Viewing Brecht Through a Marxist Lens - Essay Example

Viewing Brecht Through a Marxist Lens The notion of “alienation” is central to Marxs social and economic analysis andis the subject matter of Marxs sociology of knowledge. For Marx, the history of mankind has a double aspect: It is a history marked by the increasing control of man over nature as it is simultaneously a history of the increasing alienation of humanity itself (Coster 53). Alienation, in Marxist terms, may be described as a condition in which people are dominated by forces of their own creation, which confront them as alien powers. This notion is central to all of Marx’s early writings and informs his later work, however no longer as a philosophical conundrum but as a social phenomenon. Impelled by this Marxist perspective, Brecht devised Mother Courage and Her Children. This play perfectly illustrates the fact that Brecht embraced Marx’s thesis that in an alienated society, the inclination of human beings, their consciousness, is merely a reflection of their environmental conditions, their position in the process of production. Brecht’s intent in the writing of Mother Courage was obviously didactic, for it at once conveys both instruction and entertainment. Thus, the audience was to be part of a greater social process that they would then urge forward. Brecht sought to manipulate and engage their rationality and not their sentimentality or emotional identification. To this end, Brecht shattered the contemporary notions of dramatic theater, whose tenets included the “suspension of disbelief.” In Mother Courage, he created alienating effects, techniques he employed to remind spectators that they were watching the mere enactment of reality, not reality itself. At critical moments, he flooded the stage with white hot light and scripted inane ditties to be wrought at key junctures. He used the device of song frequently in this play. In fact, Mother Courages first appearance on stage is initiated by a song, at once both ensuring that the audience is not empathetic and drawing attention to the action as a play, and enactment of a certain perception of reality. Throughout the play, this is what function the songs served, as well as to make poignant observations and address real issues onto which Brecht wanted to focus the audiences attention. The sudden appearance of song at seemingly unlikely points in the play has an alienating effect and is intended to confuse, creating a lack of moral perspective and irony. In so doing, Brecht jolted the audience out of their complacent, passive expectations. He forced viewers to confront the issues as he presented them and to decipher the implicit meaning behind the conveyed actions. Through their alienation, the audience could then discern the true reasons for the characters’ behaviors and the implications of the backdrop against which they were affixed. Brecht’s innovative techniques surely appeared unusual to the audience and differed from the traditional dramatic methods. Also, as words are not spoken to the audience, it is difficult to get caught up in the story, to be led into an emotion by a tone of voice. To add to this sense of self-reflexiveness, scene changes were made in full view of the audience, reminding them of its existence as a play, again alienating them from the impression of a true life tale and eliminating opportunities for atmospheric affect. Spectators were not meant to become involved, they were constantly reminded that what they were viewing was merely a play. These techniques were intended to startle the audience into objectivity. Brecht intended his viewers to retain an attitude of inquiry and criticism in their analyses of the incidents portrayed and the issues raised by the fiction. However, perhaps the most significant technique Brecht uses in Mother Courage to ensure that the audience does not succumb to an unfolding plot is the summary of occurrences at the opening of each scene. This establishes an inevitability that disallows passivity; it encourages the audience to view with a critical eye, which is, in Marxist thought, the only way true reality may be perceived. An analysis of Brecht’s methods makes it quite clear that the playwright objected to the soporific attitude of contemporary audiences and, as such, worked to compel them to confront and analyze what they saw before them. Thus, in the service of Marxist ideology, and, perhaps more immediately, of pedantry, Brecht does not develop his characters. Mother Courage ignores the dramatic conventions of character growth, progress, movement toward denouement, or even development in the ordinary, psychological and/or social sense. In this play, the scenes are only loosely held together, having an episodic feel, to the extent that they must be perceived as mere fragments of random events occurring over an indeterminable period of time. As a result, characters are only highlighted as a function of circumstance rather than as a site of especial psychological interest. Analyzing this play through a Marxist lens, we become aware of the meaning behind Marx’s ideas regarding alienation (which were espoused by Brecht): That is to say that being alienated from the objects of labor and from the process of production, people (in this instance the characters) are alienated from themselves, thereby making it virtually impossible to empathize with them or their plight or to even fathom a guess as to how to regard them. Alienated persons are alienated from the human community. When people confront themselves they confront each other. Thus, the characters in Mother Courage are not only alienated from themselves and each other but from the audience as well. Perhaps the most salient example of such alienation is the character of Mother Courage herself: She is selfish and egocentric, subscribing to capitalism and blinding herself to its consequences. And, though she does not embrace the principle of war, she lacks the strength of her convictions and exploits the war by profiting from it. This is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something alien, not belonging to him activity as suffering (passivity), strength as powerlessness, creation as emasculation, the personal physical and mental energy of the worker, his personal life. . . . as an activity which is directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. (Marx 126) It would appear from the character of Mother Courage that Brecht wanted to inspire in his audience a willingness to change people’s attitudes, their fixed mind-sets that overshadow their basic moral values. According to Marx, unless people have food and shelter (basic human needs), they cannot have freedom. This tenet of Marxism is elucidated in the figure of Mother Courage, in Brecht’s not-so-subtle manipulation of the audience into the realization that surface appearances are irrelevant and that his play should not be perceived as a trite tale but as a significant presentation of social issues. Through shattering the usual dramatic elements of character, song, structure, style, and staging, the playwright ensures that the audience remains in a state of alienation, confounding their pedestrian expectations. Reading this play at the current moment in history, with the benefit of hindsight, renders Brecht intellectually sophisticated yet sociologically naïve. On the one hand, he was a revolutionary, a Marxist maverick if you will, exposing the absurdity of modern life under capitalist ideology. He attempted to bring to the fore the human costs of this still prevalent mode of existence. His characters, and in fact the genre that he introduced, operate(s) deus ex machina, that is they and it provide(s) a contrived solution to an insoluble difficulty. Through his then unique brand of manipulation, Brecht made apparent the contradictions of the modern state of capitalism. On the other hand, for a dramatic form to endure, perhaps something more is required. After all, can a postmodern audience embrace the fact that Mother Courage unequivocally reconciles compassion and tenderness with business values? In our era of subterfuge, “public appearance,” and “political correctness,” can the figure of Mother Courage be accepted and embraced as a function of our media proscripted reality? Can we face her as an image of ourselves as she pushes her cart off the stage at the end of the play—after having lost all three of her children to the ravages of dominant ideology? Are we all as pathetic and as unsympathetic—that is, as alienated from ourselves and each other—as she is when she seemingly unaffectedly rolls away crying “Back to business”? Selected Bibliography Brecht, Bertolt. Coser, Lewis A. Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977. Marx, Karl. Early Writings, trans. and ed. by T. B. Bottomore. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Simon, Lawrence H., ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. Read More