Literature and cultural memory. Iconoclastic revitalisation of myths

Abstract

The article deals with transformations, "creative translations" and iconoclastic uses of a religious symbol. Such treatments are employed with particular intensity in the field of literary texts that can be defined as the so-called contemporary apocryphal narrative. Therefore, analysed here are selected works of such "writers-iconoclasts" as Nikos Kazantzakis, José Saramago, or Philip Pullman. These texts, understood as cultural documents, are read from the semiotic perspective, which seems to be particularly useful in the thought of the origins, methods and results of transformation of the symbolic figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Using these methods, one can see the culture-semiotic potential of semantic shifts taking place within the religious symbolism, and thus reflect inidentity-forming mechanisms based on nurturing source myths (a phenomenon which also occurs, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, in any act of transgressing a taboo). In the "new gospels", the religious symbol may be translated from the language of the sacred into the profane, thus gaining new semantic potentials while preserving all its traditional meanings and previous readings. In this process of "creative translation" it is subjected to a process of revitalisation, which prevents him from being cast into the "semantic wasteland" and allows for its continued operation in the centre of the cultural universe of meanings.