SOURCE: "The Uses of Delay in The Power and the Glory," in Renascence: Essays on Value in Literature, Vol. 46, No. 4, Summer, 1994, pp. 211-23.

[In the following essay, Malamet examines the narrative function and symbolic significance of delay, hesitation, and suspense in The Power and the Glory.]

Just past the midpoint of The Power and the Glory, as the whisky priest is being led to jail, Graham Greene reiterates the feelings of resignation and fear that have hitherto haunted him: "He knew it was the beginning of the end—after all these years…. When would they discover who he really was? When would he meet the half-caste, or the lieutenant who had interrogated him already?" As in a number of Greene's preceding works, such as A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock, a sense of inevitability hangs over the main pursuit of the novel; the priest broods over the fact that he must eventually be hunted down. In an earlier passage, he nervously awaits in his home village the arrival of the lieutenant and his men: "Was this the end at last, he wondered?… If they were so careful, they must know beyond the shadow of doubt that he was here. It was the end." Yet on both occasions his anxiety is premature; the lieutenant fails to recognize him although they face each other. We are repeatedly invited to share the priest's point of view that there is no way out. The first time he is arrested, he thinks, "Everything now seemed irrevocable," and yet Greene heightens the suspense and then allows the priest to evade capture. After being released in the morning from the cell, the priest is prevented from going to wash with the other prisoners: "'We've got other plans for you,' the sergeant said." This vaguely threatening statement is followed by a trivial inquiry as to how the priest has slept in the night, which only furthers his anxiety about "how much longer all these preliminaries" will take. When he is subsequently recognized by the half-caste, who is also in the prison, it seems "as if God were deciding … finally." But the dichotomy between recognition and capture becomes ironically complete at this stage. The police have unknowingly arrested the man they have been seeking, but the lieutenant fails to identify him, while the half-caste recognizes but chooses not to implicate him.

The priest's musings about "preliminaries" and "God deciding" are, on one level, apt metaphors for the author's manipulation of the text. Greene's use of deferral bears clear links to typical devices of movement and suspension found in most mystery stories, where

that state of more or less pleasurable tension concerning an outcome, which we call suspense, depends on something not happening too fast. In other words, the detective story formula offers a remarkably clear example of the crucial narrative principle of "deliberately impeded form." ([Dennis] Porter)

But Greene's handling of the pursuit narrative is also marked by certain essential differences and resists narrow genre categorization. R. W. B. Lewis is correct in his surmise that by the time of Brighton Rock "the unsolvable mystery of the human condition … has become Greene's obsessive subject," and that a central weakness in the earlier novels is "rooted in a failure to disentangle the mystery of the mystery, to separate it out from the contingencies of melodrama and the staged surprises of the brain-twister," but his statement requires a fuller account. In what follows, I explore the purpose for which Greene employs such thriller devices as pursuit and delay in The Power and the Glory. Delay operates on many levels in the novel, from the text's hesitation in identifying the priest—including his own reticence to reveal himself—to the suspension of his capture. Ultimately, Greene alternates the hindrance of the lieutenant's goal of the priest's arrest with a different vision of deferral, one that can be seen within the religious context of a winding quest toward an unspecified, and never fully confirmed, future redemption.

The familiar materials of the thriller form are all present in The Power and the Glory: the pursued man, the threat of violence, the shadow of betrayal. From the motto taken from Dryden denoting the hunt to the use of delay to create suspense, the novel is suggestive of the techniques and narrative structure of a fast-paced crime story. But these elements are clearly wedded to a deeper purpose; for R. W. B. Lewis, The Power and the Glory, along with such books as Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter, is "a mystery story, in the popular sense, that functions ably as a trial run for a mystery drama in a more ancient theological sense." This thought is echoed by Grahame Smith, who points to the novel's structure "of an elemental pursuit; the simple outlines of this are obvious. But, as well as being the hunted, the whisky priest is also a hunter in quest of what is presumably life's most important object, its meaning. For him this can be found only within not just a religious, but a Catholic, context." The fabrication of suspense for its own sake is thus not Greene's final goal in this novel; as he asserts in a review of Livingstone's travel writings, "the plot of the novel catches the attention, but the subject lies deeper." With this quotation in mind, Gwenn Boardman wisely cautions against a simplistic reading of the text:

Too often, criticism of The Power and the Glory focuses on its pursuits by secular and divine "hounds" while missing the novel's deeper subject…. in The Power and the Glory, there is the "map" of the plot, an exciting and sometimes terrible narrative. There are also special marks—the allusions to Catholic teaching and the very title of the novel.

