| Haydee Morgan-Hollander interviews Michael Cawood Green, author of For the sake of Silence |
Micheal Cawood Green , Haydee Morgan-Hollander
 For the Sake of Silence
by Michael Cawood Green
In language, the devil truly lies in the detail.
- For the Sake of Silence (p 60)
"I have learned at last to measure grace by silence. But only by doing the unspeakable.” So begins the penance most fitting for a monk of the Trappist Order, an order dedicated to a life of silence. These are the first of the many, many words Father Joseph must use to tell of his fumbling attempts at preserving the Trappist’s withdrawal from the world while the mission fields become too strong a temptation for the group of monks with which he has travelled to South Africa. He watches in growing dismay as they create Mariannhill, a monastery that rapidly becomes one of the largest in the world, primarily through its establishment of a chain of mission stations stretching across the colonial landscape – but at a terrible price.
For the Sake of Silence takes the form of its narrator’s flawed and ultimately futile confession and is based on the founding of the Trappist monastery of Mariannhill near Durban. Deeply researched, it follows its inexorable slide into the missionary work forbidden to Trappists, and the storm that breaks as their silent life drifts into the world of words.
Mariannhill is finally expelled from the Trappist Order and made a missionary order in its own right, but only after a destructive internal power struggle and fraught contact with the settler and "native" communities beyond its walls.
Truly, truly, many times the thought has occurred to me as I lie here, would that I had never seen this Africa and laid the foundation of so many sins and scandals!
(p 501)
These culminate in a series of spectacular historical incidents, including a high-profile exorcism, the death by poisoning of thirteen children, the incarceration of Mariannhill’s first black priest in a mental institution, and a war of words over the translation of the Catechism into isiZulu that destroys the last remnants of cloistered silence in the monastery.
Even in my old age I was forced to return to the Regulations and read again the paragraph that states: “We never tell any story about the sin of impurity, nor even speak of it. We say nothing which might bring it to mind, either directly or indirectly. We should have so great a horror of it, that we ought not even to know that such a sin exists. Or if it is known,” – alas, dear, dear M – “we should still lose all memory of it …”
(p 161)
The novel sails close, at times, to “creative non-fiction”, but ultimately demonstrates the power fiction has to hold up to question the ways in which we perceive the past – and the present. For the Sake of Silence is resonant with a time when many of the new freedoms to speak exist in an uneasy relationship with new forms of silencing. The book was recently launched at the Time of the Writer festival in Durban.
Even today, I suspect that if the quality of the paper available to me here in this far-flung colony of a country were not so execrably poor, I may have been content to leave for you only gleaming white sheets, the physical embodiment of the purity of silence.
(p 74)
By writing the novel, did the narrator not break with the Rule of Silence? Or does the rule not apply to the written word?
Thomas Merton, the most famous modern Trappist (he died accidentally, or was murdered, in the late 1960s), wrote prodigiously, arguing that writing (as opposed to speaking) was an act of meditation, and therefore part of a life of strict silence and contemplation. Father Joseph does not believe this: writing for him is a deep act of penance, of punishment.
The book is intimately concerned with the narrator’s efforts to choose and act upon his choices: it is character that often defeats this. One of the quotes in the book is from the Rule ("'In much speaking,' says the Rule, 'you will not escape sin'"), and this is part of the governing irony of the book: that it takes so many words to explain what he has done for silence.
I wanted above all else to catch the narrator’s voice: it is he, his perspective, that makes this a novel, regardless of the accuracy of (most of!) the historical detail (see the Author’s Note at the end for the points where I have deliberately parted from what I am fairly certain was the case).
It may be true that anything I have to confess is best left to silence, but what then of silence itself, at least the silence I sought to safeguard? If this has to be put before you in so many, many words, well, that is because I, more than most, have had to come to terms with the secrets that lie on the other side of silence. All I can offer you is the certainty that each word I write is a penance for the things I did in silence, for the sake of silence.
(p 10)
Is your book filling the gaps? Providing the dialogue, the words?
