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DRAMATIC GENRE, RITUAL,
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
——~<~o»—___
JAN L. HAGENS
How do modern theater’s attempts to reconnect to ritual relate to its ability,
or inability, to find solutions for the conflicts it enacts? More specifically, when
we think of how ritual is employed in the performance of dramatic texts, the
generic strategies that first come to mind are tragic, as in the communal rite
of sacrificing, and comic, as in the communal rite of mocking and celebrating.
But can ritualistic elements contribute toward aims beyond these two funda¬
mental yet divisive genres? When drama and theater envision reintegrative
outcomes to their conflicts, which transformative conduits do they employ,
and how do these conduits relate to specifically ritualistic approaches? How
can “primitive” ritual contribute to drama, an aesthetically nuanced and fre¬
quently self-referential construct that, in its most absolute variants, displays
psychological stories and personal decisions for a spectating audience? Build¬
ing on Braungart’s and Fischer’s work on Literature and Ritual, we will exam¬
ine some characteristics of ritual that may help to enable dramatic solutions,
and perhaps even an entire dramatic genre, beyond comedy and tragedy.
Among the literary genres, this is the differentia specifica of drama: that it
participates in both word and world, brings together ideal and real, joins — to
use theological terms — spirit and body. It shares this body with ritual, for
which corporeality is a sine qua non. (It is a worthwhile question to consider
if ritual could be conceived of as a purely mental process.) With respect to
the notion at the center of the present volume — poetic rituality — drama
thus has greater opportunities than the other literary genres, i.e., lyric poetry
and epic or prose. Of course, lyric poetry and prose do have some opportuni¬
ties, and Wolfgang Braungart in his writings rightly attempts to expand the
notion of poetic rituality to all forms of literature, especially lyric poetry.*
Nevertheless, the particular affinity between ritual and drama remains uncon¬
tested, an affinity which becomes even more obvious once drama’s trajectory
toward the stage is taken into account: drama would be caught in a pragmatic
| Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, Tiibingen, Niemeyer, 1996, 148-165, 254. Braun¬
gart’s most important contributions to this discussion are listed in the bibliography.
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