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Brecht: Gestus, Fable, Attitude-cum-Stance JOACHIM FIEBACH Cestus, or "gest," as John Willett preferred to translate it, is one of Bertoh Brecht's key aesthetic notions.' He insisted on regarding poetic and theatrical language as "gestic" and even on requiring gestic music.2 It was the "gestic material" (gestisches Material)3 that the actor must interpret (auslegen) in order to convey the (variously translated) "fable," "narrative," "plot," or "story-line(s)." He considered the narrative line to be the main business of any theatrical event (Veranstaltung).4 That narrative line, for which I shall choose the term "fable" (Brecht uses Fabel, in italics, in the German original of his "Short Organum"), he defined as the entirety of "all gestic activities" that make up the composition of a playas produced.s It is this reading of fables as "coherent compositions," giving insights into societal structures and processes , that has contributed much to a widespread understanding of his theatre as over-didactic and purely rationalist. Hence his aesthetic has often been treated as the epitome of a closed system, and his approach to society and the arts has been filed away as old-fashioned, one-dimensional, and essentialist, regardless of his numerous emphases on incessant, ever-regenerating, contradictory , and thus open-ended change as the basic element or driving force of history, of societal processes and individual behaviour, and - not least - of the type of theatre he had in mind and tried to realize6 I would like to read both Brecht's interpreters' and his own often-articulated understanding of the relationship between fable and gestus in a different way, or, put radically, to reverse it. I shall argue that his plays should be viewed and produced as complex sets of mutually contradictory and self-contradictatory sequences of events. As to the phenomenon "Gestus," instances of it should be regarded as presentalions of separate, even apparently incoherent, clusters of gestic activities ratherthan as whole compositions or fables with an all-encompassing coherent narration conveying a "message" that could be summarized in one or two sentences, according to the fabula docet principle, Modem Drama, 42 (1999) 207 208 JOACHIM FIEBACH so essential to the drama and theatre of the European Enlightenment. Brecht himself gave influential examples of such fabula docet summarizing - for instance, in the ground-breaking publication Theaterarbeit (1952)7 - that were emulated by many interpreters later on. To approach Brecht in a way that is at least slightly new requires us to focus on his notion of Haltung, a concept I regard as an expanded, broader understanding of Cestus. An idea basic to Brecht's aesthetic and to his world view, Haltung is difficult to render in English, encompassing as it does his whole philosophy in a nutshell: his understanding of the centrality of the body or of sensuousness, of the overriding importance of the actual contradictory interrelationships between individual bodies and within the individual himself, and, in the final analysis, forming the social fabric. Darko Suvin has suggested "posture-cum-attitude, stance or bearing" as an appropriate English translation8 I would like to re-cast this as "attitude-cum-stance," if this can at all be considered passable English" A glance at The Caucasian Chalk Circle might indicate what I mean by "reversing" readings (and productions) of Brecht's theatre. It seems to be commonplace that the stories of Grusche and Azdak convey both initially and in the final analysis a straightforward philosophical or historically strategic "message": things ought to belong to those or should be at the disposal of those who work with them productively. But I would like to emphasize something else. It is the complex cluster of ever-changing "attitudes-cum-stances," paradoxical or, as Brecht would call it, "contradicatory," unclear, strange, and at the same time very familiar gestic activities of plebeians in their desperate struggle to survive in a hostile, murderous, socially split society. A string of apparently incoherent sequences of those attitudes might give insights into the cunning means that underdogs have to master in order to come to tenns with fundamentally hostile societal circumstances dominated by utterly callous and ruthless ruling strata. There are very different and "self-contradicting" gestic activities for...

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