First, an explanation. I am about to launch on probably the most intensive reading adventure of my life. It will take up most of my time and conceptual energy. My options are either a) let blogging slip or b) blog my reading list. I've chosen the latter, as it will keep me writing as I read (thus a mnemonic device) and keep me connected to the five of you who read this blog, who are yourselves readers, and who probably have interesting things to say about the books I'm reading. Thus, a post entitled "Bertolt Brecht." Kafka's coming up in the next day or two. After that. . . well, we'll see.
On another note, here's an interesting article about an "environmental heretic."
I find it highly likely that Brecht was the type of dramatist Plato would have allowed to remain in the Republic. There isn't much confusion of who is who or what is what in Brecht's theater, throughout its many instantiations (whether non-Aristotelian, "Epic," or, as it was called toward the end of his life, "Dialectical); everything has its place, is properly signified, maintains a certain ontological status. Things are things, history is history, acting is acting, and attending the theater is just that. No one loses his head, no one is confused as to what is the real and what the imitation. Indeed, even the actor has a proper and singular skill: the discovery of the appropriate "gest" by which one is to convey a situation, and, in doing so, reveal its inner tensions and complications to the audience. [Plato's real complaint about the poets is that they did not have their own proper profession and skill; they were malleable, changable, never the same.] For Brecht, the actor is, in a most fundamental way, an educator and a communicator, speaking to a calm and contemplative audience of the history of the world. (Brecht was serious about the calm and the cool. In his earlier, less fully theorized statements on the theater, he claims that it would be highly revolutionary if the audience was permitted to smoke cigars in the theater. It would create a space of relaxed analysis, like at a sporting event.)
The need for this "intellectual, objective theater" Brecht saw, as he saw everything, as historical. In this respect, he follows Trotsky's position on the state of the arts in the age of communist revolution: the new, "socialist" man would require a new theater. The bourgois theater, which he saw as being an institution of Aristotelian rules, would not do. Why? For a number of reasons, but probably the one he returns to again and again is that the Aristotelian emphasis on identification, empathy, and catharsis results in two confusions, indeed in two fundamental errors. First, by identifying emotionally with the hero and becoming affectively involved with him, the audience ceases to recognize his situation, the historical and material forces at work which have created him. Well before theory had taken hold, Brecht was a firm constructivist: there is no essential, ahistorical human--every character is the direct result of an cultural/social sitution, not the least dermination being class. This leads to the second problem with identification: by appealing to a sense of universal human emotion/sentiment, the Aristotelian theater erases difference. Every audience member is the same in the bourgeois theater, every person identifies with the main character, sympathizes, etc. In contrast, the non-aristotelian theater "divides its audience" (Brecht on Theater 60). The epic theater places difference, change, situation at the center of the drama, and is focused on communicating that to the audience.
This didacticism, while in early Brecht really runs the risk of sounding fairly heavy-handed, is always coupled with fun. Early on, Brecht claims that the "learning" vs "entertaiment" distintinction is bourgeois--we can, in fact, have fun as we learn. While later he shifts from learning as enjoyment to a theater of entertainment and learning, it is interesting to see Brecht as a continuation of the Renaissance rule of "dulce et utile": art's purpose is to delight and to teach. This is what M. H. Abrams calls an aesthetic theory with a "pragmatic orientation," focusing on what effects art has on the audience/reader, etc. To the very end, even when he acknowledges the place of the beautiful in art, Brecht is above all else a pragmatist.
But such a description doesn't do his work justice, since he is a complicated pragmatician and definitely a nuanced revolutionary artist. Perhaps his most famous term, translated in English as "the alienation effect," was a neologism derived not from Marx but Victor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist whose theory of "defamiliarization" was an effort to explain the emergence of new art. To be sure, defamiliarization is perhaps Shklovsky's least "formalist" term, focusing on our perception of things, but nevertheless it is still clearly based in what Perloff and others tend to call a constructivist mode, simply put, the clear recognition that all meaning, all perception, and all language is the product or result of concrete organization of materials, of things. While Shklovsky wants to "make the stone feel stony," Brecht claims that art must make strange everyday things by raising them "above the level of the obvious and automatic," allowing us to see their historical and sociological reality (92). To do this, the dramatist does not simply need a message (like communism): he needs techniques. Thus, so much of Brecht's critical energy was spent on outlining ways to generate alienation effects through acting, set design, music, etc. Incidentally, in his own writing about formalism, Brecht also follows Trotsky: new contents, new forms.
