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The Mirror and the Dynamo: On Brecht’s Aesthetic Point of View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2022

Darko Suvin
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Extract

The time has come to give art, by a pitiless method, the precision of the natural sciences. But the principal difficulty for me is still the style, the indefinable Beauty resulting from the conception itself.

Flaubert, Correspondence

In the preface to his most famous theoretical essay, the Little Organon for the Theatre, Brecht in part retracted his early vituperations against aesthetics, which in the 1920's had led him to ask (as the title of an article of his goes): “Shouldn't we liquidate aesthetics?” With the growing maturity and complexity of his poetry and plays, the feedback from practice to theory which was a permanent feature of Brecht's work led him to recognize that those vituperations —which he never wholly abandoned —were directed at the bourgeois German aesthetics of his epoch, at “the heirlooms of a depraved and parasitic class” (SzT VII.8), and not at a philosophical and sociological discipline dealing with the pleasing and the beautiful (mainly in art), as such or as a whole. For, by the end of the 193O's, Brecht had in his lyrics and dramas, as well as in his theoretical writing, recognized that his own work was also pleasurable —if pleasure were no longer opposed to learning.

Type
Research Article
Information
TDR (1967) , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , Fall 1967 , pp. 56 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © The Drama Review 1967

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References

1 All quotations from Brecht have been taken from the collected Suhrkamp edition. Having no English translations at hand, I translated tham all anew. Brecht's essays on theatre, Schriften zum Theater, will be indicated in the text by a SzT in brackets, with the Roman numeral indicating the volume and the Arabic the page.

2 This is already clear in one of his fundamental essays, The Street Scene (1938; see SzT V. 69-70), with another landmark, Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Learning? (1936; see SzT 111.51-52), marking the visible transition towards it.

3 Cf. H. Roller, Die Mimesis in der Antike: Nachahmung, Darstellung, Ausdruck (Bern, 1954).

4 Compare the Swiss playwright Max Frisch's discerning diary observations from the time of his acquaintance with Brecht in 1948: “Brecht relates to a projected world which doesn't yet exist anywhere in this time, visible only in his behavior which is a lived and inexorable opposition, never daunted through decades of external toil. Christians related to the other world, Brecht to this world.” (Tagebuch 1946-1949: Frankfurt a. M., 1950, p. 287.)

5 Brecht's note, quoted in H.J. Bunge-W. Hecht-K. Rülicke-Weiler, Bertolt Brecht (Berlin, 1963), p. 40, trans. D.S. Elisabeth Hauptmann, Brecht's collaborator at that time, wrote in her diary of July 1926 about Brecht's work on Joe Fleischhacker, a play planned as carrying on the series of “the coming of mankind into the big cities” begun with In the Jungle of Cities: “Finally Brecht started to read national economics. He asserted that money practices were obscure, he had to see now what money theories were like. But even before he came to important discoveries, at least for himself, he had concluded that the old (great) form of drama wasn't fit for representing such modern processes as the international distribution of wheat, the life stories of people of our times and generally for all events with consequences… During these studies he drew up his theory of ‘epic drama.'” (“Notizen über Brechts Arbeit 1926,” Sinn und Form, second special issue on Brecht, 1957, p. 243, trans. D.S.)

6 Diderot, Le Paradoxe du Comédien, trans. D.S.

7 The term has been taken from Brecht's own use in such plays as The Baden Learning Play on Consenting. “Consenting” was one of the key terms of post-war German sociology which Brecht seems to have been quite well acquainted with, especially through Fritz Sternberg and Karl Korsch (see Sternberg's memoirs Der Dichter und die Ratio, Gottingen, 1963, while Brecht's correspondence with his mentor Korsch is just beginning to be published in periodicals). Cf. Max Weber's chapter “Einverständniss” (Consenting) in Ueber einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie (Max Weber, Soziologie-Weltgeschichtliche Analysen Politik: Stuttgart, 1964, pp. 126-140).