Mock Ritual in the Modern Era

Reginald McGinnis is Professor of French at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Essai sur l'origine de la mystification and coeditor, with Fayçal Falaky, of Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France.John Vignaux Smyth is Professor of English at Portland State University. He is the author of The Habit of Lying.

• Introduction 1. Ridicule 2. Mock Ritual in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia 3. Mocking Priests in Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste 4. Mock Ritual and the Emergence of Objectivity in Madame Bovary 5. Mock Ritual and Medicine in Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas 6. The Duel as Privatized Mock Ritual 7. Charlie Hebdo: The Ambivalence of Mockery Summation Concluding Unscientific Postscript Bibliography Index

At the heart of this lively and astute study is the vexed entwinement of ritual with ridicule. In a briskly paced series of readings of literary works from Voltaire and Diderot to Michel Houellebecq and Charlie Hebdo, McGinnis and Smyth show us that while every ritual threatens to become a parody of itself, so does even the fiercest mockery of ritual inevitably assume its own ritualistic aspect. We are as ensnared today as were the writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment, in the joke of jokes: that to laugh at high seriousness is to claim a no less risible high seriousness for ourselves.