Note: numbers divided by a slash within brackets, such as "[111/112]", indicate the page numbers of the original Routledge print edition. They have been included for readers wishing to cite the print rather than the internet version of the book.
ach of the topics, tropes, and themes that will be discussed in this chapter relates differently to our reference paradigm, the shipwreck on the journey of life, and each has something of interest to tell us about modern iconsology. The Deluge, a literal event recorded in the Old Testament, exemplifies a supposed fact that the Judaic and Christian traditions have endowed with paradigmatic significance. According to the Book of Genesis, Cod sent His flood to punish man for his evil, and therefore the Deluge serves as the biblical equivalent to the notion of the shipwreck as punishment. In both situations, God sends water to engulf the guilty. At the same time that Genesis provides a culturally paradigmatic instance of the Lord's punishing guilty human beings by using the forces of nature to do so, it also offers a corollary one of His preserving the faithful. Since the Middle Ages the ark that saved Noah and his family has been taken by believers as a divinely intended type of the Christian church, or Christ Mystical: it indicates, say the exegetes, that God placed in history an example of the principle that one is saved only by joining with others in the Church of Christ, a church which, like the ark itself, finds itself besieged by destructive forces from without but which God ultimately preserves and employs to lead man to new life. The accepted meanings of ark and Deluge, however, become subverted in the nineteenth century, as many begin to question the nature of divine Justice. Since the Deluge stands as such an explicit instance of divine vengeance, its subversion requires a particularly explicit questioning of Christianity. Considered from the point of view of the shipwreck paradigm, then, the Deluge, in many of its nineteenth-century artistic and literary manifestations, represents the post-Christian subversions an unambiguous biblical event traditionally taken as paradigmatic.
The figure of Odysseus, in contrast, exemplifies ironic and subversive intonations of a secular literary or mythic personage. One of the prime facts about this cunning, much-traveled, much-suffering [133/134] man who has descended to us from the ancient, pre-Christian past is that he is the man who would return home. Therefore, the Homeric hero has many similarities to St Augustine's figure of man voyaging to his heavenly home, for both Odysseus and Or must return to their points of origin to become themselves fully.
Like the Deluge, the rainbow receives a specific paradigmatic value from Genesis, which relates that the Lord Himself declared that it would always be a covenant-sign, the emblem of His promise to man. Unlike the Deluge itself, which can never occur literally again, the rainbow placed in the heavens by God appears both in biblical and in contemporary history. It therefore provides problems and possibilities for the artist who would employ it. The rainbow also provides the iconsologist with an opportunity to distinguish the different ways that images, situations, and figures function in pictorial and literary arts.
Last modified 27 December 2004