Quêtes littéraires, 2013, No 3: Entre le sacré et le profane
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- ItemLa toile et le voile : l’art, la littérature et le sacré dans trois récits romantiques(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Pinon, EstherThe literature of the Romantics, in the first part of the 19th century, is steeped in religious doubt. Moreover, the sacred was a taboo yet unavoidable subject especially in novels and short stories that were considered at the time profane genres. Romantic writers exploited certain covert strategies in order to speak of the unspeak-able and touch the untouchable. They resort, for instance, to their artistic culture with its centuries of pictorial tradition that render religious figures and events more familiar and accessible. Musset’s Le Tableau d’église, Vigny’s Daphné, and Gauthier’s La Toison d’or, all bear witness to a striking (meeting) harmony between iconoclastic and/or cavalier characters and sacred works of art that focus on the Passion. All three writers interweave aesthetic contemplation with mystical communion, thus revealing a new sense of the sacred that is often ambiguous, nay, subversive. And since sacred art is not in itself sacred, it allows writers to come very close to sacrilege in order to examine the fine line between the profane and the sacred.
- ItemAutour de l’axis mundi. De la notion théorique à la mise en image littéraire dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras et Le Sphinx des glaces)(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Jarosz, AdamThe symbolism of axis mundi constitutes an integral part of cultural and religious systems across the world. Such symbolism appears clearly and precisely in all forms of religious life. As it is stressed by Eliade, many a time, axis mundi is an intersection of three varied ontological zones (the interior of the Earth, the surface of the Earth, and the Heaven) and creates a contact place of man with sacrum. The axis mundi symbolism, analysed here as a part of literary studies, is reflected also in two important novels by Julius Verne (Adventures of Captain Hatteras, 1864-65 ; An Arctic Mystery, 1897) dedicated to the polar regions. In both novels, such sites (the northern and southern poles) become a literary image of axis mundi, while the hypothesis finds its confirmation in the nature of psychological experiences of the heroes cast in the polar regions. The symbolic and religious study of such experiences leads to the conclusion that in both the analysed cases they may be understood as an experience of a contact with sacrum.
- ItemRetrouver le temple du sacré : la logique des extrêmes dans le roman de Durtal(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Sibourg, EléonoreIn the late 19th century, a reversal of the values linked to the sacred and the profane can be observed. As Religion retreats, Positivism and faith in Progress fill the gap left by the abandoned spiritual belief. A nostalgia for transcendence arises amongst writers. Naturalism turns out to be sterile, but, sill, a belief in God seems to have become impossible. It is in this context that Huysmans writes his novels. The Durtal tetralogy in particular focuses on this theme: desperate, the main character wanders around Catholicism, seeking a sense of the Sacred. He first explores the world of Satanism before the conversion. But even when faith is regained, problems are not solved. In the religious domain itself, Durtal condemns the sacralization of the profane. Henceforth, the Durtal tetralogy manifests itself as a novel of the in-between: from brothel to church, between up-above and down-below, between almighty materialism and bourgeois Catholicism, this misanthropic writer prays for a renewed and primitive form of religious practice in which the individual can access the Sacred again. The quest for the supernatural, through a questioning of contemporary society, becomes a quest for Identity.
- ItemJean-Pierre Camus : la moralisation d’un genre immoral est-elle possible ?(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Pawłowska, MajaCamus complements his novels with long peritexts, thus using his ecclesiastic authority to legitimise their moral and didactic value. In these peritexts he juxtapposes the licentious novels with his own devout works of fiction, which are, in his own words, not only valuable and worth recommending, but also capable of saving the readers’ souls, put in danger by other texts. In any case, a close reading of these peritexts reveals a view which challenges the idea of the novel’s insidiousness and which bears witness to Camus’s great fascination with this officially condemned literary genre.
- ItemComment le rapport au texte biblique transforme le rapport au texte littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : le cas Rousseau(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Di Rosa, GenevièveIn the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced the process of its creation as an imposture – thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless failed to grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted on biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he compared it to the violence caused to his own literary works. By drawing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners of reading a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted on his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orientation to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.
- ItemLes crucifix comiques dans quelques textes du Moyen Age français(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Sobczyk, AgataThe presence of the crucifix in comical literature is a special case of an encounter of the sacred and the profane. It appears in several French medieval texts, where it is associated with sexuality or with food, it is treated with familiarity and even casualness, which is not meant to outrage the public, but to make people laugh. The profanation with which we are dealing here has many aspects, depending on whether it can be assigned to a particular personage or to the author, since it is included in the story itself. In the former case, much can be justified by simplicity, but the intentions of the personage do not always seem pure. In the latter case, contrary to expectation, the sacrilege is not necessarily associated with anticlericalism. However, what is the most interesting is the question of the reception of this kind of texts in a profoundly Christian society.
