INTRODUCTION
2016; Wiley; Volume: 69; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/glal.12112
ISSN1468-0483
Autores Tópico(s)Travel Writing and Literature
ResumoThe lead strand at the April 2014 conference of the Association for German Studies (Britain and Ireland) held at the University of Manchester was ‘Rethinking Brecht’. This special issue of German Life and Letters presents six of the papers delivered at the conference, supplemented by a paper by Jürgen Hillesheim, the Director of the Brecht-Forschungsstelle in Augsburg. One reason for choosing the theme was the remarkable upsurge in research about Brecht by UK scholars in the new millennium, which includes the following publications: Tom Kuhn and Karen Leeder's edited collection Empedocles' Shoe: Essays on Brecht's Poetry (2002);1 Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles's Brecht on Art and Politics (2003);2 John White's Bertolt Brecht's Dramatic Theory (2004);3 Laura Bradley's Brecht and Political Theatre. ‘The Mother’ on Stage (2006);4 a series of essays by Tom Kuhn on Brecht and the visual arts in, among other places, The Brecht Yearbook (2006) and Monatshefte (2013);5 Steve Giles's new translation and scholarly edition of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (2007);6 Robert Gillett and Godela Weiss-Sussex's edited collection of essays ‘Verwisch die Spuren!’ Bertolt Brecht's Work and Legacy. A Reassessment (2008),7 produced under the auspices of the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Brecht's death; Ronald Speirs's edited collection of essays Brecht's Poetry of Political Exile (2000),8 followed by his path-breaking articles in the Brecht Yearbook about the young Brecht's sensibility;9 and Ann and John White's Bertolt Brecht's Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (2010).10 These were followed in 2013 by the AHRC project, ‘Brecht into English’,11 which has published the following volumes in Bloomsbury's Methuen Drama imprint, supplementing a list already comprising some fifty volumes of Brecht in English: the classic Brecht on Theatre in a revised edition by Marc Silberman, Steve Giles and Tom Kuhn (2014);12 Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks, edited by the same team (2014);13 Berliner Ensemble Adaptations, edited by David Barnett (2014);14 and The Business Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar, translated by Charles Osborne and edited by Anthony Phelan (forthcoming, 2016). An edition of Me-ti by Anthony Tatlow is due to appear in 2017. A volume of Love Poems, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine, has appeared with W. W. Norton (2015),15 who will publish their further translations as Collected Poems (1400 pages) in 2018. Finally, this research has informed the production of two major monographs: Stephen Parker's Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life (2014),16 and David Barnett's A History of the Berliner Ensemble (2015).17 Why, however, should there be such a need to rethink Brecht? Brecht is, after all, acknowledged to be one of the greatest writers in twentieth-century German literature. He is the most performed dramatist world-wide after Shakespeare, and has massively influenced the development of drama and theatre on an international scale since the 1950s. He was also a key figure in the development of contemporary critical theory – not just its Marxist variants,18 but also French post-structuralism.19 On the other hand, he has been castigated by right-wing commentators for his political beliefs, by Marxist critics for his aesthetic practices, and by feminist theorists for his views on gender, a process that reached its climax in John Fuegi's widely criticised biography Brecht and Company in 1994.20 Brecht divides opinion and provokes controversy, and is one of the most complex and contradictory figures in modern German culture. He is also an author of considerable range and variety: poet, playwright, novelist, satirist, cultural theorist, multimedia practitioner, actor, director, singer-songwriter. His life spanned the most turbulent times in the twentieth century, and he had to adapt repeatedly to drastic shifts in social, economic and political circumstance. These discontinuities stamped his artistic and intellectual development, so much so that one might wonder how the ‘same’ man came to write the 1918 version of Baal, the 1932 version of Die Mutter, and the 1954 version of Der kaukasische Kreidekreis – or Der Dreigroschenprozeß, the Svendborger Gedichte, and Die Geschäfte des Herrn Julius Cäsar. Not surprisingly, literary critics, editors and theatre reviewers have sought to make sense of Brecht by homogenising him, slotting him into neat categories such as Brecht the anarchist, Brecht the behaviourist, or Brecht the Marxist. Somewhat ironically, critical approaches to Brecht also lend themselves to pigeon-holing, as we shall now see with reference to the early international reception of Epic Theatre before we consider some of the ways in which Brecht is at present