Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation by Elizabeth Wright (review)

580 Book Reviews than the man who worked fIrst with Elisabeth Hauptmann from late 1924 on, then with Margarete Steffin from 1931 until her death in 1941, and with Ruth Berlau from 193'3 until his death in 1956. Starting from 1925 on, I see the beginnings of what will become a huge shift in work published under the Brecht label. I trace that shift not to Brecht, who, as is gradually becoming known, persisted in the basic misogyny that marks virtually everything produced until 1925. but to the other workers, usually women, who worked for next to nothing in the Brecht factory. Perhaps, we are now ready to begin to contemplate the idea that works of art, like babies. may often involve more than one person in their production, Perhaps we can see in the lineaments of a St. Johanna of the Stockyards, or of the "young comrade" as played by both men and women, or of a Mother Courage or a Grusche, something of mother Hauptmann, or Steffin, or Berlau, or Weigel? In short, the texts might begin to be seen as having been mothered as well as fathered. Might then the influence of "him" begin to be seen rather more accurately as the influence of "them?" That would be a reinterpretation of the phenomenon called Brecht. JOHN FUEG!, FLARE PRODUCfIONS INC. ELIZABETH WRIGHT. Postmodern Brecht: A Re~Presentation . London: Routledge 1989. pp. xii, [54. $45.00; $[3.95 (PB). Viewing Bertolt Brecht as a "deconstructionistavant La lettre" enables Elizabeth Wright to challenge traditional, received ideas about Brecht. As the book's sub-title indicates, Wright re~presents his work by "co-opting him as a post-modernist." This creative, carefully developed strategy combats "Brecht-Mudigkeit," Brecht-fatigue, a disease commonly found in academic trenches of the 1970S. In the first chapter, "Misunderstanding Brecht: the critical scene," Wright surveys Brecht's reception. The standard tripartite scheme of interpretation maintains - in both Europe and America- "introductory value" only: "Early subjectivist-anarchist, middle period rationalist-mechanistic, and the supposedly mature dialectical phase." "To revitalize Brecht," as Heiner Milller puts it, "one must recognize that to use his work uncritically is a betrayal." And the post-structuralist reception of Brecht, according to Wright, "amounts to a Lacanian Brecht ... for the V-effect disturbs the Imaginary mirror-relation of the spectator with his/her image, upsetting the complacency with which the current self-image is being viewed." Wright astutely stresses the important role of spectator complicity during theatrical praxis in her chapter "Brecht in Theory and Practice." She notes that "the success or failure of the Brechtian theatre can never be a question of the text, unless it be that the audience is included as an effect within it." In this way, "Brecht's re-functioning of the stage articulates ... a distinctly modem understanding ... to open up a new discourse about writer, text, and audience." Echoes ofpost-modem Bataille and Barthes pleasantly resound in Wright's words. Book Reviews 58r But before Wright can trace Brecht's post-modem trajectory and legacy, she delineates his place in critical modernity. The book's fine fourth chapter, "Placing the theory: Brecht and Modernity," explicates the Brecht-Lukacs dispute, the Brecht-Benjamin partnership, and the case of Adorno against Brecht. Wright concludes: Both Brecht and Benjamin were theoretically right in believing that the new technology would radically alter the production and reception of art, but they were over optimistic in hoping for the desired political effect. ." It was Adorno and Lukacs who proved to be historically right: technology increased rather than decreased art's vulnerability to commidification. In shon, "technology turned culture into kitsch." Along with Jean-Franr;ois Lyotard, Wright believes that "a work can become modem only if it is first postmodern." She explores the aesthetics ofearly Brecht in Baal and In The Jungle of the Cities and finds the "unrepresentable" as well as the " unsayable" theatricalized with even greater spectator complicity, for the "pressure is put on the audience to co-produce.'~ Such post-modern Brechtian presentations without representational significance eventually pave the way for the "phenomenon called performance; a theatre of shocks calling upon a new kind of spectator." In performance...