This article explores selected literary works by Marian Pankowski, a Polish writer known in the Belgian artistic milieu. Several of his texts are set in Belgium and frequently feature Belgian characters as central figures. Owing to the author’s pronounced penchant for transgression, his fictional universe regularly depicts acts of degradation or profanation. Eroticism and love are often vulgarized, while sacred elements are treated blasphemously. Simultaneously, however, the reverse process occurs: through the repeated enactment of ceremonies, ostensibly “low” acts, everyday objects, and mundane spaces are elevated to the status of the sacred. Rituals even confer a quasi-sacred authority upon certain characters, transforming them into figures akin to priests or shamans. These dual processes – degradation and sanctification – operate in parallel throughout Pankowski’s work.
The literary work of Jacques Sojcher is rooted in the presence-absence of the father who disappeared at Auschwitz. It makes him a convinced atheist who is not a stranger to the sacredness of life, nor devoid of religious culture. Also immersed in Catholicism, a more human religion in his eyes, the writer never ceases to reread texts from the Jewish tradition as much as the Gospels or the Fathers of the Church. A diffuse sacredness permeates this universe of the in-between which is accomplished in the writing and the meeting of numerous women, all at the same time sacred and lost. This leads him to perceive the singularity of the Belgians’ being-in-the-world; to play with a tender irony which eliminates any spirit of seriousness; to profess non-dogmatic atheism; to preserve, in the uncertainty of the profane, the sweetness of a sacred which metamorphoses, like the imagination, flatness and uniformity.
This article examines the interplay between the sacred and the profane in the life and work of Paul Nothomb (1913–2006). Deeply immersed in the historical upheavals of the twentieth century, Nothomb’s journey was marked by a transition from heroic Communist activism to an existential quest for meaning, rooted in a Hebraic reading of the Bible. Drawing on an analysis of his narrative Non Lieu (1996), we will demonstrate how his linguistic study of Genesis desacralizes the text while simultaneously sanctifying the ‘original nature’ of Man, which is present in everyone and guarantees a path to immortality. Ultimately, his work illuminates both the human condition in general and his own personal experiences in particular, especially the ordeal of torture.
Émile Verhaeren’s first two collections of poems seem to be structured around a dialectical tension between the resolutely secular tone of Les Flamandes (1883) and the sacred tone of Les Moines (1886). Add to this equation the publication, in the meantime, of Contes de minuit (1884), and it becomes possible to understand how the sacred and the secular are articulated in terms of temporality in the work of the Belgian writer. In Verhaeren’s creative process, which aims to be resolutely modern, opening up aesthetic barriers implies decompartmentalising moral categories, and intertwining sacralisation and profanation. In this respect, contrary to appearances, Verhaeren followed the lesson of Victor Hugo’s Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit rather than that of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal – which he considered rather unmodern – favouring a form of sacralisation through terror.
The paper analyses the main themes of the short story collection Les Héroïnes, nouvelles polonaises (1864), published at a time when Poland (then divided between Russia, Austria and Prussia) was in the midst of the January Uprising (1863–1864) against the Russian Empire. Shortly before France itself faced Prussian forces (1870), Joseph Vilbort sought to raise awareness among French readers of the suffering of the Polish people and to keep alive sympathy for their “holy cause.” He recounts the tragedy of the patriots of 1863: men who knew they were going to die for a lost cause, but who went ahead anyway so that “Poland would not die.”