These "special marks"—the priest's journey to self-realization and the earthly restoration of the power and glory of God—constitute for Boardman the novel's essence.

But this assessment, while accurate, verges on establishing too rigid a dichotomy between form and content in the story, between the employment of pursuit and suspense and the depiction of the priest's development as a man of God. "The hunt," if rather limited as a strict plot device, is fertile as a metaphor; it is a means of gaining access to and understanding this deep subject. For Greene's fiction does not take the divine presence for granted; Tennyson's acquiescence that "I still believe, though I cannot see. And I have faith that God will be waiting for me when I have crossed the bar" ([J. Hillis] Miller) is accelerated by Greene into an active process of looking for grace in a world considered to be "a burning and abandoned ship" (The Power and the Glory). The notion of abandonment presumes an Abandoner, and pursuit in the novel is both an indispensable narrative tool and a symbol by which Greene evokes the sense of something missing, of an absence. That the police hunt is subsumed within the search for God is indicated by the priest's initial decision not to head north to safety, but to travel "in the actual track of the police … he wasn't ready yet for the final surrender … Jogging up and down on the mule he tried to bribe God with promises of firmness." In this sense Greene interestingly reverses the traditional detective novel sequence whereby a puzzle precipitates a search; in The Power and the Glory, it is the search for the priest, who is temporarily at large, that calls attention to the more mysterious gap between man and God.

The novel begins, appropriately enough, with the language of searching: "Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexico sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet." The image of the vultures occurs throughout the first chapter, an overt symbol for the machinery of the state that converges on the lone priest, and it also embodies the designation of the Church as a parasitical entity feeding on the poor that composes the core of the lieutenant's plea to the priest's village neighbors: "You're fools if you still believe what the priests tell you. All they want is your money." The hunt for the priest is already underway at the outset and spans the entire length of the text, but Greene slowly reorients the meaning of the novel's chases. The priest's dream in the crowded jail cell distinguishes between genuine and illusory pursuits:

His eyes closed and immediately he began to dream. He was being pursued; he stood outside a door banging on it, begging for admission, but nobody answered—there was a word, a password, which would save him, but he had forgotten it…. His feet had gone to sleep and he knelt outside the door. Then he knew why he wanted to get in: he wasn't being pursued at all: that was a mistake. His child lay beside him bleeding to death and this was a doctor's house. He banged on the door and shouted. "Even if I can't think of the right word, haven't you a heart?"

The underlying direction of the priest's experience is the attempt to "see the doctor"; he must bang on the door and find the "right word" that leads to God. One of the main objects of the novel's deferrals and postponements, therefore, is to allow the priest to forge a more profound bond with his faith. Delay works as a thriller technique but it also contains Christian significance, as Patricia A. Parker writes:

The time between First and Second Coming is itself a respite or "dilation," an interval in which the eschatological Judgment is held over or deferred, a period of uncertain duration when the "end" already accomplished in the Advent is, paradoxically, not yet come…. The deferral of the promised end is, in the phrase of Alanus de Insulis, the "dilatio patriae," the delay of the coming of the Sabbath which is the extended interval of time itself.

The Power and the Glory is ironically structured around the various "comings" of the lieutenant; his failure to perceive the priest the first two times they meet necessitates a delay in judgment and the priest's predetermined end is thus briefly stayed. Greene's incorporation of deferral as a thematic component in the novel's Christian content is also exemplified by the priest's sermon to the peasants about heaven:

We deny ourselves so that we can enjoy. You have heard of rich men in the north who eat salted foods, so that they can be thirsty—for what they call the cocktail. Before the marriage, too, there is the long betrothal … the beating you always get from the jefe because you are too poor to pay, smallpox and fever, hunger … that is all part of heaven—the preparation. Perhaps without them, who can tell, you wouldn't enjoy heaven so much.

Here life resembles a dilatory quest that culminates in heavenly fulfillment, but this tribute to what lies ahead is subverted by the insistent and immediate pursuit of the lieutenant close at hand:

It was not easy to concentrate: the police were not far away…. A voice whispered urgently to him, "Father."

"Yes?"

"The police are on the way. They are only a mile off, coming through the forest."

The juxtaposition of a speech that promises something that can only be fully tasted in the future, and a Mass which can brook no delay—"Were they on horseback or on foot? If they were on foot, he had twenty minutes left to finish Mass and hide"—sharply denotes the novel's tension between movement and suspension.