being rethought in research. Brecht was first perceived as a major figure in European theatre thanks to the Berliner Ensemble's touring performances in the mid-1950s. In the two years immediately following the Berliner Ensemble's performances in Paris in 1954 there was a good deal of response to Brecht's work in the French press. The French cultural theorist Roland Barthes analysed these responses and discerned four main tendencies in Brechtian criticism, which he linked to the reviewers’ political stance.21 Although Barthes was dealing with press comment in the two years leading up to Brecht's death in 1956, his categories can easily be applied to much subsequent Brechtian criticism, as indicated by the contemporary references incorporated in our account of Barthes's analysis. The far Right took the view that Brecht's work is utterly discredited because it is political – Brechtian theatre is mediocre because, quite simply, it is communist theatre. Conservative critics separated the man from his works. The man is abandoned to politics, but his work is seen as great art – as great theatre. But it is great despite Brecht's politics; see, for example, Michael Billington's review of Mother Courage: ‘This is precisely why Brecht was a great dramatist: his humanist sympathy was constantly at war with his political orthodoxy’ (Guardian, 8 December 1993). Liberal critics saw Brecht as a humanist, but in order to emphasise the fact that his heart is in the right place they denigrated the significance of his theoretical precepts, as seen in Charles Spencer's review of Mother Courage: ‘Jonathan Kent's production wisely ditched almost all of Brecht's instructions and stage directions and found humanity in the play, rather than mere dialectic’ (Daily Telegraph, 28 September 2009). Orthodox communists attacked Brecht for not adhering to the principles of socialist realism, criticising the absence of a positive hero in his work and Epic Theatre's anti-illusionism – grounded in its rejection of the principles of mimetic realism.22 Barthes's analysis indicates that Brechtian criticism is heavily politicised, and that the relationship between the aesthetic and political dimensions of his work is controversial and contentious. His categories also imply that such critical approaches are not based on the whims or idiosyncrasies of individual critics. It would, however, be misleading to construe critics’ responses as mere reflections of their political stance. For example, contemporary reviews of the Leipzig and Berlin premieres of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1930 and 1931 often have a moralising or religious dimension that cuts across the political affiliations of individual critics. They also do not demonstrate a straightforward correlation between a critic's political and artistic perspectives, as indicated by the variety of positions adopted by left-wing reviewers.23 An alternative way of engaging with the complexity of critical responses to Brecht might be derived from Hans Robert Jauß’s classic essay ‘Literaturgeschichte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft’.24 Jauß focuses on the aesthetic rather than the political dimensions of literary reception, and contends that readers and audiences always perceive texts with reference to a series of assumptions concerning the nature of literature. In order to meet the objection that such assumptions are merely arbitrary or subjective, he suggests that they are embedded in a definable referential system of coordinates or expectations, namely an ‘Erwartungshorizont’. The ‘Erwartungshorizont’ incorporates elements such as a prior understanding of genre conventions, formal and thematic aspects of texts known to the reader, and the opposition between practical and poetic language. Both these dimensions of the ‘Erwartungshorizont’ are problematic, however, and the concept needs to be modified in two ways. First, Jauß’s emphasis on subjective responses might usefully be replaced by a focus on discursive presuppositions. Instead of establishing the constitutive features of the reader's horizon of expectations, we should seek to reconstruct the relevant horizon of discourse that underpins readers’ reception of texts. The term discourse is used here not in the Foucauldian sense, but to designate the set of implicit and explicit beliefs and presuppositions that inform and constitute a theoretical domain in their textual embodiment, for example by means of figurative language, rhetoric and syntax.25 Second, the horizon of discourse should not be construed essentially or primarily in aesthetic terms, as the presuppositions informing particular readings may also be ethical, political, sociological, or even metaphysical.26 This broader conception of reception theory is of great relevance to such a strongly political, experimental and provocatively challenging author as Brecht. Indeed, the essays collected in this volume bear out its aptness, not least Ernest Schonfield's discussion, following Walter Benjamin, of Brecht as