Oldal 65 [65]
DRAMATIC GENRE, RITUAL, CONELICT RESOLUTION
substitution. In ritual, the real violence of conflict or sacrifice is substituted by
sacralized symbolic violence; then, rituals metaphysical or religious technigue,
that most often aims to effect and control changes in the world, is further
idealized in theaters aesthetic illusion-making, which, though not a game for
its own sake, pulls further back from real-world effects and thus decreases the
need for actual violence. In this vein, critics like Girard interpret tragedy as
an aestheticization of ritual sacrifice, as a sublimation of aggression and vio¬
lence that carries a therapeutic cathartic effect; interestingly, the spectator
is purged of violence without realising it, or without being aware of how this
process, which contributes to conflict resolution, takes place.”
5.) Ritual situates the individual, as Braungart analyzes, within a “pre-exist¬
ing” cultural context: it reaches a deeper sphere of reality. When ritual induces,
supports, guides our feeling and doing, this alleviates an often overwhelming
burden on the individual, on the — to use Braungart’s quoting of Ehrenberg
— “fatigued self.”” Through ritual, or through a theater performance that is
ritualistic, we participate in a communal, social, cosmic, or religious order.
This order takes on much of our existential burden, and it reassures us of the
alignment between our subjectivity and the world, of our belonging.
Perhaps we will better understand how ritual and drama can work hand in
hand if we examine which transformative conduits drama and theater employ
when they aim for reintegrative outcomes to their conflicts. Asking about
methods and instruments of conflict resolution will highlight differences and
commonalities between ritual and drama. Some of drama’s relatively frequent
conduits of conflict resolution appear not to use ritual at all or not in extenso,
and none of the following methods appear to derive much of their problem¬
solving capacity from ritual: the zero case of coincidence and luck, when a
conflict is solved by mere arbitrary and unpredictable chance; divine prede¬
termination; unstructured violence and brute force in chaotic warfare. Drama
uses conduits of resolution that are closer to ritual when it resorts to the natu¬
ral cycles of nature, as in the seasons or the old year and the new, of death and
rejuvenation. Such natural cycles share with ritual that they occur in repeating
patterns, and that in them a destructive pattern is often joined to a productive
one: a tragedy thus can be sublated into a reconciliatory superstructure, i.e.,
into a drama of reconciliation. In nature, this occurs when fall and winter are
followed by spring and summery; in ritual, this happens in the Christian mass,
when it proceeds from tristia to gaudium, from sacrifice to resurrection in the
20 Ibid., 431, insists that art is not a mere game.
?! René Girard: Violence and the Sacred, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977,
passim [La Violence et le Sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972]; Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, 245;
Erika Fischer-Lichte: Das theatralische Opfer: Zum Funktionswandel von Theater im 20.
Jahrhundert, Forum Modernes Theater 13.1 (1998), 42—57, 55.
22 Braungart: Ritual, 428.
* 63°