The plot of a thriller is consumed by its forward motion, by the spectre of the chase and capture that is always ahead, but the classic detective story, as Dennis Porter notes, "is a genre committed to an act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back." In The Power and the Glory, the priest is the focal point for these two competing narrative patterns. One is the prospective view: what is likely to happen next given the unfolding action? The other, the retrospective impulse, continually refashions meanings of the past as plot developments lead to a new understanding of prior events. This is what Robert Coover refers to as

a tension in narrative, as in life, between the sensation of time as a linear experience, one thing following sequentially (causally or not) upon another, and time as a patterning of interrelated experiences reflected upon as though it had a geography and could be mapped. It is, in a sense, the tension between future time, which, with its promise of death and its intransigent sequence of days and nights, bears down upon us remorselessly, and time past, which if it can be said to exist at all, exists only in cranial space, in that sprawling, multilevel and often chaotic house of our memory.

This duality infuses The Power and the Glory. Even as his doomed fate chases and passes by the priest several times before finally ensnaring him, the novel's pattern of delay grants him several opportunities to uncover and reexamine memories of complacency and greed in his past: "somewhere they accumulated in secret—the rubble of his failures." While the lieutenant, at least on the surface, is content with simply finding and executing his man, the priest, in being forced to flee, gains a sharpened perception of his previous behavior—"the fat youngish priest who stood with one plump hand splayed authoritatively out while the tongue played pleasantly with the word 'Governor'"—and deepens his sympathy for others.

There are few clues to the priest's past life; one is a scrap of paper left over from a dinner given at Concepión in his honor that he carries with him "as a charm," a reminder of a time when he had envisioned that "a whole serene life lay ahead—he had ambition. But in the night spent with the mestizo, his ambitions come back to him as "something faintly comic." His life as a fugitive has brought with it the gradual surrender of the signs and objects of the priesthood:

feast days and fast days and days of abstinence had been the first to go: then he had ceased to trouble more than occasionally about his breviary—and finally he had left it behind altogether at the port in one of his periodic attempts at escape. Then the altar stone went—too dangerous to carry with him.

But the loss of his chalice or the breviary—the signs of his vocation—does not displace the priest's hermeneutic frame of reference; he interprets humanity itself as a series of traces of divine presence: "God was the parent, but He was also the policeman, the criminal, the priest, the maniac and the judge. Something resembling God dangled from the gibbet or went into odd attitudes before the bullets in a prison yard or contorted itself like a camel in the attitude of sex." The novel expresses the difficulty in experiencing God's connection with man, as the Indian woman's futile prayer for her child indicates: "Did she expect a miracle? and if she did, why should it not be granted her, the priest wondered?… The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity." But the priest never questions the truth of presence and takes as his underlying assumption that God, while transcendent, is surely an everpresent reality; after he is let out of prison, he notes, "God had decided." This is what Thomas J. J. Altizer speaks of as the "clear and radical distinction between an unknowability which is the consequence of the presence of a transcendent or mysterious identity and an unknowability which is the consequence of the absence of all identity as such." Thus the priest also looks to the unfolding of events as a symbol of divine intention; before he is let out of jail, he strikes

yet another bargain with God. This time, if he escaped from the prison, he would escape altogether. He would go north over the border. His escape was so improbable that, if it happened, it couldn't be anything else but a sign—an indication that he was doing more harm by his example than good by his occasional confessions.

The text initially concentrates on the police search, but the priest's blurred photograph on the police-station wall symbolizes the difficulty the police have in identifying him. The Chief of Police notes that the priest "can pass as a gringo," and the drive to hunt down the priest is carefully thwarted by Greene through many devices, including the blurring of identity. The lieutenant admits that the priest "looks like all the rest," a situation that proves frustrating: "If only, he thought, we had a proper photograph—he wanted to know the features of his enemy." Even the mother of his child has difficulty in spotting him when they reunite after a six-year absence:

"Ah, Maria," he said, "and how are you?"

"Well," she exclaimed, "is it you, father?"

He didn't look directly at her: His eyes were sly and cautious. He said, "You didn't recognize me?"

"You've changed." She looked him up and down with a kind of contempt.

While the police are facing difficulties in their forages at capture, the priest is coming to terms with an identity that he initially tries to leave fuzzy, like the hard-to-decipher photograph. At first, the priest embraces anonymity. Like a shadowy criminal in this watchful universe of Tabasco, he must be guarded in his initial conversation with Mr Tench:

The stranger said, "I was expecting to see someone. The name was Lopez."

"Oh, they shot him weeks ago," Mr Tench said.

"Dead?"

"You know how it is round here. Friend of yours?"

"No, no," the man protested hurriedly. "Just a friend of a friend."

