SOURCE: "Sacrificing to Baal," in Dying Gods in Twentieth-Century Fiction, Bucknell University Press, 1990, pp. 82-107.

In the following excerpt, Phillips analyzes various mythical rituals enacted by the narrative of A Minor Apocalypse, emphasizing their significance in the context of the Polish resistance movement.

A Minor Apocalypse(1979) is the ninth novel by Tadeusz Konwicki and his second to be published in samizdat, the Polish underground system for circulating dissident literature. When the narrator tries to dispel his waking thoughts about death—his own mortality, his country's subjection, the planet's extinction—with "gestures of ritual," he means only his morning routine and the habit of writing, that "narcotic of the wounded individual." The narrator's friends Hubert and Rysio arrive just at this point to recommend a much more primitive ritual, one that could, in fact, come straight out of [James] Frazer's chapter on "The Burned God." The "friends" politely propose...