Brecht's Early Plays by Ronald Speirs (review)

Book Reviews 273 a personal and generational level, the last two with usurpation as a general social phenomenon. In The Cherry Orchard, "the parvenu usurper Lopakhin receives something nearer [than in The Three Sisters] to positive endorsement." Chek.hov's Oblomovism leaves us with the question, never answered, of the identity of the real usurper. Without fully spelling it out, Peace has identified the play's central tension, pointed out by Fergusson: the suffering of change. Peace's study is most enlightening when he focuses on usurpation or substitution not just as the central theme, but as the central method in the plays. The two stages before the audience at the beginning of The Seagull suggest incompatible but at the same time complementary concepts of drama (and a metaphor for Chekhov's own dramaticart): the onecontains and at the same time relies on the other. So with the other contradictions of the plays. Typically, Chekhov gives us laughter "through tears." It was not Peace's purpose to examine fully Chekhov's uses of irony. But by focusing on Chekhov's predecessors and the challenging of action by allusions, Peace has enabled readers who lack his familiarity with the Russian literary tradition to appreciate better the nature of Chekhov's oblique drama and the infinite care with which it is constructed. CLAYTON A. HUBBS, HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE RONALD SPEIRS. Brecht's Early Plays. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press 1982. Pp. xi, 224. $42. Ronald Speirs's basic approach to Brecht is sound, as are many of his particular insights. His aim is to isolate Brecht's pre-Marxist work and write a partial critical biography, a description of the total human and creative phenomenon represented by young Brecht, without any tailoring of ideas to fit what came later. His guiding conception, the idea that the center of Brecht's early intellectual life is occupied by a need to achieve "mastery" over the treacherous complexity of human experience, is in my opinion definitely promising. But the organization of the book, as a series of discussions of individual works, is a mistake. The conception is biographical, not text-interpretive, and the casting of each chapter as if it were the interpretation of a text has the effect of smothering the real insights under long, additively constructed arguments of uncertain direction and value. In each chapter the author feels obliged to finish up with the text he is discussing; several times, therefore, rather than develop and thereby strengthen an interesting transtextual idea when he arrives at it, he contents himself with stating it in a relatively innocuous form, and then simply listing (in a long series of paragraphs connected by words like "also," "further," "another") its various manifestations in the text at hand. The ideas and insights are thus weakened; connections between texts, the developmental strains, lose clarity of focus. The idea that suffers most, as might be expected, is the central idea of "mastery." Speirs lays special stress on Brecht's poetic vision (and actual personal practice) of intense, indiscriminate affmnativeness as a means of mastering the pain and the uncomfortable complexity of experience, an affirmativeness that reaches its extreme 274 Book Reviews and its perversion in the "masochism" of a Shlink or an Edward. But the ingrained problematic quality in this attitude, the inherent paradox in this line of thought, the question (which is obviously important in Im Dickicht der Stiidte) of whether pain or suffering does not lose its very nature by being affirmed, with the result that the unmastered complexity of experience becomes greater than ever, is hardly developed at all. In fact, one detects in the thought of Speirs's book a strong tendency to focus on the play Im Dickicht. It is in the discussion of this play that Brecht's raising of the question of "the inadequacies of language" is mentioned, but, inexplicably, without any develop­ ment of the idea of language as itself, by nature, an attempt to master experience. It is in reference to this play that Speirs suggests the idea of mastery as a function of the formal artistic situation, rather than as an attitude exemplified directly by characters; but again, the connection with...