Afterwardsness as Catholic Aesthetic in Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means

Both Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) feature bomb explosions during the London blitz which instigate instances of Catholic conversion that are traumatic. Faith unfolds belatedly in a phenomenon Freud calls nachtraglichkeit, or afterwardsness. Although the study of religion and literature has gained more legitimacy over the past decade, very little scholarship brings trauma theory into the field. This paper opens dialogue between literature, theology, and trauma by appropriating Richard Kearney’s religious hermeneutics to argue that Greene’s and Spark’s novels transform Joyce’s secular notion of epiphany into a Catholic aesthetic for trauma. Both novels depict bomb explosions as traumatic but epiphanic moments of conversion in which faith arises belatedly through the process of writing itself. Narration gives the past a future in the possibility for a renewed faith in God.