Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing by Patrick R. Query
2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/0041462x-2885203
ISSN2325-8101
Autores ResumoIn September 2011, José Tomás appeared before a packed audience for the final fight in Barcelona’s iconic bullring. After Tomás was carried off on the shoulders of the crowd, spectators surged into the arena to gather sand from the ground which had, moments before, been paced by bull and bullfighter in their deadly dance. The New York Times described these fistfuls of dust as “souvenirs,” but, as Patrick Query’s study of ritual, modernism, and the idea of Europe wishes to remind us, we might also understand them as relics, a piece of sacred ground once touched by the blood of a sacrificial victim. And, as Query’s book convincingly demonstrates, the play of local and European identity at work in contemporary debates about the role of the bullfight—its use as badge or bludgeon in discussions of Catalan, Spanish, and European identity, let alone concerns about its inherent violence—has a long pedigree testified to in a wide variety of interwar writing. While Query’s analysis of the bullfight’s ritualistic function is in many ways the most dramatic element of his nuanced argument—the cover appropriately features the bullfighter in midflourish before a large crowd—it is only one element in an impressive study of diverse literary and ritualistic forms deployed in the exploration of the idea of Europe between the wars.Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing argues that verse drama, the bullfight, and the Catholic Mass provide the ritual tools and sacred spaces whereby modernist writers defined, tested, suspended, and potentially harmonized a host of apparent opposites, most notably the tense relations among the local, the national, and the European grounds of political identity. The architecture of Query’s study is based on a series of elegant triads. Verse drama, bullfighting, and the Mass are married to a trinity of modes of engagement: making, watching, and using ritual. The study of each ritual form’s literary presentation is introduced in one of three interchapters that contextualize the particulars of the ritual under investigation. Readers unfamiliar with the uneven public life of modernist verse drama, the accoutrements used in the faena, or the history of Catholic oppression in Mexico will leave the book with an excellent understanding of the pertinent basics of each. Query provides close analysis of texts ranging from T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and the Mexican travelogues of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, to name only a few. If at first blush this list seems eclectic, he provides ample support for his principles of selection in the introduction. There, Query builds suitably flexible definitions of both Europe and ritual.In the case of Europe, Query surveys possible definitions of European identity articulated by thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Bernard Crick, Andreas Michel, and Edmund Husserl (again, to name only a few), not so much to debate their definitions but rather to shift the conversation away from an essentializing question-and-definition dynamic. While criticizing the “blind spots, exclusions, and false assumptions” in Crick’s argument, for instance, Query finds a toehold in Crick’s assertion that “Europe is ambiguous” (6). Rather than write such ambiguity away, Query dwells on it as an essential feature of the idea of Europe, a tension born of the relationship between local cultures, languages, and traditions and the broader concept of a unifying European identity. Specifically, rather than answering the question “What is Europe?”—a formulation that, as he notes, can result in some very conservative and totalizing replies—Query pivots back to the literature to ask: “What does an idea of Europe expressed in the literature of ritual contain? What cultural material adheres to it, and what falls away? How well does the idea of Europe experienced in ritual respond to the cultural and political demands of the interwar period?” (8). Answering these kinds of questions requires an approach to Europe as “a way instead of an object,” or, as Timothy Reiss posits, a “field of relations that incorporates [European] identity, while denying such identity any singular accumulation of properties” (quoted in Query 10).These questions also allow Query to investigate ideas of Europe as manifest in literature situated abroad, particularly in British writing located in Mexico. As such, Query understands his work as a contribution to literary globalization studies that recuperate “Europe” as a worthwhile term of investigation beyond its function as a colonizing force. He presents Europe as “a unique and essential third term in the local-global dyad, one that any