Illuminations, p.17
Illuminations, page 17
fn1 This text on Max Brod’s Franz Kafka; Eine Biographie, Prague, 1937, is contained in a letter to Gerhard Scholem, dated June 12 1938.
fn2 Zauberreich der Liebe (Magic Realm of Love), 1928. (Translator’s note.)
fn3 Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, New York-Cambridge, 1929, p. 342. Quoted by Benjamin in German translation.
fn4 See the preceding essay.
What Is Epic Theatre?
THE RELAXED AUDIENCE
‘There is nothing more pleasant than to lie on a sofa and read a novel,’ wrote a nineteenth-century narrator, indicating the great extent to which a work of fiction can relax the reader who is enjoying it. The common image of a man attending a theatrical performance is the opposite: one pictures a man who follows the action with every fibre of his being at rapt attention. The concept of the epic theatre, originated by Brecht as the theoretician of his poetic practice, indicates above all that this theatre desires an audience that is relaxed and follows the action without strain. This audience, to be sure, always appears as a collective, and this differentiates it from the reader, who is alone with his text. Also, this audience, being a collective, will usually feel impelled to react promptly. This reaction, according to Brecht, ought to be a well-considered and therefore a relaxed one – in short, the reaction of people who have an interest in the matter. Two objects are provided for this interest. The first is the action; it has to be such that the audience can keep a check on it at crucial places on the basis of its own experience. The second is the performance; it should be mounted artistically in a pellucid manner. (This manner of presentation is anything but artless; actually, it presupposes artistic sophistication and acumen on the part of the director.) Epic theatre appeals to an interest group who ‘do not think without reason.’ Brecht does not lose sight of the masses, whose limited practice of thinking is probably described by this phrase. In the endeavour to interest the audience in the theatre expertly, but definitely not by way of mere cultural involvement, a political will has prevailed.
THE PLOT
The epic theatre purposes to ‘deprive the stage of its sensation derived from subject matter.’ Thus an old story will often do more for it than a new one. Brecht has considered the question of whether the incidents that are presented by the epic theatre should not already be familiar. The theatre would have the same relationship to the plot as a ballet teacher has to his pupil: his first task would be to loosen her joints to the greatest possible extent. This is how the Chinese theatre actually proceeds. In his essay ‘The Fourth Wall of China’ (Life and Letters Today, Vol. XV, No. 6, 1936), Brecht states what he owes to this theatre. If the theatre is to cast about for familiar events, ‘historical incidents would be the most suitable.’ Their epic extension through the style of acting, the placards and captions, is intended to purge them of the sensational.
In this vein Brecht takes the life of Galileo as the subject of his latest play. Brecht presents Galileo primarily as a great teacher who not only teaches a new physics, but does so in a new way. In his hands, experiments are not only an achievement of science, but a tool of pedagogy as well. The main emphasis of this play is not on Galileo’s recantation; rather, the truly epic process must be sought in what is evident from the labelling of the penultimate scene: ‘1633 to 1642. As a prisoner of the Inquisition, Galileo continues his scientific work until his death. He succeeds in smuggling his main works out of Italy.’
Epic theatre is in league with the course of time in an entirely different way from that of the tragic theatre. Because suspense belongs less to the outcome than to the individual events, this theatre can cover the greatest spans of time. (The same is true of the earlier mystery plays. The dramaturgy of Oedipus or The Wild Duck constitutes the counterpole of epic dramaturgy.)
THE UNTRAGIC HERO
The French classical theatre made room in the midst of the players for persons of rank, who had their armchairs on the open stage. To us this seems inappropriate. According to the concept of the ‘dramatic element’ with which we are familiar, it seemed inappropriate to attach to the action on the stage a non-participating third part as a dispassionate observer or ‘thinker.’ Yet Brecht often had something like that in mind. One can go even further and say that Brecht made an attempt to make the thinker, or even the wise man, the hero of the drama. From this very point of view one can define his theatre as epic theatre. This attempt is taken furthest in the character of Galy Gay, the packer. Galy Gay, the protagonist of the play A Man’s a Man, is nothing but an exhibit of the contradictions which make up our society. It may not be too bold to regard the wise man in the Brechtian sense as the perfect showcase of its dialectics. In any case, Galy Gay is a wise man. Plato already recognized the undramatic quality of that most excellent man, the sage. In his Dialogues he took him to the threshold of the drama; in his Phaidon, to the threshold of the passion play. The medieval Christ, who also represented the wise man (we find this in the Early Fathers), is the untragic hero par excellence. But in the secular drama of the West, too, the search for the untragic hero has never ceased. In always new ways, and frequently in conflict with its theoreticians, this drama has differed from the authentic – that is, the Greek – form of tragedy. This important but poorly marked road, which may here serve as the image of a tradition, went via Roswitha and the mystery plays in the Middle Ages, via Gryphius and Calderón in the Baroque age; later we may trace it in Lenz and Grabbe, and finally in Strindberg. Scenes in Shakespeare are its roadside monuments, and Goethe crosses it in the second part of Faust. It is a European road, but a German one as well – provided that we may speak of a road and not of a secret smugglers’ path by which the legacy of the medieval and the Baroque drama has reached us. It is this mule track, neglected and overgrown, which comes to light today in the dramas of Brecht.
