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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 fundamental 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 frequently self-referential construct that, in its most absolute variants, displays psychological stories and personal decisions for a spectating audience? Building on Braungart’s and Fischer’s work on Literature and Ritual, we will examine 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 opportunities, 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 uncontested, 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. Braungart’s most important contributions to this discussion are listed in the bibliography. + 57 +