Perhaps. But more to the point, Biegner (Father Joseph) is forced to use words to fill the gaps in his own religious vocation.
This was the case at first, but steadily I found within myself a deep enthusiasm for the exercises of religion, particularly prayer, or rather - and the distinction is important - meditation. In a truly meditative state, I felt I had nothing to say but, strangely, was still able to say it. I felt I was in a dialogue of silence, a communion made of not-speaking. Here I found the beginning of the experience that was to hover just before me as it drew me further and further into the religious life in which I wished to lose myself - no, not so much lose myself as find myself without words.
(p 79)
Fr Joseph’s words challenges the first line of St John’s Gospel, in which he lays out the fundamental nature of God. Do you write word for word, as opposed to page for page or chapter for chapter?
This book has been so thoroughly written and rewritten that I do think I have weighed every word: certainly this is my ideal way of writing.
And so, here again, I am left to play the historian, scrabbling through dusty old papers lost in the past they record or pouring over more recent publications, if only to measure how far they deviate from what I know or guess to be the truth.
(p 131)
Who is this talking? Biegner or Green?
Biegner, Biegner, Biegner. Writing fiction is telling the deepest truth you know through otherness. But it is the otherness that must speak, not a ventriloquist author using his characters as dummies. This is not fiction.
It has been said, "If literature is not an argument with the world then it is nothing." Are all fiction writers inevitably concerned with politics?
I’m not fond of the passive voice: many people have said this, in many different ways and contexts. It is truism, therefore true but meaningless until put into specifics. I only know that when one is writing truly creatively, one works in images, not ideas. Of course, "politics" (whatever this means) saturates both at the most intimate level: a comma is a political act, in certain circumstances (more than most would guess).
For the Sake of Silence is the follow-up to Sinking, your first work of historical fiction and a set work at two international universities. It has been produced as radio (voice) play and dance drama (She had a sinking feeling). Are there plans for a theatre production in its original verse drama?
Sinking was set at the University of Texas in Austin while I was a guest professor there, but I discovered it was being taught in Columbia only when one of my graduate students began his doctorate there and let me know that it was one of his set works. I have been preparing a theatrical script with a few different Durban directors/producers during the period of the final editing of the new novel, but this will have to take a back seat while we get the novel off the ground. But we will be coming back to this: I’m very excited by the script.
Sinking was received in New York to great acclaim by students from countries as far as Angola and Colombia. What does a book collect on such travels, the contents no longer isolated in its language of origin?
Professor Rosalind Morris, who set the work for her course at Columbia, wrote to me in 2006 of Sinking: "I was pleased to be able to assign the book in my class ... I wanted to tell you, now that the students have had a chance to read your work, how much they loved Sinking. I was astonished by their subtle and deeply moving readings, their appreciation of the labours of translation and the ways in which your work manages to not only narrate the trauma of the sinkholes but also to produce a poetics of the everyday object in which is buried the unspeakabilities of life in that odd community. We had a long and often vigorous discussion, students reading aloud passages form your work which they found especially moving. All of them were quite awed. So you now have a small fan club in New York City, among students who come from places as far afield as Angola, Colombia, and Up-State New York."
I had much the same experience in Austin, but your question asks more of me than I could hope to put down here. I am fascinated by, and have written on, literal and cultural translation, and what happens in the process – all of which tells me that it is almost impossible to generalise about this: specific examples, researched and examined in detail, are enormously telling, generalities blur into the banal.
If I were to risk the banal, I would say that in essence fiction is about the challenge of otherness, creating through it, understanding, or, much more appropriately, being engaged by, drawn into it. Travelling is the very nature of fiction; by definition it takes you somewhere else, into someone else, challenging everything you are in the process. This is why reading it requires an investment, a commitment, even in its lightest form; there is not much point to it, otherwise.
In Christ we are transfigured by faith, that is to say, raised above our historical condition.
(p 26)
How do you view history and fiction? What are their differences?