- ItemLe « sacré gauche » chez Georges Bataille et Hubert Aquin(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Hoffmann, CandyGeorges Bataille and Hubert Aquin both explore a mystical experience displaying strong similarities, related to what Roger Caillois called « left sacred », that is the impure, malefic sacred, which is accessible by transgression and corresponds to the privileged moment of unity between people. For Bataille, God is absent, even dead: Lamma sabachtani is no longer a question but an assertion in his essays. The object of his new mystical theology is not God, but « the unknown». The divine is reduced to the human, transcendence to immanence. The goal is to free the mystical experience from its religious background and to make ecstasy accessible to every-one. It is precisely by communicating that men can break their isolation and unite themselves with others. « Eroticism of bodies » and « eroticism of hearts » are two of the experiences proposed by Bataille which lead to the sacred. Hubert Aquin is also fascinated by the « left sacred », by eroticism in particular, but it represents for him a temptation which eliminates from the « right sacred » Jesus Christ and perfection He is, for Aquin, the absolute corresponding to the communion between the human being and the Son of God ; it consists in being reborn and in living in “the Christ of the Revelation”.
- ItemLe Jugement dernier de Léon Delmont : déplacements du sacré dans La Modification de Michel Butor(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Guermès, SophieThe compartment in A Change of Heart is a secular space. However, the Sacred will gradually invade it through hallucinations of the narrator. Thus an unexpected and fantastic struggle led by the Pope, priests, cardinals, prophets and sibyls against Leon Delmont will cause a change of his initial decision, motivating and justifying the novel’s title.
- ItemLe choix de Ponce Pilate, entre le sacré et le profane(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Tongiani, SaraAt the beginning of The Man and the Sacred (1939) Roger Caillois affirmed that “every religious conception of the universe implies that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane”. Caillois discussed the theme of the sacred throughout his life, in several essays, articles and lectures. In 1961, Caillois wrote Pontius Pilate, a brief novel in which he explored the dilemma of the governor of Judea. For the first time, Caillois changed genre. The author escaped the theme of the sacred by way of the novel. The purpose of this paper is to show how the theme of the sacred leads to a comparison between the thought of Caillois, the theories of the College of Sociology, and the theme of The Scapegoat by René Girard.
- ItemUn Dieu sadique : le rôle de l’image blasphématoire de Dieu dans Dolce agonia de Nancy Huston(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Front, IzabelaThe present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston allows the author to describe the sacred element in human life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to the three aspects of the text dependent on the type of God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering; the tone and the appropriation of time variations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love.
- ItemSacrum et profanum dans Yonec de Marie de France (XIIe siècle)(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Gęsicka, AnnaIn the Breton lais, we encounter a brilliant marriage of the Celtic and Christian « marvel » (merveilleux), which is revealed on various semiotic levels. The zones of sacrum and profanum interpenetrate and provoke the reader’s afterthoughts with abundant and profound imagery. In Yonec by Marie de France, at the moment when the coming from Autre Monde protagonist is receiving the Eucharist, he con-stitutes one body with his beloved. In this paper, I attempt to uncover a spiritual meaning/message underlying the text, characters-symbols. The clue to this analysis is the idea of transition: from one status to another, from one figure to another, or from one meaning to another.
- ItemPèlerinages barrésiens(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Bompaire-Evesque, ClaireThis article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings three successive forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to instill in them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès’ intellectual evolution is exemplified by The Sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to paganism and forward to integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.
- Item« Qu’est-ce que la Religion universelle ? » : étude sur une question posée par Baudelaire(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Szymański, TomaszIn “My heart laid bare” Baudelaire writes about the “Universal Religion” devised for “the alchemists of thought,” “a religion that comes from man, considered as a divine memento.” The idea, as we read in the text, was inspired by the writings of Chateaubriand, De Maistre and those of the “Alexandrians”. And indeed, the two former authors wrote explicitly about a „universal tradition” that finds its fulfillment in the Catholic religion. It does not matter if we recognize the “Alexandrians” as representatives of the Neoplatonic school, the Alexandrian Fathers of the Church, or disciples of Hermetism, the very term implies a tradition of both syncretic and mystic character that resembles gnosis. Baudelaire’s “Universal Religion,” despite his Catholic convictions, cannot be associated with Catholicism. Based on a universal transmission of myths and symbols, it rather refers to eternal truths about man as well as to the divine source of all beings – also in the modern world, which puts God’s existence in doubt.