Thus, even in what we might now see as his most ideologically grounded and politically revolutionary, Brecht remained, always, an artist. And even when he is arguing that A-effects are in the service of bringing about real political change, these political statements have very interesting philosophical and aesthetic consequences. To see this, a bit more on alienation.
The first, and perhaps most important, step in generating a non-aristotelian, non-empathetic theater is the condition and attitude of the actor. The actor must not identify with the character; instead, she must recognize that she is, in fact, acting. There is thus a division in the heart of the epic actor, a non-identification without which the theater as such disappears. In contrast to this is "Western [i.e., Aristotelian] art":
The Western actor does all he can to bring his spectator into the closest proximity to the events and the character he has to portray. To this end he persuades him to identify himself with him (the actor) and uses every energy to convert himself as completely as possible into a different type, that of the character in question. If this complete conversion succeeds then his art has been more or less expended. Once he has become the bank-clerk, doctor or general concerned he will need no more art than any of these people need 'in real life.' (Brecht on Theater 93)
In other words, by attempting to replicate or recreate the real, Aristotelian theater essentially becomes the real, shoves the audience so deeply into the emotions, sensations, feelings of the protagonist that art qua art is done away with. And this is a critical problem, for such an immanent immersion means that nothing will feel strange, nothing will be brought to consciousness: Marlon Brando is Don Corleone, Michael is his son, and we the audience are experiencing their emotions. The entire experience remains affective and, thus, subconscious. Method acting and its techniques don't hide this identification: one becomes the character, one doesn't repeat lines one simply reacts as the character. I've heard of a number of cases where the actor goes by the characters name off camera and between rehersals.
Clearly, then, Aristotelian theater erases difference on yet another level. After the differences between the audience members are eliminated in the name of the universal human, there is also no difference between actor, character, and audience--all are conected in a chain of affectivity. Epic theater, in contrast, wants to preserve this difference. The model of acting Brecht borrows from everyday life is the "street scene." Imagine, he says, someone trying to explain to a crowd an automobile accident that the person has just witnessed. The accident is an historic event, with causes, effects, problems, potential mysteries, characters, and consequences. In telling the story, the narrator will inevitably act: "the driver turned his head like this, the victim stepped off the sidewalk with his left foot, the driver turned the wheel too hard like this." In other words, the narrator will take on the character and reveal the situation through specific gestures and actions without ever a) identifying with the character emotionally, psychically, etc. or b) having his audience confuse him with the character. All are fully aware that he is acting, that it is an imitation of the past; all are involved in consciously trying to understand what has happened, why such and such an action produced these results and not others. In other words, the situation becomes a point of inquiry, even contingent. The audience is cooly, but critically, invested in what is happening before them. Everyday actions, like driving a car and crossing the street, become "alienated," made strange, since they are positioned within a larger historical whole. In my normal walking along the street, I pay no attention to what foot leaves the curb first, but if, in this specific historical moment under consideration, I know that the action has consequences, then it becomes more than a simple gesture. Difference is inserted into everything; things are divided from the flux of experience, made strange, and, as a result, are able to be thought.
In other words, by becoming non-identical with the character, the action, and the emotions, the Epic theater shows what something really is in its historical particularlity. This seems counterintuitive, but it feeds into Brecht's Hegelian-Marxism: everything is involved in a dialectical movement, which means that everything (and everyone) is caught up in a contradiction and self-division. History always has its opposited embedded in it, and since theater as such relies on non-identity, it becomes an important tool for understanding history. [One might, of course, see Aristotle's famous "fiction"/"history" distinction here, but in its opposite sense: Fiction, for Aristotle, was more philosophical than history because the former deals in universals. Brecht might say that the theater is more philosophical because it reveals the otherwise unrecognized forces at work in a given historical event.] Brecht's characters are never "heroes" precisely because we can see their contradictions, we see their self-division.
