Word: joans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...President pleading once again for more U.S. military aid to Southeast Asia. Antiwar underground radicals igniting a bomb at the State Department, hiding another in a federal building in Oakland. Peace marchers rallying in Washington, exhorted by Congresswoman Bella Abzug, Congressman-Priest Robert Drinan, Folk Singers Joan Baez and Pete Seeger. Demonstrators occupying the Minneapolis and Washington offices of Hubert Humphrey, temporarily seizing the South Vietnamese consulate in San Francisco. Senator Strom Thurmond bellowing through a bullhorn in support of the Saigon regime...
Between this Joan-too-spiritual and that Joan-too-earthy, a third Joan has been waiting to be born. In his eighth novel, Australian Thomas Keneally, who once studied for the priesthood, slowly and thoughtfully reconstructs a whole Joan, less spectacular than the first two but decidedly more convincing and perhaps, at last, more moving...
...original legend of Joan of Arc was all ethereal voices and uprolled eyes. George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan suffered from an opposite flaw: a 15th century French farm girl with 19th century English socialist leanings, she seemed all pragmatism and muddy boots...
Whores and Lice. At her simplest level, the Keneally Joan can be very simple indeed-obstinate but rather dull with the protuberant brown eyes of a cow: "Looking at her, you nearly went to sleep." She is an object of manipulation. The knights wave her like a banner to win battles. The "fat clergy" cash in those victories as new ecclesiastical revenue. The Dauphin, of course, uses her to gain his crown. Keneally graphically savors the irony of this visionary innocent ("our little he-nun") ending up in the midst of disemboweled and headless corpses, moving from battlefield to bloody...
...system that knighthood is no longer in flower. As she lifts the siege at Orléans and pushes her balky Dauphin with the "fat, un happy lips" toward his coronation at Rheims, she is hurrying onstage not a monarchy but the modern nation-state. The descendants of this Joan are the bourgeoisie...