“Ritual” in Recent Criticism: The Elusive Sense of Community

word for every shade of difference from an "accepted" meaning, and this is probably a healthy condition. "The abuse of an old word, if explained, may give less trouble than the invention of a new," writes C. S. Lewis (550). The mania for new phraseology has not always helped the social sciences, and there is no reason to think it would advance the understanding of literature. Still, explanations should be forthcoming when words undergo their necessary abuse. What, for example, does it mean to call a literary work a ritual? Some of the most reputable critics over the past decade have said that Milton's Lycidas is "a mourning ritual" (Wittreich 98), that Goethe's Faust "is an exceptionally clear instance of the work of art conceived as a socializing rite de passage" (Hartman, Fate 110), that Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" ends "with a ritual drama of rolling the universe toward an overwhelming question" (Feder 221), that a minor Jacobean play exemplifies the principle that "poetry is a ritual of resurrection and rebirth" (Cope 174). For the most part these statements are illuminating when read in the context of their arguments, so it would be churlish to accuse the authors of irresponsibility. "Ritual," however, has become a wonderfully unstable and intriguing word, owing, as I hope to show, to developments in our understanding of both ritual and literature over the past ten or fifteen years. The use of "ritual" has quite properly been associated with myth criticism, but if we examine John B. Vickery's classic collection of essays in this field, Myth and Literature, we may find that as late as the 1960s myth critics held certain notions about ritual that are no longer tenable. Stanley Edgar Hyman's 1958 essay in that collection stands as the most confident assertion