scholarly journals The sacral function of language, literature and the Bible in the context of Borislav Pekić’s novel "The Time of Miracles"

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katica Á¸°ulavkova
Keyword(s):  
Individual Performance ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Perlocutionary Act ◽  
Radical Type ◽  
Language Literature

The sacral function of language, literature and the Bible in the context of Borislav Pekić’s novel The Time of Miracles This essay promotes the thesis about mythogenesis as a form of cosmogenesis. It also addresses the sacral function of language in literature and in the Bible. It follows an approach according to which Biblical myths are constantly re-created (Lk. 11; Jn. 9) and their archetypal schemata – actualized. Specifically, the paper demonstrates that through the actualization of the mythical narratives from the Bible, the universal archetype of the Miracle (mystery, secrecy) is essentially actualized. This interpretation is made on the basis of two illuminative fragments from the novel The Time of Miracles (1965) by the contemporary Serbian writer Borislav Pekić (1930–1992).Borislav Pekić reads the coded language of the mytho-biblical mysterious vision of reality with meticulous, historical, social, political, and psychological attention, and yet, instead of submitting it to a radical parody of hyper-realistic qualities, he demythologizes them only to re-mythologize the most sensitive sacral places in the mythical-biblical matrix: the miracles of Jesus. Pekić creates a mythopoetic chronotope of a “time of miracles and deaths”. In contrast to the usual categories – mythical time, historical time, time of dreams, he introduces the category of “time of miracles” or, in other words, “miraculous time”. “Time” itself, understood as a replica of the Being, initiates the question of miracle creation as a radical type of mythogenesis. Connecting Christian miracles with death, Pekić actualizes the archetypical vision of the resurrection. He knows that the modern world, whose humanism is put at stake, needs a spiritual renaissance (resurrection). Only upon the foundations of the renewed spirituality can a more humane civilization be established.Pekić’s novel, sensitive to the antinomies of reality and of the human psyche, reaffirms the principle of the fictional, regardless of whether it has been based on biblical narratives. Contrary to the stereotypical Christian perspective of the miracle, Pekić creates an individual performance of the miracle, both sceptical and emphatic, both biblical and imaginary. Pekić demystifies the Christian story through the prism of pre-Christian consciousness, subtly pointing to the need of renewal of free, non-canonical thought. This context implies the affirmation of the vitality of the multifocal and carnivalized pagan matrix, without rejecting the importance of the Christian one. As a result, the novel The Time of Miracles is experienced as a “perlocutionary act of speech” in which the latent, sacral function of language is activated, its power to transform the worldview, and indirectly, the world itself. Sakralna funkcja języka, literatury i Biblii w kontekście powieści Borislava Pekicia Czas cudów W artykule wysuwa się tezę o mitogenezie jako formie kosmogenezy oraz podejmuje problematykę sakralnej funkcji języka w literaturze i Biblii. W pracy zastosowano podejście, zgodnie z którym mity biblijne są stale od-twarzane (Łk 11, Jn 9) oraz stale reaktualizowane są ich archetypowe schematy. W tekście omawia się zatem kwestię aktualizacji mitycznych narracji z Biblii, nade wszystko zaś – uniwersalnego archetypu Cudu (tajemnicy, sekretu). Prezentowana interpretacja oparta jest na dwóch fragmentach z powieści Czas cudów (1965) współczesnego serbskiego pisarza Borislava Pekicia (1930–1992).Borislav Pekić czyta zakodowany język mitologiczno-biblijnej wizji rzeczywistości ze skrupulatną historyczną, społeczną, polityczną i psychologiczną uwagą. Co więcej, zamiast poddać ją radykalnej hiperrealistycznej parodii, demitologizuje ją tylko po to, aby ponownie re-mitologizować najbardziej drażliwe sakralne miejsca mityczno-biblijnej matrycy – cuda Jezusa. Pekić tworzy mitopoetyczny chronotyp „czasu cudów i śmierci”. W przeciwieństwie do zwykłych kategorii – czasu mitycznego, czasu historycznego, czasu snów – wprowadza kategorię „czasu cudów” lub, innymi słowy, „cudownego czasu”. Sam „czas”, rozumiany jako replika Bycia, inicjuje pytanie o stworzenie cudu jako swoisty typ mitogenezy. Łącząc chrześcijańskie cuda ze śmiercią, Pekić aktualizuje archetypową wizję zmartwychwstania. Wie, że współczesny świat, którego humanizm jest zagrożony, potrzebuje duchowego renesansu (zmartwychwstania). Tylko na fundamentach odnowionej duchowości można bowiem ustanowić bardziej ludzką cywilizację.Powieść Pekicia, wrażliwa na antynomie rzeczywistości oraz antynomie ludzkiej psychiki, potwierdza kreacyjną moc fikcji, niezależnie od tego, czy jest oparta na biblijnych narracjach. W przeciwieństwie do stereotypowej chrześcijańskiej interpretacji cudu Pekić tworzy jego indywidualne przedstawienie, zarówno sceptyczne, jak i empatyczne, biblijne, jak i wyobrażeniowe. Pekić demistyfikuje chrześcijańską historię przez pryzmat przedchrześcijańskiej świadomości, subtelnie wskazując na potrzebę odnowienia niezależnej myśli niekanonicznej. Ten kontekst implikuje potwierdzenie witalności wieloogniskowej i skarnawalizowanej pogańskiej matrycy, nie odrzucając znaczenia chrześcijańskiego. W rezultacie powieść Czas cudów odbierana jest jako perlokucyjny akt mowy, w którym uaktywnia się ukryta, sakralna funkcja języka, jego moc przekształcania światopoglądu, a pośrednio – samego świata.

