1Rather unpredictably, Swift’s latest novel The Light of Day1 has given the subject of adultery a new lease of fictional life,2 and reviewers, notably Adam Mars Jones3 and Hermione Lee,4 did not fail to point to similarities between this work, and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.5 A contrastive approach to these two novels might be a challenging way of investigating how, over the past half century, the English novel has evolved in its treatment of intimacy and personal feelings, in relation to society at large. Indeed, in both cases, emotion is intrinsically linked to the impersonal. For Greene, who was a great admirer of Conrad, there is an attempt to hold emotion in check. The author’s commitment to Roman Catholicism largely helps channel personal passions, which are sublimated into more impersonal forms of religious worship. Swift, for his part, creates a narrative voice which is simultaneously private, introspective, and impersonal, in so far as it constantly hovers on the brink of the unsaid, while polyphonically reverberating the subterranean passions of suburbia.

2Both The End of the Affair and The Light of Day are set against the bustle and anonymity of London’s suburbs, which contributes to depersonalize characters. In the two fictions, a detective has been hired but, significantly, in Greene’s The End of the Affair, Parkis, the figure of the shadow, remains on the periphery of the text, while in Swift’s The Light of Day, George Webb, Mr Invisible, is the focal eye and ear of the narrative. Webb spins his textual web from personal recollections, interlaced with hearsay, rumour and gossip. The detective is hired by Sarah Nash to follow her husband to Heathrow airport, where he is supposed to bid farewell to his young lover, Kristina, a Croatian refugee. In Greene’s novel, the roles are inverted as it is, more conventionally, a man, Maurice Bendrix, who hires a detective, to have a woman, Sarah Miles, his former mistress, trailed.

3The dual and complementary notions of impersonality and emotion could be dialectically investigated from two angles. First, both fictions, though fifty years distant, are set against the context of suburbia, a highly impersonal background in which personal feelings and emotions are liable to fade out into anonymity. History, in particular, as in the bulk of British fiction today, plays ambivalently on the personal and the impersonal. Then, it will be shown that both in the antagonizing voice of the main narrator in Greene’s The End of the Affair and in George Webb’s the self-deprecating voice in The Light of Day, there is the same interrogation on narrative subjectivity. Effects of distanciation are sought after in Greene’s fiction with the creation of Bendrix, the first-person narrator, who is a novelist too, but an atheist, and as such presents a vision of experience that is poles apart from that of the implied author, a Catholic convert. The End of the Affair could be viewed as a shadowy text, one that approaches the mystery of faith from the dark perspective of unbelief. By contrast, The Light of Day would be a shadowing text, striving to trail the barely or half formulated. The narrator’s task consists indeed in putting into words all those pregnant silences, that vacillate on the verge of articulateness: ‘I think we often have the thoughts and the feelings and those thoughts go unsaid because words don’t immediately come out. In my new novel and in Last Orders, I was in part trying to give a voice—If I can put it like that, to people’s inner thoughts and perceptions.’6

1 Impersonality and emotion in suburbia

4The country vs suburbia polarity is a prevailing topos in the British post-war novel.7 A striking feature of this opposition lies in the dialectics between the nostalgic evocation of past literary models, and a deliberate attempt to come to terms with the present: ‘contemporary analysis frequently does battle with a hankering for the past.’ (189) Both The End of the Affair and the Light of Day present a world in which characters are confronted to the impersonal anonymity of sentiments, reduced either to symptoms calling for treatment, or to commodities for cheap soap operas. Yet, each in its own way attempts to rescue and celebrate the private dimension of feelings and emotions; Greene, a little ponderously, by restoring the sense of the religious in the midst of suburban Britain, and Swift, through a poetic use of the negative sublime. Impersonality is thus first established to be subsequently circumvented. Both novels favour a form of anonymity in characterization which apparently precludes any reader’s identification. In The End of the Affair, Henry Miles, the heroine’s husband, is a dull senior civil servant who is transferred from the Ministry of Pensions to the Ministry of Home Security. In the maze of a world of red tape he is a lacklustre, featureless character with a unidimensional voice. (50) In Greene’s counter-romance, the romance motif is parodically referred to, through Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table, (77) to suggest by contrast the plainness and ordinariness of the prototypical modern man. Sarah’s husband has long since stopped being sexually attracted to her, and Greene mentions, quite openly, male impotence, in a big anticlimax to chivalric tales of manly prowess! Maurice Bendrix, cast in the role of the lover, is for his part a self-centered, and obsessively jealous character. Curiously Greene, who once somewhat unfairly reported that the characters of Woolf and Forster ‘wandered like cardboard symbols through a world that was paper-thin’8 could not come up with a better comment for his own Henry Miles. The latter, indeed, is described as a model for a character in a novel which Maurice Bendrix, the narrator, plans to write: ‘A time came when I deliberately told Sarah that I had only taken Henry up for the purpose of copy, copy too for a character who was the ridiculous, the comic element in my book.’ (10) Actually, for all the hardships he has to undergo, Henry never goes far beyond this self-reflexive, metafictional dimension. He does not quite come alive because of the ink in this paper-thin world. Autoreferentiality entails distance and, predictably, readers are likely to shun the vicarious experience of loss and grief, as Henry first comes close to losing his wife, who is willing to jilt him, and of then losing her for good when she dies of pneumonia.

