The Achievement of Brecht Raymond Williams

(i> It quite often happens that a writer’s reputation reaches us

before we have any close knowledge of his work. It was so with Ibsen in England, in the 1890s; it has been so, with Brecht, in the 1950s. Ideas can travel faster than the literature from which they are derived. In the case of Brecht, two kinds of idea were associated with him before we knew his plays with any adequacy: first, the idea of an epic theatre, centred not on identification but on alienation; second, that he was a communist, a Marxist intellectual, deeply involved in current political controversy and therefore open to straight political reactions. As we get to know Brecht better, we do not find either of these ideas irrelevant; each is very close to his essential achievement. But at best, with the frame ready-made, we read the achievement backwards; at worst we cut down the picture to fit the frame. Most of us have still to gain a full knowledge of Brecht’s work, which is not as yet available as a whole and not yet all translated. But it seems that we may now have just enough work to begin a critical estimate: one which grows out of what seem to be the major plays rather than out of the reputation.

(ii) The movement against naturalism in the theatre was never merely

technical. At its most mature, naturalism effectively embodied all that was best in the general middle-class view of life: respect for individuals and family relationships, a general humanitarianism, a preoccupation with individual conscience. This view was taken to breaking-point in Ibsen, at that historical period (of fundamental importance to modern culture) when the best men trained to this view of life were beginning radically to question its adequacy. One main line of this reaction was to break the domestic frame, to con- front man again with God and with certain absolute human demands. This line has led to the best of our own verse drama. The second main reaction was to confront man with his real society, to widen the scope of moral questions from personal to social behaviour.

Ibsen stands at the head of both these reactions, but each, ob- viously, had to develop beyond him. His major achievement, though he looked penetratingly in every direction from the deadlock that preoccupied him, was the dramatic realisation of men faced by a false society, which could not remain external but which in its consequences broke in on the family and on the most secret individual life. Much interesting modern drama has simply repeated this pattern: the calling to make life, the debt and complication that

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drag back and destroy. Only a few have searched beyond this, towards the sources of the destructive element. One source has been identified as the inevitable collapse of humanism: man’s pride, detached from God, taking its fall. A second source, mapped by the new psychology, was idenaed as a permanent destructive element in man: the roots of guilt and hate. Between them, these sources have supplied much of our best twentiethentury work.

Brecht looked in a different direction. He saw the destructive forces as parts of a false social consciousness, which had perverted moral thinking and erected many kinds of specious defence and disguise. So deep was this perversion that sympathy was the last thing wanted. We must be shocked into seeing the real situation, with no temptation to draw back because it would expose someone with whom we had identified ourselves. Only the shock would do, in the first instance: it was not a case of refining the argument, but of throwing us back on reality and breaking its terms.

(iii) In his early plays, in the 1920s, this impulse to shock, at any level,

is very clear. At this stage, very similar to some English drama in the 1950s, there is a raw chaotic resentment, a hurt so deep that it requires new hurting, a sense of outrage which demands that people be outraged. So deep is this that it is very often expressed in crude physical imagery; it is a revulsion from spit and excrement which demands the exposure of both; a revulsion from false loving which leads straight to the whore. Many writers have used this simple exposure of dirt, this conscious turning to whores and criminals, as a way of expressing the tragic collapse of virtue. In Joyce, Maya- kowsky, Brecht, the same patterns of attraction and disgust are clear. And for some time, in Brecht, there was nothing more. In The Threepenny Opera, the criminals and whores are offered as a portrait of respectable bourgeois society-not exactly a representa- tion which that society will wish to acknowledge. And indeed there can be no acknowledgement. There is quite enough disgust, quite enough sense that life and society are immoral, to support successive generations of middle-class playgoers in their enjoyment of such plays: the crooks and whores are the licensed types of the society, and can be warmed to because they live out the reality without pretence. All such work reveals itself, finally, as a protection of conventional morality: there is no real shock, because these are a special class, with no relation to ourselves. It is profoundly dis- couraging to see so much contemporary English drama and fiction still tramping this same road: the consciously outrageous that nobody even pretends to be outraged by, but simply settles back to enjoy. Brecht, when this happened to his Threepenny Opera, was driven into a new creative effort. He thought he had turned the

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trick in the play’s production, but he had been caught in his own paradox: the more people sat back and watched this kind of action, the less they identified themselves with its characters, the safer their ordinary view of life was, When the Threepenny Opera was published, Brecht wrote :

It is a sort of summary of what the spectator in the theatre wishes to see of life. Since, however, he sees at the same time certain things that he does not wish to see and thus sees his wishes not only fulfilled but also criticised . . . he is, in theory, able to give the theatre a new function . . . Complex seeing must be practised. . . Thinking about the flow of the play is more important than thinking from within the flow of the play.

