The Quiet American

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Desire and Colonialism: The Quiet American

Graham Greene's 1955 novel the Quiet American strikes the modern reader as a prophetic parable of American ignorance, European colonization and nationalist conflict in Vietnam. In many ways, it seems to demonstrate how the seeds of American failure in the region were sown early on, because of cultural misunderstandings between West and East. However, on a deeper level it is also an astute analysis of how colonialization and cultural oppression is 'written' on the bodies of women, how love for the exotic 'other' is really self-love, and how horrific actions are justified as necessary through false rationalization in the European colonial mindset. In the novel, Western men often believe that they possess superior insight and power in contrast to women, and project their own needs upon the bodies of women -- and upon the nation of Vietnam. The human tendency to project one's own needs upon the exterior world exacerbated in a culturally unfamiliar Third World context, where a member of the colonizing nation always sees his perceptions of the world as superior to native-born people.

In the Quiet American, the British narrator, Thomas Fowler, comes from a nation that has colonized many other countries even though the war in Indochina seems specifically like an American anticommunist struggle. Fowler thinks he is 'above' what he sees before him, because he is an objective reporter, just like he is above the religious sensibilities of his wife that prevent him from marrying his Vietnamese lover Phuong. Fowler's favorite phrase about himself is that he is: "Not involved," a phrase that he describes as "article of my creed. The human condition being what it was, let them fight, let them love, let them murder, I would not be involved, my fellow journalists called themselves correspondents. I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action -- even opinion is a kind of an action (Greene 29). This is somewhat disingenuous, of course, given the way that reporting in Vietnam is portrayed throughout the book. For example, in one incident the reporter Fowler meets with the Catholic Lieutenant Peraud, to observe a ceremony in honor of the Virgin of Fatima, which is disrupted by an attack by the rebel forces. Fowler is prohibited from writing a story about it, which effectively makes him complicit with the censors. This affront to the integrity of his profession as a journalist concerns Fowler less than a threat to his personal life, namely the loss of Phuong to another man. Despite his detached and British language about noninvolvement in an American and French conflict, Fowler's possessive attitude towards his Vietnamese lover is just as much an act of colonization as the French and American actions in Vietnam.

Likewise, American Alden Pyle's idealistic desires to save Vietnam and to save Phuong are just as much acts of patronizing colonization as more apparently exploitative measures taken by his fellow Americans. "Democracy was another subject of his - he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world" (Greene 12). In the scene where Fowler confronts Pyle's employer the U.S. Economic Aid mission he says Fowler was "too innocent to live," because he foolishly envisioned himself fighting "the Red menace, a soldier of democracy" (Greene 32). "He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and said 'Win the East for democracy'" (Greene 31-32). Despite Alden Pyle's insistence that he understands the conflict in Vietnam better than the Vietnamese, he imposes American ideals and norms upon what he sees -- even the reader is first greeted with a scene of Pyle drinking milk at a local milk bar, which he insists is just like an American soda shop. Pyle imposes American cultural norms on everything he sees in Indochina, from his lover Phuong, to what he sees around him in terms of the populace's political needs.

Thus, poor Phuong is misunderstood by both of these Western men, one cynical, one idealistic. She is perceived as vulnerable by her lovers, both her Englishman and her American, and exploited in different ways. Over the course of the novel, because it is told from Fowler's perspective, the reader never gains a sense of who Phuong is as a human being, only what he sees in her, and what he projects onto her image. Phuong becomes more of a metaphor for South Vietnam itself, less of a character and how Europeans saw it as exotic, vulnerable, and feminine, and how Americans saw it as ripe for the taking, in danger of being overtaken by communism, and thus in need of American democratic moral guidance and salvation. Phuong is also treated poorly by her own sister, dominated by almost every other character in the novel, which further reinforces her status as a metaphor for Vietnamese peasants who cannot articulate themselves either in the face of European and American misunderstanding and misinterpretation, or more powerful ideologues from their own people.

A refusal to acknowledge to Vietnam's real, divergent needs is a common theme runs throughout the novel. Perhaps the most obvious example of American blindness is Pyle's constant insistence upon the need for a 'Third Force' (that is, the use of insurgent, illegally funded groups) to save Vietnam, because of the fact he has read it in a textbook, the Role of the West, at Harvard. Pyle still has the point-of-view of a student, not a realist. By treating the Vietnamese badly, essentially by funding terrorist groups through covert operations that support his supposedly pro-democratic ideology, Pyle is convinced he is doing the 'correct' thing, even though it causes atrocities, as evidenced during one particularly horrific bombing sequence in a crowded marketplace. Pyle's thinking, Greene implies, mirrors all terrorists who think that by taking lives, they can save lives, and also American ignorance about the complexities of life in other nations.