a critic of the language of business and politics in the Dreigroschenroman. Noting that much (West) German criticism of the novel has been concerned with questions relating to genre, Schonfield writes that Dreigroschenroman explores the ‘coercive character of the market and its reliance on the deception that a transaction is mutually beneficial’. Not only that, following the principle of fighting fire with fire, Brecht contends in the novel that the means to combat such activity conducted in plain sight is to deploy ‘plumpes Denken’ with equal openness, unconcerned that it may attract the accusation of ‘Schwarzweißmalerei’. At the same time, horizons of discourse are not restricted to literary categories, but can be applied to all forms of art. They can also be used to characterise artistic production more generally, including the various modes of a work's subsequent appropriation through editing, translation and adaptation. These dimensions of appropriation are relevant to the consideration of the international dissemination of Brecht's work, which is discussed by Ela Gezen in relation to Turkey, a country previously neglected by scholars in this respect. Her examination of the theatre ensemble Dostlar Tiyatrosu and its co-founder Genco Erkal shows how Brecht's dramaturgy and theatre practice were appropriated from the 1960s onwards. Gezen highlights Erkal's interpretation, transformation and adaptation of Brechtian theatre aesthetics for the Turkish context in a manner in keeping with the reception of Brecht in other parts of the world by a generation of politically progressive figures who embraced Brechtian theatre as a catalyst for societal change. From the 1960s to the 1990s, the standard scholarly edition of Brecht's works in German was the Gesammelte Werke (GW), which printed the final and supposedly authoritative versions of Brecht's plays and was published by Suhrkamp in 1967.27 Overseen by Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's collaborator since the 1920s, GW brought together volumes of Brecht's plays, poems and writings which had appeared between 1953 and 1965. The initial volumes had been finalised by Brecht, and it was Brecht himself who established the editorial principle of publishing the final versions of his plays and poems. This approach had in fact been challenged, before the publication of GW, by Dieter Schmidt in his ground-breaking work on the markedly different early versions of Brecht's first full-length drama, Baal.28 The same concern to reconstruct the genesis of the works in order to identify patterns in Brecht's changing aesthetic and political positions informs Ronald Speirs's study of Brecht's early plays and Steve Giles's examination of the different versions of Die Dreigroschenoper.29 Finally, in a scathing article entitled ‘Der entstellte Brecht. Die Brecht-Forschung muss (endlich) von vorn anfangen’, the German Brecht scholar Jan Knopf contended in 2006 that the established approach exemplified by GW was obsolete and unscholarly.30 In the case of Baal, for example, he observes that the final version written by Brecht in the 1950s is significantly different from the initial versions written and rewritten between 1918 and 1926. The editorial approach adopted by GW removes Brecht's works from their historical context, which is relegated to mere background status. Knopf then highlights the scholarly virtues of the new German edition of Brecht's works, the Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe (BFA), published between 1988 and 2000 – not surprisingly, as he is one of its lead editors.31 Certainly, BFA has its place alongside other German-language scholarship, most notably the five-volume Brecht Handbuch (2001),32 also edited by Knopf, and Werner Hecht's Brecht Chronik (1997),33 which has created a fresh base for research since the end of the Cold War. Knopf argues that BFA historicises Brecht by printing the first published versions of his works. Later versions are then discussed in the textual commentary, or reprinted in part or in whole. BFA also incorporates far more textual material than GW, especially in the case of Brecht's theoretical writings, by printing copious amounts of previously unpublished material. Knopf concludes, with considerable justification, that BFA renders obsolete all previous editions of Brecht's works, together with the individual volumes that derive from them. But even in 2006, he notes, the older, unreliable versions were still being reprinted, so that a fundamentally misleading and distorted image of Brecht was still being perpetuated. The sustained critique of editorial policy in GW is borne out by Brecht's own authorial practices. He was an inveterate re-writer, not just of other people's plays, but also of his own. His later re-writings often reflect a significant change in his political or aesthetic position, so that GW is notoriously unreliable as a basis for serious study of his works, not least those written during the Weimar Republic. GW also implicitly assumes a teleological