Take, for instance, Mother Courage, perhaps his most famous character. As a canteen wagon owner/operator, she declares her love for the German religious wars (of the 17th century) because they make her a lot of money. At the same time, she adamently opposes her own children's involvement in the war. Maternal instincts (more on instincts in a second) are in a state of conflict with mode of production. The latter wins out: one by one, MC loses her children to the war, and the play ends with her claim that she needs to get back into business. The larger forces (war is always a matter of money) are played out in the individual forces which make up Courage's actions. She learns nothing at the end of the play, but, as Brecht was quick to point out, that doesn't mean that the audience hasn't learned something.
None of the characters move beyond their reliance on material production in MC, with one notable exception: Kattrin, Courage's mute daughter. And I'm not positive she's an exception. Kattrin is afflicted with a sensitivity to suffering, particularly for the young. She wants a child and family of her own, but her muteness, an injury to the face, and the war itself keep defering her hopes for a husband--and her mother tries as hard as she can to keep her from getting married. In perhaps the most famous scene of the play, Catholic forces are about to ambush and unsuspecting town as Kattrin and some farmer's watch. When the farmer's mention the fact that the children will be slaughtered, [and Brecht's stage directions are clear: it is specifically the children that affects Kattrin; thus, it is more than sympathy causing her to act.] Kattrin moves into action, taking a drum up onto the barn roof and pounding as loud as she can as a warning. This of course brings the Catholic troops, who threaten, attempt to bribe, and eventually shoot her down.
The only threat that comes close to stopping her is the one to the canteen cart., i.e., to Kattrin and Courage's mode of production. Kattrin pauses momentarily when they say they are going to destroy it if she doesn't come down, but then resumes pounding. Presumably, we can read this as one side of the contradiction winning out: some maternal instinct disrupts the constraints of material production. This is the exact opposite of Courage, whose instincts almost always lose out to business. Of course, "maternal instinct" is itself a sociologically shaped reality. And yet Kattrin has had very few influences encouraging her maternal desires; Courage and everyone around her act as if she won't or can't get a man. It is almost as if the animal real, in this instance, forces Kattrin beyond or outside of her immediate social situation and material base, as if below our class consciousness is that other, physical consciousness which can, from time to time, break out.
Interestingly enough, Brecht recognized that this scene was the closest Mother Courage and her Children comes to Aristotelian drama. It maybe that the sense of animal or emotional "universality" Kattrin reveals produces that effect. But, nevertheless, at the plays end, it is Courage alone we are left with, and through her our own situation is made strange.
Slightly sporadic reflections on the end of a long day:
This afternoon I went to a talk and it revealed much more about myself than I'd have liked it to, and probably not at all the way the author intended.
The presentation was a meditation on memory and mourning via a phenomenon the author called "synthetic experience"--that is, the intersection between public, "historical." "ideological" phenomena and the personal, the idiosyncratic, the individual. His case study: a series of letters exchanged between a low level British diplomat and his two teenage daughters in the 18th century. The diplomat, going insane as a result of syphallis (which he had given to his wife, resulting in their legal separation, neither of which the girls knew about), is away somewhere trying to generate (badly) international relations; the girls are at home and write to him about the London scene, particularly the theater. The author's reading of their letters focused on passages describing the new stagings of Shakespeare, and he [the author] reads their descriptions and stated preferences for the plays as projections of the family drama that is actually occuring in this real life economy of domestic desire.
It was a lovely paper, compellingly presented, in a slow, almost entrancing prose. The possibilities were equally interesting--after all, if art does anything at all for real live human beings, there is a good chance that it is a way for us to hedge our own desires and pains, a way to frame our anxieties and talk about the things that are just simply too close for us to otherwise get to. And, as far as a conference presentation goes, I'm all in favor of freedom. After all, standing up in front of a crowd of people for 30 minutes to talk about art and culture shouldn't be an exam, but, instead, it should be a chance to say "here's what I'm thinking about. Here's what I'd suggest. Here's what matters to me right now."
