Brecht: An Aristotelian Malgre Lui

BRECHT: AN ARISTOTELIAN MALGRE LUI BRECHT WOULD APPEAR AT FIRST SIGHT to make a much better Platonist than an Aristotelian. Plato, with his deep-rooted distrust of the emotions as a permanent threat to the hegemony of reason, banished all but hard-headed didactic poets from his Utopia, whereas Aristotle commends the cathartic emotionalism of tragedy. Brecht, equally suspicious of the emotions, obstinately affecting the dress and mannerisms of an unsentimental, tough-minded proletarian boor, repeatedly stressed the rationalistic element of his theatre! and the utilitarian value of literature in general as a didactic stimulus towards sociopolitical (i.e. Marxist) thinking.2 Moreover, from 1931 onwards, Brecht consistently describes his 'epic' dramaturgy as 'nicht-aristotelisch .' In view of the invariably polemical nature of the context 'non-Aristotelian' is scarcely a strong enough rendering of his term, and 'anti-Aristotelian' would be nearer the mark. Yet Aristotle cast a longer shadow than Brecht and most of his critics would care to admit. Whatever else the epithet might be taken to mean,s there is no doubt that Brecht was thinking first and foremost of a kind of theatre which would consciously aim to prevent the self-identification of observer and observed, that simple emotional acknowledgement, in terms of theatrical psychology, of our common humanity, which criticism usually calls 'empathy' (,Einfiihlung'). In his notes to the short didactic play on the subject of the Spanish Civil War, Senora Carrar's Rifles (1937), B.recht even equates the terms 'Aristotelian' and 'empathetic' without more ado.4 This suggests that Brecht misinterpreted the 'mimetic' nature of traditional art as badly as Plato once did, and likewise misinterpreted Aristotle's intelligent qualifications . For Brecht traditional theatre, like religion, was 'Opium furs Yolk,' part of the gross middle-class swindle which hoodwinks the 1 E.g. 'Wir wollen hauptsachlich, dass man denkt im Theater' ('we principally'Brecht does not say 'exclusively,' however-'want people to think in the theatre'). Schriften zum Theater, VII, p. 26'1. 2 Ct. B's use of the terms 'Gebrauchslyrik' for his poetry and 'Gebrauchsmusik' for the strictly ancillary musical aspect of his productions; similarly his plays of the 30'S are unashamedly called 'Lehrstiicke' and others are referred to as 'parableplays .' 3 E.g. opposition to the Unities, those frivolous inventions of the Renaissance, which have little or nothing to do with Aristotle. 4 Stucke VII, p. 60. 111 112 MODERN DRAMA September unsuspecting proletariat into accepting the status quo, and thus delaying the inevitable Marxist millennium; indeed, Brecht castigated it on several occasions as 'a branch of the bourgeois drug-traffic.5 His misconception is understandable in its historical context: towards the end of the 19th century there was a continual 'improvement' of theatrical techniques-lighting, scenery, scene-shifting, costuming and special effects-starting with the Meiningen troupe, developing through the experimental Theatre Libre of Antoine and Freie Biihne of Otto Brahm; these, in conjunction with a new phonographic-photographic approach to drama, catered for by the social plays of Zola, Toistoi, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Shaw, Chekhov and the rest, and rendered histrionically convincing by new acting methods such as Stanislavski 's, made it possible to reproduce with astonishing fidelity the actual minutiae of everyday life. 'Art,' wrote Arno Holz in 1890, 'has the tendency to revert to nature,6 and he summed up this tendency in a typically pseudo-scientific formula: 'Art == Nature - x' (where x is the inadequacy of artistic reproduction). Theatre, with its three-dimensional, live 'mimesis' of reality, is clearly the form in which x can be reduced to the barest minimum (the three-sided room, the curtained framework, division into acts, etc.). This new, and on the whole misguided, Naturalistic approach to theatre was still in full swing when Brecht made his first contact with it during the First World War. True, the avant-garde had rejected Ibsen for Strindberg, and Expressionism was making its hysterical impact on all art-forms; as early as 1903 Apollinaire, following the Bohemian grotesqueries of Jarry and Lugne-Poe, was working on his 'drame surrealiste,' Les Mamelles de Tirt!sias; in 1907 Meyerhold was demanding a theatre in which the audience 'never forgets for a minute that it is...