5In The Light of Day, a similar process of character depersonalization may be observed. The fact is that they often disappear behind institutions subsuming them. George Webb, formerly a cop, still carries about him the taint of, as he puts it, ‘the pigs, the fuzz, the filth.’ (130) On being barred access to the Nash’s house, shortly after Sarah’s murder, he mentally remarks: ‘A police matter, but I was the police.’ (27) By the same token, once she is in the nick, Sarah—remembered as the Nash case—becomes a paradigmatic figure for all women-prisoners. Webb, in a more or less conscious replay of the Ballad of Reading Gaol, implies that she too, like all her pals in jail, has crossed a line: ‘It’s only natural: to kill the man you love— love? Loved?—then to want to be dead yourself.’ (146) So, Swift succeeds in arousing empathy at the very least, if not sympathy, among his readers, by underscoring the plain, humdrum lives of every Joe citizen. This persistence of emotion, in the midst of a modern world described as impersonal, is achieved by two main devices: first, the possibility of instantaneously multiplying a given scene at any moment in the narrative, and secondly, the law of character reversibility, best summed up by the chiasmus: ‘I might have been him (he might have been me).’ (62) The multiplying principle is first found in the overall frame of Swift’s novel. The diegesis is indeed based on the exact repetition of what could have been an ordinary day, if disaster had not struck. It is indeed on one Thursday, November 20th 1995, that Sarah Nash stabbed her husband Bob to death, on his return from the airport, where he had seen his lover off. Exactly two years later, on 20th November, 1997, which through a coincidence also happens to be one Thursday, George Webb mentally relives, step by step, all the events of the tragedy. Paradoxically, this recreation of the circumstances of the fateful day, through anamnesis, can be interpreted as an attempt to unwrite a personal tragedy, destined to become common fodder for tabloids: ‘it made the paper... but a small splash.’ (160) Following a pattern of routine visits that is so common in Swift’s fictions—from Prentis’s visits to his institutionalized father in Shuttlecock, to Amy’s weekly jaunts to call on her mentally-retarded daughter in Last Orders—George Webb has become accustomed to going to the woman prison, twice monthly, to see Sarah. Swift’s fiction highlights one day which is both ordinary and special. Contrary to all the fiction-conscious narrators of post-modern novels who keep making comments on the act of textual production, Webb is weaving his tale, almost unwittingly, as uncalled-for, unpremeditated thoughts flash across his mind on his way to the detention centre. Swift represents something akin to involuntary memory. Apart from his acute awareness of linguistic pitfalls, the only self reflexive thought flashing across Webb’s consciousness is a desire to make the momentous event of the past unhappen. The detective irrationally wishes that, by putting painful recollections into words, one could somehow erase the tragedy, as if the act of telling could precipitate the story into impersonal non-existence: ‘I could stay here all night. As if to prevent it, as if to make it unhappen.’ (233) Strangely, the text fantasizes the possibility of a non-event through the repetition of the exactly similar. This is precisely what Swift in Waterland calls reality, in contradistinction with the here and now: ‘reality’s not strange, not unexpected... uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness... Reality is that nothing happens.’9 Webb imagines a state of perfect ordinariness, where every Jack may have his Jill, or Helen her Clare, for that matter, as he finds out rather late that his daughter loves a woman.

