into a meditation upon his own impending mortality, Monsignor Quixote marks Greene’s final shift from a writer noted for his rational skepticism over faith and...

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