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COPYRIGHT 2005 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
The article presents Graham Greene's 1982 Monsignor Quixote as a continuation of romance tradition. It demonstrates how the familiar motif of a quest undertaken by a chivalric knight errant organising the plot of the medieval genre, which conventionally revolved around the questions of truth and virtue, has been transformed by the modern novel to express the dilemmas concerning the place of spirituality in the materialist worldview of capitalism. Thus, in a series of comic adventures the titular Monsignor and his companion Zanca, a Marxist mayor, appear to be the last knights-errant, believing in either the divine design of the world or justice respectively. Their views, however, prove to be so incongruous with the reality that they are considered as sheer madness. The modern travesty of the medieval motif of quest only proves how the transformed ideology of the post-medieval times has enforced adjustments in the romance formula, which has survived in the novel, and which are accountable for its inherent parodic streak. The romance heroes with their spiritual values can but cut tragicomic figures in the modern world.
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The diversification of literature into genres has always been a problematic task, since the nature of the relationship among the literary categories is unequivocal. The concept of the genre relies heavily upon the ideas of difference and discontinuity and yet nowadays most scholars agree that it is next to impossible to draw fixed generic boundaries, since genres enter in relationships one with another in all sorts of unexpected ways. Literature thus should be viewed simultaneously in terms of both continuity and discontinuity, whereas up to now, the genre theorists have overplayed either one or the other. As McKeon explains, "archetypalist theory", represented by Levi-Strauss and Frye, "tends to overemphasise continuity and identity", whereas "its alternative approach", adopted by Auerbach and Watt, "tends to exaggerate alterity and difference" (McKeon 1988: 10). Watt and Auerbach relate the transformations of the literary form to the transformations of extra-literary reality: philosophy, religion, economic conditions. Levi-Strauss and Frye have tried to discover the perennial form, structure, or a "mythic archetype", dissociated from content and history, epitomising that which is mutable, and thus accidental, rather than essential.
The history of the genre theory, however, demonstrated the inefficiencies of both the approaches to the development of literature, since form and content, structure and history, have proved to be entirely dependent one upon the other. Every genre, every text even, will demonstrate both the continuity and change in the history of literature. As Ortega y Gasset explains, genres are no more than "wide vistas seen from the main sides of human nature. Each epoch brings with it a basic interpretation of man. Or rather, the epoch does not bring the interpretation with it but actually is such an interpretation. For this reason, each epoch prefers a particular genre" (Ortega y Gasset 2000: 272). The world undergoes...
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