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JAN L. HAGENS
community; in drama, a similar tandem pattern can be observed in Shake¬
speare’s late plays, when he uses the change of seasons to support a perception
of rejuvenation and to bend tragedy toward reconciliation, as in The Winter’s
Tale. While the natural cycle may no longer be satisfying as an assumed cause
of reconciliation in human affairs and interpersonal conflict, there remains a
deep affinity between natural cycles and ritual: both are pre-rational, as well
as repetitive. In this sense, ritual is almost like human-made nature. Thus, the
natural cycle and the change of seasons work as parallels to and as illustra¬
tions of human affairs, and they can carry poetic and persuasive weight in the
bringing about of reconciliation. The ritual pattern of birth, death, and rebirth
underlies reconciliatory dramas more than tragedy, but, strangely, ritual’s con¬
nection to the latter has been researched much more intensely.
Besides such natural, objective conduits of conflict resolution, drama may
also employ more subjective conduits to lead its serious conflict to a productive
ending: a protagonist’s leap of faith can achieve this, when he or she is willing
to enter into risk without a cost-benefit calculation, but this approach — as
we see it, for example, in Goethe’s Iphigenia among the Taurians — does not
bear an obvious relation to ritualistic behavior — in fact, Iphigenia breaks
the Taurians’ sacrificial rite in order to save her brothers, his friends, and her
own life. Another subjective, emotional disposition that freguently enables
dramatic conflict resolution is the ability to feel mixed emotions or to feel
pity, so that catharsis becomes a stepping stone toward reconciliation, as in
Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Lessing’s Nathan the Wise; or it is an ability to dream
or a sense of humor that make re-framing and progress possible. However,
none of these methods appears to derive from ritual.
A third group of conduits are intellectual skills that are located in the indi¬
vidual but also create reference to ideal objective standards: reason, cognitive
flexibility, the ability to assume a higher vantage point or another’s perspec¬
tive, to see or even create alternative courses of action. These rational and
ethical talents are mostly independent of ritual. The emotional, psychological,
cognitive, and intellectual conduits of reconciliation that are located in the
individual’s subjective conditions and abilities are quite different from any
features that possess the power of ritual.
However, a final group of conduits of conflict resolution seems to have more
affinity to the idea and practice of ritual: the social and political one. Often it
is institutions which enable the control of aggression and then make possible
debate and negotiation, bargaining, mediation, arbitration, adjudication, and
consensus. To give an early example, in the Eumenides it is judicial trial and
23 For the most influential interpretation of the Christian mass as drama, see O. B. Hardison:
Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early His¬
tory of Modern Drama, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, especially 35-79.
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