He certainly considered that he had written the play in such a way that this complex seeing was enforced: in his “epic style” and in distancing effects that pushed the spectator into “the attitude of one who smokes at ease and watches”. But he was still himself confused, himself not distanced, and moreover

today the theatre exerts an absolute primacy over dramatic writing. . . The moment it gets hold of a play, the theatre immediately starts transforming it-except those passages which are not in direct contra- diction to the theatre-so that it no longer in any way remains a foreign body.

The realisation of this fact drove Brecht, as it has again and again driven dramatists in this century, into a frontal attack on existing theatrical traditions and methods, and into the development of his own previously scattered amendments. It led him also to another characteristic conclusion :

Since the theatre itself is resisting the transformation of its function, it is a good thing if those dramas whose purpose is not only to be produced in the theatre but also to change the theatre are read by the spectator himself--out of sheer mistrust of the present-day theatre. . . In drama too we should introduce footnotes and the practice of thumbing through and checking up.

He even wrote of elements of his epic style-such as the boards describing coming scenes-as a start towards the “literarisation of the theatre. . . to establish contact with other institutions of intel- lectual activity”.

Yet the conception of the Threepenny Opera was against him; it fitted too easily, in spite of his efforts, into “what the spectator wishes to see”. I t is not a matter of technical immaturity; in method the play is often brilliant. It is really that too much of himself was still contained within what had become a conventionally dissident pattern of feeling: that faced with an immoral society you can display immorality as a kind of truth. People buy and sell each other, in the Threepenny Opera, with cold hearts and with only occasional covering sentiments. But yes of course, the audience comments; that’s life. Never “that shouldn’t be life”; never even “that needn’t be life”; but the old cold-hearted muck about the warm-hearted

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crooks and whores who at least are honest, who have seen through this nonsense about society and all that earnest moralising. Brecht thought he had seen through these things himself-the society was false and the moralising hypocritical-but he already realised that at this point you have really seen nothing, because what you have seen is what the society wants you to see: “eats first, morals after”. Brecht thinks he is detaching himself from this by calling it bourgeois morality, but in the Threepenny Opera this is so external, so casual and incidental, that it is in effect an indulgence. The displacement of feelings about modern commercial society on to a group of pseudo-eighteenth century robbers and whores is as good as an escape clause. Nobody leaves the theatre saying “I am like that”; he leaves saying “they are like that”, the people on the stage and no doubt a good many others too, but not us. To a dramatist who wanted to teach new ideas, the inevitable reception of the Threepenny Opera was a challenge to new methods.

(iv) At the end of the 1920s Brecht turned consciously to a didactic

theatre and to Marxism. St. Joan of the Stockyardr is an exciting exploration towards the manner of his late plays, but a more characteristic result of his new emphasis was The Measures Taken, a bare exposition of revolutionary morality which seems to me wholly devoid of any kind of interest. Escaping the cynical paradoxes of the Threepenny Opera, Brecht had also left behind the idea of “complex seeing” which was his most original dramatic contribution. Temporarily, for the sake of discipline and simplicity, his unique insight into the contradictions of morality was set aside, for a willed conclusion. The same is true, really, of his more substantial version of Gorki’s Mother, which is genuinely dramatic and yet which he had later to revise to get the necessary complexity of interpretation. Slowly, and now through the tensions of exile, he was working towards dramatic methods which could do justice to his vision, and then suddenly, in two or three extraordinary years at the end of the 1930s, he broke through to his Good Woman of Setzuan, his Mother Courage, and his Galileo. If we add to these the later Caucasian Chalk Circle, we are at the heart of Brecht’s important drama.

