Verfremcluhanseffekt

VERFREMCLUHANSEFFEKT As JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY KNOWS by this time, the real problem with Bertolt Brecht's VerfremdungsefJekt is that it doesn't work, a fact responsible both for the lasting popularity of Brechtian drama and for the inordinate amount of scholarly writing on the subject. For Brecht's intention, as manifested repeatedly in his theory, is to change the audience's mode of apprehension of the play from one of emotional acceptance to the scientific critical detachment necessary if the perceiver is to learn from the drama how to change the world. Yet in production, and even on the printed page, the effect is by almost unanimous opinion totally other. For while in retrospect we may recognize the tactical errors implicit in the lives and choices of Grusha and Mother Courage, as we may in that of Hamlet, our immediate suffering of the actions of the plays is as emotional, as caught up, as warm and sloppy and humanly empathetic, as is our apprehension of any traditional drama. Perhaps more so, for the effect of Brecht's structural machinations may be only to enlarge the play's encompassment of our emotional life and so increase our emotional involvement . Faced with a dramatization of the paradoxes of society we cry "Oh how true to life that is," and rather than leaving the theatre determined to alter that life, we on the contrary weep all the harder: refusing to see the paradox as a reformable social evil we embrace it instead as a universal verity. And the counter argument that this state of audience reception is true only for the dullards in a capitalist society places us in the difficult position of positing a difference in kind between the audiences of Communist nations and our own, a revolution of sensibility achieved moreover in an extremely short time. It also asks us to believe that the same play is simultaneously an outstanding achievement in the modes of these two separate hypothetical sensibilities: that on opposite sides of the Berlin wall two audiencets exult in the same artifactone as a tool for scientific social manipulation, the other as a dip into the warm bath of emotional truth. Though such double appreciation can exist, in for instance the sense that one may admire the design of a complex surgical instrument, it seems unlikely that it could occur on so grand a scale. Besides, Brecht himself in the Little Organon and elsewhere specifically states that his audience consists of "Aristotelian" empathizers and that it is this given against and for which he writes. It is the assumption of this paper that if VerfremdungsefJekt is operative in the manner in which Brecht's writings indicate that it should 340 1971 VERFREMCLUHANSEFFEKT 341 be that that operation is carried out by means of a mix of sensibility modes far more complex than would be allowed by the simple polarity of unconscious emotional empathy versus detached critical observation . Some critics have too often assumed that it was the latter mode which Brecht obviously intended, that when he states that empathy is only one mode of observation [53]! he is of course calling for its only opposite, an error traceable, I think not so much to Brecht, who is usually careful not to exclude emotion, but to the fact that we lack a construct of sensibility which allows a mix rather than a polarity. That our apprehension of his plays in the theatre does not create critical objectivity may obviate his theory, or may equally well obviate our understanding of the possible modes of critical objectivity. That Brecht's theory is itself sometimes unclear and self contradictory ; that it may have been written under pressures of political necessity, internal or otherwise; that it did change over the length of his lifetime; that various production techniques were used and then dropped-all these things are true, but they need not mean that the theory because complex is therefore somehow hypocritical or faulty. Our assumption here is that just as the plays constitute an apprehension and encompassment of reality, so too does the theory; that discursive writing was not Brecht's best manner of expression is not the point. Behind the vitiating...