Oldal 115 [115]
RITUAL AND THEATRICALITY IN GOETHES WILHELM MEISTER
suddenly from behind curtains, speak, and again disappear. Clearly, there is
a deliberate attempt here to draw on the power of ancient religious ritual to
construct a sense of an alternate, higher reality alongside ordinary mundane
experience. It is in this context that Wilhelm is informed, “You are saved, and
on the way to your goal” (HA 7.7.9, 495 ; E 303), and presented with his certifi¬
cate of completed apprenticeship. Yet a few pages later Jarno pokes fun at the
ritual: “Everything you saw in the tower was the relics of a youthful enterprise
that most initiates first took very seriously but will probably now just smile
at” (HA 7.8.5, 548; E 335). Wilhelm is aghast: “So they are just playing games
with those portentous words and signs? ... We are ceremoniously conducted to
a place that inspires awe, we witness miraculous apparitions, are given scrolls
containing mysterious, grandiose aphorisms which we barely understand, are
told we have been apprentices and are now free — and are none the wiser.”
(HA 7.8.5, 548, E 335-336). Jarno makes an effort to defend the practices, at
least as props for the young, who “have an unusually strong hankering after
mysteries, ceremonies and grandiloquence”; they “want to feel, albeit dimly
and indefinitely, that [their] whole being is affected and involved” (HA 7.8.5,
548-549; E 336). Jarno’s own unusual passion for knowledge and clarity almost
derails the entire enterprise; aware now of the excesses of his own prosaic
bent, he still regards disenchantment as salutary, even if he recognizes that it
is destructive for most if it comes too soon. Wilhelm, meanwhile, is offended
at having been subjected to yet another level of patronizing manipulation,
even though it is true that he certainly does want to feel that his whole being
is affected and involved in discerning his path forward in life.”
Of course, Jarno’s perspective is not authoritative; it is merely one perspec¬
tive. We cannot simply assume this to be a final statement that ritual is a
merely adolescent affair, although it is indeed probable that Goethe is passing
judgment on clumsy modern attempts to recreate the transformative poten¬
tial of ancient ritual. Literature, among the arts, is the most highly reflexive
— it reflects on ritual rather than enacting it, although rituals of course often
employ texts. At a certain moment, the novel aspired to be secular scripture
— meriting the kind of reading and re-reading that scripture undergoes and
serving as a touchstone for tracing one’s own spiritual development.'* Moreo¬
Richard Schechner argues that “the basic opposition is between efficacy and entertainment,
not between ritual and theatre. Whether one calls a specific performance ritual or theatre
depends on the degree to which the performance tends toward efficacy or entertainment.”
From Ritual to Theatre and Back, in R. Schechner — M. Schuman (eds.): Ritual, Play, and
Performance, New York, Seabury Press, 1976. On this measure the Tower ritual is would-be
ritual exposed as mere entertainment, as void of character-forming power — even as the
exposé itself may yield character transformation.
13 See Herdt: Ibid., 140-147. On the notion of “secular scripture,” see Nicholas Boyle: Sacred and
Secular Scriptures, Notre Dame (Ind.), University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. As Braungart
perceptively notes, repetition is constitutive of literary aesthetic, insofar as even the most
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