The technique of introducing the priest as an unidentified presence is repeated often in the novel. Several times he is described as "the stranger," and when he re-enters the town of the opening chapter he is simply depicted as the "man in the … drill suit." Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan points out what she views as the thematic function that this hiddenness serves: "[in Part I] we recognize the protagonist as a priest only by the circumstances which surround him and not by any essential, identifiable quality in himself…. The author seems to tell us in this way that the man is not yet worthy of his role as a priest, a father of his people." But even after he is designated "a priest," he is still forced to adopt various disguises. Pressed for a name by the lieutenant in the village confrontation, he uses that of Montez, the man who has been shot earlier in Concepción as part of the lieutenant's hostage-taking plan. And his conversation with the mestizo is couched in denials:

"Won't you say a prayer, father, before we sleep?"

"Why do you call me that?" he asked sharply, peering across the shadowy floor to where the half-caste sat against the door.

"You are a father, aren't you?"

"I have a child," the priest said, "if that's what you mean."

Finally, however, the priest relents to the mestizo's incessant probing:

A voice said, "You are the priest, aren't you?"

"Yes." It was as if they had climbed out of their opposing trenches and met in No Man's Land among the wires to fraternise.

The priest's shifting guises indicate not only how he is seen by others but also mark his faltering progress toward self-recognition and connection with God. One of the central ironies of the novel is that the priest eludes capture often, and yet at the same time he betrays his identity repeatedly through the compassionate embodiment of his calling. The mestizo, noting the priest's refusal to beat his mule, comments, "You talk like a priest," a phrase that is repeated word for word by a murderer in the prison cell in response to the priest's gentle admonition that "It's a terrible thing to kill a man." The Power and the Glory traces the growth of the priest's self-scrutiny and draws a parallel between this and his deepening understanding of God and the subsequent desire, in the prison, to drop his various masks and be seen for what he is. Greene reflects this picture of the intertwined reality of man's relation to himself and his communion with God in the description of the vandalized cemetery in Carmen:

One image of the Mother of God had lost ears and arms and stood like a pagan Venus over the grave of some rich forgotten timber merchant. It was odd—this fury to deface, because, of course, you could never deface enough. If God had been like a toad, you could have rid the globe of toads, but when God was like yourself, it was no good being content with stone figures—you had to kill yourself among the graves.

Just as ridding oneself of God here is said to require self-destruction, then to seek for and find God entails the search for oneself.

The pattern of the priest's initial hesitation but ultimate admission of his vocation is most powerfully expressed in the prison, where he is touched by "a sense of companionship which he had never experienced in the old days when pious people came kissing his black cotton glove." His encounter with the pious woman juxtaposes his past reactions to such meetings with a new awareness: "He was more out of touch with her kind than he had ever been; he would have known what to say to her in the old days, feeling no pity at all, speaking with half a mind a platitude or two." His feelings of helplessness form the beginnings of a true integrity; he is unwilling and unable to substitute the easy rhetoric of the past for the genuine difficulty of present communication. His self-revelation to the prisoners is preceded by Greene's reminder that the priest has a secret life. An old man in the cell relates that he has an illegitimate daughter, which he does not realize reaches deep into the heart of his listener. This poignant irony, combined with the subsequent story, approvingly told by the pious woman, of priests who took away the man's child, prompts the priest to break the shield of anonymity and bare his identity: "He said after a moment's hesitation, very distinctly, 'I am a priest.'"

The parallel structure of police pursuit and the priest's growing wish to make himself known continues to be purposefully interlinked. The priest remains invisible to his police pursuers; they still cannot identify him despite the fact that on his photograph someone has "put a ring round his face to pick it out." The photograph records something that has since altered; formerly, his was "a buffoon's face, good enough for mild jokes to women, but unsuitable at the altar-rail. He had tried to change it—and indeed, he thought, indeed I have succeeded, they'll never recognize me now…." Though Greene asserts that "the priest, for all his recollections of periods in his life when he was different, never changed" ([Marie-Francoise] Allain), the priest attributes his undetectability in the eyes of the law to a new internal reality:

The priest stood not far from his own portrait on the wall and waited. Once he glanced quickly and nervously up at the old crumpled newspaper cutting and thought, It's not very like me now. What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days…. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt …

