Kød, blod og ord. Om nadveren som litterært topos

Resumé

The motif of the Eucharist seems, in different permutations, to persist in Western literature even in modern, secular times. This paper argues that the motif persists because it implies a discussion that is also central to literature: What is the relation between signifier and signified, vehicle and tenor – bread and body, wine and blood? Is it possible for the immaterial signified to become present in the materiality of the signifier? In his writings on the Eucharist Martin Luther insists that bread and wine do not represent the body and blood of Christ, they are his body and blood, because Christ has diffused into the world. The Eucharist implies the idea of the material presence of that which would in other cases be the absent signified of the signifier. This may be the reason why the Eucharist is a recurring metaphor in Marcel Proust, in his striving to make of his novel a cathedral where the reader receives the Eucharist wafer, like the madeleine cake that makes the past sensually present and possible to orally consume. The paper analyzes examples of the Eucharist motif from Proust, Paul Celan, Elfriede Jelinek, and the Danish contemporary author Bjørn Rasmussen, arguing the Eucharist to appear in texts that have a special interest in the way that the signified can or cannot be present in the material signifier, even when those texts are skeptical or critical towards the Christian discourse.