Postmodern Brecht

A Re-Presentation

Elizabeth Wright

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134833375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In this radical and deliberately controversial re-reading of Brecht, first published in 1989, Elizabeth Wright takes a new view of the playwright, giving us a more 'Brechtian' reading than so far achieved and making his work historically relevant here and now. The author discusses in detail Brecht's principle theories and concepts in the light of poststructuralist theory, and reassess the aesthetics and politics with regard to Marxist critics of his own day. Wright includes a re-reading of Brecht's early works, which presents them in relation to a postmodern theatre, and gives critical analyses of the work of Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, and Heiner Müller, who use the techniques of performance theatre, showing how they deconstruct Brecht's distinction between illusion and reality and point to a postmodern understanding of their dialectical relation.

1
Misunderstanding Brecht: the critical scene

Brecht's work, owing to its range of theory and practice, is read, performed, and taught, perhaps more than the work of other writers of his stature, via the mediations of past scholars and critics who have become established as an orthodoxy within what might be called a broad church. Thus most informed theatre-goers probably believe that they have a fair idea of Brecht's principal innovations in the theatre and will be able to cite the central categories of his theatrical practice. It seems inevitable that for the moment there is no way of re-reading Brecht without also rereading the story of his reception.¹ To think through the readings of other scholars has become quite as important as to sort through the formidable quantity of writing that Brecht has left. I would therefore like to give a critical overview of Brecht criticism within the context of my own project, that of co-opting him as postmodernist. If modernism is to be characterized as breaking with tradition while still retaining an individualist stance, then postmodernism can be seen as calling into question both tradition and individualism. In order to indicate something of the way this might be done my account will focus on the issues involved, both explicitly and implicitly, rather than on the precise contributions of the various scholars I draw on. I regard the mediation of recent German scholarship as particularly important for Brecht studies in English, for while German scholars seem to take cognizance of what is being done in English, unfortunately this does not operate the other way round, English scholars rarely engaging with the works of German scholars, except to draw them in as support.

What is the present status of Brecht as a political writer? In the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Brecht has been demoted from national author and is now seen as a big disappointment. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) he is viewed as a pedagogue of the theatre, a rationalist thinker presenting a simplified view of reality. A still-prevailing view on both sides of the Channel is to see Brecht as moving through three phases, from an early subjectivist, or anarchist, or nihilist phase in Baal (I make the world), to a middle-period rationalist, or behaviourist or mechanistic phase (the world makes me), to a supposed dialectical resolution of the dilemmas of phase one and two in the late plays (dialectic between self and world), presumed to usher in a third and mature phase. In the past this conclusion resulted in his being seen in the West as a great writer despite being a communist, and in the East in his having achieved a proper dialectic despite his beginning with a decadent aesthetic. The English view is by and large still in support of this version, running from Esslin in 1959 to Suvin in 1984 (except for Dickson, 1978, who organizes Brecht's oeuvre by arguing for a consistent anticipation of Utopia through all his works), but there are now signs that German scholarship, for a long time equally committed to its own three-phase version, is challenging this view by interrogating anew both Brecht's work and that of his critics.²

Common to the theories of the three phases is the notion of ultimate continuity. What is seen as the turning point in Brecht's development, his encounter with Marxism in the mid-1920s and his subsequent reversal of the first, subjectivist phase into the second, objectivist one, is painlessly assimilated in a crude notion of dialectic. This moment is given a different interpretation by East and West. The West reads the 'conversion' to Marxism as an outcome of Brecht's personal psychology: the anarchist-cum-nihilist creator of Baal (regarded generally as in some sense the alter ego of the young Brecht) is searching for firm ground and promptly invents the Lehrstück, which enables him to substitute a collective authoritarianism for a self-indulgent individualism. In the third and final phase, there is a synthesis of the two positions, resulting in the 'great' plays. This view has become more refined and sophisticated since its inception by Esslin (1959, p. 137) in Suvin's version (1984), although in an afterword to his book, he would like to amend his 1967 view of a 'non-consenting, a consenting and a mature phase', which he now considers 'too neatly Hegelian'. He is far from oblivious of the political implication of the 'Esslinian bisection into immature (read political) and mature (read aesthetic) phases', but holds that the tripartite scheme 'is probably still of some introductory value' and that 'no acceptable alternative is yet to be seen' (Suvin, 1984, pp. 268-9). What is not immediately obvious is that this tripartite scheme is illicitly shifting an account of biographical stages onto an interpretation of the texts. It is a kind of genetic fallacy, for there is no necessity that an interpretation should be bound to a particular source of influence at a particular time. The ideology of the works is more likely to reveal itself if one attends to their textual elements without recourse to the immediate circumstances of composition.

But even from the biographical point of view the tripartite scheme is not secure. Reiner Steinweg's (1972a) methodical analysis of Brecht's theory of the Lehrstück as distinct from the content of the plays themselves, together with his presentation of hitherto unpublished material from the Brecht archives, has necessitated a new look at the way Brecht conceived the relation of aesthetics and politics, and this has offered a way out of the three-phase syndrome, since the documents Steinweg has published show that for Brecht the Lehrstück was to be the theatre of the future, but there is little sign that it is being taken account of in Brecht studies here (I shall come back to this whole issue, including the problem of translating the term Lehrstück).