6At any moment in the narrative, a given scene may potentially multiply, because characters, being temporal strata (‘the student still inside the teacher... the hidden layers in people’ [67]), they can be caught in networks of friends or acquaintances, both synchronically and diachronically. They exist on different temporal planes, simultaneously. This is precisely where history comes in. In The Light of Day, History (with a capital H) fades into the impersonality of suburbia, because historical records become part of the hidden layers in people, and thus partake of the aforementioned multiplying of perspectives. The historical destiny of Napoleon III, and of his wife Empress Eugénie, is closely related to that of George Webb and Sarah Nash. After the smoke and carnage of Magenta, Solferino and Sedan, the deposed Emperor was to end up his life in, of all places, Chislehurst, in a building that was to become the pavilion of the golf association George Webb’s father was a member of. Once the chain of endless repetitions has been set off, it weaves in a seemingly haphazard way a whole network of correspondences. Married to the dour, Catholic, Spanish Eugénie, Napoleon yields to philanderering, and it is precisely on the golf course, close to the club house where the emperor died, that George Webb as a child discovered, in an epiphanic moment, that his father had a mistress. Sarah Nash, a former lecturer, now a widow in prison, is translating a book on Empress Eugénie who, when Napoleon died, still had fifty years to go. Swift thus subtly knits historical figures into his suburban chronicle, so that Napoléon and Eugénie of Chislehurst are but an extension of all the other anonymous couples of the story: ‘We were sitting here in a wine bar in Wimbledon on a Tuesday evening to swap notes on an Emperor and Empress who lived over a century ago. This could be how it was with us.’ (76) By trivialising historical personages, Swift adds a further temporal layer to his own protagonists, and he also suggests that just as characters may walk out themselves, famous figures may walk out of their cardboard images, if only to find some peace and quiet in the light of day, far from the limelight of official records.

2 Religious sublime and negative sublime

7Through their diametrically opposed use of the voice of a first-person narrator, both novels raise the issue of narrative subjectivity and its impact on readers: can a text verging on the impersonal arouse emotion? Conversely, can a passionate one be but a way to shun personal emotion? In spite of efforts to create distance, there is much of Greene in The End of the Affair, however much the story’s emotional appeal may be eclipsed by the heavy-handed plea for Catholic faith. On the opposite, even if Swift claims that there is next to nothing about himself out of which to make a book, his work is praised for its lyricism. Through its minimalism: word-paring, phrase-clipping, scene-whittling and so on, The Light of Day is undoubtedly elegiac. In a 1999 article, provokingly entitled ‘Narrating without a Narrator,’10 Christine Brooke-Rose spoke of her plan to extend Robbe-Grillet’s use of a ‘narratorless present tense for narrative.’ This constraint aimed at breaking from the familiarities of language ‘to focus with great intensity... on... the constant impact of outside phenomena on active, but not always reflective consciousness.’ It could be shown that Swift occasionally manages to convey the illusion of this narratorless present in fragmented passages which are—in spite of their seeming impersonality—emotionally-charged. So, from Greene’s foregrounding of an antagonizing narrator, to Swift’s near-effacement of a low-profile one, different ways of reading are induced, in which emotion plays in rather unpredictable ways.

8By choosing Bendrix, a novelist, as first-person narrator, Greene embarks on a metafictional mirror-game. Indeed Bendrix is both Greene’s intradiegetic alter ego and his polar opposite. He shares with the author of The Power and the Glory a dislike for in-depth psychology and an interest in the dangerous edge of things, in the deadly space between the normal world and damnation. Greene’s characters are known for setting themselves challenges. In The End of the Affair, the most striking example of this daredevil game with destiny consists of a sort of an inverted Pascalian wager. After making love to the writer Bendrix, Sarah Miles witnesses what she believes to be his death, when a V1 falls on the house. She prays with all her heart that if God brings Bendrix back to life, she will give him up forever. When it eventually turns out that Bendrix’s life is spared, Sarah breaks off the affair, without saying why. This is precisely the kind of plot which Bendrix, as a novelist could think up, when he claims: ‘I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions.’ (18) Yet, on the other hand, Bendrix is, ideologically and religiously, Greene’s arch enemy. More than two decades after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, the author delegates his voice to a narrative persona, who is a professed atheist, snidely and derisively commenting on the figure of God as plot-maker, for instance: ‘If I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, “Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet.”’ (7) Greene thus builds up a dialogic relation between himself, as implied author, and this chief contestant. By rejecting sentiments, and rationally analyzing his relation with Sarah, Bendrix turns a love story into narcissistic self-contemplation. The narrator, in particular, investigates the mechanism of his gnawing jealousy, while he puts forward his case in favour of atheism. Through dramatic irony though, the logical arguments he propounds to dismiss faith have all the emotional urgency of the confessions of a convert. And ultimately, the image that stands out is that of an atheist struggling to keep his unbelief, while being gradually dragged towards agnosticism: ‘I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.’ (191) Bendrix, the novelist-narrator, is thus Greene’s direct opponent in a highly polemical text. What should have all the equanimity of rational thinking is permeated by passion and, very often Bendrix’s lines echo the mystic writings of St Teresa of Avila, or St John of the Cross: ‘We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace.’ (47) Greene’s first-person narrator commends the rationality of mathematic principles: ‘I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clean as air,’ (11) by using words evoking a spiritual fusion that is conducive to the annihilation of the self. Impersonality, either through logical abstraction or mystical transcendence, hovers on the margin of Bendrix’s biased and egotistical account. So, with Greene, the dialectical opposition between belief and unbelief overlaps with the complementary relation between impersonality and emotion. To Greene’s sense of religious sublime would correspond Swift’s negative sublime.