The Good Woman of Setzuan is a brilliant matching of Brecht’s essential moral complexity with a dramatic method which can genuinely embody it. The moral framework is expIicit, as it was in Strindberg’s Dreamplay, in the traditional device of the gods visiting earth to find a good person. But the action which this initiates is clearer in Brecht than in Strindberg, because the central perception is more precise. In his early plays Brecht had been attracted to morally ambiguous characters, whom he could use to point a cynical paradox about conventional morality. In The Good

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Woman of Setzuan these feelings have developed and clarified. He can now invite us to look at what happens to a good person in a bad society, not through argument, but through a dramatic demon- stration. Shen Te is linked to some of his earlier characters in that she is first presented as the conventional kind-hearted prostitute, but this is almost incidental and certainly does not count in the main action. Brecht can show, through her, without ambiguity, the ways in which goodness is exploited, by gods and men alike, if it remains on a purely individual basis. If it is always a sin against life to allow oneself to be destroyed by cruelty or indifference or greed, then goodness is trapped in an intolerable dilemma: the real split in consciousness which a purely individual morality, seriously lived through, inevitably leads to. Goodness turns into its opposite, and then back again, and then both co-exist, for the dilemma is beyond individual solution. And this is conveyed with simplicity and power in Shen Te’s transformation of herself into her tough male cousin, Shui Ta, who is first a disguise and then in effect takes on an inde- pendent existence. Brecht is always impressive, in his mature plays, in the discovery of ways of enacting genuine alternatives: not so much, as in traditional drama, through the embodiment of alterna- tives in opposing characters, but by their embodiment in one person, who lives through this way and then that and invites us to draw our conclusions. This is “complex seeing” integrated in depth with the dramatic form, and it is carried right through in that there is no imposed resolution-the tension is there to the end, and we are formally invited to consider it. The ordinary reactions with which we cover this tension are carefully put into the mouths of other charac- ters, so that we can discover their inadequacy while the tension is still there to see. The methods of expressionist drama, normally used to manifest this breaking tension within a single consciousness, are used by Brecht with power and skill, but have acquired a new clarity, a genuine absence of the hysteria characteristic of ordinary expressionism, by the use of controlling and distancing elements which spring from the desire to examine rather than to expose. Brecht is as far as possible, in this play, from the method of special pleading which insists on the spectator or reader seeing the world through the action and tensions of a single mind. This ordinary expressionist emphasis has been transformed by deliberate generalisa- tion, and by the appeal to impersonal judgment. The Good Woman of Setzuan, if not Brecht’s greatest play, is a profoundly original development of dramatic form in its most important sense.

In cestain ways, the Caucasian Chalk Circle belongs with The Good Woman of Setzuan, in dramatic method, but it is a very much less successful play. The framework of the Soviet collective farm dispute is arbitrary and distracting; the issue it raises is not followed through. In the main action, two stories-of Azdac and of Grusha- are again quite arbitrarily related. The dramatic image in the title

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is effective, and is given Brecht’s characteristic twist: the woman who fails the test wins because she is more concerned with life than with property and therefore cannot compete. This genuinely dramatises a revolutionary morality, putting life and growth before precedent and formal title, But the simplicity and dramatic point of the Grusha story are blunted by the quite different conception of Azdac, who is a survival (interesting in that it shows the element of persistence in Brecht) from the earlier vision of anarchic paradox. Azdac’s carica- ture of justice is like Macheath’s caricature of free enterprise: each reminds us of negative elements of the original by living out an even more preposterous negative. Like all good caricature, Azdac is enjoyable, but it is then only arbitrarily, by a kind of reckless coincidence, that he is in the end dramatically identified with the positive morality of the story of Grusha. Brecht’s vitality and bril- liance, clear in this play as in nearly everything he wrote, are not dramatic virtues that we can accept unanalysed. He is often very like Shaw in this: that he becomes more exciting-more consciously vital and brilliant-as he becomes more confused. About experi- mental drama, people are often afraid to say this, restricting them- selves, because of uneasiness, to comment on the techniques as such. But we shall always fall short of true judgement if we suppose that these isolable qualities are the whole terms of value; we have to look at what the wit is for, what the engaging roughness is for, and in the case of The Caucasian Chalk Circle I think we shall discover that in effect they distract both audience and author from a central con- fusion of experience.

(v) The first great merit of Mother Courage is that it brings back into

drama a kind of action which on the whole has been abandoned to the novel. To call this action Shakespearean is not to put the praise too high: history and people come alive on the stage, leaping past the isolated, virtually static action that we have got used to in modem theatre, yet replacing it not by a simple pell-mell but by an action that continually multiplies rooted detail, in an active history of events and persons, controlled from a centre of moral concern which is not the earlier desire to demonstrate but the mature com- mitment to “complex seeing”. What is important about this play is that the drama simultaneously occurs and is seen; it is not an action assumed and then argued. Such an achievement ought not to be rare-it is what all the textbooks prescribe-but it is in fact only rarely (Synge’s Piayboy of the Western World is another good example) that it is unmistakeably there.