The termination of the hunt, it becomes clear, is contingent on the priest's final "return." Part III of The Power and the Glory describes the priest's brief, tranquil stay with the Lehrs, but the visit is intended as a kind of temporary interlude, an illusion of peace. Lured away by the mestizo to attend to the dying American gangster, Calver, the priest quickly forgets the Lehrs: "the other world had stretched a hand across the border, and he was again in the atmosphere of flight." The story is fashioned so that we accept the reality of flight and the priest's eventual capture as the unavoidable conditions of the text. After the priest leaves the Lehrs' comfortable haven (thereby confirming his ultimate commitment to divine service), the strands of the narrative converge methodically. The priest himself announces that the suspension of the story will no longer be necessary: "'Now,' the priest said briskly, 'we won't delay any more,' and he started down the path, with a small sack slung over his shoulder." But this statement, which seems perfectly supported by the subsequent hastening of plot developments—the priest's capture and execution—is still undermined by Greene in the remainder of the story. For delay continues to plague the narrative; even the self-assured and end-oriented lieutenant, who is "in a hurry to get home," is befuddled and thrown into doubt by what he perceives as the confusing, duplicitous course of the priest's arguments: "You never talk straight. You say one thing to me—but to another man, or a woman, you say, 'God is love.'" The ending is further delayed by the lieutenant's assent to the priest's wish for a confessor; Padre José's hesitation, and the argument with his wife over the matter, conflicts with the lieutenant's desperate desire to progress to an ending:

"Perhaps, my dear," José said, "it's my duty …"

"You aren't a priest any more," the woman said, "you're my husband." She used a coarse word.

"That's your duty now."

The lieutenant … said, "I can't wait here while you argue. Are you going to come with me?"

If the fear of nonresolution haunts the lieutenant—"You have such odd ideas … Sometimes I feel you're just trying to talk me round," he tells the priest—then the hollow ring of closure seems to deflate his former zeal for the hunt: "He looked back on the weeks of hunting as a happy time which was over now for ever. He felt without a purpose, as if life had drained out of the world."

As the novel works its way to a close, Greene inserts a "fictional" analogue to the real story of the plot, with the tale of a saint that Luis' mother reads him:

"Reaching the wall, Juan turned and began to pray—not for himself, but for his enemies…. He raised the crucifix at the end of his beads and prayed that God would forgive them …"

"Had they loaded?" the boy asked.

"What do you mean—'had they loaded'?"

"Why didn't they fire and stop him?"

"Because God decided otherwise."

The reverent fictional treatment of the death of the priest is parodic in its simplicity, but the parallel runs deeper than this, for the mother's narrative is also delayed in comic fashion:

"Now the moment had come, the officer gave the order to fire, and—" She had been reading too fast because it was past the little girls' bedtime and now she was thwarted by a fit of hiccups. "Fire," she repeated, "and …"

The two little girls sat placidly side by side—they looked nearly asleep—this was the part of the book they never cared much about …

"Fire," the mother tried again …

Finally the mother blurts out the remaining narrative and quickly ushers a close to the bedtime story: "'And now,' the mother went rapidly on, clapping her hands, 'to bed.'" Like a microcosm of the detective action of the novel, the woman's recitation of pious stories to her children features a delayed ending until, in the last chapter, the man of God is shot.

Almost all fiction operates on some principle of delay or suspension, but the use of peripeteia—especially in the ordinary detective story—is absorbed by the reader in a spirit of confident anticipation of an ending to the text which will establish order and grant explanatory meaning to the preceding narrative. This is what Frank Kermode refers to in The Sense of an Ending as a "disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and instructive route. It has nothing whatever to do with any reluctance on our part to get there at all." Greene's suspensions, his twists in the narrative path, are not absorbed or given full relief by the ending of his novels, but it is not just that his books contain "open" endings characteristic of many modernist works which refuse to seal the illusion of a fully rounded life that is now poised and ready for evaluation ([Marianna] Torgovnick). Critical interest in Greene often focuses on what follows the last page; speculations abound in the reader's mind as to the status of Pinkie, or the whisky priest, or Scobie. What is their post-narrative fate? ([Albert] Sonnenfeld). The Lehrs' Bible contains explicit directions for theological problem solving:

If you are in trouble read	Psalm 34.
If trade is poor	Psalm 37….
If you desire peaceful slumbers	Psalm 121.

But the priest's astonishment at these "over-simple explanations" perhaps reflects Greene's own sense of wonder about the metaphysical realm.

The Power and the Glory ends with the ultimate repudiation of the lieutenant's pursuit, and of the teleological drive of the thriller, with the resurrection of the priesthood:

"If you would let me come in," the man said with an odd frightened smile, and suddenly lowering his voice he said to the boy, "I am a priest."

"You?" the boy exclaimed.

"Yes," he said gently. "My name is Father—" But the boy had already swung the door open and put his lips to his hand before the other could give himself a name.

Thus the text's "speechless" conclusion is particularly skillful in its conflation of a realistic narrative requirement—the obscuring of clerical identity is vital in an atmosphere of persecution—with a deeper metaphor which is at work here, the silence of ineffable mystery.