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JAN L. HAGENS Athenian theater especially during the final catastrophic phase ofthe Peloponnesian 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-theother or a parts-whole relation. A performance that wants to lead a potentially tragic conflict toward positive resolution needs to interweave ritual and reflection. 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. + 66 +
