The power and the glory

The Power and the Glory (Engl .: The Power and the Glory ) is a in 1940, first in London published novel by Graham Greene . He describes the bloody struggle of a young revolutionary officer in Latin America against one of the last poor priests of the Catholic Church in the country.

action

After a left wing revolution in Tabasco , Mexico (presumably the 1930 Republican Revolution), a young officer full of hatred for the hypocritical Catholic Church persecutes one of its last living priests. This priest, who risks his life with pastoral care among the poor in the country, flees from village to village from the soldiers sent to kill him, who also murder hostages in order to get hold of him. He is by no means a saint and above all a person who has been burdened with a number of sins of various kinds: He is addicted to alcohol , so a schnapps priest . He fathered a child while drunk and hadn't looked after him for years. And only angrily he follows his God and the vocation imposed on him - drowning his fear and exhaustion in alcohol.

Grotesque situations arise several times: In order to get hold of altar wine, for example, the priest lets himself into a beggar with connections and ends up in a hotel room, where he buys wine and schnapps in bottles from the governor's cousin, which he and his cousin together and drink the police chief who was chasing him.

For the sake of the reward, a mestizo finally betrays the priest, who runs into the trap with his eyesight. Although he was called to take the last confession of a wounded criminal, he also seeks redemption through death, redemption from his oppressive sins, from the persecution and the burden of conscience of the hostages who were shot because of him.

Before he was shot, the lieutenant and the priest had conversations in which a mutual respect developed: Both sides were looking for a way out of the wickedness of this life in their own way - one in the revolution, the other in the (purified) church the poor. Both the persecutor and the persecuted have in common the certainty of being abandoned in the misery of the world.

Style and composition

The events are told chronologically in a linear structure with occasional brief reviews. The authorial narrator focuses on the priest, from whose perspective he predominantly tells. But the narrator also knows the emotional world of other characters, e.g. B. those of the officer who was pursuing him, and made several philosophical comments.

The novel begins and ends not by chance with family situations - for Greene, salvation does not come from the guns of social movements or ideologies, but from the love of individuals:

At first we meet a dentist in the desert of the city. He leads us to the priest, to whom he tells of his abandonment: living separated from his wife, one son died, receiving no sign of life from the other for many years, admitting his failure - just "an abandoned ruin of love". Then, triggered by the conversation with the priest, he writes to his wife and at the end of the novel actually receives an answer from her - one of the very few comforting events in this humanitarian misery.
On the very last pages of the novel we are back to the family of the pious mother mentioned at the beginning, who reads the stories of saints to her children in the evenings. And a successor to the appointed and in the meantime shot priest is knocking softly on her door. Like his predecessor, he is on the run and wants to be allowed in - the story of proselytizing underground continues.

interpretation

The figures of the lieutenant as well as those of the persecuted priest have no individual names, they are representatives of two world-wide forces for the relief of the burden of those charged. But both are isolated in their social structure: the lieutenant, who after the priests wants to put politicians and even his own corrupt boss on the list of those to be persecuted, and the priest, who, in contrast to the church of the wealthy, hears the reputation of the poor tried to live with them.

Greene manages to draw the two representatives of their movements as heroes at the same time: Neither one nor the other of these two opposing figures is denounced. Both are entangled in the ideals of their movements and at the same time in their warping, the right and no less the wrong can be found on both sides. Either way, life is a tale of tears - hardship and self-criticism, more certainty cannot be found: "It must sometimes be a consolation for the soldier that the atrocities are the same on both sides: no one was ever alone." (German edition of 1948, part 2, end of chapter 1, p. 124)

bibliography

Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory. Novel. William Heinemann, London 1940
German edition: The power and the glory . German by Veza Magd and Bernhard Zebrowski . Zsolnay, Berlin 1948 (also Heinemann & Zsolnay, London 1947)
German paperback edition: The power and the glory . Translated from the English by Käthe Springer and Veza Magd. dtv, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-423-13154-4

Secondary literature

Karl Heinz Göller : Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory . In: Horst Oppel (Hrsg.): The modern English roman - interpretations. Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2nd rev. edition 191, Berlin 197, ISBN 3-503-00701-6 , pp. 245-261.
Arvin R. Wells: The Power and the Glory . In: John V. Hagopian and Martin dolch (eds.): Insight II - Analysis of Modern British Literature . Hirschgraben Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970, s. 153-16164.

filming

The command of conscience was filmed in 1947 . Directed by John Ford ; the main role of the priest was played by Henry Fonda , the officer Pedro Armendáriz . In 1962 a remake was published by the director Marc Daniels , which was based closer to the novel. - Mirror 50/1960.