The German reception

No reader ever reads from a position of neutrality: the reader reacts politically, even and especially where he or she inveighs against the politicizing of the arts. The German reception has its own peculiar fascination owing to its divided interests, that of East and West. A comprehensive article by Michael Schneider (1979) sets out in some detail how Brecht's fortunes have always fluctuated with the political consciousness of the Germans, serving as a kind of barometer of the current climate. During the Cold War of the 1950s Brecht's anti-fascist and anti-militarist plays furnished ideological ammunition against the FRG's policy of economic and military recovery, and during this time Brecht achieved the status of a new socialist classic in the GDR. In the FRG on the other hand, the workers and the petit-bourgeois became wholly preoccupied with the economic miracle (one might instance the reactions of the characters in Edgar Reiz's recent epic film Heimat), and evinced no further interest in politics. Hence Brecht's reinstatement as a classic was left to the intellectuals, who were inclined, as in England, to accept the artist despite the Marxist. Brecht's hour as a political writer in the GDR came in the wake of the student uprisings of 1968, when he was hailed by German youth as the communist poet of the day and as the poetic representative of class conflict, and when, according to Schneider, he became the property of radicals and socialist intellectuals, traded in for the existentialist theatre of Anouilh, Sartre, Camus, Ionesco, and Beckett, with the result that 'the Brecht-boycott of the fifties made way for a regular Brecht-boom' (Schneider, 1979, p. 27). His canonization in the FRG duly followed and he became a classic with an extending influence on the new left poets.

Yet all was not won: his fortunes declined in the early 1970s together with the impetus of the student revolt, at which time he lost his immediate political relevance. He was now set aside to make way for a new cult of inwardness, among whose representatives were Hermann Hesse and Peter Handke, a cult which constituted 'a neo-existentialist revulsion against politics, science, enlightenment', and culminated in 'Brecht-allergy', not to say 'Brecht-antipathy' (Schneider, 1979, p. 29). Yet all was not lost, because before the end of the 1970s this syndrome too became a new commodity, marketed as 'Brecht-fatigue' (Brecht-Müdigkeit) (Mittenzwei, 1977, p. 100). At a colloquium held in Frankfurt in 1978 Brecht was deemed inadequate by theatre directors because he could not provide them with enough subject-matter in his plays for their own subjectivity. But this, as will be seen, is really partly a problem of copyright (see 'Wer hat das Recht am Brecht'³), namely the extent to which Brecht's plays might be freely used as 'material', as he himself would have approved.

The English reception

Whereas recent German scholars have approached Brecht via the changing relations of aesthetics and politics within a specific historical context (Giese, 1974; Claas, 1977; Voigts, 1977), English scholars have continued to turn out either studies of the man and his work (Dickson, 1978 – though this breaks bounds because it treats Brecht as first and last a political writer), or of Brecht and the theatre (from Willett, 1959, to Needle and Thomson, 1981, to Fuegi, 1987). The introduction of the most recent collection on Brecht and the theatre declares that it 'is addressed to students and teachers of drama and non-academic readers, as well as to the German specialist', the focus being 'primarily on Brecht's place in the German theatrical tradition' (Bartram and Waine, 1982, p. ix). It is still assumed that the history of the modern theatre, culminating predictably in an institutionalized epic theatre with V-effect, will go down well all round, particularly if it includes a 'factual' account of the politico-historical context.

Another tendency of English Brecht reception is to introduce an ad hominem assessment on the basis of the contradictions between his life and his art, as in a review by Timothy Garton Ash, which asserts correctly that Brecht was a 'great exploiter: plundering books, friends and women' and was finally 'enthroned in East Berlin, with a West German publisher, Austrian passport and Swiss bank account' (Times Literary Supplement, 9 December 1983, p. 1363). Of course the review ends with an all too predictable sentiment: 'The poet Brecht is superbly subversive of every orthodoxy – including his own', or, as Esslin put it in 1959, 'a truly creative writer will have to break out of the narrow limits of the creed to which he has committed himself, namely, by following his own intuition' (p. 208). While Brecht's undoubted opportunism, his autocratic ways with women, and his political ambivalence are of considerable biographical and ideological interest and may make him in some respects an unadmirable figure, they are surely not factors to be held indiscriminately against him when a critical survey of his achievements as a writer is being conducted. Thus it is disconcerting that the most recent account of Brecht's theatrical practice, while being quite illuminating, keeps pointing up the gap between Brecht's socialist views and his privileged position in society, telling us, for instance, that 'Brecht moved in an atmosphere of radical bohemianism while retaining as his home base the comfortable attic apartment with maid service at his bourgeois parents' home and secretarial service at his father's office' (Fuegi, 1987, p. 9). A more objective account of Brecht's Realpolitik in the context of his personal and political aspirations and the various circumstances under which he came to live can be found in an article by Pachter (1980). The most systematic answer to the attacks on Brecht's political integrity is given by Brooker (1988), who argues in a close biographical and historical account that Brecht remained as interventionist in his later years as he had been earlier.⁴