Their relative discursive strategies. Hayden White made a career of proving all history was really narrative, and thus essentially fictional in construct if not content. The first historical novelists believed deeply that they were extending the understanding of history as a discipline (and some still do). It is difficult to put it better than JM Coetzee did amidst the "historical" pressures of the 1980s:
I reiterate the elementary and rather obvious point I am making: that history is not reality; that history is a kind of discourse; that the novel is a kind of discourse, too, but a different kind of discourse; that inevitably, in our culture, history will, with varying degrees of forcefulness, try to claim primacy, claim to be a master-form of discourse, just as, inevitably, people like myself will defend themselves by saying that history is nothing but a certain kind of story that people agree to tell each other - that ... the authority of history lies simply in the consensus it commands. The categories of history are not privileged, just as the categories of moral discourse are not privileged. They do not reside in reality: they are a certain construction put upon reality. I see absolutely no reason why, even in the South Africa of the 1980s, we should agree to agree that things are otherwise.
South Africa has had a rich history of literary output. Until relatively recently, realism dominated the production of fiction in South Africa. And the present output?
Realism was a necessary by-product of the act of witnessing that the terrors of our past demanded. I am not sure we are relieved of that burden yet by any means, or ever will be, but the new challenges around us ask more of us than the presentation of the spectacle of oppression, be it for recognition or shock value. This shift has been going on for some time: compare Gordimer with Coetzee. Currently, there is much talk of South African writers being free to adopt all sorts of modes, even the "lighter" ones of the detective or crime novel, the comedy of manners, etc. We are "normal" now, ordinary if you will, in a thoroughly globalised sense: Njabulo Ndebele spoke of the "rediscovery of the ordinary" as far back as 1984; perhaps now we risk the onset of the tyranny of the ordinary.
Did historical conditions play a part in producing so few publications on monastic life in South Africa?
For a start, South Africa’s long history of anti-Catholicism in the colonial period makes Catholics a comparatively small and largely under-represented group. Later, "Die Roomse Gevaar" was a major part of apartheid thinking (Mariannhill itself was often threatened with closure in the 1960s). Historical conditions made it even more difficult for a monastic culture in particular to take root, especially one that was not even of a missionary orientation.
'Why, when the world thinks of a monastery, does it think of murder, evil? What is it about a cloister that brings killing to mind?'
The long history of gothic novels featuring murdering monks and profane monasteries.
No one has learned more than I that when you write about an experience you cast it in a new form and therefore furnish it with a new purpose. It is impossible to tell the truth of an experience in words because words are of a different form from experience.
( p 167)
What does this quote say for the truth, silence, the breaking of silence, your book?
Just that: accepted truths are a construct of particular discourses that can never pin down the truth once and for all: this book is meant to open up "the truth" about Mariannhill (which is, as it must be in a work of fiction, an image that stands for much more than the actual physical place or its history) to the full play of representation, out of which something new can be gleaned with each facet in its different light.
The characters in my first novel, which focused on the famous sinkhole disaster on the Blyvooruitzig Mine in the far Western Transvaal in the mid-60s, were probably as regionally foreign from me as other white South Africans could be, yet I found in them the perfect vehicle to express my sense of the world disappearing from beneath my feet. A number of people, including Elize Cawood and the poet Ingrid de Kok, who grew up in the area, expressed their sense of how well I had caught the people and the region.
You wrote a number of articles on the uses of history in South African fiction which was the subject for your book Novel Histories: Past, Present and Future in South African Fiction. To what degree do one’s surroundings influence writing? Did Pinetown have any significant influence?
Yes. Again, it is the specifics that count. In my case, the most immediate effect of my "surroundings" is battling to win time out of them to write. This means late nights, early hours, when one’s physical context takes on a phantasmagorical quality at best.
Pinetown was a flat, lower middle-class, extremely white town which I could not wait to leave; and now I remain fascinated by all it suppressed in being what it was. What it is now, is entirely foreign to me. I also have a chameleon-like ability to be happy almost anywhere: I love Austin, Texas, as much as London or York, Durban as much as any of these, in the oddest of ways. It reminds me of a WH Auden poem (especially those out of season seaside towns he uses as effectively as settings); always knowing that it will never be a TS Eliot poem, no matter how good it is. This probably defines me as a writer, a little too late for the really big South African topics, but although it can be rather good. I am terrified that this may define me as a writer.