THE INTERRUPTION
Brecht differentiates his epic theatre from the dramatic theatre in the narrower sense, whose theory was formulated by Aristotle. Appropriately, Brecht introduces his art of the drama as non-Aristotelian, just as Riemann introduced a non-Euclidian geometry, This analogy may bring out the fact that it is not a matter of competition between the theatrical forms in question. Riemann eliminated the parallel postulate; Brecht’s drama eliminated the Aristotelian catharsis, the purging of the emotions through empathy with the stirring fate of the hero.
The special character of the relaxed interest of the audience for which the performances of the epic theatre are intended is the fact that hardly any appeal is made to the empathy of the spectators. Instead, the art of the epic theatre consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it succinctly: instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be educated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they function.
The task of the epic theatre, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions. This presentation does not mean reproduction as the theoreticians of Naturalism understood it. Rather, the truly important thing is to discover the conditions of life. (One might say just as well: to alienate [verfremden] them.) This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings. The most primitive example would be a family scene. Suddenly a stranger enters. The mother was just about to seize a bronze bust and hurl it at her daughter; the father was in the act of opening the window in order to call a policeman. At that moment the stranger appears in the doorway. This means that the stranger is confronted with the situation as with a startling picture: troubled faces, an open window, the furniture in disarray. But there are eyes to which even more ordinary scenes of middle-class life look almost equally startling.
THE QUOTABLE GESTURE
In one of his didactic poems on dramatic art Brecht says: ‘The effect of every sentence was waited for and laid bare. And the waiting lasted until the crowd had carefully weighed our sentence.’ In short, the play was interrupted. One can go even further and remember that interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context. It is therefore understandable that the epic theatre, being based on interruption, is, in a specific sense, a quotable one. There is nothing special about the quotability of its texts. It is different with the gestures which fit into the course of the play.
‘Making gestures quotable’ is one of the substantial achievements of the epic theatre. An actor must be able to space his gestures the way a typesetter produces spaced type. This effect may be achieved, for instance, by an actor’s quoting his own gesture on the stage. Thus we saw in Happy End how Carola Neher, acting a sergeant in the Salvation Army, sang, by way of proselytizing, a song in a sailors’ tavern that was more appropriate there than it would have been in a church, and then had to quote this song and act out the gestures before a council of the Salvation Army. Similarly, in The Measure Taken the party tribunal is given not only the report of the comrades, but also the acting out of some of the gestures of the comrade they are accusing. What is a device of the subtlest kind in the epic theatre generally becomes an immediate purpose in the specific case of the didactic play. Epic theatre is by definition a gestic theatre. For the more frequently we interrupt someone in the act of acting, the more gestures result.
THE DIDACTIC PLAY
In every instance, the epic theatre is meant for the actors as much as for the spectators. The didactic play is a special case largely because it facilitates and suggests the interchange between audience and actors and vice versa through the extreme paucity of the mechanical equipment. Every spectator is enabled to become a participant. And it is indeed easier to play the ‘teacher’ than the ‘hero.’
In the first version of Lindberghflug (Lindbergh’s Flight), which appeared in a periodical, the flyer was still presented as a hero. That version was intended as his glorification. The second version – and this is revealing – owes its origin to the fact that Brecht revised himself. What enthusiasm there was on both continents on the days following this flight! But this enthusiasm petered out as a mere sensation. In The Flight of the Lindberghs Brecht endeavours to refract the spectrum of the ‘thrill’ (Erlebnis) in order to derive from it the hues of ‘experience’ (Erfahrung) – the experience that could be obtained only from Lindbergh’s effort, not from the excitement of the public, and which was to be conveyed to ‘the Lindberghs.’
T. E. Lawrence, the author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, wrote to Robert Graves when he joined the air force that such a step was for modern man what entering a monastery was for medieval man. In this remark we perceive the same tension that we find in The Flight of the Lindberghs and the later didactic plays. A clerical sternness is applied to instruction in a modern technique – here, that of aviation; later, that of the class struggle. This second application may be seen most fully in Mother. It was a particularly daring undertaking to keep a social drama free of the effects which empathy produces and which the audience was accustomed to. Brecht knew this and expressed it in an epistolary poem that he sent to a New York workingmen’s theatre when Mother was produced there. ‘We have been asked: Will a worker understand this? Will he be able to do without his accustomed opiate, his mental participation in someone else’s uprising, the rise of others; the illusion which whips him up for a few hours and leaves him all the more exhausted, filled with vague memories and even vaguer hopes?’
