Blood, Shit, and Tears: The Textual Reinscription of Sacrifice, Ritual, and Victimhood in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal

This essay revisits Bernard MacLaverty's 1983 novel, Cal, in order to re-read it as a site of textual ritual sacrifice. This sacrificial reading draws on René Girard's landmark literary-anthropological explorations of the dynamic relations between sacrifice, religion and violence in Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. The essay argues (a) that Cal obsessively articulates and engages the Girardian mechanisms of violence, religion and sacrifice, and (b) that Cal makes it possible to theorize how literary texts "sacrificially" intervene in, modify and reinscribe the dynamics of modern political violence.