Now you know why it’s so warm in bed together,
Look around you the house is burning down.
I don’t think this is what they had in mind when they sang about the home fires burning:
But it looks like it’s really caught on in this town.
Turn away from the mirror to the window,
Oh, come on do you have to even ask?
You can’t really believe we’ve got problems of a serious nature,
After all, we’re armed, white, and middle class.
(Lyrics to An Old South African Lovesong, or "Sarie Marais Revisited", Johannesburg, 1984, Michael Green)
The sympathies of my visitors were mainly, if mildly, with the English forces, despite the law in the Orange Free State requiring all teachers to be Protestant and the denial of grants to Catholic schools in the Transvaal.
(p 444)
KwaZulu-Natal is predominantly English-speaking, the religion diverse to the point of global, as opposed to the Free State (of my upbringing) which is mostly Protestant and Afrikaans-speaking. How do the socio- and cultural upbringings of the two language groups of your age group compare?
Again, I’m not sure how I would know. Apartheid was all too successful in separating people, even English and Afrikaans (Pinetown High School was desegregated linguistically during my time as a pupil there). It was also very successful in creating an Afrikaans middle class, which may explain why some Afrikaans writers of my generation and younger may have been slightly better off. Then again, I grew up on the tail end of my mother’s family’s genteel poverty, while my father rebelled against his own parents’ relatively affluent middle-class life and became a motor mechanic for the Province, which he remained until he retired. I was left to do whatever I chose with my life, as long as I paid for it. Stoking funded the student part, until I did well enough to be given bursaries and scholarships to study, nationally and internationally – but that was really to fund a music career in which I spent more on guitar strings than I ever made performing. And then, rather to my own surprise, I was offered my first lecturing job and have been lecturing with a passion for years, although also with an underlying sense that this would fund writing fiction – which I am finally doing.
Your music career drew more attention from the Security Branch than the music industry. What did the English songwriters and singers protest about as opposed to the Boere-Woodstock, which worked because it was Afrikaans?
Let me cut to the end: I no longer have any idea how to define an "English" protest movement, which is why I have stopped writing and performing music. It all comes down to accent: South African English singer-songwriters have never developed an authentic singing accent, whereas Afrikaans singer-songwriters seem born into one. Then again, an Afrikaans friend of mine says he can’t stand the accent Afrikaans singers use, so perhaps I make this point out of sheer ignorance. I still enjoy Afrikaans singers and songwriters – on the most post-rock of fringes, preferably - more than those singing in the accent that no longer convinces me even in my own voice.
As a solo musician you performed in a range of bands and in 1982 3rd Ear Music released White Eyes, which immediately sank into what David Marks has called the "hidden years" of the oppressive times …
People were never sure what the title of my album was: technically it was White Eyes, the title song’s chorus stating, “white eyes are a prison”. But the corrugated iron wall behind me in the cover photograph had “media messages” scrawled on it, some anonymous graffiti many thought I had put there. I hadn’t, and the media didn’t listen anyway. The song “White Eyes” was lyrically one of the weakest on the album: "Africa, how can I call you mother? My skin’s too fair, some say I’ll burn when your heat gets fiercer …” – embarrassing 80s whitey attempt at questioning the only national affiliation I have – and it suddenly strikes me as truer now, and less gauche now, than it was then.
So much, then, for the war of words out of which we were born in Africa, delivered from Dunbrody, and born again in the most appropriately named province of Natal.
(p 172)
Why “appropriately named province of Natal”?
Natal means "birth": the province was "discovered" by the Portuguese on Christmas Day and named in honour of Christ’s birth.
Are there any similarities between Zulu and Trappist customs?
Very few (this is argued in the Afterword); but the similarities of the burial process really did have an impact on the Trappists’ "native" audience.