THE ACTOR
Like the pictures in a film, epic theatre moves in spurts. Its basic form is that of the shock with which the single, well-defined situations of the play collide. The songs, the captions, the lifeless conventions set off one situation from another. This brings about intervals which, if anything, impair the illusion of the audience and paralyze its readiness for empathy. These intervals are reserved for the spectators’ critical reaction – to the actions of the players and to the way in which they are presented. As to the manner of presentation, the actor’s task in the epic theatre is to demonstrate through his acting that he is cool and relaxed. He too has hardly any use for empathy. For this kind of acting the ‘player’ of the dramatic theatre is not always fully prepared. Perhaps the most open-minded approach to epic theatre is to think of it in terms of ‘putting on a show.’
Brecht wrote: ‘The actor must show his subject, and he must show himself. Of course, he shows his subject by showing himself, and he shows himself by showing his subject. Although the two coincide, they must not coincide in such a way that the difference between the two tasks disappears.’ In other words: an actor should reserve for himself the possibility of stepping out of character artistically. At the proper moment he should insist on portraying a man who reflects about his part. It would be erroneous to think at such a moment of Romantic Irony, as employed by Tieck in his Puss in Boots. This irony has no didactic aim. Basically, it demonstrates only the philosophic sophistication of the author who, in writing his plays, always remembers that in the end the world may turn out to be a theatre.
To what extent artistic and political interests coincide on the scene of epic theatre will become manifest in the style of acting appropriate to this genre. A case in point is Brecht’s cycle The Private Life of the Master Race. It is easy to see that if a German actor in exile were assigned the part of an SS man or a member of the People’s Court, his feelings about it would be quite different from those of a devoted father and husband asked to portray Molière’s Don Juan. For the former, empathy can hardly be regarded as an appropriate method, since he presumably cannot identify with the murderers of his fellow fighters. Another mode of performance, which calls for detachment, would in such cases be right and fitting and particularly successful. This is the epic stagecraft.
THEATRE ON A DAIS
The aims of the epic theatre can be defined more easily in terms of the stage than of a new drama. Epic theatre allows for a circumstance which has been too little noticed. It may be called the filling in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the players from the audience as it does the dead from the living; the abyss whose silence in a play heightens the sublimity, whose resonance in an opera heightens the intoxication – this abyss, of all elements of the theatre the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance. The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dais. The didactic play and the epic theatre are attempts to sit down on a dais.
On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
I
Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties. The introductory poem of the Fleurs du mal is addressed to these readers. Will power and the ability to concentrate are not their strong points; what they prefer is sensual pleasures; they are familiar with the ‘spleen’ which kills interest and receptiveness. It is strange to come across a lyric poet who addresses himself to this, the least rewarding type of audience. There is of course a ready explanation for it. Baudelaire was anxious to be understood; he dedicates his book to kindred spirits. The poem addressed to the reader ends with the salutation: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’ It might be more fruitful to put it another way and say: Baudelaire wrote a book which from the very beginning had little prospect of becoming an immediate popular success. The kind of reader he envisaged is described in the introductory poem, and this turned out to have been a far-sighted judgment. He was eventually to find the reader at whom his work was aimed. This situation, the fact, in other words, that the climate for lyric poetry has become increasingly inhospitable, is attested to, among other things, by three factors. In the first place, the lyric poet has ceased to represent the poet per se. He no longer is a ‘minstrel,’ as Lamartine still was; he has become a representative of a genre. (Verlaine is a concrete example of this specialization; Rimbaud must already be regarded as an esoteric figure, a poet who maintained an ex officio distance between his public and his work.) Secondly, there has been no success on a mass scale in lyric poetry since Baudelaire. (The lyric poetry of Victor Hugo was still able to set off powerful reverberations when it first appeared. In Germany, Heine’s Buch der Lieder marks a watershed.) As a result, a third factor was the greater coolness of the public even toward the lyric poetry that had been handed down as part of its own cultural heritage. The period in question dates back roughly to the middle of the last century. Throughout it the fame of the Fleurs du mal has constantly spread. This book, which was expected to be read by the least indulgent of readers and which was at first read by few indulgent ones, has, over the decades, acquired the stature of a classic and become one of the most widely printed ones as well.
If conditions for a positive reception of lyric poetry have become less favourable, it is reasonable to assume that only in rare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers. This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience. Even though one may approve of this development, one may be all the more hard put to it to say precisely in what respect there may have been a change. Thus one turns to philosophy for an answer, which brings one up against a strange situation. Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the ‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in society. What they invoked was poetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of myths. Dilthey’s book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung represents one of the earliest of these efforts which end with Klages and Jung; both made common cause with Fascism. Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matière et mémoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented toward biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience. Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as private life. It is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data. It is, however, not at all Bergson’s intention to attach any specific historical label to memory. He thus manages above all to stay clear of that experience from which his own philosophy evolved or, rather, in reaction to which it arose. It was the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism. In shutting out this experience the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the form of its spontaneous afterimage, as it were. Bergson’s philosophy represents an attempt to give the details of this afterimage and to fix it as a permanent record. His philosophy thus indirectly furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself to Baudelaire’s eyes in its undistorted version in the figure of his reader.
