Cognitive Catharsis in The Caucasian Chalk Circle

In Bertolt Brecht's 1930 Lehrstück [learning play] The Measures Taken, the Four Agitators relate to the Control Chorus (and their offstage audience) the events leading up to their killing of the Young Comrade, whose violation of the teachings of Communism has endangered their cause and justified his sacrifice. During their propaganda efforts, they explain,

[W]e went down into the lower section of the city. Coolies were dragging a barge with a rope. But the ground on the bank was slippery. So when one of them slipped, and the overseer hit him, we said to the Young Comrade: "Go after them, make propaganda among them after work. But don't give way to pity!" And we asked: "Do you agree to it?" And he agreed to it and hurried away and at once gave way to pity.

(Measures 84)²

The Young Comrade's first misstep – significantly, an acquiescence to pity – figures as a moment of peripeteia, demarcating, in Aristotle's terms, the end of the play's involvement. The Agitators' denunciation of pity (which constitutes one pillar of their juridical defense) is upheld in the play's unraveling, in which the Control Chorus adjudges the killing justified: "We agree to what you have done" (Measures 108). Thus, The Measures Taken, which has been called the "classic tragedy of Communism," seems to make susceptibility to pity the Young Comrade's hamartia, reversing his fortunes and leading to his expulsion from the collective (Sokel 133).³

Brecht here employs his customary sly irony, echoing the tragic form while signaling the Lehrstück's militancy against Aristotle by castigating pity, one of the constituent elements of katharsis as well as its enabling precondition. More generally, the Agitators' disdain for the Young Comrade's pity (a disdain they describe but do not display for the Control Chorus) enacts Brecht's contempt for theatrical emotion in his early career. "I don't let my feelings intrude in my dramatic work," he declared in a 1926 statement that John Willett calls "the first expression of his doctrine of the 'epic theatre'" ("Conversation" 14; qtd. in Brecht, "Conversation" 16): "Contrary to present custom [figures] ought to be presented quite coldly, classically and objectively. For they are not a matter for empathy; they are there to be understood. Feelings are private and limited. Against that the reason is fairly comprehensive and to be relied on" ("Conversation" 15).⁴ This binary distinction between "feelings" and "reason" is often taken as Brecht's position on theatrical emotion in general, an assumption with justification in Brecht's writings of the period. Indeed, his notorious 1930 table itemizing axes of distinction between "dramatic" and "epic" theatres climaxes in "feeling [Gefühl]" versus "reason [Ratio]" ("Modern Theatre" 37; "Anmerkungen zur Oper" 79). This stance toward "feeling" is borne out in his early plays, with their reluctance either to represent emotion or to incite it. As Brecht instructs his spectators in his prologue to his 1927 play In the Jungle of the Cities: "Judge impartially the technique of the contenders, and keep your eyes fixed on the finish" (118).

Brecht's hostility toward emotional effects in this period is rooted in his refusal to view spectators as objects to be conditioned in the manner proposed by some of his Soviet counterparts. But Brecht's equation of spectatorial emotion with group passivity recedes in his theoretical writings, as his resistance to theatrical emotion softens. This softening, complete by the 1953 version of the "Short Organum for the Theatre,"⁵ does not represent a "theoretical compromise" on the issue of emotion – the judgment is John Willett's – but rather a gradual rejection of the behaviorist paradigm relied upon by Eisenstein, Meyerhold, and like-minded theorists (qtd. in Brecht, "On Experimental Theatre" 135).⁶ Brecht's 1944 declaration that "the orthodox theatre […] sins by dividing reason [Vernunft] and emotion [Gefühl]" suggests a prescient view of emotions that challenges the...