scholarly journals PUBLIC RITUALS: GRASPING MYTH IN DAVID GROSSMAN’S TO THE END OF THE LAND

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-250
Author(s):  
Yael Almog
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Israeli Society ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Word Play ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
Modern Hebrew

The article investigates David Grossman’s To the End of the Land as an intervention into debates on the presence of myth in Israeli society. Do resonances of the Bible in Modern Hebrew perpetuate biblical narratives as constitutive to Israeli collective memory? Do literary references to the Bible dictate the rootedness of Hebrew speakers to the Land? Grossman’s novel discerns the implications of these questions for the political agency of individuals. It does so through the striking adaptation of a motif much frequented in Israeli literature: the Binding of Isaac. The prominent biblical myth is transformed in the novel through a set of interplays: the unusual enactment of the Akedah scene by a matriarch; original exegeses of biblical names; and the merging of several biblical narratives into the novel’s structure. The protagonists reveal their “awareness” of these interplays, when they reflect on the correspondence of their “lives” with various biblical narratives – whose divergence from one another enable them to negotiate the overdetermination of myth in political discourse. The article argues that the novel’s reflective stance on the role of myth in Israeli society is codependent on the philosophy of language that it develops. To the End of the Land features language acquisition, linguistic interferences with Israel’s main vernacular by other languages, word play and semiotic collapse. Through the presentation of linguistic utterances as contingent, associative, subjective and ever-changing, the identification with biblical narratives is rendered volatile. To the End of the Land questions the limits of Israeli literature in redefining the valence of the language in which it is written as well as the ability of literary texts to reshape major conditions for their own reception: collective memory and national motifs.

Untimely Development, Ugly History:A Drama in Muslinand the Rejection of National-Historical Time

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-183
Author(s):  
Mary L. Mullen
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
The Core

This article considers the politics and aesthetics of the colonial Bildungsroman by reading George Moore's often-overlooked novel A Drama in Muslin (1886). It argues that the colonial Bildungsroman does not simply register difference from the metropolitan novel of development or express tension between the core and periphery, as Jed Esty suggests, but rather can imagine a heterogeneous historical time that does not find its end in the nation-state. A Drama in Muslin combines naturalist and realist modes, and moves between Ireland and England to construct a form of untimely development that emphasises political processes (dissent, negotiation) rather than political forms (the state, the nation). Ultimately, the messy, discordant history represented in the novel shows the political potential of anachronism as it celebrates the untimeliness of everyday life.

