Brecht and Method [1 ed.] 1859848095

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Brecht and Method •

FREDRIC JAMESON

VERSO London

•

New York

First published by Verso 1998 ©Fredric Jameson 1998 All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London Wl V 3HR USA: 1 80 Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN 1-859 84-809-5 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jameson, Frederic. Brecht and method I Fredric Jameson. cm. p. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-85984-809-5 1. Brecht, Bertolt, 1 898-1956-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PT2603.R3997Z71265 1998 98-29362 832'. 912-dc21 CIP

Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden Printed by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn

For Gert Weymann

Contents

Prologue 1

Niitzliches

1

2

Monadic Chronologies

5

3

Triangulating Brecht

PART I

19

Doctrine/Lehre

4

Estrangements of the Estrangement-Effect

35

5

Autonomization

43

6

Episch, or, the Third Person

51

7 Dualities of the Subject

58

8

66

From Multiplicity to Contradiction

PART II 9

Gestus

Pedagogy as Autoreferentiality

89

10

Parable

99

11

Grundgestus

105

12

Casus

118

13

Allegory

122

C O NT E N T S

Vlll

PART III

Proverbs!Spriiche

14

Proverbs and Peasant History

131

15

Registers and Generic Discontinuities

140

16

Representability of Capitalism

149

17

'Beinah'

161

Epilogue

18

Modernity

1 65

19

Actuality

1 68

20

Historicity

1 75

Index

181

Prologue

1

Niitzliches

Brecht would have been delighted, I like to think, at an argument, not for his greatness, or his canonicity, nor even for some new and unexpected value of posterity (let alone for his 'postmodernity'), as rather for his usefulness and that not only for some uncertain or merely possible future, but right now, in a post-Cold-War market-rhetorical situation even more anti-communist than the good old days. Brechtian slyness: so it was, for example, that instead of denouncing a 'cult of personality' that could not but nauseate him, he proposed that we should, rather, celebrate the essential 'usefulness' of Stalin (something not only Trotsky and Mao Zedong, but probably even Roosevelt, would have been willing to endorse). 1 Indeed, it was as just such a proposer of proposals that he himself wanted to be remembered: -

Er hat Vorschliige gemacht. Wir haben sie angenommen. (XN, 191-2) He made proposals. We Carried them out. 2

On the other hand, it is characteristic of the Brechtian dialectic that no such suggestions ever remain wholly unambiguous. So it is, for example, that precisely this argument, deployed by the 'modernist' architect of Me-ti (Book of the Turning Ways) to defend a Corbusian aesthetic of beauty and usefulness, draws upon itself the disgust and repudiation of his workers: Gerade so gut [they tell him] konntest du einem Kuli, der beim Kahnschleppen mit Lederpeitschen gepeitscht wird, Stiihle anbieten, deren Sitze aus Lederrie­ men geflochten sind. Vielleicht ist wirklich schon, was niitzlich ist. Aber dann sind unsere Maschinen nicht schon, denn sie sind for uns nicht niitzlich. Aber,

2

B R E C H T A ND M E T H OD rief Len-ti schmerzvoll, sie ki.innten erhaps then, in the largest ense of the word, there i

a Brecbtian rhetori whose ambitions

are cast a widely a Aristotle's which seek the Good i n its most august clas icaJ city- care form, and about which it has be n

aid that it should

be grasped as the fust sy temaric hermeneutic of oci a l dai ly life' .22 In that case, it will be something a Littl s oring of a point over the adver ary

more comprehensive than the and will imply strategies of

thought and action rhat exceed ow- concepts of the verbal. till

there are a few rhetorical concepts in the narrower sense that

eem appropriate: that of irony

for exampl.e, a

category for the varieties of invective reversal

which we fo1d

concept of irony bring rhetorical

sarcasm

a comprehensive

cynical parado ', sly

o often tbl'Oughout Brecht's sentence . The with it a double bonu : it i

one of the few

trategies which is considered a trope i n the narrower

(or in the more post-contemporary one, a a more general attitude it ha

en e

in Pa ul de Man), while as

been more generally ascribed to the

world-view of all the great modem , or wa at the lea t a fundamental part of the ideology of moderni m until the latter came under attack and hi torica l ob olescence in the postmodern period. So the ' ironic German' (Erich Heller'

