The Greene Knight

            As I read Graham Greene’s ‘The Destructors,’ I could not help but notice that Trevor (or T as the gang takes to calling him) had extremely similar qualities to the terror of Gotham City: the Joker.

Why doesn't the Joker want to kill Batman?

            Despite the graveyards he has filled in his career, despite brutally murdering Jason Todd (the second of Batman’s sidekicks), and despite committing any and every atrocity he can to torture Batman to the point of breaking, the Joker does not hate Batman. In fact, the opposite is true. Without Batman, the Joker would not have a purpose. At the beginning of ‘The Destructors,’ Greene describes T as a relatively boring member of the gang. T “never wasted a word” (382), and when he did speak, his “words were almost confined to voting ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the plan of operations” (383). However, Old Misery not only sparks T to speak, but to take charge and become leader of the gang. As Blackie and T burn Old Misery’s money, Blackie feels that the only reason T would do what he was doing was because he hated Old Misery. However, T says that he does not hate him, and that it would be “no fun” (389) if he hated him. 

Without Batman, crime has no punch line.

            T also knows that he needs Old Misery, as much as the Joker knows that he needs Batman. When he designs his plan to destroy the house, he bases it solely on the fact that he knows Old Miserly would be away during the destruction. When they lock Old Misery in his loo, an unknown voice provides him with a blanket and food. I would like to argue that it was, in fact, T who did this. Old Misery had provided him with the means to gain power, and he wanted to see Old Misery’s reaction to the destruction. Despite having had opportunities to kill Batman in the past, the Joker chose not to. The fact of the matter is that they complete each other. In Batman: The Animated Series, Batman fakes his death in order to track down drug dealers. When the Joker thought that Batman really was dead, he stopped committing crimes, because “without Batman, crime has no punch line.” Nobody would be there to appreciate his work, and grieve at the end result. And, simply put, that’s no fun for anybody.

            One mystery throughout ‘The Destructors’ is T’s motivation to destroy Old Misery’s house. When he first suggests destroying the house, T says that he does not want to steal anything. He didn’t want to increase his wealth or the wealth of the gang. Once inside the house, he and Blackie burn Old Misery’s money, further enforcing this point. As mentioned above, he does not claim or show to have any animosity or hatred towards Old Misery. He does not dislike the house, and in fact says that it’s “beautiful” (384). Through the events, he briefly gains power in the gang, but if his intention had been to gain power, why had he never shown any indication of this desire in the past? In fact, all that anyone knows about T is that his father was formerly an architect and now worked as a clerk, his mother was arrogant, and he was born sometime before 1954. The Joker, as well, does not have a clear past. Since his emergence in 1940, the Joker has provided dozens of backstories. In 'The Killing Joke' by Alan Moore, the Joker says that "If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" Though some possible motivations might emerge because of his past (i.e. rebellion against his father’s architecture or psychological trauma caused by the war), T does not claim any of them. And, in fact, that's the Joker's whole point. It's not the past, where he came from, or who he is that matters. As Bruce Wayne struggled to find out everything he could about the Joker, Alfred suggests the possibility that the Joker is not trying to gain anything through his actions. “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” T says something to Blackie that almost mirrors this. "All this hate and love, it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie" (389).

            In searching for T’s method, I think the best thing to look at is the theme of destruction. After declaring that there are only things, T looks around the room at the “shadows of half things, broken things, former things” (390).  This is one of the points that the Joker seeks to make to the people of Gotham. He believes that everything can be destroyed, and therefore is not real or important. Laws can be broken, so they mean nothing. Justice can be destroyed, so there is no justice. As T looks around the house that he once called beautiful, he sees things that once were beautiful, now destroyed. If nothing is real, and everything can go, then life is just one big joke. The Joker puts it best in two simple words: “Everything burns.”

I feel like I could keep going on and on about this, but I'd like to instead pose the question to you guys. Below, I'm going to post some more pictures and video clips that, I think, can further relate the Joker to T. How do you think these scenes relate, or do not relate, T and the Joker?