9In The Light of Day, Swift evokes a secularized world. The only direct allusion to God is through George Webb’s former wife Rachel who, having rejected her religious education, only keeps in later life a sort of awe for a fantasized censoring God: ‘the big stern daddy part of him.’ (135) The experience of the sublime is not related to any transcendence but to the acute coming to awareness of the uncanny ordinariness of the real, which eschews any totalising, meaningful representation. Language provides no fixed landmarks to the narrator’s puzzled consciousness, as the latter can only experience the enigmaticity of his own ipseity and selfhood, within the plain uneventfulness of suburbia: ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London... sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England,’11 or to quote The Light of Day: ‘This safe-as-houses land where nothing is meant to disturb the peace.’ (21) The treatment of the dehumanizing impersonality of the modern world, leading to the decentrement or collpase of the subject (‘Falling. Off the edge, of the cliff of life’ [49]), is a commonplace of contemporary aesthetics, from the French Nouveau Roman to the ‘age of suspicion’ and later, postmodernism. What marks Swift’s singularity, however, is an attempt to stick to a form of humanism, in the midst of existential and eschatological angst. So, in an ambivalent way, his fictions—notably The Light of Day—both insistently emphasize moments of sheer impersonality—through a narrative technique akin to Brooke-Rose’s ‘narratorless present’—and uphold a strong commitment to human values, chiefly by celebrating the unbounded energy of yarnspinning—the narrative yen —, and thanks to an unrestrained delight in the bawdy. The narrator repeatedly alludes to himself as clumsy in using language; yet, instead of being an alienating experience, writing allows him to build up a close relationship with Sarah Nash, a lecturer. Swift’s fiction is thus a two-handed polyphonic novel: ‘The truth is she’s taught me to say things, to say all this, to put things down in words. It’s been an education really,’ (8) and a modern variation on the Bildungs-roman, featuring an anonymous ex-cop slowly getting access to written language, and discovering love in the process. Webb is the perfect illustration of Swift’s belief that ‘the real art is not to come up with extraordinary words but to make ordinary words do simple things.’12 Through his unobstrusive narrator, Swift pays an oblique homage to Shakespearean bawdiness, with such apparently unpremeditated phrases as: ‘The crematorium doing a roaring trade. But he didn’t want to be burnt.’ (LD 54), or ‘Wouldn’t gynaecologists be, like diplomats, immune—protected? And how does it work for women: “I’m a gynaecolgist”—chill or thrill,’ (36) and ‘I’m a private dick.’ (115) At times, the text seems to be writing itself of its own accord, as it were, excluding any references to any here and now, as if an image imprinted itself on the retina of some impersonal witness: ‘Interview rooms. Grey walls, scuff marks. An ashtray nobody empties.’ (30) Through this de- narrativization process, signalled by the notorious absence (‘nobody’) of an unidentified subject who might potentially have acted (by emptying the ash tray), the text reaches the terse vividness of a haiku in no man’s urban land. Hence, through the evocation of a not quite ordinary day in the lives of his set of suburbanite characters, Swift plays with language and narrative forms to show that, ultimately, impersonal words must disappear behind the power of emotion and the hard tangibility of what they designate:

More words that you have to take seriously, big wordy words that used to be just words in the dictionary or like words in someone else’s language. But now (I feel their weight too) they’re as real as rocks.

‘Remorse’, for example.

Today, of all days, they’re real. (169)

10While Greene’s fiction highlights what, in the process of writing, reaches beyond deliberate intention, Swift tries to find some verbal correspondence for the half uttered, the barely utterable, and for what remains at the level of potential utterances. As a shadowy novel, The End of the Affair suggests the surrender of the self in the act of creation. Greene delegates his voice to an inimical narrator who, in his turn, finds himself under the sway of forces beyond his rational control: ‘this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book—the unconscious worked on it.’ (20) Bendrix’s improbable dream of overcoming the limitations of subjectivity is contradicted by the annihilation of the self through the mystic dark night: the noche oscura, turning the confessions of an atheist into a frantically religious novel. In a secular world, The Light of Day pleads for the effacement of language: ‘the best words are often the least noticeable words, because they are transparent’ (Swift, Interview) to allow emotion to come through, unchecked. Swift thus opts for a form of writing that would succeed in making readers forget its written-ness. This unobtrusive fiction would confine itself to a mere shadowing function. The wordiness of words would ideally be self-obliterating so that ‘Strange English words. Their shape, their trace, their scent’ (188) might boil down to something as plain and simple as the light on one—not so ordinary—November day!