reasonably thorough discussion of globalization cannot afford to ignore” (11). This stance bears fruit in his later chapters in a series of thoughtful readings that demonstrate how writers such as Lawrence, Waugh, and Greene think through the idea of Europe in relation to Mexico, one existing neither in simple opposition to Mexico nor through blanket reappropriations of Mexican culture and landscapes.The ambiguity inherent in the idea of Europe is “tethered,” as Query says, to “the visible evidence of discrete places, objects, and bodies in action” through the specificity of ritual itself (7). This act of binding, however, does not result in facile answers to the question of belonging. Ritual is not the “solution” to the “problem” of Europe. Indeed, quite the opposite, as Query emphasizes, ritual’s inherently ambiguous nature provides a felicitous ground for maintaining and exploring similar ambiguities at work in the understanding of Europe within the literature he investigates. Ritual works not through abstraction but through the very stuff of the world: bodies, language, blood, lance, dance, wine, and bread. Query offers a concise survey of critical analyses of ritual in modernist literature to distinguish his project from those that situate ritual as primarily a “primitive,” metaphorical, or psychological phenomena. His is not a study in which all things are ritual, or one in which all rituals are reducible to an atavistic, master Ur-Rite. Fittingly so, as it is precisely the specificity of rituals in their modern embodiments that Query sees as central to the ways in which his authors negotiate the correlation between local and European identity.Query’s definition of ritual—which he draws from a variety of anthropologists and theorists, including Catherine Bell, George Moss, and Jan Koster—includes three main elements: it is, first, a formal, repetitive action that is, second, “essentially collective” and, third, requires a “special location” or sacred space (17). He argues that ritual’s iterability, community orientation, and literal grounding is taken up by interwar writers invested in imagining a European community while keeping their feet planted on local soil. Query then pauses to consider the “implied connection to tradition” and the “most disputed element of ritual: belief” (18). While these elements are unproblematic in relation to the Catholic Mass, Query rightly acknowledges the difficulties involved with the role of anything like belief when discussing verse dramas and bullfights: “The modern bullfight is most certainly not the cult of Mirthras, and Murder in the Cathedral is not a sacrificial rite.” As with his discussion of Europe, Query sidesteps this problem by reminding readers of the goal of his project: not to tightly define ritual but to investigate its literary and political utility. While acknowledging that belief is not properly operative in, say, audience experiences of verse drama, the “space that belief once occupied” is a valuable locus of potential meaning for the poets attempting to draw upon ritual form (19). Query nods to several rites that fulfill this definition and that find expression in interwar literature, including “the pilgrimage, the pageant play, and the political rally,” as well as “rituals of Judaism and Islam.” He justifies his focus on verse drama, bullfighting, and the Mass because of their close adherence to his definition of ritual, their function as a “kind of political testing ground,” and, most compelling, their ubiquity and popularity: “[They] drew more attention than other ritual forms from some of the most important British and Irish writers of the interwar era” (3). The scope of Query’s book testifies to this fact. His conclusion invites readers back to the possibilities of other ritual forms in investigating how authors negotiate the idea of Europe. The well Query has opened is far from tapped, and another measure of the success of his project is that it will no doubt stimulate more scholarship on the topic. The function of pilgrimage, for example—which Query briefly touches upon in his study of Eliot and W. B. Yeats—is particularly tantalizing. More surely remains to be said.Before looking at his close readings, a note of caution to the reader. Because of its diverse body of texts and broad range, scholars and students are likely to engage Ritual and the Idea of Europe selectively, entering through the kitchen door of the index rather than through the very gracious foyer of Query’s introduction. All I can say is—Don’t. The value of Query’s larger argument is diminished when we approach it piecemeal. The book is also an invitation to reconsider marginalized or generally undervalued texts anew, ones we will overlook if we simply slip in and out to look at a few pages on George Orwell or David Jones. This reader came hungry for verse drama and left with a desire to read