‘A Conflict between an Image and a Man’: The Visual Diction of Romance in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair

Abstract

This article purports to suggest a reading of one of Greene’s most influential and haunting novels through special attention to its iconotextual specificities. More especially, it starts from a hesitation between the figure of the tableau vivant and that of the painting effect to analyse the power of the visual (as opposed to the visible, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s terms) in the novel. To do so, the article attempts a reading of Greene’s novel in the light of Marie-José Mondzain’s analyses and demonstrates that Greene’s conception of the visual is more of the open, problematical type that Mondzain links to the figure of incarnation (as opposed to the proselytising, closed model of the icon as a vehicle of incorporation). In the end, such an analysis helps see Greene’s work as a rejection of univocal religious melodrama in favour of a more open, ethically exacting practice of romance.