It was then I first began to wonder if the Africans could only become Christian when we gave them the language in which to be Christian. What did this say of a God of silence? Many times in the months and years ahead, when we tried to cross the barrier of the languages around us, it occurred to me that in propagating God He ceases to exist outside the language in which He is put into words. (p 225)
The language that must be used to "convert" the "native" is of itself suspect to a monk committed to silence, for whom words are suspect and limited.
Where does one begin to research an account of this nature, covering centuries, involving many countries, the intricate life and Rule of the Religious, not to speak of the many different languages?
The Author’s Note at the end of the book provides the best answer to this. Finding the answers to so many questions was so central to the writing that the book could, I suppose, be called a work of “creative non-fiction” or the “literature of fact” – if I actually believed in the distinctions upon which such categories depend. However much you think you can see, the story you are after is hidden by more than the haze from veld fires and the exhalations of the land. It will be a long time before you discover that the thirteen children in those graves – which you could, possibly, see with binoculars from this promontory – were murdered. And even longer before it occurs to you that there is a possible alternative to the commonly accepted, although never proved, assumption about who the murderer was. Locating Biegner’s home village in the Czech Republic and reading the beginnings of his life history from the still eloquent landscape was one of the rewards of writing this book.
Is there a book which you would love to own, but cannot because it is out of print, or in the Vatican, or too expensive?
Many, I am sure, but none come to mind right now. I did have to buy some relatively rare and expensive books (like Ricard's book, which really exists) to write this book.
Is (the Church’s) permission needed to write a book of this sort?
I felt no need for permission as such. The book will be controversial in certain religious quarters, I am sure, but I am also sure of my factual ground and can defend it – even though this is finally a work of fiction, and not therefore to be defended on factual grounds. I did, however, feel ethically bound to let all my informants know exactly what I was doing. The Superior of Mariannhill’s response was exactly that given in the "translator’s" introduction:
It is our hope that his tale will increase interest, both within and outside the Church, in the process of enquiry into the public veneration of the figure at its centre, Abbot Francis Pfanner, which we plan to put before the Congregation of Sacred Rites.
I have built this into the fiction, but Franz is now, many, many years after the period in which the fictional Translator’s Note is meant to have been written, in just such a position, and Father Bernard of Mariannhill did give me this response when he was helping me with my research.
For the Sake of Silence asks questions about Catholicism over the ages, conspirators, the future of the Catholic Church. It’s also made relevant by subject of the Royal Lottery, vaccination and land reform (p 368) that continue into this day …
I did want to create a "thick" sense of history, a story steeped in its time that resists easy modern appropriation. A story that holds us at a distance, judging our age as we judge the age in which it is set. Yes, indeed, the land question has re-emerged as one of the most sensitive issues contemporary Mariannhill has to deal with: there are many challenges as to the legality/ethicality of how they obtained so much land in the late 1800s / early 1900s, for example.
And yes, the other issues you mention are, too, among many others, problematic ones that have lasted through to current times. But I am more interested in calling up a period very different from our own, when the issues may be related to contemporary ones, but were fought out in a very different context that causes us to rethink - without necessarily any direct "relevance" - our own context.
It is the "otherness" of fiction that interests me, and the ways in which writers must make that otherness relevant by means that bypass the obvious "connections" over time, so that these cease to be ideas or principles but become a felt effect that physically becomes present for us.
In the end, I write the fiction to express these concepts because I can’t express them in any other way. It is the fiction that counts, not the "ideas", or whatever they are, behind it. And its connection to contemporary "reality" is vital, but not if reduced to banal "relevance": this must be felt on the bone, not through intellectual analysis.
What lessons were lost in the seventeen months Brother David did not spend as a novice, deep, say, in the Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross, or pouring over the Psalms? Was this when Brother David, in learning to speak so well in the new languages [Zulu] about him, failed to learn that we ourselves are but words spoken by God, and that a word can never comprehend the voice that speaks it? (p 239)
Ah, the mystery of religious expression – mysteries precisely because they are beyond literal explanation. I have paraphrased an actual religious text here, concerned with the religious mysteries beyond words. Let’s leave it at that.
The Translator’s Note refers to the proper term for God’s work as a chronicle (p 15). Kindly explain?