Epic and Novel

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 396-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natasha Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Big Picture

This essay explores a peculiarly Victorian solution to what was perceived, in the middle of the nineteenth century, as a peculiarly Victorian problem: the fragmentation and miscellaneousness of the modern world. Seeking to apprehend the multiplicity and chaos of contemporary social, intellectual, political, and economic life, and to furnish it with a coherence that was threatened by encroaching religious uncertainty, Victorian poets turned to the resources of genre as a means of accommodating the heterogeneity of the age. In particular, by devising ways of fusing the conventions of the traditional epic with those of the newly ascendant novel, poets hoped to appropriate for the novelistic complexity of modern, everyday life the dignifying and totalizing tendencies of the epic. The essay reevaluates the generic hybridity of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) as an attempt to unite two distinct kinds of length—the microscopic, cumulative detail of the novel and the big-picture sweep of the epic—in order to capture the miscellaneousness of the age and, at the same time, to restore order and meaning to the disjointed experience of modernity.

Black Books and Brownies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future

Scottish fiction about the Reformation is concerned with the mechanics of historical change, which are rendered through a series of enchanted books and people discussed in Chapter 8. In the novel, The Monastery, describing the Dissolution and Reformation, Scott gothicizes the Bible as a magic book and the White Lady as its guardian to dramatize the mysterious nature of religious change, the dependence of the future on a Gothic past, and the need for interpretation. In Old Mortality, Scott’s protagonist escapes the frozen dualities of Covenanter and Claverhouse, revealing historical change itself as problematic in Humean terms and requiring a leap of faith. James Hogg contests this presentation of the Covenanters by re-enchanting them as supposed brownies, as mediators of history and nature, and in his Three Perils of Man reprises Scott’s wizard Michael Scott pitted against Roger Bacon and his ‘black book’ the Bible to present the Reformation as an eternal reality.

Magical Realism: Language World Picture in the novel «One Hundred Years of Solitude» of Gabriel Garcia Márquez

2021 ◽  
Vol IX(257) (75) ◽  
pp. 21-26
Author(s):  
N. V. Chorna
Keyword(s):  
Magical Realism ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Picture ◽  
Realistic View ◽  
Way Of Thinking

The article focuses on the study of language world picture of the magical realism discourse in the novel «One Hundred Years of Solitude» of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The magical realism discourse depicts a realistic view of the modern world through the prism of mythological way of thinking and supplements mysterious, farial and mystical elements. The main conceptual characteristics of magical realism discourse are considered to be: fantastical elements, unity of reality and magic, possible words, mythical chronotope, author’s reticence, hyperbolization of the secret and metadiscourse

Scott’s Momentaneousness

2017 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-310
Author(s):  
Luke Terlaak Poot
Keyword(s):  
Processes Of Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Aesthetic Principle ◽  
Descriptive Language

Luke Terlaak Poot, “Scott’s Momentaneousness: Bad Timing in The Bride of Lammermoor” (pp. 283–310) This essay takes up the debate at the beginning of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), noting that critics have generally treated one figure in this debate—Dick Tinto, the painter who advises our narrator to use less dialogue and more descriptive language—as a strawman. Critics have mostly overlooked the extent to which Tinto articulates the dynamics of “momentaneousness,” an aesthetic principle drawn from Scott’s contemporary, Henry Fuseli. Fuseli defined a momentaneous painting as one that represents a moment with a clear past and future. For Fuseli, paintings ought to select pregnant moments for representation, moments from which whole narrative sequences can be intuited. Implicit in this notion is the belief that some moments are particularly suited to representation because they are qualitatively different from others—more fully narrative, because more indicative of larger processes of change. Turning to Scott’s novel, I show how this assumption features prominently in The Bride of Lammermoor, where it repeatedly produces unforeseen, calamitous consequences. The moment’s disruptive potential culminates in an aptly novelistic take on momentaneousness: the cliffhanger. The cliffhanger draws the act of reading into a circuit of temporal interruption and delay, reproducing the bad timing endemic to the novel’s plot. When read as an instance of momentaneous representation, The Bride’s climactic cliffhanger can be said to incorporate the reader’s own interpretive activity into the bewildering experience of historical time that the novel depicts. This technique, I argue, helps to account for The Bride’s peculiar place in the Waverley canon—its pessimistic historical vision and fatalistic narrative logic.

