The idea of such an encounter is enhanced by focusing on another dramatic image of that moment of consternation, one that assuredly defines Brecht’s theatre. Drawing so much into itself, this imaginative and clear-sighted description, beyond any notional application to a particular text, also encompasses what is essential in every creative act of “reading” constituted between reader, text, author, and the effect of what is read. It thus helps to open these texts to differently nuanced interpretations, because it situates what may seem specific to Brecht within a wider context. It suggests how a Brechtian reading illuminates the anthropological act, and so enables a better understanding of how the whole text, both anthropological and dramatic, is constituted:

L’idéal du théâtre brechtien, ce serait que le public fût comme un groupe d’ethnographes rencontrant tout à coup une peuplade sauvage. S’approchant et se disant soudain, dans la stupeur : ces sauvages, c’est nous. C’est à ce moment que le public devient lui-même un collaborateur de l’auteur: en se reconnaisant, mais dans l’étrangeté, comme s’il était un autre, il se fait exister en face de lui comme objet et il se voit sans s’incarner, donc en se comprenant.^[18]

An encounter with these “savages” brings us face to face with ourselves. Interpreting a dramatic work, the audience produces itself – “il se fait exister en face de lui” — if it has been shocked into an auto-ethnographic experience more complex than either the possession of scientific certainty or simple empathetic identification with an externalized emotional state can furnish, because both, though differently, inhibit self-examination. Yet without some level of empathy — “that’s us” — there will be no compelling impulse to question oneself.

Such distancing does not conveniently pin down or absolutize something in order to highlight and explain it, nor does it indulge us as spectators. Paradoxically, and primarily, it unmasks us as the strangers we have become to ourselves.

The parallel between Racine and Brecht exists because their texts uncover the monstrous unconscious of their cultures, provoking a consternation that must turn in upon the self, if it is to fulfill its purpose. Brecht’s was a method in development, whose potential, in spite of his fame, remained under-recognized. The constraints included a perceived authorial intention, frozen in a growing body of selective criticism, either in response to presumed ideological correctness, governed by political pressure (for and against), and, later, the blunt instrument of necessary permission to perform. Given such restrictions, productions colluded in variations of the standard, classic interpretation of Brecht’s distancing aesthetic: the confident actor held the character at arm’s length, rationalizing, as the dramaturgy seemed to require, from a position of knowledge, externalized and clarified in that visible découpage.

Though mutually exclusive, rationalization, based on “scientific” certainty, and “automatic” identification with Mother Courage both obviate self-enquiry. If natural empathy helps us shed an emotional load, which is what Sartre meant by “psychology,” it reinforces, instead of confronting, our own repressions. Sartre argues that the shocking encounter compels us to face up to ourselves. Therein lies its anthropological effect. The focus, the “real” drama, shifts from stage to spectator. This encounter is hazardous, its outcome uncertain.

If the figures we observe in the theatre are not somehow distanced, their very familiarity, their similarity to ourselves, the way they meet our expectations, offer us a psychological escape route through that form of empathy, which appears to identify with, share, and thereby alleviate their burden, but in fact amounts to a form of self-exculpation, because it simultaneously relieves us of a repression by projecting onto others what we hide from and deny in ourselves. At the very moment we identify with them, perhaps secretly pleased by our own sensitivity, we both lose our self and paradoxically sever ourselves from them. We effectively scapegoat them and they suffer for us. In such transactions, the actual interrelationship between audience and character, reader and read, remains opaque.

This anthropological distancing no longer conveys appropriate attitudes, positioned by theoretical certainty, through figures isolated by découpage. It does not simply condemn reprehensible behaviour or fetishize ideal meanings. It neither clinically objectifies masked characters, nor empathizes with all-too-human figures, because the encounter reveals an estranged observer, who must now examine what had been taken for granted. Such distancing does not conveniently pin down or absolutize something in order to highlight and explain it, nor does it indulge us as spectators. Paradoxically, and primarily, it unmasks us as the strangers we have become to ourselves. Mother Courage is more complex than the dramaturgy may have seemed to suggest and Barthes or, on occasion, even Sartre supposed.