Criticism of the play has usually got off on the wrong track by starting with the question whether Mother Courage, as a person, is meant to be admired or despised. But the point is not what we feel

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about her hard, lively opportunism; it is what we see, in the action, of where this leads. By enacting a genuine consequence, Brecht raises his old paradox to a new level, both dramatically and intel- lectually. It is not “take the case of this woman”, but “see the case of these people, in movement”. What else can be done, here, where blind power is loose, but to submit, to chisel, to try to stay safe? And by doing these things, here-submitting and pretending to virtue, or submitting and cheating round the back-a family is destroyed. The question is then not “what should they have done?” but “what are they doing, what have they done?” All Brecht’s dramatic skill is deployed to lead us to this critical realism; it is not an abstract morality, with force and pressure temporarily set aside, but an active process which is simultaneously moral and dramatic. The terrible drumming of the dumb girl, at the end, is not a solution, or an isolated heroic gesture; it is part of the urgency of the whole conception, calling the city to attend to what is happening:

You’ll sleep forever when you’re dead But if you’re not, then look alive.

The play is written, throughout, to present this urgency without identification. The contradictions in the characters-that they are sometimes hard, sometimes generous, and so on-are real, but they exist not only at the level of personal qualities; they exist also at the level of the play as a whole. Much of the speech is the play speaking, drawing strength from its characters but also moving beyond them, as here :

Chaplain: . . . Mother Courage, I see how you got your name. Mother Courage: Poorer people need courage. They’re lost, that’s why.

That they even get up in the morning is something-in their plight. Or that they plough a field, in wartime. Or that they have an Emperor and a Pope, what courage that takes, when you can lose your life by it. The poor! They hang each other one by one, they slaughter each other in the lump, so if they want to look each other in the face once in a while-well, it takes courage, that’s all.

The control here, in so complex a piece of dramatic writing, is remarkable. The direct comment comes through, and indicates the main concern of the whole work, but at the same time the word-play on “courage” follows with exactly the right amount of emphasis: we need this woman if we are to look ourselves in the face; the drama, with this character at its centre, is a way of looking.

(vi> Galileo is an achievement of a quite different kind. It is a play of

the crisis of consciousness, as opposed to the dramatisation of con- flicting instincts, conflicting illusions and momentary perceptions, in Mother Courage-a play that had rightly to reach crisis with the frantic drumming of one who cannot speak. Galileo is conscious,

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and to that extent he is a free man, in ways that the pressed and driven cannot be expected to be. In abstraction, the choice presented to him looks the same: accept our terms or be destroyed. But in detail, the choice is quite different. Because he is conscious, not only can he foresee consequence, but also, inevitably, he represents more than himself, embodies in his person reason and liberation.

Once again, criticism of the play has got off to a wrong start, with the question “Is Galileo to be admired or despised?’. Brecht is not asking this question. He is asking what happens to consciousness when it is caught in the apparent deadlock between the terms of individual and social morality. Galileo’s submission can be rational- ised, and perhaps justified, at the individual level, as a way of gaining time to go on with his scientific work. But the point this misses is what the scientific work is for. If it is for common human understanding of the world, the betrayal is fundamental. It is by detaching his individual scientific work from the general human purposes which it ought to serve that Galileo has failed. It is not, in the end, what we think of him as a man, but what we think of this result. In the detail of its writing, and in the force of its presentation of Galileo himself, the play brings this issue to real consciousness: not as a “problem”, but as a matter of real pressures. It has often been said, by Western critics, that Brecht’s Marxism was a handicap or at best an irrelevance. Yet surely here, at least, it is the intellectual quality of a new way of looking at the world that lays the foundations for the play’s greatness. We are used to the issues of martyrdom, or of the individual in conflict with his society, but we are not used to this radically different way of looking at the matter:

Galileo: Could we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scien- tists? The movements of the stars have become clearer; but to the mass of the people the movements of their masters are still incalculable . . . With time you may discover all that is to be discovered, and your progress will only be a progression away from mankind. The gulf be- tween you and them can one day become so great that your cry of jubilation over some new achievement may be answered by a universal cry of horror.

