Oldal 19 [19]
RITUAL AND AESTHETIC PRESENTIVITY
autosuggestion of pietistic inwardness looked for the social space created by a
community of people who shared their opinions, enabling them to articulate
their thoughts and thereby bring themselves to being.
Consequently, pietistic rituals were equally productive in the literary sphere.
Religions are always discourses of aesthetic experience. This is why religion
and art are so closely linked. Sacred and profane rituals alike both require
and create aesthetics. In this regard, substantial evidence from ritual theory
suggests that religion, on the one hand, and art, literature, music, and (sacred)
theater, on the other, developed in parallel during the cultural evolution. They
constantly referred to each other, and then continued to differentiate them¬
selves from one another. They cannot simply be derived from one another (for
example, ritual cannot be derived from myth, and myth cannot be derived
from ritual, as the old dispute in ritual studies goes).
Even today, all dimensions of literature reveal “its numerous links to the
ritual, whether in its production and reception, its aesthetic form, its struc¬
ture, its content and thematic positioning, its social connection, its social
placement, and its social organization.” This list speaks of the potential held
by aesthetic affirmation, which literature always has, too. This is particularly
evident in literature which is “applied” to a ritual and directly included within
it as functional literature. Literature must therefore be researched within this
context, which shapes its aesthetics and poetics. This is especially true for
ritual texts that play a role within a religious context (liturgical texts, psalms,
litanies, Christmas and Easter texts). However, even when used in profane
social ways, literary texts are made accessible for ritual practices and used
under the auspices of such practices (writers’ unions, writers’ cults, the hon¬
ouring of writers, readings, clubs and literary associations, book fairs, etc.).
“Cult books” and “cult authors” are currently playing a key role in literary
modernity (Salinger, Hesse).°
The matter appears to become much more complex when an individual’s
reception of literature is considered. However, the reader still participates
in the aesthetic of the ritual, which gives a sense of community. People who
write and read form part of a symbolic community, even though the reader re¬
mains an independent individual. Establishing a community by remaining an
individual is the ritual secret of literature. This secret is indebted to the force
of form and expression, which gives both order and direction. A major new
challenge arises when the systems of literature and art differentiate themselves
from one another and change their focus, taking subjectivity as their specific
5 Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1996, 17.
° Christian Klein: Kultbücher: Theoretische Zugänge und exemplarische Analysen, Göttingen,
Wallstein, 2014.
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