Historical Novel or Novel History? Michael Cawood Green's For the Sake of Silence

Abstract

Michael Green's novel For the Sake of Silence narrates how the Trappists who arrived in Natal in 1882 transformed themselves from an enclosed monastic order bound by its Rule to silence, worship and labour into an active missionary order, the Congregation of Missionaries of Mariannhill. In his theoretical work, Novel Histories, Green (1997. Johannesburg: Wits) argues a novel about the past should be more than fictionalised history. Like history it is a discourse but it is an alternative discourse that has as its disposal multiple ways of interpreting both present and past. This article shows how, while evidencing a historian's dependence on documents and chronologies as a fiction, Green's novel acquires an authority that that rivals that of the historical record. By using different narrative genres and tropes of silence and words spoken and written, the novel becomes more than a record of the past. The novel is principally the autobiography of Father Joseph Cupertino who in creating his narrative is committing himself to identifying causes and effects and creating patterns of meaning that run counter to an unquestioning acceptance of God's direction of human affairs which the Trappist Rule requires of him. Ironically he has submitted himself to the secular and how the secular speaks about itself.