Though Brecht shuns an “apologetic discourse,” and offers “no Marxist catechism,” ^[8] Barthes therefore looked to a “post-Brechtian” theatre that would be marked by the dispersion of the tableau, the pulling to pieces of the “composition,” the setting in movement of the partial organs of the human figure, in short the holding in check of the metaphysical meaning of the work — but then also of its political meaning; or, at least, the carrying over of this meaning towards another politics.^[9]

Like the Chinese sage, Laozi (Lao Tse)… Mother Courage criticizes states that require an excess of virtue from their citizens. If only they were properly governed, ordinary virtues would suffice.

But it is symptomatic, as of more straightforward responses to Brecht’s texts, that Barthes missed the resonances in Mother Courage’s remark. He took it straight, as evidence of an ideal, if negative, meaning, of a découpage that offers a morally reprehensible figure up to criticism. He does not see her observation as convoluted and challenging, nor that it is part of a longer lasting critique. Barthes, therefore, simplifies and, in effect, himself fetishizes Brecht’s discourse. Like the Chinese sage, Laozi (Lao Tse), probably the immediate and certainly the mediate source of this observation, Mother Courage criticizes states that require an excess of virtue from their citizens. If only they were properly governed, ordinary virtues would suffice.^[10] These texts, therefore, already contain “post-Brechtian” characteristics. Not to have seen more complex possibilities, because the dramaturgy was so new, is scarcely surprising, but it affects the relationship between reader and what is read, and reduces the possibilities of rereading.

Sartre’s Brecht, also interestingly divided, was differently contradictory. He critiqued The Caucasian Chalk Circle because he felt the partial use of masks suppressed subjectivity. The masked character is seen “from outside,” and such distancing withholds sympathy.^[11] The “abstract” masked figures seemed to him like “insects.”^[12] To mark any individual as faceless, where others are not, and hence as incapable of change, suggests “Hegel, not Marx.”^[13] Sartre argued that whereas the dramatic form attempts to understand its characters, the epic form shows what happens to them without understanding why.

In a wide-ranging discussion, he measured the distance and closeness between these two forms. The distinction turns on the assumed consequences of distanciation and on the degree to which imaginative participation in the character is supposedly suppressed. Like his own plays, Brecht’s show that action and its consequences must be judged. They are likewise not concerned with the psychology of why things happen. Though disliking Brecht’s supposed claim to objectivity, he places his own writing between the dramatic and epic forms of theatre and, therefore, concludes that these forms can learn from each other:

l’une tire vers la quasi-objectivité de l’object, c’est-à-dire de l’homme, et va ainsi vers l’échec, puisqu’on n’arrive jamais à avoir un homme objectif, avec l’erreur de croire qu’on peut donner une société-object aux spectateurs, tandis que l’autre, si on ne la corrigeait pas par un peu d’objectivité, irait trop vers le côté de la sympathie, de l’Einfühlung, et risquerait de tomber du côté du théâtre bourgeois. Par conséquent, c’est entre ces deux formes de théâtre, je crois, que le problème aujourd’hui peut se poser.^[14]

Sartre, unsurprisingly, defended his own drama against Brecht’s but rightly insists that Brecht did not suppress the emotions, merely wanting the spectator’s not to be “blind.” Helene Weigel provoked the audience into tears, thereby achieving Sartre’s own end of showing and moving at the same time.^[15] Where Barthes proposes, and criticizes, common ground between Brecht and Diderot’s Enlightenment aesthetic, Sartre goes further, and farther back. He remarks elsewhere how much Brecht’s plays have in common with French classical theatre and its Aristotelian antecedents and so, by implication, with his own. All show us “what we are: victims and accomplices at the same time.”^[16] He also suggests a wholly unexpected analogy between Brecht and Racine: not on the basis of a comparable distancing through stylization but primarily, though as its consequence, the exact reverse, namely a deeper, more intense engagement between audience and performance. This reaches far beyond the immediate comparison with Racine’s figures in Bajazet:

On nous montre nos amours, nos jalousies, nos rêves de meurtre et on nous les montre à froid, séparés de nous, inaccessibles et terribles, d’autant plus étrangers que ce sont les nôtres, que nous croyons les gouverner, et qu’ils se développent hors de notre atteinte, avec une impitoyable rigueur que nous découvrons et reconnaissons tout à la fois. Tels sont aussi les personnages de Brecht … et nous nous retrouvons en eux sans que notre stupeur diminue.^[17]