Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Literature and the Representation of Cultural Rituals and Ceremonies
Comparative literature and cross-cultural analysis

You’re Not Invited, But You’re Watching Anyway: Literature, Rituals, and the Weird Theater of Belonging

There’s something almost humiliating about watching a ritual you don’t understand. Like showing up to a wedding and realizing, too late, that the dress code was metaphorical. Everyone’s in emotional black tie and you’re in jeans. Literature—when it’s honest—lets you linger on the edge of that ceremony. It shows you how people rehearse grief, joy, identity, belonging. It hands you the hymnal but doesn’t stop the procession when you mispronounce the names.

What I’m saying is: cultural rituals in books are not just worldbuilding props. They’re tiny stages for collective identity. Sometimes sacred, sometimes aggressively performative. Always a little suspicious.

Let’s talk about how literature holds a mirror to those ceremonies we perform so automatically that we forget they’re staged. Let’s talk about how novels expose them, mock them, rebuild them, mourn them. Not from the safe remove of “academic exploration,” but from that itchy, unplaceable feeling of watching a stranger light incense and realizing you’ve never believed in anything long enough to burn it.

The Wedding Is a Funeral Is a Baptism

First things first: rituals in literature are never just what they say they are.

Take Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Western readers tend to approach it like a National Geographic documentary—ooh, look at the Igbo wrestling matches, the kola nut ceremonies, the yam festivals, how exotic—but Achebe’s not writing to flatter your anthropological curiosity. He’s writing about a cultural world where ritual isn’t spectacle. It’s oxygen.

There’s a scene where the egwugwu—a masked council of ancestral spirits—judges a domestic dispute. You could read that as quaint, or you could realize you’re watching the legal system, religion, performance art, and ancestral memory all braided into one. These men wear the dead on their faces. It’s both theater and sacred order. It’s also—let’s be honest—a little terrifying.

Compare that to the sterile rituals in Western lit: the courtroom scenes in To Kill a Mockingbird, where “justice” is stripped of any real sacredness. It’s performance without belief. We’re in a world where ritual persists, but its authority has hollowed out. The robe’s still there. The gavel still bangs. But nobody thinks the judge is communing with the ancestors.

Achebe’s rituals live. Harper Lee’s rituals limp. That’s not a value judgment—it’s a cultural one. In some worlds, ritual is survival. In others, it’s a bureaucratic formality with a side of collective delusion.

White People Cry at Funerals, But Not the Way You Think

Funeral scenes are always too neat in fiction. The eulogies come right on cue. Someone cries just enough. The protagonist has a revelation. It’s all very structured grief.

But then you read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and everything breaks open.

The funeral here isn’t a ceremony—it’s a trauma loop. A racial, ancestral, spiritual knot that refuses to be untangled by flowers and casseroles. The ghost of Given (literally a ghost) haunts not just the house but the narrative structure. Ward takes the Southern Black funeral and makes it more than a cultural symbol. It becomes a threshold. Between the living and the dead. Between who you are and who you’re supposed to perform for.

Compare that to something like The Great Gatsby, where Gatsby’s funeral is just a ritual failure. Nobody shows. There’s no community to carry the grief. Ritual needs witnesses. And Gatsby—who played dress-up with American aristocracy—dies alone, like a bad magician after the trick fails. The ceremony collapses because it was never real.

Both funerals say something about belonging. Who gets ritual? Who gets the full ceremony? Who gets silence?

Spoiler: It’s racialized. It’s classed. It’s haunted.

The Party Is the Ritual Is the Lie

Let’s not pretend rituals are always sacred. Sometimes they’re just social choreography.

Think of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. The “ritual” of caste, of decorum, of gendered obedience—every scene brims with tiny performances designed to keep the machinery of shame and power humming along. Ammu and Velutha aren’t just breaking a taboo by being together. They’re breaking the unspoken ceremony of who’s allowed to love, to live, to die with dignity.

And it’s not just India. It’s every society that uses ritual as surveillance.

Rituals tell us who belongs. And—more crucially—who doesn’t.

