Being in the Image and Text
Michelangelo, Last Judgement
In many religious images on this site I have shown how the artist both illustrates their effort to unite with God and their own difficulties in creating the image itself. Paul Jay, a literary critic, found something similar in St. Augustine Confessions. He writes that Book 10 of the Confessions focuses on St. Augustine's difficulty in using language to “represent being in the text.” He continues: “While it stands, then, as an allegory of the Christian soul’s efforts to unite with God, it also stands as an allegory of the self-reflexive writer’s problematic efforts to bridge the distance between past and present – between himself and his own textual representation of himself.”1
It's a reminder that while we today put a lot of emphasis on originality, there are some important features in both art and literature that rarely, if ever, change.
1. Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Cornell University Press) 1984, p. 31
Posted 03 Oct 2011: MichelangeloInner TraditionReligionTheory
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