The Resonance of Conflict: Genre and Politics in the Transatlantic Reception of The Quiet American

Set in Saigon during the final days of the French Indochina War, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American portrays the onset of the American conflict to come. Most of the story is structured by an allegorically fused love triangle: Fowler, a cynical British foreign correspondent who prides himself on being uninvolved, is challenged by Pyle, the eponymous quiet American, for the love of the young Vietnamese woman Phuong. Step by step, Fowler discovers that Pyle’s position at the Economic Aid Mission is a front for covert operations: acting on an OSS mandate, he is leading a campaign for the armament of a “Third Force” meant to diminish the power of Vietnamese communism. As Pyle’s campaign turns violent and civilian casualties mark the development of his ambition, Fowler is drawn out of inertia: through contacts with Viet Minh agents he plays a part in Pyle’s murder, simultaneously ending his own uninvolvement and adding to the US sense of the Vietnamese communist threat.

Viewed in its bare outline, the novel invites postcolonial readings. The love triangle, for example, can be seen as a particularly disillusioned dramatization of Orientalist discourse.¹ In both early and later criticism, however, such theoretically informed interpretations are far less common than those emphasizing biographical and historical backgrounds. On the one hand, The Quiet American is often viewed as a watershed in Greene’s œuvre, marking both a thematic and a generic shift from his earlier, so-called Catholic novels, that focused on metaphysical rather than political problems. Central to this idea is that the timing, setting, and thematic of involvement amplify The Quiet American’s ties to la littérature engagée and political debates of the 1950s-and not least to Greene’s relation to those debates (Bergonzi 144ff; Diederich 30; Greene, Ways of Escape 154ff; Philips 79; Stratford 310).² On the other hand, many scholarly readings use a biographical frame for more direct historical readings. In the most notable of these readings, the novelistic fabric is conflated with historical veracity, often with a view to two key points: first, the testimonial first-person narrative; and second, the likeness between descriptive passages in the novel and Greene’s reports on the French Indochina War published in the London Times and Le Figaro. Stephen J. Whitfield, for example, argues that the novel and its first film adaptation were squandered chances “to face the implications of involvement in the Vietnam struggle for national independence (66ff). William Bushnell underscores the factual basis of the character General Thé (406). Kevin Lewis examines the first film adaptation process as a “time capsule of American Cold War policies” (478). Simon Willmetts uses the same film to probe the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood in the post-WWII period (127ff). Kevin Ruane uses the novel as a fulcrum to inspect details of British and American covert operations in Indochina during the early 1950s, especially stressing Greene’s role in these operations (Ruane 432ff, 446ff).

The biographical and historical readings of The Quiet American have distinct merits in their own right, but they also imply that the novel’s reception has been shaped by a dynamic process between contextual climates, historical change and perceptions of the novel’s generic stature. Though often simply called a “political novel,” The Quiet American has been treated as a thriller, a roman à clef, a work of prophetic journalism, a personal ideological statement, a piece of history, and even as an historical source text. Some early US critics, for example, saw the novel as a “mouthpiece” for Greene’s “anti-American attack” (Trilling and Rahv 66ff; cf. Culhane 87; Davis 32). After the televised trauma of the Vietnam War, the situation was near the opposite. In 1978, Gloria Emerson wrote that Greene “had always understood what was going to happen there, and in that small and quiet novel, told us nearly everything” (123). More recently, the novel has become shorthand in political discourse for anti-interventionism, with President George W. Bush criticizing “the Graham Greene argument” and the phrase “quiet Americans” cropping...