For about twenty years, into the mid-1970s, Brecht’s theatre achieved something like iconic status, partly due to the impact of two Berliner Ensemble productions at the International Theatre Festival in Paris: Mother Courage in 1954; in 1955, and markedly different, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. One more sombre and realist in performance, the other more parabolic and comic, both told emotionally compelling stories of “ordinary” lives endangered, or crushed, in large events. A dispassionate eye focused contemporary crises by means of historical and cultural distancing. The audiences admired the innovative dramaturgy’s moral focus and its aesthetic pleasure, normally thought to preclude each other.

Bertolt Brecht
German Federal Archive, 1954
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-W0409-300 /
Kolbe, Jörg / CC-BY-SA

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Though not really abstracting from the events of each plot, this dramaturgy was seen as intending dispassionate judgment rather than compassionate identification, in the hope that political insight would encourage desirable social consequences. Yet, as a prism separates the spectrum that constitutes a beam of seemingly pure white light, clarity, on reflection, is composed of impurities. Under scrutiny, perceptual gradations become apparent, initial black and white distinctions lose their contours, and what constitutes illumination changes.

Critics saw the performances in terms of Brecht’s distinction between “epic” demonstrative acting and “dramatic” empathetic psychologizing.^[1] Because it affected their aesthetic or philosophical interests, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes each offered a more differentiated analysis of this new theatrical practice than advocacy, or dismissal, which characterized conventional criticism. Their responses were themselves productively conflicted.

Where others underlined the dramaturgy’s political message, Barthes singled out the aesthetic quality of performance, stressing what he called “l’acte théâtrale lui-même.” He described the overall effect: less semiology, or discursive coherence, than seismology, due to its power to disrupt.^[2] He connected Brecht’s social gestus — “one of the clearest and most intelligent [concepts] that dramatic theory has ever produced” — with what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) called the “pregnant moment,” which draws together the strands of an episode into a memorable embodiment of significant meaning.^[3] In Brecht’s case, what mattered was less the particular topic than the attitude towards it revealed through the actor’s performance which is, to a degree, separated from a thereby distanced character and situation.

Barthes related this meaningful moment to Diderot’s tableau, constructed by an act of découpage, a cutting out (and, we may say, off), which simultaneously creates a (we may also say dubious) unity in what he calls a “geometric” discourse that offers, in a double sense, an arresting perspective on its subject. Such a tableau “has something to say (something moral, social) but it also says that it knows how this must be done.”^[4] When firmly cut out, we encounter “the coincidence of the visual and the ideal découpages,” and then an ideal meaning or whole is, in Diderot’s words, “contained under a single point of view.”^[5]

This can result in the creation of a “fetish-object,” though fetishization may come “to a halt,” depending on the tableau’s “composition.” Fetishization and composition together produce a “dialectic of desire.”^[5] Though this aesthetic both fetishizes an ideal meaning and awakens a desire to elude it, the critique, conducted within the performance, needs “a sovereignty of the actor, master of meaning, which is evident in Brecht, since he theorized it under the term ‘distanciation.’” As agent of the dramaturgy, distancing gives the actor sovereignty over the character. In spite of his admiration, this assumption pinpoints a dilemma for Barthes’s in Brecht’s “system,” since the movement of this dialectic of desire is predetermined by the strategy of its primary instrument, the alienation effect. We could say that the dramaturgic dice are loaded.^[6]

Perhaps this is why Barthes favoured fragmented or independent scenes in a loose structure, and disliked Mother Courage’s “maxims” like: “Whenever you find great virtues, you can be sure that something is going wrong.”^[7] Prompted by the actor’s distancing, the audience, in Barthes’s view, is expected to withhold support from such opinions. This dramaturgy therefore suggests, if with novel sophistication, a positive negation of the negation, rather than allowing an open-ended exploration of the dramatic material. The presumed découpage appears too confident, the “subject,” both topic and figure, too fetishized, too unified and objectified, too lacking the “textual” and musical, anti-determinist post structural qualities Barthes was beginning to favour, which undermine a more prescriptive structuralist representation.

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]

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.