Ritual Unbound: Reading Sacrifice in Modernist Fiction (review)

Modernism's critical reception has proceeded through certain stages, initially willing to confirm the intentions of the modernists themselves, then skeptical of modernist ideology, and now often out to show how modernist writers' achievements outstrip their intentions. Ritual Unbound argues that the classic modernist anti-hero is much more than just a rebel or an object of anti-social satire. Whereas modernism's first critics read Kurtz, Gatsby, and Edward Ashburnham as products of modernist disillusionment, and later critics for signs of their creators' ideological bad faith, Thomas Cousineau makes a far more powerful argument. They are scapegoats, objects of their cultures' sacrificial rituals, and signs of the devious and destructive way societies constitute themselves through violent ritual exclusions. The novels in which they appear dramatize and expose that process, but they also do much more. Each ironically "remystifies" the process, its narrator fooling us into complicity, until "the aesthetic form of each novel proposes … an imaginary solution to the intractable problem of creating, in the real world, a non-sacrificial community" (18). Explaining how key modernist texts go from the familiar anti-hero to the imaginative creation of non-sacrificial community, Cousineau completely transforms a stock figure and attributes vital new anthropological significance to modernist writing.

Kurtz seems evil enough, but, really, he is a scapegoat for an evil that far exceeds him, and, as the supremely "isolated individual," he becomes symbolic of the way "a group acquires its sense of solidarity by designating one of its members as an outsider" (85, 81), a process enacted by Heart of Darkness. Once we've been shown it, however, we're taught how to create communities by other, better means: "Conrad locates a real and sustaining difference in the distance between the mythologized figures that Marlow constructs throughout his narrative and the demystified figure of Marlow himself, who creates bonds among the members of his community without becoming its scapegoat" (62). As the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" indicates, Conrad is all about solidarity, and Heart of Darkness shows him replacing bad sacrificial solidarity with that which we achieve (as the preface suggests) through storytelling: "In Heart of Darkness he presents the activity of the storyteller as a sublimated alternative to the violent, atavistic methods for achieving solidarity to which human communities are otherwise likely to resort" (63). The better form of community develops between Marlow and his listeners—and then between Marlow and us, making us unable to ignore the darkness we perpetrate as "members of communities that practice 'unspeakable rites'" (85). Kurtz emerges finally as the nexus of a project at once anthropological and aesthetic. His anti-heroism is a result of the way human societies build community through exclusion, and his story is a result of the way aesthetic form might redeem human community by modeling the form of a more inclusive social structure.

Chapters on The Turn of the Screw, The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse describe similar critiques of the scapegoating tendency in human culture and similar aesthetic alternatives to it. Each chapter, however, describes very different versions of this critique and its alternative. Remarkably, Cousineau's consistent critical model turns out diverse interpretations—which are also fresh and provocative readings of each of the novels.

He argues that the real problem in the endlessly problematic The Turn of the Screw is that of rivalry: "How … can we resolve the conflict between our inextinguishable desire for priority and our inevitable relegation to the position of latecomers?" (41) This question presents itself to James's governess because she arrives at Bly after the children's parents and first caregivers have established their priority; she must find some way to manage the "encounter between a successful predecessor and a belated aspirant" (43), and she does so by transforming "a personal conflict into a public accusation" (56). Displacement leads to scapegoating, which spreads all over the novella, especially to its form. There it is ended, finally, for "the...