Turner contested: “The concept of individuality has been hard-won, and to sur¬
render it to a new totalizing process of reliminalization is a dejecting thought.
(...) Liminoid theater should present alternatives; it should not be a brainwash¬
ing technique.”"' He insisted that modern man needs the freedom that drama,
not ritual, provides.
Turner is probably correct in that there is much ritual in late medieval and
early modern drama and less in Elizabethan drama and French and German
Classicism, where freedom and individual agency are foregrounded. The mod¬
ern subject is a sixteenth to eighteenth-century achievement we cannot ignore;
the central status of the rational, moral, and decisive protagonist should not
be superseded but sublated and integrated. For a modern spectator, for a con¬
temporary audience, a conflict resolution is more convincing and satisfactory
if it comes about through both communal participation in ritual and the indi¬
vidual’s responsive reflection. As inhabitants of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, most of us want to witness singular characters, with decisions and
actions that originate in a unique instant, and that do not wholly depend on
the repetition of traditional patterns of ritual and ceremony.
Clearly, Turner felt that going back to medieval or pre-historic times was
not an option. Instead of adopting Turner’s radical and antagonistic stance,
we could align ourselves with Richard Schechner, who does not differenti¬
ate so sharply between ritual and theater because, to him, both are forms of
performance which can be distinguished according to their effect: ritual has
more of a visceral, transporting, and transforming function; drama more of
an intellectual and entertaining function.” The difference is a matter of degree
and proportion. However, even if the affinity between ritual and drama is made
evident by subsuming both under the category of performance, it remains a
legitimate question whether there might not exist an unproductive tension
in the historical and systematic relation between, on the one hand, primitive
social ritual — a communal reality, pre-rational and pre-literary, immediately
participatory, prescribed and codified, obligatory, unquestionable, repetitive,
and even religious, without much individual agency in regard to right and
wrong — and, on the other hand, individually shaped drama — an aestheti¬
cally complex and nuanced object that displays often psychological stories and
self-conscious personal decisions for a more distant, spectating audience, in
original and creative “as if” ways.