- ItemSylvain Trudel et le réenchantement du monde(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Thomas, Jean-PierreSince the middle of the 1980s, French Canadian novelist Sylvain Trudel has constantly put his characters in contentious situations from which they try to escape by way of creating alternative worlds at the same time real and fantastical. This device takes the characters away from their trite everyday life and into a symbolic and mystical universe. The synthème seems to be fit into that symbolic frame. Through the child’s point of view – which seems then to become some sort of secret language – each object belonging to the realm of the profane becomes tinted with a sacred meaning. Synthème and symbol would then be considered as vehicles for the sacred, that which shows through Sylvain Trudel’s novels.
- ItemLe mélange du sacré et du profane dans les livrets de tragédies lyriques du librettiste Nicolas-François Guillard (1752-1814)(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Champonnois, CécileNicolas François Guillard (1752-1814) was one of the best librettists of the Tournant des Lumières. The libretto of Proserpine by Quinault, set to music by Lully at the end of the seventeenth century, was adapted by Guillard and once again set to music by Giovanni Paisiello in 1803. Six years later, in 1809, La Mort d’Adam, adapt-ed by Guillard from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’ Der Tod Adams (1757), was set to music by Jean-François Lesueur. These rewritings, with religious or sacred topics staged for a secular theatre by Guillard, are very different from the original works and tend to be family dramas: he then transforms them into secular works with secular content. Human sacrifices are present in these works, but seem to feature here for family reasons and not only for religious purposes. Divinities are presented by the librettist as human beings, whose family roles are predominant. The sacred and the profane are mixed in these two librettos, changed into hybrid works. Guillard seems to use the same model to adapt historical, mythological or religious works, which means that the role and the importance of the religious in the works staged at the Académie Impériale de Musique in the period of the Tournant des Lumières has to be examined.
- ItemLa musique sacralisée dans les œuvres de quelques écrivains romantiques(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Opiela, AnnaThis article analyses poetic visions, based on synesthesia and referring to Swedenborg’s correspondence theory, evoked by listening to music. In these visions the musical impressions are in some way sanctified, and they contribute to the development of the spiritual area. This aesthetic phenomenon is noticeable in Balzac’s novels. The music for him is the light penetrating the listener’s soul and a means of accessing divine mysteries. Similarly, in George Sand’s works music is the inspiration to create soulful poetic visions and the character of Consuelo who, by her singing, is vouchsafed by divine revelations.
- ItemL’amour vu comme un « rite de passage » : la confrontation du sacrum et du profanum chez Marguerite Duras(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Ledwina, AnnaOne of the distinguishing characteristics of Marguerite Duras’ works is her focus on contradictions, especially in the realm of physicality, which is part of the “dialectic of desire”, a nonverbal pleasure. In the analysed novels: The Sea Wall and The Lover this passion manifests itself through the “rite of passage”. It is a double discovery of one’s own and someone else’s physicality. Duras perceives love as an uncontrollable, violent “experiment”, a rebellion against one’s mother and restrictions. Narrating one of the most important (and secret) episodes of her life – crossing the Mekong – the author depicts the sexual initiation of a young heroine (Duras’ alter ego), who seduces a mature man with her behaviour and dress. This experience allows her to experience the absolute and become initiated and free. For the narrator, it is an opportunity for in-depth analysis of the secular and the sacred aspects of desire. To fully understand the sacred and the profane in Duras’ works, it seems necessary to approach the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective.
- ItemLa transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Sadkowski, PiotrThroughout the centuries French and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they examine the question of identity dilemmas of contemporary men. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse Fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of the contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier’s text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motifs analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.
- ItemLa quête du sacré dans les romans de Chantal Deltenre(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Zbierska-Mościcka, JudytaLa plus que mère, La Cérémonie des poupées and La Maison de l’âme, the trilogy of the Belgian writer and ethnologist Chantal Deltenre – published in the first decade of the 21st century, illustrates post-modern religiosity, the main characteristics of which are diversity, syncretism and relativism. The search for sacrum is supposed to be a kind of initiation journey undertaken mostly by lost and uprooted individuals. It is a search for a safe and meaningful space (place), which is not just the opposite of the shapeless and meaningless world of profanum, but also one that allows to build one’s own identity.
- ItemLe syncrétisme de Du Bartas(Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II, Wydawnictwo Werset, 2013) Taïlamé, SteeveThe works of the humanist Du Bartas has been considered religious, with the aim to present a Calvinist conception of the world conforming to the dogmas. However, the presence of paganism and the effects of dissonances shows that Du Bartas belongs to a spiritual tradition beyond the dogmas. The poet in fact writes in the tradition of Marsil Ficin and his vision of the profane and the sacred is totally in accordance with that of the hermeticist philosophers. Beneath the superficial meaning and the topical speech about religious subjects, there lies a much higher truth to be expressed clearly to profanes, those unable to understand the unity of traditions.