In Sally Rooney’s Normal People, we get the secular rituals of Irish middle-class adolescence: the Debs, the dinner party, the awkward sex where nobody talks about feelings. Here, the ritual is anti-ritual. It’s self-consciousness. A new religion where detachment is holiness.

But it’s still ritual. Still ceremony. Still performance.

Even silence, when repeated enough times, becomes liturgy.

Ghosts, Ancestors, Algorithms

Okay. Let’s get weird for a second.

What happens when you don’t have a culture to inherit? Or when that culture was stolen, colonized, meme-ified into something unrecognizable?

In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, there are ceremonies without names. The grandmother who prays in a hybrid Vietnamese-English litany. The funeral rites imagined, remembered, half-invented across the refugee archive of memory. Vuong isn’t describing rituals as clean, Instagrammable moments. He’s describing a kind of ceremonial glitch.

What happens when the ritual breaks?

What replaces it?

Sometimes: trauma. Sometimes: poetry. Sometimes: TikTok astrology and YouTube tarot because modernity is a joke and the soul still wants symbols.

In that way, Vuong has more in common with Ottessa Moshfegh than you’d expect. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the protagonist creates her own grotesque ritual: sedate, sleep, repeat. A private religion of pharmaceutical oblivion. It’s postmodern. It’s ironic. But it’s also deadly sincere.

Because when the collective ceremony disappears, people invent new ones. Or fall apart trying.

Is Literature the Last Real Ritual?

There’s a case to be made—and I’ll make it, sloppily, emotionally—that reading itself is ritual.

Not the act of decoding letters. But the way novels ask us to sit still, absorb, believe in fictions that press against the membrane of reality. It’s not just consumption. It’s communion.

When I read Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, I didn’t just observe a ritual. I entered one.

The story spirals around Tayo, a mixed-race Laguna Pueblo man returning from WWII, broken in body and spirit. Western medicine doesn’t help. Western stories don’t either. Only Indigenous ceremony—a ritual older than war, older than nation-states—can re-thread his self.

Silko doesn’t explain the ritual to the reader. She lets it breathe, bleed, confuse you. You’re not invited, but you’re allowed to witness. That’s a privilege. That’s literature doing something more than narrating. It’s enacting.

Not performatively. Not for likes. But because story itself is the ceremony.

Toni Morrison does the same thing in Beloved. The exorcism of Beloved isn’t about supernatural horror. It’s about community, about oral tradition, about remaking the self through collective memory. Baby Suggs preaching in the clearing—“Love your flesh”—isn’t a speech. It’s a ritual. A sermon to reclaim Black bodies from the logic of slavery.

That’s what Morrison knows. Rituals can be resistance.

Even if the form looks fractured. Even if it ends mid-sentence.

We Burn Things, Therefore We Exist

Here’s the messy truth: every culture invents ceremonies to survive its own chaos.

Sometimes that means baptizing a baby. Sometimes it means watching your friend go through a breakup and saying the same soothing platitudes you heard once in a movie. Sometimes it’s lighting a cigarette. Sometimes it’s smashing a glass. Sometimes it’s sending one last text you know you’ll regret.

Ritual isn’t ancient. It’s constant. And novels, when they’re honest, don’t describe rituals like historical reenactments. They show you how ritual feels. How it binds. How it betrays. How it consoles.

If you strip a character of their rituals, you’re not freeing them. You’re exiling them.

That’s why so much of modern literature feels like wandering. Characters adrift. No compass. No shared language. Just vibes and unresolved trauma.

We stopped writing wedding scenes. Now we write about the afterparty. The hangover. The phone call that never comes.

Final Thought (But Not a Conclusion, Obviously)

Literature lets us crash the party of someone else’s belief system. Not to steal the cake, but to ask: Why do you keep doing this? What does it hold together? What happens if it falls apart?

When rituals work, they hold the soul in place. When they fail, they show you how fragile the whole human project really is.

And when a novel dares to stage those rituals—whether it’s an Igbo festival, a Black Southern funeral, a whispered Catholic confession, or the numb silence of a modern breakup—it’s not just telling a story.

It’s inviting you to kneel.

You don’t have to believe.

But you do have to feel.