The narrator accurately, if poetically, describes a chronicle:
For the same reason there is in the eyes of the Church no history as such. Forgive me, our busy historian, but the Church has no need of historians, only accurate chroniclers, accountants of time (it can be no accident that a Franciscan friar invented double-entry bookkeeping) who set down a strict register of occurrences, no more, no less. There is no reason for them to consider motives, explain connections, guess at reasons. The true historian of the Church searches only for God, tracking the echo of His footsteps as they fade into the clangour of passing events, seeking only His trace as it cools and evaporates into the night air you call history. He seeks to reconstruct nothing less than God’s will by following painstakingly the clues it leaves in the passage of time.
Mathematics and language: are they related?
Mathematics was a kind of language that struck me now as chaste and true, cutting through the excess in which Vienna was drowning and in which I myself so nearly went down. It was a language into which I longed to translate all the uncertainties of my life and the falsehoods I saw all about me.
(p 79)
In this case, Biegner longs for the purity of numbers, mathematical formulations, that have a wordless purity about them. It is part of his shift towards silence. I have an extremely ambiguous relationship with the confessional mode in South African writing (this is part of the deliberate strategy behind the narrator’s failed confession in For the Sake of Silence).
Cawood was adopted as middle name for your creative writing, while Green is used for your scholarly writing. Why Cawood?
Cawood is my mother’s maiden name. Donnée Phelps Cawood died when I was ten years old, but my earliest memories of wanting to write stories stem from walking with her to school (she taught at the primary school I attended in Pinetown). Beyond this, not acknowledging her in the name under which I write creatively would in some way seem disingenuous: for reasons mostly beyond me she is in some way my link with the imaginative, possibly because my relationship with her has been largely imaginary, possibly because I sensed in her a love for the imaginative not common in the world in which she lived and died.
Are you related to actor Elize Cawood?
When Elize was reading – marvellously, I may add - various parts in the radio play version of my first novel, the verse novel Sinking, we discussed the possibly of our being distantly related as we both descend from the Cawood 1820 settler family. There were, however, two branches of the family, so this may be very distant. More oddly, and entirely coincidentally, when I was attempting to follow up on such questions in the 1820 Museum in Grahamstown with my wife-to-be, we discovered that her South African ancestor had captained the ship upon which the Cawoods came to South Africa. But we Greens drop off most of the Cawood genealogies – I come from too modest and weak a dynastic line to have any sense of carrying the weight of family.
Living now as I do in the reality of the world to which I have been exiled, where the medium to which I must entrust the fullness of my confession is as rough and shoddy as that reality, I find I have little choice but to adorn it with words.
(p 74)
Your interest in American literature took you to the United States, later also York University?
My Masters degree was in American literature, although I chose Stanford (the scholarship gave me a choice) to study under Ian Watt, at that time an influential critic I admired. A year or two after I left he suffered a stroke, and a friend who had studied with me at the time asked how they noticed – he wasn’t the most inspiring teacher, although a great scholar. Half way through my time at Stanford I was so desperate to get back to “the struggle”, especially the camaraderie of the political music movement, I wanted to switch to the then unknown field of South African literary studies. I couldn’t really study that in South Africa then either, in any serious sense, especially as I wanted to work on historical fiction with literary people and historians. York University (UK) had a famous southern African studies centre then, so after a few years this was where I ended up doing my PhD. It only sounds slightly odd now that one had to leave the country to study its literature.
While on a research fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies you also pursued your "obsession" about the Trappist monks. Why the interest?
I won the research fellowship on the basis of a combined creative/scholarly study focused on the Trappists in South Africa – the first time SOAS accepted such a thing, I believe, and perhaps the last. I have since published a number of academic papers on the subject as a sort of background to the novel, with a few more to come.
The obsession grew out of my thinking of Mariannhill, near which I had grown up in Pinetown, although it seemed in another world in those days, as a background to an invented plot. But every twist I discovered in the "background" material drew me further and further in, and it became a better story than anything I could make up. From first to last, I could not believe what a superb narrative awaited me in the archives, field trips, interviews, and often misleading secondary sources. I couldn’t wait for what I would find next, and hope the reader feels the same, even at the most intricate and convoluted moments.
