and enjoyed more the splitting of coalitions than the parting of the vulva” (Keneally,
1975:189).
Keneally constructs this novel through a series of impressionistic narrative
sketches, both of the characters and the landscape, metaphorically in the manner of
Monet and it is no surprise that Monet is mentioned as the confidant of Clemenceau
who thinks the artist something of a god (Keneally, 1975:171). The eighty-seven
short scenes, each with a Brechtian title, for example, To the Toilets, The General
Who Swallowed a Hook, and The Suicidal Horse, insinuate the omnipotence of
Keneally as he plays with his characters and their routine humanity. The dreams,
nightmares and portentous symbols in the text cannot be treated too lightly for they
indicate a very significant sub-textual layer of the novel: Keneally’s preoccupation
with the psychology and symbolism of Carl Jung. Jung paid great attention to the
Old Testament character of Job, the relationship between God, humankind and
Satan and the significance of dreams. For example, in the Book of Job it is written:
God speaks first in one way,
and then in another, but no one notices.
He speaks by dreams, and visions that come in the night,
when slumber comes on mankind,
and men are all asleep in bed.
Then it is he whispers in the ear of man
or may frighten him with fearful sights,
to turn him away from evil doing,
and make an end of his pride;
to save his soul from the pit,
and his life from the pathway to Sheol (Book of Job, 33:15-18).
I n his essay, Answer to Job (Jung, CW 11, pars. 553-758), Jung asserted
that the Old Testament Book of Job provides a remarkably comprehensive symbolic
account of an encounter with the Self (through dreaming), a process that describes
an individual experience in which the ego has its first major conscious encounter
with the Self, an obvious theme in this novel. I ndeed, Gossip from the Forest is
very dependent on Jungian psychology to express its philosophical base. The
conjunction of the Foch and Erzberger dreams and their content has been
expressed by Keneally as a Jungian synchronicity; synchronistic in the sense that
homosexuality or bisexuality in this novel represents an archetype which has been
described as something that:
... seems to move both from within and without, manifesting
impulses, emotions, images, ideas and interpretive structures in
the interior psyche yet also as concrete forms, events and