development on Brecht's part – the final versions are presumed to be the most ‘authentic’ – whereas the reality of Brecht's artistic production is rather different. Can we really say, especially in the light of Stephen Parker's analysis of Leben des Galilei, that the 1955 version is more sophisticated ideologically than, or aesthetically superior to, the 1939 version? Remarkably, the 1939 version was published for the first time in BFA. BFA is itself, however, problematic in certain respects. It claims to present the first published versions of Brecht's plays and poems – an entirely laudable intention, and one that is crucial if we are to properly understand the nature of Brecht's development as a writer. The problem is that BFA does not always print the first published versions, especially in the crucial period from 1926 to 1932, which marks Brecht's shift to Marxism. For example, it publishes Brecht's revised versions of classic texts such as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Die Dreigroschenoper, which appeared in Versuche in 1931 and 1932 respectively, and in so doing implies that his adoption of Marxism was more straightforward than it really was. Analysis of the various versions of Mahagonny and Die Dreigroschenoper written between 1927 and 1932 shows that Brecht's artistic and intellectual development in the latter years of the Weimar Republic was complex and contradictory. It involved a series of overlays of old and new positions embodying neither an implicit goal nor a radical break with his ‘pre-Marxist’ past.34 Another major advance in BFA is that it publishes a much broader and definitive range of Brecht's theoretical writings, including a large number of texts not published in his lifetime. However, they are organised strictly chronologically rather than by category, such as theatre, performance, art and politics, or film and radio, as in the new four-volume English edition of his writings.35 As a result, the chronological approach in BFA can leave the general and even the academic reader with a great deal of organisational and editorial work, especially in the case of Der Messingkauf. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that our understanding of Brecht's artistic and intellectual development during the Weimar Republic, for example, has been significantly enhanced thanks to the first volume of his writings in BFA. It contains all the essays he wrote between 1914 and 1933, except for essays specifically related to his own plays, which constitute the fourth and final volume. Crucially, it incorporates a large amount of previously unpublished material, as well as revisiting the dating and editing of previously published pieces. The new English edition of Brecht on Theatre is heavily indebted to BFA, but does not slavishly follow its organisational principles. Brecht's writings from the Weimar Republic are presented chronologically instead of being grouped thematically, so as not to pre-empt judgement on the contentious nature of his development in this period. However, the essays he wrote in exile between 1933 and 1947, and in the final phase of his career in East Berlin between 1948 and 1956, are grouped thematically in order to help orientate the reader. The publication of the BFA version of Der Messingkauf in 1993 represents the most drastic piece of re-editing in that edition. Whereas the previous German and English editions, by Werner Hecht and John Willett, had presented the reader with a relatively coherent and eminently readable work, the BFA version does not provide us with a work at all.36 Instead, it presents some 200 disparate texts in chronological sequence, following the key phases of the composition of Der Messingkauf: 1939–41, 1942–3, 1945, and 1948–55. Within those phases, the texts are allocated to the four nights (of discussion) Brecht had indicated; unallocated texts follow the four nights. While this may be fascinating for hard-core Brecht specialists, it poses considerable difficulties for the general reader, or even academics and their students, who need a more user-friendly edition. To give but one example: in the BFA version, the famous opening scene does not appear until seventy-eight pages into the text. So why not simply carry on using the older German edition, or Willett's Messingkauf Dialogues, which derives from it? The basic problem is that Brecht never completed the Messingkauf project: there is no ‘work’ as such. The texts published in BFA correspond to what Brecht had actually written between 1939 and 1955 – but the version presented by Hecht and Willett is contentious and misleading. Texts are switched between nights; unattributed texts are allocated to specific nights; separate texts are run together to constitute seemingly coherent wholes; dialogues are distinguished from fragments; and headings are interspersed from Brecht's various and inconsistent plans for individual nights. To be fair, Hecht and Willett are quite open about what they each tried to do, namely produce a readable version from