For myself, every word for God has in the end betrayed our ability to know God. And who would know this better than one who has put before you so many words in place of God, one who has sat up through long days and even longer nights to tell you such a long tale about God, or the loss of God, instead of simply, as Gregory the Great put it, resting in God?
(p 553)
Julia Bell, novelist and lecturer, writes that throughout the history of the novel, fiction has proved a better form when aiming to build (political) understanding than the newspaper report. Can books really change the world, our way of thinking?
That they have on occasion done so is indisputable, but whether this is for the better or not, perhaps is. And this can never be a primary intention, or we are talking about other modes of expression entirely.
How must a novel be read, as opposed to say a newspaper or magazine?
Saturation. Fiction is the experience of losing oneself, without ulterior motive. This is where a certain length is a requirement, and a certain commitment of time. Everything currently works against both, but nothing in the sound-bite world can replace this.
Whereas biblical storytellers attribute their inspiration to God, writers since seem to find in the fictive way of thinking a personal power – a fluency of mind that does not always warn the writer of the news it brings. Why is the incident described below left until 54 pages into the book, without any clues, as if the reader too, could be guilty of betrayal, of breaking the rule of silence?
"When the Prior did not yet know me well," Franz replied, "and when he was still well-inclined towards me, he asked me whether I wouldn’t go along with him in a plan he was preparing. This was to separate from the motherhouse, sell the monastery, and move to America, taking the younger brothers with him." (p 54)
A good idea: but remember too, that the narrator himself is baffled: the first clue, as I recall, that not everything Franz tells him can be trusted.
The bark of the flat trees was a ghastly greenish‑white, and their spectral branches were covered with long, white, and very sharp black‑tipped thorns such as we had never seen except in the more graphic representations of the only crown Our Lord was to wear on this earth. (p 113)
Biegner, the narrator, talks quite a lot about how the material world has significance for him (eg p 113), or even more so, how it does not. See the opening of the Afterword:
For a monk, nothing is as it is, everything stands for something else. Meaning is everywhere, the whole world a book read intensely for signs of God’s invisible presence. It was so tempting, for example, to see in the flat red disc of the sun that hung against the leaden sky of the autumnal month in which Franz died a blood-charged host, the wafer in the mouth just as it is saturated with the wine.
The dull and dreary setting of East Griqualand in that month worked against this perception, as did each of the hard, cold months to follow. The hills were burnt by black frost into a dun sameness, altered here and there only by the smoke of a grass fire hanging motionless in the frozen air, or pools of fog caught in the gullies abandoned by the rivulets of summer. Hills of ice and fire indeed, but not, as St Augustine puts it, pregnant with the causes of things that are born, like mothers pregnant with young; not charged with God’s grandeur, proclaiming His glory, showing forth His handiwork. The flat and empty sky of that land with no horizons remained frozen, locked. Monk enough as I still was then, I remember being torn between seeing this as a symbol of desolation or else as a simple refusal – perhaps even the inability – of the universe to communicate.
If the story does not at some point take over from the writer, the writer is not writing creatively. Fiction is not ventriloquism; the characters must begin to speak you, not you them. This sounds cheap, romantic nonsense, but I don’t know a writer who won’t admit this in one way or another.
"No matter how much I reminded myself that God is everywhere, I could not feel His presence in Dunbrody" (p 136). The reality of Dunbrody or the reality of Africa?
The rest of the story will give as much of an answer to this as one is likely to get.
Out of each birth, a small death: and for me, the far greater question of the final silence which will swallow us entirely – except for the echoes we leave whispering in our wake, taken up by other mouths, surrendered into other ears. (p 172)
Further reading
www.mariannhill.org
Pictures courtesy of
Father Andreas Rohring CMM – Mariannhill (pictures of Abbot Francis’ graveyard)
Michael Green
KZN Literary Tourism, http://www.literarytourism.co.za.
Reageer: webvoet@litnet.co.za
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