Brecht in Neverneverland: The Caucasian Chalk Circle

BRECHT IN NEVERNEVERLAND: THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE RAYMOND WILLIAMS IS ONE OF OUR BEST CRITICS of modem drama. His article The Achievement of Brecht (Critical Quarterly, III, 2) is perspicacious and just except for the single paragraph in which he dismisses The Caucasian Chalk Circle. He finds the framework of the collective farm dispute "arbitrary and distracting; the issue it raises is not followed through." The stories of Azdak and Grusha he finds "again quite arbitrarily related." Azdak he sees as living out a preposterous negation of justice, "a survival from the earlier vision of anarchic paradox" who blunts the point of Grusha's story. All these faults he ascribes to "a central confusion of experience" in the play. I should like to offer here an alternative reading. The collective farm dispute is omitted from Eric Bentley's translation and from many productions, so I will begin by summarising it. A certain valley has been left desolate by war. The goat-breeding kolchos which formerly occupied it has settled further east and now wishes to return. But a nearby fruit-growing kolchos has submitted plans to irrigate the valley and plant orchards and vineyards. An expert presides over a meeting to decide the fate of the valley. An old man from the goat-breeders distributes cheese which is generally agreed to be excellent. His intention had been to demonstrate the inferiority of the cheese produced in the new valley, but this is shown to exist only in his own imagination ("it doesn't even smell of morning there in the morning"). His case is no more than the rationalisation of the nostalgia of the old people for familiar surroundings . The young are perfectly happy. The old man appeals to the law, but a girl replies: The laws will have to be reexamined in any case, to see whether they are still valid. When the agriculturist outlines the irrigation project, the old man grudgingly gives way and asks for a copy of the drawings to take home with him. In honour of the visiting goat-breeders the fruitgrowers have arranged a play "which has some bearing on our problem." 11 12 MODERN DRAMA May The issue which this scene has raised is the issue of justice. The law of property and hereditary rights is here abandoned in favour of a new kind of justice whose principles are to be worked out in the play and celebrated in the epilogue: But you, who have listened to the story of the Chalk Circle Take note of the meaning of the ancient song: That what there is shall belong to those who are good for it, Thus the children to the maternal, that they thrive; The carriages to good drivers, that they are driven well; And the valley to the waterers, that it shall bear fruit. It is a strange reading of the play which sees this issue as "not followed through." The law, at the beginning of the play, is merely a prop for injustice , exploitation and corruption. Great care is taken of the Governor 's heir, more care indeed than is likely to produce a thriving child, but this care springs not from parental love, but from the knowledge that the child guarantees the perpetuation of injustice for it further generation. It is heavily ironic that the crowd of beggars and petitioners should forget their complaints in their obsequiousness : God bless the child, Your Grace! The "apple of the Governor's eye" is quickly abandoned when danger threatens. The province itself is lighthandedly lost through blindness and complacency: Oh, blindness of the great! They wander like gods Great over bent backs, sure Of hired fists, trusting In their power which has already lasted so long. The old law is at last overthrown. The town Judge is strung up by the carpet-weavers. For a time there is chaos. The princes and soldiers in uneasy alliance keep up a semblance of authority. This is the point at which both Grusha and Azdak enter the story. Each seeks to salvage from this chaos some sort of valid order-Grusha an order based on love and kindness, Azdak an order based on his own idiosyncratic...