But, at the end of the day, I didn't entirely buy it. I was highly suspicious: what right do you have to read these apparantly passing references to the staging of plays in London (one of the few public sources of entertainment available to that class) as some sort of secret performance, as a deferred and disavowed drama of its own? Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention to the passages he cited, but most of them seemed relatively minor discussions of the plays. It wasn't like one of the daughter's said "you know, Dad, Lear's dillemma really bothered me, and here's why." THAT kind of (in)direct discourse in the letters themselves I would have found far more believable. [Incidentally, one of my Shakespearen friends felt the connections were quite strong. So its possible that my knowledge of the plays was the problem.]
Essentially, I felt as if here was a very clever, and indeed impassioned, parallel being drawn between two disparate texts. It was creative. But that was about it. It didn't tell me anything really new. It didn't tell me much at all.
That is how I initially felt. And I tried to raise these points with my friends, who for the most part liked the talk. I kept saying things about method, about rigor, about the production of knowledge. I admitted there was probably a certain degree of envy coming into my complaints, as a low-level wannabe watching a Yale prof talk about what he wants, however the hell he wants, and getting paid to do it. But I tried to couch my complaints in theoretical and disciplinary problems. At the end of the day, I said, if I handed a paper like that into one of my profs, I'd have by tail handed to me. And rightly so.
But, as I kept talking, and thinking about what he'd done, I had the strange sense of alienation that we get sometimes when we find ourselves arguing vigorously for something we don't entirely believe. It was as if I was watching myself sound like a proper, theoretically justified, "disciplined" scholar, saying all the "right" things (by a certain definition, to be sure) and realizing that all of the things I was saying flew in the face of my larger commitments. Such as, the inextricable connection between emotion and thought. Such as, the impassioned commitment that needs to make one feel as if they are part of what it is they are studying. Such as, the ability (as an earlier speaker had put it) to see one's self as in history but not entirely of it.
In other words, there was so much of how this author was going about pursuing his thought that I agreed with, indeed would celebrate, even if there were certain elements of what he said that I would have done differently, or would like to have seen worked out further, or would have pushed for further definition, further "rigor," blah blah blah. Which isn't trying to drive another wedge, between, say, rhetoric and content. Its just to say that overall there was far more to that paper than my initial criteria of evaluation had taken into account.
And that was when, in my state of profound self-division, that I realized his work was far more abitious than I had initially thought. That he was, indirectly, putting forth a challenge to the way I had been thinking about the definition of literature, about how we talk and think about, about how it matters and whether we can talk about that matter at all. Maybe I've swung a little too far in the opposite direction in my response to his talk, but I'll live with that. Because, above all else, I realized that I sounded like a mealy "academic": someone with a far too narrow idea of what counts and what doesn't, who is putting up barriers to hold thought in instead of pursuing pathways by which it can be followed, and, in particular, someone whose concern with rigor was being used to tame the wildness (Andy Meyer's term) that is the literary text--and, indeed, to tame all of the tangled interactions of our desires that make those texts interesting to begin with. The whole reason I got into this business is because I believed that literature was something of an innoculation against that pedantry. But I've found out, and seen, that the scholastics are always ready to start stacking angels on pin heads.
So, my friends, this is an open invitation to you who care about any of this. Don't let the world of overpaid wordy types sap your soul. And don't let it sap mine. When I start arguing too strongly for something you know I don't believe, smack me over the head with your complete Emily Dickinson. She'd have liked it. . . and I'll be better off.
Here's a declaration I want to follow out. Join me if you'd like:
GIVEN that Nietzsche carried Emerson around in his back pocket,
GIVEN that Emerson is arguably the single most recognizable name of 19th cent. American literature,
GIVEN that the quest for the ordinary is, as Melville and Wittgenstein taught us, fraught on all sides,
GIVEN that Wallace Stevens was a philosopher, William Carlos Williams was a scientist, and Robert Creeley was, simply, a badass,
GIVEN that a recent article on Frost's notebooks only added more fuel to these ideas which I've been mulling over for some time,
RESOLVED: we need a revolution in the way we think about "American" literature.
I prove Lindsay Water's argument that we read too quickly by only skimming what appears to be a fine article. But speed reading has its advantages; in this case, a reference to Monty Python's Proust-in-15-seconds skit, which I had never heard of before. I offer it to you now in all its rapid and bawdy glory.