In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews FREDRIC JAMESON. Brecht and Method. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Pp. 184. $35ยท00. The nineties have brought an increase in both the quality and the quantity of Brecht studies in general, although improved archival access has so far not led to a new Brecht biography worth the name. Among the vast recent Brecht literature one book is outstanding: Fredric Jameson's Brecht and Method. Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina, Jameson is the author of many works. including the classic Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Lote Capitalism and The Cultural Turn. Even before Brecht and Method was published, Fredric Jameson was regarded as one of the leading Marxist critics writing today. This book demonstrates amply that once again he has new insights to offer to Marxists and non-Marxists alike by exploring the connections between drama and politics. Jameson regards Brecht as important not because of his greatness or his canonicity but, rather, for his "usefulness" in a post- Cold War situation even more anti-Communist than in the good old days. Jameson wants to show that Brecht's"proposals" were more on the order of a method than a collection of facts, thoughts, convictions, first principles, and the like. The object of study and characterization is not so much Brecht as the Brechtian. Sketching this "idea of Brecht" is as important as his individual texts, "or perhaps - to be somewhat more measured - that is distinct from them all (all the while including them)" (29). In order to do so he offers a prologue in which he "triangulates" Brecht. Language, thought, and narrative practice are layers of a specifically Brechtian method. Accordingly, the study is divided into three parts: doctrine, gestus, and proverbs. In what follows, we wish to demonstrate the specific usefulness of Jameson's study for a discussion about the relationship between social theory and a theory of the theatre. Modern Drama,42 (1999) 286 Book Reviews The book's first part on "doctrine" offers an unusual reading of the Lehrstiicke or learning plays (deliberately communist and collective plays of the late twenties and early thirties). Partially following Reiner Steinweg, Jameson dismisses the usual interpretation of these plays as an apologia for Stalin's purge trials to come. He stresses instead their character as a sort of "master class": "Specific to the Lehrstiicke ... was their exclusion of the public and, at the same time, a rotation of the actors throughout the various roles. In other words, it is what in the theatre is called a master class, but one which does not necessarily have a master director present either; even though we must imagine Schiffbauerdamm as one continuous master class, to which a paying public is invited only on selected occasions" (63). Thus, it is a theatrical practice which gets as close as possible to Brecht's social utopia - not because the public is excluded as such, but because the actors are part and parcel of the learning process. The passage of the various actors through all the roles necessarily creates a multidimensionality, which implies "that the text and its performance slowly blur and disappear into enlarged discussions.... [Ilf something like the idea of a 'master class' is adopted for such a strange new process-entity, one feature it makes clear is the inseparable presence of so-called theory within the larger 'text' itself' (64). Drawing on the Berliner Ensemble's production of Coriolanus and its fouryear rehearsals in which no gesture was considered too insignificant, Jameson concludes that "the text includes all commentaries on the text.... [Tlhe final performance is also a pretext for all the theoretical inquiries that necessarily precede it in practice, and ought then to follow it in theory" ([ [3). Following Darka Suvin, Jamesoncharacterizes the "theatre as an institution microcosmic of society as a whole, and thereby of the symbolic and utopian allegories it offers as an experimental space and collective I.boratory" (t [). This seems to be especially important in a historic situation in which "the very disappearance of the idea of the party" ([ [3) - we might add, at least in the understanding of Marx, Lenin, and Gramsci - puts the question of the relationship...

pdf

Share