On Birgitta Trotzig's notion of iconoclasm

Bibliogr. s. 294-297

The Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1928–2011) defines her own process of literary creation in interart terms as a translation of pictures into verbal signs. She often comments on the intersemiotic difficulties involved in this transformation by referring to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. Using Trotzig’s notion of the iconoclastic controversy as a starting point, the present article investigates her understanding of the picture-word-transformation problems. The line of argument comprises five stages. In the first stage, the main issue of the article is presented and specified. In the second stage, it is argued that previous critical approaches to Trotzig’s Byzantinism in most cases have been based on misleadingly anachronistic and mainly Occidental categories. In the third stage, the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is related to the distinctive character of the theological thought of the Eastern Church. In the fourth stage, the Byzantine iconophile and iconoclast theories are applied to Trotzig’s literary works. A close reading of a representative prose poem of hers, “Teologiska variationer” (“Theological variations”), demonstrates that her works unequivocally support the icon theology of the iconodules. In the closing fifth stage, Trotzig’s notion of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is reconstructed on the basis of her essays and interviews in which she explains her own as well as other authors’ intersemiotic difficulties. In conclusion, these difficulties are related to general aesthetic, political, ideological and philophical conflicts, all of which are – paradoxically – diagnosed by Trotzig herself in typical categories of Western theology.