The Comparatist

THE COMPAKATIST BOOK NOTES VIRGIL NEMOIANU AND ROBERT ROYAL, eds. Play, Literature, Religion: Essays in Cultural Intertextuality. Albany: SU ofNew York P, 1992. vi + 221 pp. The association between the beautiful and the sacred goes back to the origins of the human species and continues to be an essential aspect of Uterary art even in our secular era. However one describes it, the link between the sacred and the beautiful cannot be broken, yet in recent years we have chosen for the most part to ignore or even to revile it. The relationship between play and order is intrinsic to the species, the place where ritual, literary, and cultural structures first articulate themselves and where societies continue to develop the means to make sense of their activities. We may have tried to hide from these fundamental features of the production of culture, but they are hard to avoid in any serious discussion of the way literature works. The goal ?? Play, Literature, Religion is to explore the relationship between Uterature and reUgion whüe also estabUshing the playful context at the center of both cultural regions. Each of the essays in the collection discusses some aspect of the link between literature and religion or the play of the sacred in general, making use of texts from various cultures. The mix of standard authors and less famüiar ones is a strength of the book, for it demonstrates the wide range of interest its subject can sustain and provides useful commentaries on writers who receive less attention than they deserve. Ofparticular note in this respect is Robert Royal's essay on Charles Péguy's Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu. Royal's assessment of this long poem is masterful and compelling. It manages to bring forward all the central issues that are involved in the relationship that obtains among play, Uterature, and religion: "Other forms ofplayfulness mask ultimate despair; true playfulness can exist only where, in the strictest theological sense, both God and Man are really at play" (175). Just as Schiller long ago declared that we are most fully human only when we play, Royal reminds us that the playful always involves a profound encounter ofhumans with the sacred, however they may choose to define that region. Without such an awareness, the species collapses into despair. The best essays in the volume echo this theme and express it in other ways. Louis Dupré's piece on the relationship between play and ritual is perhaps the strongest declaration of the principal relations at the center of human cultures, the means whereby we structure our societies through the play between the context of everyday life and the sacred. Dupré reminds us that "the earUest form of human play defines a sacred order, whüe even the most solemn ceremony retains the memory of its playful origins. . . . Always and everywhere human beings Vol. 19 (1995): 155 BOOK NOTES appear to have felt a need to formalize their activity, and the measured activity of play lies at the root of that self-conscious articulation of existence that we at a later stage of development are wont to refer to as 'religious' ritual" (199). Virgil Nemoianu's introductory essay is an excellent exposition ofthe hostility toward the sacred in the contemporary academy even as it weU describes the necessary relations to be found in the play between Uterature and reUgion: "Play is . . . not only arbitrary, imaginative, and chaotic, it is also ... an activity oforder. Play is perhaps the one Utopian and much-yearned-for site where complete freedom and complete order can ecstaticaUy embrace and triumphantly rest in at the same time, the golden dream ofthe founding fathers ofaesthetics, from Leibniz and Baumgarten to Kant and Schüler" (15). Other essays in the coUection focus on the comic aspect of play: Arthur Quinn discusses the uses ofhumor in the Bible, Barbara E. Kurtz assesses the relationship between the comic and the sacred in de la Barca, and Mary Anne O'Neü describes the uses and value of word play in the work ofMax Jacob. In his piece, Eric J. Ziolkowski traces the links between humor and despair in Carlyle and Kierkegaard...