a seemingly intractable corpus of materials, but their version is obsolete. The editors of the new volumes of Brecht's writings in English therefore resolved to devise a new version of the Messingkauf – now called Buying Brass – which would be consistent, reliable and readable. The editorial strategy, devised by Giles, was as follows: sequence texts by individual nights, not in order of composition; within each night, organise texts in terms of thematic clusters; present miscellaneous texts not allocated to individual nights in a separate section, also organised thematically; retain the integrity of each individual text – separate texts are not ‘run together’; indicate the date of composition of each text and cross-reference it to the BFA version. No distinction is made between dialogues and fragments – the Messingkauf consists almost by definition of fragments – and headings from Brecht's various plans for individual nights are not incorporated. What emerges is a radically new version of an old classic, which generates fundamental questions regarding how it should be read, performed and interpreted.37 Images of Brecht outside the German-speaking world are constructed and perpetuated through theatre productions and their reception, as we have already seen, and in textual terms through the medium of translation. Employing the conceptual apparatus developed in translation theory to explore the complex relationship between authorship, text, translator and translation, Caroline Summers argues that if authorship can be understood as a discursive construction, ‘Brecht’ circulates in English as a fluid ‘author-function’ (Foucault) that is more than the sum of the individual versions, and shapes them in its turn. In Tony Kushner's Mother Courage and her Children (2006) Summers examines a translation shaped by Brecht's anglophone author-function but one which also enters into critical dialogue with previous translations from the position of a translator who is an established dramatist in his own right. The paper then explores the implications, for anglophone Brecht, of the ‘celebrity’ translator's attempts to observe Brechtian principles in his translatorial behaviour as well as in the translated text. At the same time, it remains striking how translations of Brecht's theoretical writings have served to transmit fundamentally misleading interpretations of key concepts such as ‘Verfremdung’. ‘Verfremdung’ is probably the most famous or notorious of Brecht's theoretical notions, and its precise meaning has provoked considerable academic disagreement. The translation of ‘Verfremdung’ also raises controversial issues, not only in the context of rendering Brecht's writings into English, but also in more fundamental terms. To what degree should the translation of theoretical concepts be informed by interpretive and inter-textual considerations? Can there be a ‘correct’ translation of theoretical concepts, whereas there cannot be a ‘correct’ translation of a poem? And, in Brecht's case in particular, how should the translator respond to the literary dimensions of his theoretical writings, with their rich complexities of register, genre, tone and wit?38 For many years, the standard translation of ‘Verfremdung’ was ‘alienation’ – and this gave rise to two fundamental misunderstandings of Brecht. The first was that Brechtian theatre was somehow cold and impersonal, because he wanted his productions to alienate the audience. He didn't – he wanted them to have fun and think. The second misapprehension is more understandable. By the 1930s Brecht was a committed Marxist, and so it has sometimes been assumed that alienation in Brecht is analogous to alienation in Marx. This parallel seems to be even stronger in view of the fact that before Brecht introduces the term ‘Verfremdung’ in the mid-1930s he uses ‘Entfremdung’ (BFA, 21, p. 396 and BFA, 22/1, p. 109) – and ‘Entfremdung’ is the term Marx uses to designate alienation.39 ‘Entfremdung’ in Marx, however, refers to the socio-economic position of the worker in the labour process under capitalism, whereas ‘Ent/Verfremdung’ in Brecht refers to an aesthetic process which renews our powers of cognition. It is much easier to grasp what Brecht means by ‘Verfremdung’ if we translate it as ‘making strange’ or ‘estrangement’. