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JENNIFER A. HERDT theater, the novel Wilhelm Meister asks whether the formative powers of drama, and with it ritual, have been outgrown in the prosaic world of modernity.? Even as Goethe seeks to write a novel capable of serving as “secular scripture,” he wrestles with the question of the role of ritual for the modern individual, tasked with taking responsibility for his own self-formation. These concerns come into particularly sharp focus in the carefully orchestrated ritual scene in which the Tower Society reveals itself to Wilhelm. Wilhelm views theater as the arena within which he can truly become a persona, but he comes to see that ordinary life is, in fact, this arena. This involves an initially painful disenchantment. The novel as a genre offers the ideal context for processing this disenchantment and this personal development, given the space it opens up for the exploration of subjectivity and interiority. How does ritual fit in with all of this? While the novel is prosaic — a prose genre devoted to prosaic reality — it can incorporate reflection on ritual. The key example of this is the scene in which the mysterious Tower Society (quite reminiscent of the Freemasons) reveals itself to Wilhelm Meister as the force that has played a fate-like role in his development. Important as this ritual is within the novel, the novel itself does not constitute an example of “poetic rituality” as defined by Saskia Fischer, since ritual elements do not fundamentally structure the novel as a whole." And while this scene surely borrows from traditions of play-within-a-play, it is, of course, as an example of play-within-a-novel, a different, incompletely performative, form of reflexivity. Hamlet orchestrates a play in order to ascertain Claudius’ guilt; the Tower Society orchestrates a ritual in order to catalyze Wilhelm’s emancipation from adolescence, but Goethe nests this ritual within the fluid, pluriform realms of subjectivity opened up by the novel. The ritual is not actually performed, only retold. Goethe is wrestling here with the question of whether both drama as an art form and ritual as a decisive site for ethical formation have been outgrown in modernity. He gives no final answer to this question. That in itself demands the reflective consciousness characteristic of modernity; and of the novel. The long and complex plot of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship can nevertheless be summed up briefly: Wilhelm, growing up in a bourgeois household where he is expected to follow his father into the life of commerce and thereby * Jürgen Jacobs: Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder: Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bildungsroman, Munich, Fink, 1972, 17; Rolf Engelsing: Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500-1800, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1974, 184-192. 5 Saskia Fischer: Ritual und Ritualität im Drama Nach 1945, Paderborn, Fink, 2019, 95-99. Other key reference points in the literature include Wolfgang Braungart: “Ritual und Literatur,” in D. Weidner (ed.): Handbuch Literatur und Religion, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2016, 427-434 and Erika Fischer-Lichte: Das Theater der Rituale, in A. Michaels (ed.): Die neue Kraft der Rituale, Heidelberg, Winter Verlag, 2008, 117-139. This discussion builds on ritual studies, and in particular the work of Victor Turner: From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York, Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. + 108 +
