To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy by Darko Suvin (review)

386 Comparative Drama Darko Suvin. To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modem Dramaturgy. Totowa, N. J.: Bames and Noble, 1984. Pp. xii + 283. $27.50. To Brecht and Beyond brings together nine essays published in various journals and collections between 1966 and 1977. The book’s value lies partly in making the essays themselves easily accessible; this is par­ ticularly true for the first two, which are otherwise available only in a Yugoslavian collection and a McGill University pamphlet, respectively. But the book’s greater value lies in its making the essays available in the context of each other, as “variations on and evolutions of the same theme—modem dramaturgy as explainable by the history that constitutes it and into which it returns” (p. x i). Suvin has further enhanced this value by not eliminating the traces of this ten-year evolution. (Suvin states that he has reworked the first two essays; the others show only minor differ­ ences from the originals,) Instead, he groups the essays into two parts and provides a general Introduction and an Afterword to each part, in which he discusses the limitations in method he now finds as well as implications for further exploration. Part I begins with a sweeping overview of the rise and decay of Individualist dramaturgy—dramaturgy that conceives “the world from the individual as the ultimate reality” (p. 116). The chapter’s strengths are bought at the price of oversimplification and “uncritical reliance on an excessively Hegelian conception of monolithic world-historical epochs” (Afterword to Part I, p. 76), but they are considerable: Suvin is able to interrelate the development of bourgeois dramaturgic practice and bourgeois world-view, be it the evolution of the proscenium stage or the evolution of the individualist hero from the embodiment of the capa­ bility for free, that is, self-expressive action, to the powerless victim dominated by History as social and personal background and by the objects his subjectivity inevitably creates— including other people. Suvin continues this exploration in a less generalized comparison between Ibsen’s necessarily contradictory attempt to criticize the bourgeois world­ view using the closed form of bourgeois dramaturgy and Brecht’s open dramaturgy, which restores the dramaturgic centrality of story and social relationships— that is, relationships between people. Part II opens with two transitions. The first examines the debate on theatre organization in the Council of the Paris Commune as an example of the interdependence between institutional and dramaturgical change, or lack of it. The second, “The Mirror and the Dynamo” (written in 1967 and still a classic introduction to Brecht’s later dramaturgy, although no longer an unassailable one, as Suvin himself demonstrates in his After­ word), expands Suvin’s earlier discussion of bourgeois dramaturgy with a consideration of its reliance on an “Illusionism” that assumes that art­ works somehow directly reproduce man and the world (p. 116), then draws a broad contrast between this aesthetic and Brecht’s. Suvin locates Brecht’s central strategy in a look backward to the human possibilities realized at any stage of history from a posited fuller realization of the same possibilities. This strategy functions openly in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, as Suvin shows in an essay on the play, and it is also at work in Coriolan, where it participates in a subversion of Reviews 387 traditional readings of Shakespeare’s play as Individualist tragedy. On the other hand, Brecht’s strategy is complicated by a tendency to give the posited future specific features. Suvin discusses this tendency and points to some of its Leninist features (the exact character of Brecht’s political phi­ losophy, as Suvin points out in the Afterword, remains to be delineated) in his essay on Coriolan and again in his essay on St. Joan of the Slaugh­ terhouses. The three essays are also excellent close readings of the plays concerned; the essay on St. Joan is a masterpiece. Suvin’s final two essays move beyond Brecht to consider two “counter­ projects” (p. 271), the dramaturgies of Beckett and the Happenings. Suvin’s chapter on Beckett is particularly valuable as a telling but balanced Marxist critique. Although the majority of its essays are devoted to Brecht, To Brecht and...