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, two further candidates presented themselves in the contest to translate ‘Verfremdung’, namely ‘defamiliarisation’ and ‘distanciation’, or the distancing effect, which has been influential to the present day: ‘One complication of staging Brecht's work is how to handle his famous “Verfremdungseffekt”, or distancing technique’.40 However, this terminological change led to misunderstandings similar to those we encountered with alienation: Brecht may not have wanted his productions to actually put the audience off, but he still wanted to distance the audience from the proceedings on stage. It is of course true that Brecht does not want the spectator to identify with the characters on stage – but generally speaking, he uses the term distance to characterise the actors’ relationship to their roles, and the metaphor of decentring to clarify the spectators’ relationship to the events on stage, for example in the Epic Theatre model presented in his ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’ (BFA, 21, pp. 74–84) (p. 78). Furthermore, the term distanciation in fact reproduces the French mistranslation of ‘Verfremdung’ as ‘distanciation’, which became fashionable in the 1980s thanks to the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism. In the new English version of the Short Organon for the Theatre, Brecht refers to modern ‘Verfremdung’ effects ‘removing the stamp of familiarity’,41 and in so doing locates this technique in a modernist aesthetic tradition extending back to Russian Futurism and Formalism, and Viktor Shklovsky's concept of ostranenie, or de-familiarisation.42 Controversies surrounding Brecht's Marxism and the activist dimensions of his theatre can easily obscure the fact that from Baal onwards, before Epic Theatre as such had seen the light of day, Brechtian theatre rejected mimetic illusionism and adopted the deliberate and overt theatricality of the modernist stage.43 Similarly, soon after he started to use the term ‘Entfremdung’ he embarked on a critique of photographic realism which has both modernist and Marxist dimensions.44 In a world where the surfaces of reality – whether social or natural – are intrinsically incapable of revealing the true nature of that reality, and individuals are prevented by a deadened sensory apparatus or reified consciousness from comprehending this, the authenticity of visibility becomes a key aesthetic and epistemological issue. Modernist aesthetic discourse is permeated by dualistic metaphors concerning visibility – seeing versus mere looking, visions versus photography – as are Brecht's writings.45 This is a key feature in the Kleines Organon (KO), but Brecht's metaphorical patterns are sometimes overlooked in John Willett's translation, whereas they are highlighted in the revised version – the new gaze which is a strange gaze (KO, 44), both scientific and artistic; discernible versus visible (KO, 30); spectating versus looking (KO, 77); seeing versus staring (and listening versus overhearing) (KO, 26). As a result, in Willett's version Brecht's inter-textual and intellectual relationship with modernist aesthetic and cultural theory is obscured, as are the conceptual ramifications of ‘Verfremdung’ and its intertwining with Brecht's revised realist aesthetic.46 Willett translates Brecht's Kleines Organon as A Short Organum, but in so doing blurs the tripartite inter-textual relationship between Brecht, Bacon and Aristotle. Bacon's Novum Organum of 1620, the founding work of modern philosophy of science – Neues Organon in the translation Brecht used – is a critique of Aristotle's philosophical Organon, yet Brecht also positions himself against Aristotle's Poetics, in that his Organon is aimed at the theatre. Just as Brecht compares his non-Aristotelian theatre to contemporary non-Euclidean geometry, so Bacon writes at the beginning of the modern scientific age and Brecht at its dystopian apogee, in a trajectory reaching from New Atlantis to Hiroshima, to coin a phrase. Like Bacon's, Brecht's Organon engages with science, not just natural science and technology, but also that new science of society, the methodology of which is grounded in ‘die materialistische Dialektik’ (KO, 45). Yet Brecht never explicitly cites Marx in the Organon, nor – to use Willett's translation – does he refer to dialectical materialism, the theoretical keystone of orthodox Marxism. This is not a minor semantic quibble. The term Brecht uses – materialist dialectic – is taken from his philosophical mentor Karl Korsch, and indicates the heterodox nature of Brecht's Marxism even as he is about to relocate to the Soviet Zone of Occupation in East Berlin.47 One of Knopf's key assertions in ‘Der entstellte Brecht’ is that the traditional editorial focus on final versions of his works constitutes Brecht as a ‘classical’ author who, like the protagonist in a ‘Bildungsroman’, has undergone a process of maturation. This approach to Brecht also presumes that his entire oeuvre constitutes a coherent, self-contained and systematic whole. Knopf argues that this presumption and the editorial decisions associated with it are fundamentally at odds with Brecht's own aesthetic theory and practice. This is because Brecht insists on the ‘open’ nature of literary texts, adopts the structural principle of montage in his theoretical writings as well as his theatrical works, and seeks out contradiction and discontinuity as he dismantles systematic structures of thought. We have here yet another reason why previous Brecht editions have misrepresented Brecht, and Knopf concludes that the reception of Brecht's work must start anew. Knopf's recent biography, Bertolt Brecht: Lebenskunst in finste
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