little Franciscan friar, who should not, according to canon law, have allowed
Keneally, figuratively, a fallen priest, to enter the monastery cloisters and violate it
but instead said, “... my antipodean friend, damn canon law!” (Keneally, 1970:49).
Apostasy, but a ‘craftier theology’, a term that he used in Bring Larks and Heroes to
describe a more potent and essential process that may replace an institutional
rubric, in the very midst of the cloisters!
Thomas Keneally is like a medievalist historian, a Venerable Bede, recording
the moral history of his age. He is the hereditary I rish bard, the raconteur storyteller
whose tales force the reader to contemplate what he sees as the constantly
recurring threat of individual extinction, man’s inhumanity to man and the ease with
which we can destroy each other, physically, mentally and spiritually. The world,
for Keneally, offers places that are open and fluid systems but are intensely
dramatic in their revelations. Thus, the horrific descriptions in Season in Purgatory
of putrefying wounds, the vivid presentation of instances where the human body is
cut, ripped or attacked by gangrene, as in the case of the young boy whom the
Germans “ ... suspended by his genitals in a well” (Keneally, 1976:93). Such
descriptions are not gratuitous authorial indulgences but rather essential detail in
the literary exposition of the vulnerability of humanity and of the fragility of human
life. Where it appears that there is a degree of authorial satisfaction in the way he
describes what may be needless pornographic violence as for example, in Season in
Purgatory, of the gorish detail of putrefying wounds on pages 39-40 and 74-75.
Such seeming indulgence marks many of his novels, particularly Confederates, but
especially Schindler’s Ark, and it may rather reveal Keneally’s desire to locate the
soul, the sacred within the profane.
The themes of guilt, oath-breaking, loyalty and betrayal present in Keneally’s
work are of course traditional Catholic themes and identify the Catholic novel but
Keneally’s writings, become the medium by which he chants his credo and theology,
a craftier theology. I ndeed, Keneally’s protagonists, apostates like him, pose
questions regarding the social conscience of humankind in a world “ ... fuelled and
governed by lies” (Keneally, 1977:6). As a theological student, Keneally would have
been familiar with the theological implications of words, apart from the fact that
they are a normal accompaniment to any form of ritual action, the word may also
constitute a chant or magic incantation and:
The sacrificing priest ... the chanting priest ... learned that the
words of the sacred literature are themselves sacrosanct and
eternal and to learn these words or to utter them is a way of
ron
(Ron)
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