characterization of Thomas Mann

who did

P R O L O GU E

21

indeed make a fetish of irony as such) spread the influence of this category across all of modern literature for a time; and the ironic attitude was famous for doing everything from preserving the fresh­ ness of language, like salt (as in T. S. Eliot), to the distancing of unwanted and overly political positions, which irony allows one now to endorse and repudiate all at once. This is certainly not what Brecht had in view, and indeed, his is, rather, that more limited 'stable irony' which Wayne Booth seeks to differentiate from the general modern ironic Weltanschauung we have just alluded to.23 Yet the more we draw Brecht's irony in the direction of old-fashioned rhetoric in this way, the less is the concept capable of doing the descriptive work which the concept of style made available to us, and the more 'irony' in this rhetorical sense becomes a property of Brecht's own Weltanschauung ( if he has one), or at the very least a feature of theatrical demonstrations as such. In either case, we rescue Brecht from a now conventional notion of modernism (the uniquely subjective style, the characteristically ironic attitude), but by the same token we find ourselves unable to characterize a distinctiveness in the language which everyone recognizes, including foreigners: the dry, witty, ironic qualities of this language use tempt one to add Brecht to Nietzsche's list (proposed in a relatively anti­ German spirit) of the three best German books (Luther's Bible, Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann, and his own). This would, however, heighten stylistic analysis to an allegorical and 'geopolitical' reading in which the very attributes of the language constitute a pointed rebuke to the author's countrymen - who have chosen fascism, but whose heavy­ handedness is also the sign, from the eighteenth century onwards, of a certain 'Third-World-type' backwardness ( 'Keep it quick, light and strong', he warned his company, on their way to England shortly before his death; remember that foreigners consider our art 'terribly heavy, slow, laborious and pedestrian'24.) Thus at the term of this or that approach to the language as such, whether stylistic or rhetorical, an interpretation emerges which shifts gears and at once repositions us on a different level, that of Haltung (stance), of collective interrelationship or symbolic act, of 'rhetoric' in the social and relational sense, or of 'meaning' and 'interpretation' in some code which transcends the merely linguistic or verbal. So that dimension of Brecht's work which is the inner or symbolic meaning of his language or style would seem to retain a distinctiveness in its own right, yet to be susceptible of formulation in at least two other different areas: we may well feel that what gives the language its uniquely Brechtian flavour is some uniquely Brechtian mode of thinking; if not

22

B RECHT AND METHO D

the shape of the gesture - not to say the gestus of this language may ultimately be considered as a symbolic act in its own right. This third possibility leads us in the direction of plot-formation in Brecht, and of the 'distinctive' and 'unique' features (to continue to use our leitmotiven) which mark the construction of a characteristically Brechtian scene or narrative, or a Brechtian appropriation and transformation of somebody else's narrative. Shifting to our second area, then, the alternative of a distinctive doctrine, we may well pause to remember T. S. Eliot's revealing remarks, at the very dawn of the modern movement, on the relationship between 'ideas' and literary texts. They are remarks which conjure up an atmosphere of philosophical pragmatism hostile to system and to speculative philosophy (the American School in which Eliot was himself trained comes to mind, but also, from a very different standpoint, that Vienna Circle from which B recht derived a certain number of philosophical attitudes through the intermediation of Karl Korsch25); but also of a general Imagism in literature, which (far more widely than the rather narrow Hulmean movement to which this school designation generally applies) marked a feeling of modern writers generally that the idea in the text was a kind of foreign body; that such 'literary' ideas demanded special precautions, and at the outside limit, in the extremist cases, demanded to be tracked down and eliminated altogether ('say it, not in ideas but in things' ) . This literary-ideological attitude, which makes the question of the relationship between conceptuality and literariness over into a crucial and topical form-problem (and, by implication, tends to preclude didacticism altogether), is perhaps most memorably formulated in Eliot's grand celebration of Henry James: 'he had a mind so fine no idea could violate it'.26 Yet the form-solution in Brecht evidently involves a combination avoided in the case of the other moderns: a choice of immanence over transcendence, but in his case a didactic or pedagogical stance which is either absent altogether from - shunned by - the other moderns, or has taken forms we have insufficiently examined: thus, Pound's inveterate schoolmasterish Ha/­ tung is dismissed as secondary and insignificant (on the grounds of the outlandishness of his economics, his Confucianism, or whatever). But Eliot himself is an interesting case here, for while a kind of standard Catholicism and monarchist conservatism neutralizes the ideational content and renders it conventional, respectable and thereby invisible, there is in Eliot very much a didactic posture not without its ana­ logies to that of Brecht himself. Thus it is that Eliot has a second curious remark, a second lesson, equally instructive for us in the present context; it is to be found in his suggestive essay on William Blake, in -

P R O L O GU E

23

which he comes to terms with the latter's 'philosophy', by observing drily: We have the same respect for Blake's philosophy . . . that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and ends about the house . . . . But we are really not so remote from the Continent, or even from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of culture if we wish them.27

