Koschorke, Albrecht.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 208 + viii pp.
$32.50 (USD). ISBN: 0-231-12756-1.
[1] This brief, provocative cultural history looks at the
holy family (Mary, Joseph and Jesus) as a code or archetype that
our “postreligious society” may ignore, but for the
last two millennia has infiltrated “the deep structure of
its imagination” (5). Koschorke clearly loves writing about
the relationship between religion and popular culture (in the broadest
sense of the word) but his true expertise lies in analyzing the
intersection of theology and cultural theory, and indeed the heart
of the book is an analysis and extension of Freud’s literary
and psychological argument about how and why Christianity supersedes
Judaism. This is heavy stuff, but Koschorke’s prose remains
remarkably lucid and accessible, even in translation.
[2] The first part of The Holy Family and Its Legacy asks
us to step back and look at the fundamental strangeness of a religion
that gets its impetus in part from the divine invasion of the nuclear
family. This arrangement produces a series of tensions; as
Koschorke puts it:
the irruption of God into the arena of the family establishes a
dense web of empirical-sacral relationship options. The internal
relationships within the Christian family triangle are overdetermined in
a way that makes possible a staggering multiplicity of symbolic
assimilations. As a result, the Holy Family has become the core
complex of a cultural symbolism that, over the course of two thousand
years, has hardly left any combinatorial possibility unexplored.
(27)
[3] Thus the book begins with Koschorke explaining the combinations
and the ironies they engender. Mary is both the lover and
mother of Christ, and Jesus is venerated as a member of the Holy
Family even as he declares that he has “come to set a man
against his father, a daughter against her mother” (Matt.
10). Koschorke seems to enjoy noting the most ironic figure
not only in the Holy Family but the whole of the Western tradition: Joseph,
a husband cuckolded by God, and a father made impotent. Koschorke
calls him “a figure who has long been the laughingstock of
Western popular culture” (17).
[4] Part III of the book (“Consequences”) skillfully
examines how these deep codes play out in Western culture. Koschorke
argues (not always as successfully) that the Holy Family has had
an impact on history and politics. For example, he examines not
only the Reformation’s updating of the iconography of the
Holy Family, but how that updating affected government policy regarding
the family. His central argument in this section is that, just as
in the Holy Family–where the biological father (Joseph) has
been replaced by a transcendent powerful father (God)–so in
modernity has the biological father been replaced by the transcendent,
powerful state.
[5] The North American reader should be aware that this book’s
arguments and examples are explicitly Eurocentric. For starters,
Koschorke justifies this work in light of the fact that “the
Christian West has entered the post-Christian era” (5). As
a European scholar of religion, Koschorke must still deal with the
idea of a “secularizing process” in a way that no American
scholar would or could (as Koschorke himself notes in his preface
to the American edition). The latter chapters examine the role of
the Holy Family in the tales of early nineteenth-century author
Heinrich von Kleist, and in German romanticism and expressionism,
potentially leaving the North American reader asking what role the
Holy Family has played in, say, the history of American revivalism
or evangelical material culture.
[6] Finally, there is the subtitle of the book: “Religious
Imagination from the Gospels to Star Wars.” Both the
dust jacket and the press release promise an analysis of the Star
Wars saga–as well as The Terminator film, which
is never actually mentioned in the book itself. In the last
chapter (of the English translation only), a few pages are devoted
to George Lucas’ overanalyzed movie product. Koschorke rehearses
the Star Wars-as-heroic-journey argument (without mentioning
Joseph Campbell by name) as well as acknowledging the film’s
pastiche-like and intertextual qualities. His thesis is that
both the original Star Wars movie and the Phantom Menace (which,
he rightly points out, tell essentially the same story) creatively
use the Holy Family archetypes. Koschorke does not need to reach
far into the films’ subtexts: in the stunningly literal-minded Phantom
Menace, Anakin Skywalker’s mother, Shmi, announces to
the Jedi delegation that her son had no earthly father. A virginal
conception is not exactly subtle, but Koschorke finds more nuanced
parallels between Watto, the rapacious digitally animated owner
of Shmi and Anakin, and Joseph, both coded as displaced Jews. He
further makes the case for the Jedi as (both) Skywalkers’ spiritual
parentage and the Force as the Holy Spirit. If Koschorke had
been more fluent with American pop. culture criticism he might have
productively linked the Star Wars saga’s use of the
Holy Family to the antidemocratic mysticism that Robert Jewett found
in the saga. Perhaps this would have required a bridging chapter
on the Holy Family archetype in American mass media genres–the
Western or the thriller.
[7] These are minor criticisms that do not take away from the book’s
real strength: Unlike most studies of religion and popular culture,
which limit their coverage of the latter to the last 20 or 30 years,
Koschorke’s book discusses medieval poetry, renaissance art,
and modernist drama. It is a tribute to his breadth of knowledge
and measured tone that his discussion of Star Wars, cursory
though it may be, seems neither less nor more serious by comparison. The
most important lesson that The Holy Family might teach a
reader of this journal is that although the academic study of religion
and popular culture is only a few years old, the relationship between
them is many thousands of years older.
Elijah Siegler
College of Charleston
Charleston, South Carolina
sieglere@cofc.edu
