Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (review)

This wide-ranging study of sacrificial themes by Derek Hughes represents an important foray into an area often seen as the exclusive province of anthropologists. Divided into fifteen chapters, the study proceeds chronologically, with each chapter devoted to a particular period or author. Though the great majority of the works discussed are literary, Hughes also extends his analyses into opera and the visual arts.

Hughes's stated aim is to "examine transformations in the literary interpretation of human sacrifice" (3), though he cautions that his book "is not an encyclopedia" (3). It is understandable that Hughes should be wary of his book being seen in this way; for instead of focusing on a few seminal or representative works, he treats a multitude of (mostly canonical) texts and artistic exempla, spanning three millennia. Although not technically an encyclopedia, in its desire for comprehensiveness Culture and Sacrifice must nevertheless be called a survey. The book's major argument or theme (articulated on the jacket copy) is that sacrifice, both ancient and modern, generally functions as an indicator of archaism or cultural dissolution (i.e., as anathema to "civilization"). But as the author also intends to show how "the meaning attached to the theme [of sacrifice] changes profoundly from one period to another" (jacket copy), it is not clear how the manifest tension between these two aims—or claims—is to be resolved.

Given that sacrifice is a topic not often treated by literary scholars—René Girard's Violence and the Sacred (1972) being the first and most paradigmatic example—a book on this subject is certainly to be welcomed. As one might expect, Girard's magnum opus looms over the book. Indeed, Hughes's stern rejections of Girard's ideas reveal not only a difference of perspective but also an anxiety of influence. Unlike Girard, Hughes is not interested in sacrifice per se but only in the varieties and vicissitudes of its representation: "The point is not the thing itself but its representation" (2) and "Literary human sacrifice rarely has much connection with the real thing" (6). However, the concept of sacrifice risks losing its specificity when it is defined loosely as "ritual death" (also part of the book's subtitle)—an assertion that a more theoretically informed discussion of the "real thing" could remedy. (Otherwise, how can one know if "ritualization" is an effect of representation or an aspect of the thing itself? Is representation not also a part of the cultural meaning of "real" sacrifice?) The word "culture" in the title is therefore not to be taken anthropologically but rather as a metonymy for the artistic imagination, for what is expressed in what Hughes calls "advanced literary texts" (10). Though Hughes refuses to theorize sacrifice as such or its representation (evidently deeming literary representation to be an autonomous system of signification), he is quick to dismiss the anthropological theories of others—particularly those of Girard, whose mimetic thesis is anathema to Hughes's autonomist view of literature: "[Girard's] use of advanced literary texts to explicate primitive social conditions is questionable, the more so because (I believe) he is rather free with the textual evidence" (24). But this is less an argument about the content of Girard's theory than about the role of literature in the humanities and social sciences, namely, its capacity to represent or refer to the world. And if one believes, as Hughes apparently does, that literary representation of sacrifice has no relation to the real thing, then, presumably, Girard's supposed lack of "textual evidence" is a moot point.

One unifying methodological feature of the book is the influence of classical culture on modern literature and art. Yet the first chapter, entitled "Human Sacrifice, Ancient and Modern," is disappointingly brief (barely ten pages when one subtracts the two and a half pages devoted to images)—hardly the methodological or theoretical prolegomenon that one would expect of such an ambitious and far-reaching study.

Chapter 2, entitled...