In order to understand the English Brecht reception properly, it needs situating in its literary-historical context. Literature's claim to a special place in society has been upheld ever since Sidney's Apology for Poetry, which restored to poets their place in the state, denied to them by Plato. In more modern times the advent of Russian Formalism in the 1930s added theoretical weight to the study of literature as an autonomous and specific discipline. Indeed the Formalists' concept of defamiliarization is often loosely taken to be analogous with the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung, a point I will come back to. At the same time, and quite independently, Anglo-American criticism came up with a theory which focused on the literary text as such, to be distinguished from all other kinds of writing and to be treated as an object free from everything but literary history itself. A crucial factor was the logical positivist distinction between the language of poetry, regarded as 'emotive', and the language of science, regarded as 'referential'. Brecht's 'theatre of the scientific age' (GW 16, pp. 700-1) strives precisely to do away with this alienating division of science and art, even though he himself necessarily works with a historically bound positivistic view of science.

The English Brecht reception may therefore be seen as rooted in the Anglo-American tradition of literary studies, untroubled by any notion of 'reception theory', to the extent that English critics rarely tangle with other critics the way that German critics do.⁵ The overwhelming feeling here is that it is both more instructive and more pleasurable to go back to the supposedly immutable and unchanging primary text or to the account of actual productions rather than to confront critically the work done by others in the field. Other critics, if used at all, are mainly in the footnotes, to give credibility to scholarship, or, if in the running text, they are respectfully acknowledged. At most, they may be used for some point of disagreement in interpretation, while any genuine controversial material, the result of the position from which the criticism is launched, is largely ignored.⁶ The interpretative enterprise of most English criticism goes counter to Steinweg's work on the Lehrstück without any sign that it has taken his point. But until Brecht's Lehrstücke are considered as a central theoretical contribution in his work and not merely restricted to their content, scholarship is not likely to get beyond the three-phase reading of Brecht in some form or other (for a full discussion – in English, though not published in England – of the Lehrstück in the context of a radical break with tradition, see Kamath, 1983).

Is Brecht dead?

It is clear from the foregoing that Brecht is far from dead as an object of critical interpretation, but the question remains whether he is dead as regards making a live contribution to the theory and practice of the theatre. And here there is no consensus. Werner Mittenzwei defines his term 'Brecht-fatigue' as a symptom of the 'aesthetic emancipation of socialist literature' (1977, pp. 101-14). The aesthetic deposing of Brecht by his former pupils (he cites Peter Hacks in particular) may be seen as a reaction against Brecht's asserted positivistic belief in reason and science and against his 'aesthetic of contradictions'. Mittenzwei argues that in a socialist society it is no longer of grave import to confront an audience with the contradictions of reality; instead it is the subjective factor which will once more engage the interest of those who have achieved socialism. There is room for a new attitude with a consequent gain for aesthetic 'playfulness'; art and science may again be seen as distinct realms, whereas Brecht had brought them together. Brecht's successors argue that a new society has need of a new aesthetic: why bother to show in art what can now be learnt from reading Marx and Lenin (Mittenzwei, 1977, p. 107)? Aesthetic emancipation means that art is no longer required as a means of changing society, and therefore is not called upon to produce a direct social effect.

However, neither for Mittenzwei nor for the authors in question does this herald a return to the old bourgeois reception with its notion of catharsis as a release of pent-up emotion. Mittenzwei argues the need for another kind of catharsis which takes account of those contradictions that are not as easily assigned to class conflict as Brecht had supposed. The problem is, however, that upholders of the dialectic in the GDR are bound to find themselves in a dilemma, in that they want to hold on to the dialectic while maintaining that a synthesis has been achieved (the problem of the contradictory reality of socialism is central to the works of Heiner Müller, as Chapter 6 of this book shows). The most recent debates in both East and West have been in the theatre world and suggest that there is a strong feeling that Brecht cannot be merely reproduced à la lettre, that to use his work uncritically is a betrayal (Müller, 1980). A new volume of essays analyses the symptoms of 'Brecht-fatigue' with a view to re-discovering the actuality of Brecht's praxis (Aktualisierung Brechts, Haug et al., 1980). To investigate the most recent area of debate I now need to make a short excursus into the issue of the Lehrstück.

The Lehrstücke are a particularly sensitive point in the reception of Brecht both as a theoretician and a practitioner of the theatre, the problem surfacing in the very attempt to translate the term. The choice, itself of ideological significance, has in the past ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Misunderstanding Brecht: the critical scene
• 2 Brecht in theory and practice: refunctioning the theatre
• 3 Theory in praxis: comedy as discourse
• 4 Placing the theory: Brecht and modernity
• 5 Brecht and postmodernism: theatricalizing the unpresentable
• 6 The Brechtian postmodern
• Conclusion
• References
• Index