The Plumed Serpent. That Query’s argument would lead anyone to pick up The Plumed Serpent again (or at all) is, I think, a testament to the overall achievement of his study.Query begins with an analysis of the verse drama of Eliot, Yeats, and W. H. Auden, his ritual emphasis varying slightly in each chapter. With Eliot, Query argues that the poet’s understanding of the English language as both local and expressive of the mind of Europe leads Eliot to situate verse drama as the stage on which English poetry might rehabilitate both British and European culture. Query first establishes Eliot’s investment in safeguarding the interplay between individual cultures and the idea of Europe via a thoughtful study of The Criterion and Eliot’s 1946 Berlin address, “The Unity of European Culture.” He then knits together Eliot’s conception of English as a word hoard containing treasures from a plethora of European languages, living and dead, with Eliot’s dramatic theory, particularly his emphasis on verse drama’s potential to revitalize language while conveying often unnameable “emotional effects” (43). Query’s close readings of Sweeney Agonistes and Murder in the Cathedral, two of Eliot’s earliest verse dramas, carefully and convincingly demonstrate his thesis. For example, Query lingers over a line in Murder: “Even the music of the line ‘The purple bullfinch in the lilac tree,’ balanced between soft Latinate adjectives (purple, lilac) and sturdy Anglo Saxon nouns (bullfinch, tree), captures the rich order in diversity behind Europe and inside English” (45). His reading of Murder expands on the many strong studies of its liturgical investments to show “how thoroughly it reflects Eliot’s clarified sense of the importance of tradition, particularly linguistic tradition, in the social utility of verse drama” (44).Similarly, Query sees Yeats’s fascination with verse drama as a way for the poet to “gather … in key elements of European cultural memory” while also “questioning the future those elements seemed to promise” (57). Query demonstrates how Yeats combines emphatically Irish content with ancient Greek and Japanese dramatic structures to bring about a ritual form that uses the local as a way of accessing the universal and transcendent. The form’s blend of European tradition, embedded in classical tragedy, with Noh bodies forth “the marriage of symbolic Europe and symbolic Asia,” as Yeats says in A Vision, the union of which Yeats saw as vital to Europe’s spiritual health and rebirth (quoted in Query 69). Here, Query focuses on Yeats’s ritual sensitivity to sacred spaces, as seen in the poet’s depiction of pilgrimage, holy sites, and haunted manorial homes, as well as on the larger birth-death dynamic in not only the content of these plays but also in Yeats’s staging. Query addresses this latter topic via an effective reading of the ever-living yet deathly effect of masks and restrained, symbolic stage action. This leads to a series of close readings in which Query tempers discussions of fascism in Yeats’s drama by showing how the playwright actually frustrates the seeming valorization and aestheticization of death. Yeats does this by either withholding violent action and its promised ritual results or commenting on it critically through ritual structures. In The Death of Cuchulain, for instance, “Yeats sacrificed Cuchulain and his vision of a mythologized national life on the threshold where heroic aestheticization threatened to overwhelm individual freedom, offering only death in return” (85).Next follows a deft reading of Auden’s drama that reveals how the playwright’s skillful manipulation of popular performance modes and ritual structures falls flat. Query’s ritual emphases here are the role of audience as participant and the many ways Auden tries and, ultimately fails, to achieve this kind of interactive dynamic in his verse dramas. Ritual structures, like the danse macabre in The Dance of Death, are powerful tools for criticizing middle-class complacency in British and European culture alike, but Auden provides no corresponding positive ritual or spiritual grounding for European identity. The result, as Query expertly shows, is a body of plays that is perhaps more performable than some of Eliot’s earliest ventures into the theater, but that offers no palliatives or possibilities. The lack of a ritual core or belief in the plays dooms Auden’s goal of communal audience involvement to failure, in Query’s estimation: “The device of audience participation, like authorial collaboration, comes to seem a substitute for true community rather than an adjunct of it” (96).Yet this formulation highlights a difficulty in Query’s study of verse drama, namely, his presentation of it as ritual in itself rather than as a shared style common to three poets who are drawing on slightly different ritual precedents. In Query’s own terms, the issue