Bertolt Brecht

NOTES ON BERTOLT BRECHT

Brecht's drama theory involves casting the theater as a place of constructive, dynamic alienation and social reconstruction.  He develops (along with Vladimir Mayakovski, Vsevelod Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator) a notion of theater that relies on a form of alienation-effect or Verfremdungseffekt that entails doing just about anything to keep the audience critical and aware that it's watching a play: floodlights, stage mechanics on display, multiple parts for actors, direct address to the audience, various interruptions, and so forth.  By such means, Brecht orients the theater towards action in the world, and rejects varieties of ancient and early modern drama theory that entail drawing us into the spectacle and taking it as if it were real.  Doing that, he suggests, only pulls us into present-day reality and makes us more or less accept it as natural, as "the way things really are and always will be," whereas we should be trying to change things for the better.

Let's consider some of the theories that Brecht rejects, beginning with Aristotle's theory of tragic drama: His treatise Peri Poietikes tells us that drama is a species of representation that uses a logical, tightly-constructed plot like the one in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus to engender strong identification with a flawed but noble hero.  If all is done well, says Aristotle, a tragic play will generate the proper tragic emotions: pity for the hero's plight and a certain dread that if we were in that hero's place, we might do and suffer the same fate.  The upshot of it all seems to be that such emotions are roused and then quelled, perhaps almost in the manner of physical exercise that "works out" the body and leaves it in a state of rest, but ultimately stronger.  We may learn something about ourselves and our place in the world, too -- whether the knowledge turns out to be comforting or, as is usually the case in tragedy, quite otherwise.  Brecht would see Aristotelian theory as clever but essentially conservative: it's probably oriented more towards preserving and justifying the status quo than towards changing it.  Aristotle was a man of science: his purpose was to study the world, not make radical alterations in the order of things on the basis of some political theory.

Then there is the neoclassical emphasis on dramatic illusionism and elegant decorum, which rely respectively on a reworking of Aristotle's drama theory and Horace's poetics in his verse treatise Ars Poetica.  Neoclassical theorists insisted -- based on a dubious extrapolation from comments Aristotle made about the so-called three unities of time, place and action -- on absolute fidelity to lifelikeness.  If the action would logically take three hours, that's how long the play should run; the location should likewise be consistent and suitably narrow, and so forth.  And of course French drama in particular was strong on a sense of the order of things, on what is and is not appropriate to represent: decorum of speech, manner, and dress must always be observed. 

The neoclassical assumptions are worth drawing out by way of critique, and nobody does that sort of thing better than "the inestimable Dr. Johnson," himself a fine neoclassical critic who could see through the pretensions of more rigid fellow colleagues across the pond.  Here is a dose of Johnson's commonsense retort against neoclassical extremism about the unities and dramatic illusion:

 

…. It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.

 ....

The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players. They came to hear a certain number of lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different actions that complete a story may be in places very remote from each other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre?

....

 

It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment; but we rather lament the possibility than suppose the presence of misery, as a mother weeps over her babe, when she remembers that death may take it from her. The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction; if we thought murders and treasons real, they would please no more.

Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.

The last thing mentioned, namely that drama and other fictions simply bring realities to mind, is a good summary of what Johnson has been saying.  It is as good as saying that while a fiction on the stage or page may be "just make-believe," our experience of that fiction is in itself authentic.  When you imagine something happening to you or someone you care about, your emotional response will be real enough.  People can be profoundly moved by works of art without any need to forget the boundaries between make-believe and life in deadly earnest.

But let's get back to Brecht.  His notion of alienating people when they go to a play may sound unrealistic and counterintuitive, but a point in Brecht's favor is that we seem to have a compelling urge to allow ourselves to be drawn into the circle of illusion, or at least -- following Johnson's commonsense view -- we are capable of feeling strongly for characters and compelling representations that "bring realities to mind."  So I suppose Brecht's theory counts on this fundamental disposition to respond intensely to imaginative fiction and creatively works with it and against it.  Brecht's plots are in fact quite good, and so is his development and handling of characters.  He isn't saying that a drama should bore us half to death with stick figures or that it should be entirely a political and intellectual exercise.  Instead, he is trying to awaken the audience's critical intelligence in a way that goes beyond our just being aware that "the stage is only a stage, and … the players are only players."  Knowing that doesn't in itself mean the audience will be inspired to change how they live and treat others.  People can enjoy what they are watching, and indeed it's doubtful that there would be any point in the exercise without the work being pleasurable -- that's an ancient given only a fool would discard.  At the same time, obvious stage props and Brechtian ploys like cue cards will often remind them that this is in fact a spectacle whose action and characters are to be judged, actively compared to the real world, and at some point in the near future, acted upon.  In Brecht's view, verisimilitude or "lifelikeness" won't accomplish any of that; in fact, it should be easy to see that all of this neoclassical thinking we have been talking about tends to prop up the playwright's present-day reality, not work towards changing it.  The same goes for the ancient Roman critic Horace's emphasis on decorum -- his famous Ars Poetica is witty and wise advice for aspiring artists, but at base, it tells the aspirants that they should learn what their audiences want and what beliefs they hold, and then reflect those desires and beliefs back to them in a more elegant form.  "Make me beautiful!" as the saying goes.  That is hardly a prescription for an art that might shake things up anytime soon.

Other avenues of thought on drama: Romantic-era plays, even though they rebel against neoclassical precept and practice, tend to be more psychomache or spiritual struggle on the part of an alienated hero -- think Byron's Manfred -- than a kind of drama that urges real social and political change.  And as for C19 realist drama like that of, say, Ibsen or Chekhov, it may have great merit, but once again it's hardly the vehicle for near-term change that someone with Brecht's revolutionary, anti-bourgeois sensibilities and agenda would find compatible.  For a Marxist, "slow change" is as good as saying "no change."  Besides, Brecht really isn't interested in designing characters so as to reveal deep inner conflicts and whatnot -- his theory of the gestus acting technique is all about demonstrating or evoking what happens at the interpersonal, social level: "it is what happens between people," says Brecht, "that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter."  ("A Short Organum for the Theatre," Kleines Organon für das Theater.  Paragraph 65.)

Finally, there's always the early twentieth century's experimental theater, just as Antonin Artaud's articulation of a "theater of cruelty" in his treatise Theatre and Its Double.  Such theories tend to collapse altogether the critical and experiential distance between theater and life beyond art, on the premise that, as Artaud suggests, people have become so numbed, so shellshocked, by so-called real life that they have forgotten how to have an authentic experience.  So art's function would to be to wake people up with a start.  It's an interesting idea, to be sure, but for Brecht's purposes as a proponent of dialectical or (earlier) "epic" theater, the theater of cruelty sounds suspiciously like aesthetic escapism, or even irrationalism.