'Culture' here signifies for Eliot an already systematic body of doctrine which is widely accepted in society, even institutionalized, and whose signal 'advantage' for the writer is that it obviates the need to divert a considerable portion of creative energy in the direction of personal 'philosophizing' ai;Id (we may say) 'bricolating' a private philosophy for himself and for his 'distinctive' modernist work. Leave aside the fact that so many moderns have felt obliged to concoct just such a private philosophy for themselves, alongside their evidently equally private language: as witness Lawrence or Proust, Rilke or Wallace Stevens, Musil or Khlebnikov. The warning also concerns the readers themselves: though it is difficult enough to imagine a gauge to measure the mental energy required to figure out the system itself or the private mythology in question, it is surely plausible that such a necessary effort on the part of the reader will inevitably drain or divert mental and perceptual resources better reserved for the sheer exposure to and evaluation of poeticity or, in other words, the language itself. It is this, of course, that has led some to characterize the experience of modernism, or of the various modernisms, as one of a quasi-religious conversion, in which we are called upon - as our entry ticket to the unique phenomenological 'world' in question - to convert to its dominant ideology, and to learn its codes, to absorb its structure of concepts of values, in some relatively exclusive way which, in our literary enthusiasm, tends to block off an approach to other rival literary codes and languages, until at length we are deprogrammed in disabusement, and reluctantly deconverted; and pass on to a similar commitment to this or that other modern writer, at which point the whole (quintessentially modernist) process repeats itself all over again. Whatever the value of this particular description, it is worth noting that Eliot himself proposes to short-circuit it and to recommend a very different framework for the poet's or the artist's work: 'a framework of accepted and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a philosophy of his own'28 - which is to say, in his own case, the Roman Catholic tradition as preserved in the rituals of the established Church of England.

B R E C H T AND M E T H O D

24

But i t is precisely thi

propo al for neutra lizing the i ncompati bility

between icleational content a nd poetic language which allows us to ee the que rion of thought and meaning in Brecht' work i11 a new light. For the equivalent of Chri tian doctrine i n the latter'

context i ,

obviou ly enough, Marxism itsel� perhaps the only fu lly codified phil­ osophy, sanctioned by whole collectivities and by tat authority itself which is comparable to Christia nity and it

scxiptural tradition

and

archives of commentary (neither Islam nor Judaism ha the ame kinds of doctrinal codification, while the other ' major' religions or even ecular

philosophies have never had the same relationship with state power). No doubt Brecht's Marxism might well be read in this way: as a framework which obviated the need to cobble together a 'private philo ophy' of his own, and thus provided a framework for a non­ problemacized aesthetic production. But a eriou (yet productive) ques­ tion may precisely be raised here by the very nature of Brecht s Mar.xi m as sud1: for on one view, wbar he learned from Kor ch was not a et of doctrine

and prin ipJes, which could serve as j ust

uch a framework,

but rather an attitude ho tile to ystem in genera l, the so-called 'logical empiricism' of the Vienna circle

whi h was equally hostiJ

to the

dialectic (and to Hegelian v rsions of Marxism) and while committed to a radical and Marxian politics, felt able to denounce a b tract doctrine and belief in fully as thoroughgoing a way as the modernist l itterateur evoked a bove. Where, then, is Brecht's Marxi m as a doctrine to be found in the fir t place? Where are his idea ? And even if, as Lukacs so scandalously sugge ted in 'What i Orthodox Marxism ?' (as decisive an e ay on 'ideas' in the Marxian tradition as the a bove-cited Eliot one for non-secular bourgeous philosophies) exclusively co

method'29

-

'Orth dox Marxism . . . refer

a hint we will try to follow up below - there

remains the matter of the ideational content Brecht's work is suppo ed to teach, since it is precisely didacticism that offered our other stumbling block. Yet we might also want to think of the kind of di.dactici m inliei:eot in teaching a parti ular mental Ha/tung, a characteristically Brechtian type of pragmati m (rather than 'Marxjsm'), of wb.ich I offer three examples here. It may initial ly be de cribed as fol low

{at fir t leaving out it

pbilo ophical co11sequences and presuppositions): you rum a problem into it

solution thereby coming at the matter askew and sending the

projectile off i n to a new and more productive direction than tbe dead end in which it was immobilized. Thus for example, evoking tbe classical

Platonic contempt for the actor (would you trust: bim more or even as much as your doctor, asks ocrates; more than your politicians? more than your judges? ) , Brecht recommends building on chi contempt and

25

PROLOGUE

using it, rather than attempting to do away with it by disappearing into the role: Die Ansicht des Zuschauers iiber den Beruf des Schauspielers als einen absurden, auffalligen und gerade