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JAN L. HAGENS community; in drama, a similar tandem pattern can be observed in Shakespeare’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 illustrations 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 connection 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 individual but also create reference to ideal objective standards: reason, cognitive flexibility, the ability to assume a higher vantage point or another’s perspective, 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 History of Modern Drama, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965, especially 35-79. . 64 ¢