with verse drama is less a lack of belief and more a lack of repetitive, traditional action: the only element common to all these pieces is the staging of poetry. Auden’s pantomime and the danse macabre are not identical to the ritual sacrifices embedded in Eliot’s and Yeats’s tragic referents, and the medieval dramatic rituals and Catholic liturgical elements at work in Murder are quite different from the Celtic and Japanese structures at play in, say, At the Hawk’s Well, let alone the incomplete Aeschylean architecture of Eliot’s own Sweeney Agonistes. This distinction is perhaps mincing, however, because all the dramas that Query considers share ritual investments in death and rebirth, and all employ these elements to negotiate local and European identities. Query’s compelling presentation of the similarities of ritual use and political concern among the three playwrights constitutes his main achievement in this section of the book. His approach allows him to reposition their dramas in startling, productive new ways, as emphatically liturgical dramas open up into political readings or social satires come under critique for their ritual failures.The middle section of Query’s triptych is a tour de force study of the bullfight in British interwar literature, one that encompasses fiction and poetry. It is here that Query first closely engages with the use of Mexico as term and testing ground in the quest for a locally sensitive European identity. The bullfight, like many death-based rituals, negotiates warring opposites, to which, in a Mexican context, Query adds “European and Non-European” (113). In chapter 4, his reading of the bullfight in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and “None of That!” makes sense of the narrative frustration in the former and relative success of the latter. Query argues that The Plumed Serpent’s apparent lack of cohesion comes from the absence of tragic closure offered by the bullfight, as registered by Kate’s inability to watch the ritual come to its climax. He adds to this a critique of scholarship that judges the novel as a piece of realism. Here, again, Query is careful not to offer a purely symbolic reading in realism’s place. Rather, he turns back to the particulars of the bullfight in a deft analysis of how Lawrence mediates European, Irish, Mexican, and US cultures, as well as class tensions, in the materiality of the ritual. In contrast, Query argues, “None of That!” coheres as it follows the bullfight ritual to its sacrificial conclusion. Rather than writing away the disturbing equivalences of bullfight, violence, and rape in the narrative, Query illuminates them and adds to them a focus on the fatal bullfighting structure of “Ethel’s own imaginative patterns and … her and Cuesta’s pursuit of one another” (137).In chapter 5 Query turns to poetic depictions of the Spanish Civil War, situating it in relationship to the bullfight as the “political workshop for Europe” (139). Query’s presentation of the bullfight in British poetry addressing the Spanish Civil War skillfully demonstrates the ways poets used this ritual to understand violence and the place of both Spain and Britain within Europe. Here, Query makes fierce and effective use of the ambiguities inherent in the bullfight, particularly the captive bull’s association with freedom (“but a freedom of a paradoxical sort. Like humans viewed existentially, the toro bravo is born to die”), as well as the use of the bullfight to recuperate possibilities for European unity in diversity (145). For example, in his reading of Stephen Spender’s poetry, Query shows how “Two Armies” shifts readers away from an us-and-them combatant mentality by returning to the roots of the bullfight ritual: all soldiers, like both bull and bullfighter, are ultimately dancing with death, not one another. Query then reads the economies of bloodshed in a wide swath of poetry through the ritual structures of the bullfight, culminating in a study of Cecil Day Lewis’s The Nabara. Here, Query reveals how Day Lewis generates auras of nobility and tragic inevitability by writing the bullfight onto the figurative bleeding out of destroyed Basque vessels. Contrasting poets who touch on the corrida superficially, like George Barker and Vachel Lindsay, with Day Lewis, Query concludes: “An underlying crisis of the Spanish Civil War may have centered on the divide, illuminated by the corrida de toros, between those with ritual sense and those without it” (164).Query’s final section turns to “a trinity of converts” to Catholicism: Greene, Waugh, and Jones. Addressing Greene and Waugh together, Query explicates the ways they reflect on issues of European identity and local culture through their depiction of the oppression of Catholics in Mexico—particularly the prohibition against Catholic ritual practices in the twenties and thirties. Pairing Greene and