Andrew Gibson (2008) `“All Propagated with the Best Intentions”: Greene, the U.S. and Indochina 1951-55. Cultural Politics, 4 (3). pp. . ISSN 1743-2197
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Graham Greene's The Quiet American is an “epochal novel.” It announces the inception of a new epoch at a decisive historical moment: on March 15, 1954, US National Security Council Directive 5412 came into force. NSC 5412 more or less coincided with the onset of the Cold War and made a political imperative of the absolute deniability of covert actions. It thereby ushered in a specifically modern form of innocence. Greene's novel is about an early version of that innocence. Modern innocence conceals the “principle of implosion” according to which ferocious opposites reverse into one another. Greene gives us his own version of implosion, the collapse of any private moral space putatively valorizable apart from global antagonisms. Modern innocence might seem principally identifiable with the Cold War era. However, Orwell's analysis of doublethink gives the concept larger scope, as do Le Carré's masterful analyses of its persistence in post-1997 British culture.
This is a Published version This version's date is: 11/2008 This item is peer reviewed
https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/cacaa543-14d4-6eef-0173-bb40a0a10063/1/
Deposited by () on 23-Dec-2009 in Royal Holloway Research Online.Last modified on 24-Feb-2010
(C) 2001 Blackwell, whose permission to mount this version for private study and research is acknowledged. The repository version is the author's final draft.
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