Global Thefts of Biblical Narrative

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald West
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Biblical Narrative ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
African Experience ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Resemblances ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Subject

This chapter takes its starting point from the African experience, across a range of African contexts, of Africa as both the subject and object of biblical narrative. When the Bible came to Africa, it came with well-established colonial metanarratives, constructed in part from biblical narratives. These colonial metanarratives were in turn partly reconstructed by the engagement with African others, from both a European and an African perspective along two diverging trajectories, with biblical narrative making a contribution to both. This chapter focuses on the capacity of biblical narrative, biblical story, to be both incorporated into “local” metanarratives and to shape these metanarratives. The contexts that are the focus of this chapter are largely “third world” contexts, across which there are significant family resemblances and important contextual differences.

scholarly journals Emancipation from the Whirlwind: Piety and Rebellion among Jewish-American Post-Holocaust and Christian Liberation Readings of Job

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David C Tollerton
Keyword(s):  
Modern World ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Political Opposition ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Theologically Conservative ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Political Radicalism ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Do So

This article focuses upon the manner in which the Book of Job’s dissonant messages of theological radicalism and conservatism have been utilised within discussion of two specific episodes of innocent suffering in the modern world – the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust and the suffering of the oppressed in the developing world. Overlaying the discussion, the following model is proposed: that, firstly, Christian liberation theologians emphasise the more theologically conservative messages that can be drawn from Job while asserting radical political opposition to those who possess power. Conversely, Jewish Holocaust theologians empathise with Job’s more theologically radical elements, yet do so within outlooks committed to conservatively maintaining the security and power of the state of Israel after two thousand years of Jewish powerlessness. This model is tested by focusing upon seven treatments of Job associated with liberation or Holocaust theologies. It is concluded that, although there are significant complications, in broad terms the model largely holds ”“ offering a comparative insight into contextual Christian and Jewish interpretations of the Bible in which political radicalism and theological radicalism are found to be at odds with one another.

“Earth has clear call of daily bells”: Nature’s Apocalyptic Liturgy in Christina Rossetti’s Verses

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 172-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chene Heady Faulstick
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Broad Definition ◽  
Emotional Interaction ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Religious Understanding

AbstractThis essay reconsiders Charles Ryder’s religious conversion in Brideshead Revisited in terms of a primarily emotional conversion. When reading the novel as a pilgrimage to passion, readers can see in Charles a legitimate, convincing emotional conversion, which should—when emphasizing traditional Catholic ideals—ultimately also be understood as a religious conversion. Charles’s emotional interaction with Catholicism includes his intimate, formative relationship with the Catholic Flyte family, especially Sebastian, and aspects of his career as a Baroque artist, as Baroque art is often identified with Catholicism. It also includes Charles’s disenchantment with both the soullessness of war, which drains its participants of any emotional experience, and the modern world, which lacks connection to depth and tradition. Finally, the emotive power of his inadvertent pilgrimage to Brideshead also connects Charles to Catholicism as the house facilitates Charles’s memories of his religious experience at Lord Marchmain’s deathbed, his artistic conversion to Baroque art, and his passionate friendship with Sebastian. Such a broad definition of Catholicism calls for an expansive understanding of religion, but it is this kind of a religious understanding that Brideshead Revisited recommends.

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