It is true that, trained to a different consciousness, we struggle to reduce the play to a different meaning, or, more honestly, argue that this conclusion is only there in one speech, and not in the play as a whole. But I think this is a simple misreading, starting from the fact that we come to the story of Galileo with our own powerful fixed image of the liberal martyr, and then cannot see what is actually being presented. Certainly the text itself is explicit: it is not only Galileo but the play that speaks. Thus Galileo’s first great speech presents the terms of the subsequent moral action:

The most solemn truths are being tapped on the shoulder; what was never doubted is now in doubt. And because of that a great wind has arisen, lifting even the gold-embroidered coat-tails of princes and

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prelates, SO that the fat legs and the thin legs underneath are seen; legs like our legs. . . I predict that in our lifetimes astronomy will be talked about in the market-places. Even the sons of fishwives will go to school.

And then this is followed in the next scene, that of the presentation of the telescope, by this speech of the Curator of the Great Arsenal of Venice:

Once again a page of fame in the great book of the arts is embellished with Venetian characters. A scholar of world repute here presents to you, and you alone, a highly saleable cylinder to manufacture and put on the market in any way you please. And has it occurred to you that in war-time by means of this instrument we shall be able to distinguish the build and number of an enemy’s ships a full two hours earlier than he can descry ours . . . ?

The contrast is hardly too subtle to be seen; if we miss it, it is because we are resolutely interested in something else. Our ordinary reception of the play is an ironic illustration of the power of par- ticular patterns of consciousness, through which we can see one action and make it another. This is typically true in the theatre, where as Brecht observed, this play can ‘without much adjustment of the contemporary theatrical style, be presented as a piece of historical “ham” with a star part’. But the play, as written, is firm. Galileo, committed to a universal view of science, is trapped from the beginning by another kind of consciousness: the imperatives of a different loyalty, to the particular ruling group that maintains him, to produce for the market and for war. It is not that as an individual he is a hypocrite; it is that under these real pressures he embodies both a true consciousness and a false consciousness-the fact of their coexistence is what Brecht invites us to see. The movement of the play, is from the ironic, apparently safe acceptance of false consciousness (what you say to get by, in an imperfect world) to the point where false consciousness becomes false action and is not irony but tragedy and waste. In the end Brecht is showing us not an individual and his history but a structure of feeling and its conse- quences: this is the central strength of his mature drama.

(vii) In the history of drama, Brecht’s achievement will perhaps be seen

as this: that he took the powerful analytic techniques of expression- ism and succeeded in reintegrating them with the main body of humanist drama. Naturalism and expressionism had in common the fact that they were ordinarily static: the unfolding of a character or group of characters; the exposition of a state of mind. Brecht took from expressionism the techniques of exposition, but broke out from its ordinary deadlock by a sense of human history and move- ment which had been absent from drama for many generations. The great power of lbsen and Strindberg sprang from the depth of

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their exposure to the deadlock. More generally, the power of naturalism had been in its commitment to the detail of human experience; the power of expressionism in its commitment to certain. basic patterns. The other developments we have seen in drama (especially in our own verse drama) were essentially refinements of these achievements: in particular the development of a dramatic language in which both detail and pattern were more specifically alive. Brecht, in his mature work, and especially in Mother Courage and Galileo, at least partly broke the deadlock: this was not the end of the action, for history was moving through it, adding a new dimen- sion. In practical terms, the sense of history became active through the rediscovery of techniques of dramatic movement: the action is not single in space and time, and certainly not ‘permanent and timeless’; it is, rather, complex in actual development, and, through the distancing that invites critical appraisal, complex and dynamic in actual reference. Struggling always with his own fixed conscious- ness, Brecht could only begin this transformation. But the idea and the practice of his ‘epic theatre’ were at once a recovery of very early elements in the humanist drama of the Renaissance (where this capacity for action seemed at its full creative power), and a remaking of these elements in terms of a modern consciousness. Continually limited by his own weaknesses-both his constant opportunism, which too often comes through as dramatic cheating, and his vestigial jeering and coarseness, the real dregs of his time and ours- he struggled towards a transformation and in part achieved it. Instead of trying to convert his work to the complacencies of our fashionable despair, or more easily to the grossness of our defensive cynicism, which at times he readily nourishes, we should try to see what it means to drama when in recovering a sense of history and of the future a writer recovers the means of an action both complex and dynamic. In most modern drama, the best conclusion is that that is how it was. Only an occasional major play goes further, with the specific excitement of recognition that this is how it is. Brecht, a t his best, reaches out to and touches the necessary next stage: that this is how it is, for this reason, but the action is continually being replayed, and it could be otherwise. And this happens, not in separate stages of seeing and reflection, but in the complex seeing of a single dramatic experience.

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