From 'Batman Confidential #12'

From 'Batman #686'

From 'Batman and Robin #14'

From 'Batman #663'

From 'The Killing Joke'

The Risks and Rewards of Teaching

I've taught Graham Greene's "The Destructors" for as long as I have been teaching.  It was the first work I ever read by Graham Greene. And from the very first read, I recognized it as a short story that seemed perfect for the adolescent male: straightforward plot, easily remembered character names, rampant juvenile delinquency, seemingly pointless destruction, and a strangely funny conclusion. As for that timeless task of identifying a theme, the story seemed to be perfectly balanced: it was complex enough that the students probably wouldn't be able to "find it" (which is the verb I would have used at the time) on their own, but with a little demystifying by yours truly, I'd make it seem like each and every student "found" it on his own in class. Furthermore, the story easily lent itself to important lessons on literary basics like conflict and character. Voila! Let's teach.

And so I taught the story every year. Even when teaching at a new school last year, I assigned it to my freshmen. Despite the new classroom, new students, new everything, I took the same old approach. My students would funnel in the door, several of them asking, "Why'd they do that?" And I, as their teacher, would help reveal to them the very real purpose to purposeless destruction. With meticulously selected passages, I set out to show Trevor as an aggrieved victim of English class systems. Having "come down in the world," I explained, Trevor wants to also bring down this house that "stands up like a top hat." Hence, the burning of money. Hence, the boy's interest in the house's architectural pedigree. We'd also focus on setting; Old Misery's house is surrounded by rubble, left over from the World War II blitz, and this daily reminder of destruction, I explained with a drawing on the blackboard, must make these boys think there are no pathways for creation. After two or three classes, we came to consensus. Our theme was nicely wrapped up and ready to be packed away before our next story: the forces of class and war can sometimes cause creative energies to become destructive.

I always had private misgivings about this interpretation. It seemed too reductive of the story's many mysteries. I'd conclude the story with many questions of my own. What's with the laughing at the end? Can we adequately explain the burning of the money? Who is Trevor? Trevor was not, I privately believed, the little Communist I made him out to be in class. Instead, I knew there was something darker at work here. Sure, Greene makes us aware of class in the story; sure, the daily reminders of war and austerity must have played a part in this. But to simply ascribe class resentment as the genesis of a meticulous, ingenious destruction -- to the very last brick -- of the house of a kind man implied that evil acts themselves are always reducible to a rational, socially conditioned motivation. And this interpretation left me wanting.

But could I really start a freshman course with some philosophical musings on mystery, darkness, and evil? Would it be better to teach an interpretation I didn't quite believe in, in order to show them how to analyze a text? Or ought I to use the story to show them sometimes there aren't answers for evil? That there is a darkness to the world?

In a way, this is one of the risks of teaching. We become entrenched in our way of teaching a story, a historical conflict, a mathematical theory. We convince ourselves that we need to teach it this way because, only then, will our students see that, if we use the rational methods, problems can be solved, texts interpreted, and history understood. We so desire to convince our students that analysis is rewarded with conclusions that we forget that sometimes the reward is confronting the mystery, the limits of our understanding.

I didn't think of any of these questions about "The Destructors" until I decided to teach a senior elective on Graham Greene (for which students will be contributing to this blog) and immersed myself into, as his fans call it, "Greeneland." Only then did I realize how secondary issues of class are in his work. Greene's English, so class issues can never wholly disappear, but they certainly take a backseat to his obsessions with evil, innocence, and the comic in the tragic. When read as the opening work of first collection, titled Twenty-One Stories, "The Destructors" suddenly seems less an exploration of class and more an introduction to Greene's universe. It's a fallen world we live in, we learn, but we, like the lorry driver at the end of the story, still have "got to admit it's funny."

So from the cinders of my previous understanding, I start anew with this course. "[D]estruction," Greene's narrator tells us, "after all is a form of creation."