Waugh allows Query to highlight key differences in their mentalities as travelers and, most important, Catholics. In the adventuresome Greene, Query finds a use of Catholicism that shifts away from “institutional sources of power” through his “mobilization of the sacraments” (171). In contrast, Waugh presents Catholicism as “a top-down and Europe-out” structure that could potentially “anchor” Mexico to a sustaining “European tradition and core.” Readers may here note an expansion from Query’s initial terms in the introduction, where it seems his emphasis will fall almost exclusively on the Catholic Mass as his ritual form for investigation. The Mass is indeed a major focus in his readings of, say, the mobilized Eucharist in The Power and the Glory. But he is equally invested in depictions of churches and holy sites, Catholic funerary rites (or, more specifically, the narrative function of their absence), devotions to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Church itself as overarching sacrament and structure. This more capacious scope serves Query well in his readings and is in many ways a natural consequence of the interrelatedness of these rites and devotional forms. Query adds a needed political dimension to discussions of Greene’s and Waugh’s Catholic imagination by linking it also to an embattled idea of Europe, one played out on Mexican soil where any Catholic praxis, with its European heritage, was inevitably also a political statement about national character and community life. He concludes by following Greene and Waugh back to Britain, as it were, where they situate Mexico as an example of resistance or cautionary tale, respectively. In Mexico, Greene rediscovers Catholicism’s ability to seed power even in “the reaches where its most magisterial structures have little visible influence,” generating a kind of triumphant sacramentality of the local (195). In contrast, Waugh uses Mexico as evidence of the cultural decay brought about when Catholicism is replaced by secularism, a distorted mirror, as Query says, of similar shifts in Europe. That two writers should come to such differing conclusions is, as Query notes, evidence of the ambiguity and ideological flexibility inherent in ritual.In David Jones, Query finds the height of the ritual-political sensibility he investigates. In his reading of In Parenthesis, Query resists mythologizing gestures that could potentially erase Jones’s investment in “small objects, words, and actions,” instead revealing how Jones preserves these ritual nodes in all their particularity as an entrance into unity. So too, he argues, “the European thing in In Parenthesis containing Catholicism and Celticism is a concrete approximation of the shape of true unity in diversity.” As with his reading of Yeats, Query again leverages ritual and “a nuanced idea of Europe” against critics who chastise what they regard to be Jones’s fascist sympathies (198). He then extends his critique to similarly nation-bound analyses of Jones’s Welsh influences that overlook his concerns with a broader, complex notion of European identity in which Europe is “a middle term between the local and the universal” (201). Query then leads us through a meticulous close reading of this immensely dense piece in order to demonstrate the interplay of Welsh, Catholic, and European identities and how they cocreate one another within the lines. This dynamic is best seen in Query’s reading of defeat and dying in Y Gododdin and Arthurian legend, which follows Jones in weaving together Celtic, Catholic, and European lore. In the figure of the Dying Gaul, always dying yet never dead, “a defeated people draw life from their defeats” (205). As Query shows, those “people” are necessarily Celtic, British, and European at once: the slumbering soldiers of Celtic legend, the sleeping Arthur of British tradition, and the dozing, dying troops of modernity. His analysis of Jones’s investment in the boast of Dai, a Welshman who narrates a lineage back to Greece, Rome, and Britain, further emphasizes the poet’s imagination of a strong, united Europe in which the flavor of local utterance is never lost.A final word should be said of the flavor of Query’s own utterances. This ambitious project is articulated in the best kind of academic prose. It is muscular and clear while still brimming, even at times bristling, with personality. Query’s gift for precision in summary and critique without loss of nuance makes for a compelling read. His book will prove valuable for any scholar of the many authors Query examines, but it is best approached in its entirety. The fact that the book coheres so beautifully demonstrates the central premise of his argument: that a host of interwar authors draw upon ritual to find varying ways to depict unity in diversity without cheapening either term.
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