Bertolt Brecht's Baal: The Structure of Images

BERTOLT BRECHT'S BAAL: THE STRUCTURE OF IMAGES BERTOLT BRECHT'S FIRST PLAY, Baal.. written in 1918 has meaning on a variety of levels. For example, on one level it is a dramatic rehearsal of the relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine.! On another level, it stands as Brecht's reaction to the sentimental treatment of the dissolute poet in Der Einsame, Hans Johst's dramatic biography of Christian Grabbe. While Brecht's amoral presentation of the dissolute poet in the image of Baal does ridicule Johst's idealization and while his play was generated in his reaction, the work has its own integrity and transcends its original satiric intent. Baal is a satire of Johst's expressionistic exploitation of the traditional moral license granted the poet. However, Baal is also an unrestrained poetic statement about a chaotic, irrational, and self-destructive world and a celebration of the intense animal energy of its hero, who sees this world and calls it beautiful. To a degree, the play is also a kind of Ubu Roi in its .outrageous affront to the spectator's or reader's sensibilities. And it exists as an even stronger affront to ethical idealism and the conception of the integrity and continuity of the human personality.2 Hofmannsthal 's "Prologue to Brecht's Baal" senses the disintegration of the traditional concept of human personality in the comments of his players who portray an acting company discussing the play: "The actor is the amoeba among all living things and therefore he is the symbolic man. The amoeba, that indeterminate primitive creature, which lets the situation dictate whether it should be animal or plant."3 Also, in an approach to the play from a knowledge of Brecht's later plays, an approach which many readers will make, the play exists as an affront to their expectations of what a Brechtian play will be. The step backward from the powerful restraint of Mother Courage and the delicate charm of much of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the violent explosion of poetic images of Baal is an unexpected emotional assault. In a series of structurally disjointed episodes , Brecht tells the story of an amoral poet who deserts three women-the wife of his publisher, a disciple'S fiancee, and another 1 Martin Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work (New York, 1961), p. 9. 2 Esslin, p. 31• 3 Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, "A Prologue to Brecht's Baal," trans. Alfred Schwarz, Tulane Drama Review, VI (Autumn, 1961), p. 119. 311 312 MODERN DRAMA December young girl-and who enters a homosexual relationship with another friend which leads to the jealous murder of the friend and the poet's own death. However, the loosely jointed episodes are integrated in a kind of unity in the periodic invocations of the myth of Baal and in the structure of the po~tic imagery, an imagery which is not only violent and effusive, punctuated with iterative words, but richly textured with metaphor coloring metaphor. In fact, Baal's ful1 text is more dependent upon the structure of its poetic images than upon the visualization of its scene and action. Baal, with Dionysus, Persephone, and Osiris, shares the myth of a combat in the nether land and a return to life, the recurrent motive of death and resurrection which manifests itself in the seasonal pattern of the death of winter and the regeneration of spring. This use of Baal as a fertility god animates Brecht's play-most specifically in Baal's identification of himself with the seasons, the recurrent images of light and darkness, and Baal's desire for the tree as a sexual object. Certainly the myth of Baal is implicit in the "Chorale of the Great Baal" which precedes the actual play. Baal, from the canon of Canaanite or Proto·Phoenician gods, is a god of the skies, stOTInS, and rains-fertility-he is overcome in the fOTIn of a bull, in a sacrifice parallel to that of Dionysus, and with his death and the death of his son comes the barrenness, the lack of vegetation of winter. The Ras Shamra text reads: "Baal descends into the womb of the earth, when the olive...