From Le roi des aulnes to Sweetness: The Allegory of St. Christopher

Abstract

This article examines the legend of St. Christopher (the Christ carrier) as an allegory of the postmodern critique of logocentrism through readings of two novels: Michel Tournier's Le roi des aulnes (1970) and Torgny Lindgren's Sweetness (Hummelhonung, 1995). In the first, the saint becomes an emblem of Nazism as an inversion of the “proper” relationship between truth and power; in the second, he becomes emblematic of representation itself. St. Christopher's entry into contemporary fiction coincides with the “postmodern turn” toward an emphasis on the signifier (the “carrier” of the Logos) at the expense of the signified (the “carried,” Logos). St. Christopher's status as an emblem of the “postmodern turn” continues in two Hollywood cameos, in Norman Jewison's The Statement (2003) and Paul Haggis's Crash (2005). In all of these representations, St. Christopher retains the status of an allegorical emblem of the postmodern battle between truth and power, and between subjectivity and agency.

Acknowledgments

Sylvia Söderlind is associate professor of English at Queen's University, Canada. She has published on American, Canadian, Québécois, and Swedish contemporary fiction, on comparative literature and translation, and is currently at work on a book on postmodern allegory and translation.

Notes

1. William Claxton's translation of Voraginus's text, to which Tournier refers, can be found on the Internet: http://www.paintedchurch.org/caxchris.htm.

2. The similarity between the fascist process of emptying out the “real” and the logic of the “precession of simulacra” identified by Jean Baudrillard as typically postmodern leads Evelyn Cobley to see in Nazism “not the last eruption of a premodern barbarism but the emergence of a ‘postmodern’ episteme” (267).

3. Angus Fletcher, in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, associates allegory with Freud's definition of repetition compulsion, which is a symptom of melancholia or unsuccessful mourning.

4. The analogous dependence on excessive symbolization of allegory and fascism is often pointed out. See, for instance, Jeffrey Schnapp's description of the trajectory of Italian fascism from the revolutionary violence of a popular movement to the implacable order of a fascist regime, as portrayed by the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Milan (25).

5. Although the traditional distinction between allegory and symbol has been questioned, notably by Paul de Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” it is heuristically useful for my argument that metaphor, which is the basis of both, can tend in two directions: toward integrative symbol or disjunctive allegory.

6. Like Tournier, Lindgren is more popular in France and Scandinavia than in the English-speaking world. When Sweetness appeared in French (as Miel de bourdon, a more literal translation of the original title), within a year of its Swedish publication in 1995, the event was front-page news in Le Monde des livres, while it took five years for an English translation to appear.

7. Unlike Tournier, Lindgren does not link this originary inversion to Nazism or fascism, but his treatment of it brings to mind Giorgio Agamben's connection of Nazism with the Roman law of paternal rights over the death and life of sons in Homo Sacer.

8. A literal translation of the Swedish would be “numinous” rather than “divine.”

9. In a subsequent novel, Hash (Pölsan, 2002) Lindgren imagines the post-Nazi career of Martin Bormann in a narrative that tropes on Nazism as the carrying of contagion.

10. It took a long time for critics to dare articulate the difference between the origin of fascism as a popular grassroots movement and its stagnation into totalitarian regime. In a polemic against Susan Sontag's critique in “Fascinating Fascism” in 1995, Rey Chow pointed out that “what sustains the aesthetics of monstrosity is something eminently positive and decent” (26).

11. Examples of these are adjectives: “phorique” (136), “anti-phorique” (549); and nouns: “anthropophore” (133), “pédéphore” (142), “astrophore” (136), “phallophore” (331), “superphorie” (469).

12. For a critique of Tournier's perceived lack of historicism, see Friedländer 46–47.

13. “Der Erlkönig” is based on a mistranslation by Herder, who rendered the Danish word for “elves” (“eller”) as the East Prussian word for “alders” (“Erlen”) because of phonetic similarity (Purdy 103). The generative power of this linguistic error becomes itself a mise en abyme of the allegorical reliance on the contingent and material aspects of language. It is often forgotten also that St. Christopher comes to us twice translated; Reprobus's Canaanite name is nowhere to be found.

14. My definition of allegoriasis is similar to Emily Apter's “symbolic elephantiasis” to which Joan of Arc has been subjected in France (Continental Drift 41).

15. St. Christopher's role in the 1997 Brian Moore novel of the same title—based on the murder of fourteen Jews in Dombey in 1944—on which the film is based, is less prominent and does not inculpate him in Brossard's death.

16. The caveat regarding the transience of interpretation does not diminish my advocacy of a “new formalism.” I agree with Jim Hansen, who contends that, “If formalism is to survive it must itself become allegorical. That is, formalist reading must become an allegory for larger, socio-historical contradictions and/or ontological problems” (669–70).