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JAN L. HAGENS
Athenian theater especially during the final catastrophic phase ofthe Pelopon¬
nesian War, when it became a means of supporting civic morale in the face of
imminent defeat: in a desperate military situation and against the odds, a god
would ensure rescue, safety, and victory. Such helpful divine interference was
so often employed as the crucial mechanism of solution that it assumed the
status of ritualistic pattern and eventually established its own theatrical form,
the Soteria plays. Ihese plays were neither tragedies nor comedies but a genre
beyond those more divisive courses of action.
Today, the most effective theater should practice a two-track approach to
performance: having invited the audience to participate in ritual, it also elicits
self-reflection. In a sense, Fischer’s entire book can be read as being about the
tension between these two poles, between a fascist way of employing ritual and
a reflexive and progressive way of employing ritual. Fischer emphasizes the
difference between ritual and literature when she claims that poetic rituality
displays more variation, innovation, creation, and critique than ritual per se,
but she also stresses that rituality and reflexivity do not necessarily stand in
exclusionary opposition to each other.” The telos of self-reflexive ritual may
be difficult, but it is not impossible. Everything depends on the exact quantity
and quality of relation between ritual and reflection that an artwork is able to
achieve. This cannot be a mere both/and, but it must be a one-through-the¬
other or a parts-whole relation. A performance that wants to lead a potentially
tragic conflict toward positive resolution needs to interweave ritual and re¬
flection. In its ritual elements, such reflexive ritual would let us participate in
and experience the shared stability of pre-existing structures in the world, of
a — if you will — divine order; but it is through its new and progressive ideas,
through language, and through its human agents’ decisions and actions, that
it would allow us to discover such an objective order. This seems fitting for
rational twenty-first-century subjects: each of us, as a member of humanity,
needs to find a path forward — hopefully, a shared path to resolution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BECKWITH, Sarah: Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, Ithaca, Cornell
University Press, 2011.
BRAUNGART, Wolfgang: Ritual und Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1996.
BRAUNGART, Wolfgang: Ästhetischer Katholizismus: Stefan Georges Rituale der
Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1997.
Drama, in Hellmut Hal Rennert (ed.): Essays on Twentieth-Century German Drama and
Theater: An American Reception (1977-1999), New York, Lang, 2004, 46-52.
” Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität, 96.
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