Abstract
The introduction to this book expresses a concern that it might be too ‘literary’ for students of ritual and too ‘ritualistic’ for literary critics. I would extend this fear into yet more complex interdisciplinary territory. The underlying issue is the manner in which the matter of ‘religion’ is almost impossible to eradicate, and when its rituals degenerate into ‘mock rituals’ then in a largely secular age there are serious questions to be addressed.
It is answers to such questions that this clever and learned book steadfastly avoids. It is rooted in the eighteenth century in France and the age of Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert: the Age of Reason when Christianity and religion in Europe are mocked and ridiculed in rituals that model themselves on the very religious rituals that they abuse. Laughter becomes an unpleasantly two-edged sword (one thinks of the proverb referred to by Milan Kundera: ‘Man thinks, God laughs’), not simply humorous but ridiculing the very rituals that are aped in mockery. At the heart of the book are wonderfully subtle close readings of two works of fiction: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the latter with its complex exchanges between the religious language of sacrifice and the themes of bloodletting and the scientific practices of the time and their mock rituals.
This is a profoundly disturbing book that never quite moves us beyond the readings that it presents in the nasty interplay between ridicule and rationality. We are reminded that Tristram Shandy was deeply important for Nietzsche, and from him we look forward to Bataille. Kafka’s unsettling, circular parable of the leopards who repeatedly break into the temple and drain the sacrificial vessels, until they themselves become part of the ritual, is never far away. And so it is with those who mock religion in critiques of ritual that become themselves mock rituals. A chapter on the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in 2015 leaves us with the ambivalence of mockery in an endless process of substitution that puts in question the categories of our post-Enlightenment society and its secularization with its ‘generalized mockery of ritual as the manifestation of what appears most superstitious in religion’ (p. 115).
There are moments – in themselves disturbing – when Christian doctrine surfaces, as in the discussion of free will in the ‘Concluding unscientific postscript’. (The Kierkegaardian echo seems a little heavy-handed.) If the sense of free will was seen as freeing us from the superstitions concerning fate, then in modernity this sense comes to be seen as illusory and merely a ‘ruse of nature’. Christian theology and doctrine are heard only in dim echoes, matters for derision in a post-Enlightenment world that has a distinctly unpleasant, and often dangerous, edge.
In the end, however, this book cannot be lightly dismissed. As it breaks down the barriers of academic disciplines it offers us a deftly intelligent argument that provides few answers – and deliberately so. But as the last page comes to a close with a question, in a world where it is thought to be clever to be amusing at the expense of others, this question is: what is so funny about peace, love and understanding?