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This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes'sSemiological Myth of Brecht'sEpic Theater
ELLISSHOOKMAN DartmouthCollege
"Themovement of his workis tactical:a matterof displacinghimself, of obstruct- ing,.., but not of conquering.... This workwould therefore be definedas: a tac- tics withoutstrategy." -Roland Barthesby RolandBarthes "To showis morethan to be." -Brecht, Schriftenzum Theater
I In one of the eclectic vignettes composing his autobiography,Ro- land Barthesdefines the role of politics in his criticism. Politics seems a science about reality, not about words, he reasons, so political discourse should never become merely generalor repetitive. Vague generalitiesare hardto avoid, though,he knows, and almost alwaysreduce such discourse to abstractbabel. By contrast,Barthes thinks that his own criticallanguage is not distinct enough from politics. Even though he would like to be an active political sujet, politics thereforeremains "foreclosed"to him. This cryptic comment makes sense when one knows that it is Barthes'sway of explainingwhy he seems to ignore Brecht'sadvice to act as a political subject rather than be exploited as a political object. Indeed, Barthes entitled this self-criticism "Brecht's Reproach of R.B.," inviting close scrutiny of his work from Brecht's point of view. Such scrutiny reveals that Barthesfelt guilty for good reason. Not only does it demonstratethe Germanplaywright's steady importancein Barthes'schameleonic career; it also shows how willfully-albeit how creatively, too-Barthes misun- derstood Brecht's "epic theater." Reviewing the first performancesthat Brecht'sBerliner Ensemble gave in Paris during the 1950s, Barthes had
Monatshefte,Vol. 81, No. 4, 1989 459 0026-9271/89/0004/0459$01.50/0 c 1989by The Boardof Regentsof The Universityof WisconsinSystem
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 460 Shookman welcomed that theater as a socially responsible alternative to the exis- tentialist anguish and theater of the absurd then current in France. Se- miology soon appealed to him more than Sartreanengagement, though, and he redefinedBrecht's theater to stressits style more than its substance. Even afterit had lost its semiotic charm for him, moreover,"epic" theater remained crucial to Barthes'smajor writings, where he enlisted its basic concepts for other critical causes. Late in life, finally, he expressed deep personaladmiration for Brechtthe thinker,writer, and dramatist.In this shifting course of his criticism, Barthesincreasingly ignored Brecht'spol- itics. Indeed, his paradoxicallifting of favorite terms from Brecht-first to praise them but then to obscure their political import-twisted epic theater into the kind of apolitical "myth" that he himself found disin- genuous in Mythologies (1957). Much of Barthes's criticism, built as it is on Brecht, thus seems self-contradictory.This striking contradiction receives scant attention in reviews of Brecht'sreception in France.'Schol- arly work on Bartheshimself frequentlyslights it, too, though not without suggestingcontexts for furtherresearch on his use of Brecht:existential- ism, Marxist aesthetics, alienation, and semiology.2In these several con- texts, studying Brechtian notions in Barthes becomes an issue of ques- tioning critical language generally. We all therefore have an interest in Barthes'screative filching from Brecht. That interest derives from Barthes'sneed for Brecht, which deter- mined the early years of his critical life. It was acute for reasons clear in WritingDegree Zero (1953), where Barthes redefined the politics of lit- erarylanguage just one year before the BerlinerEnsemble first played in Paris. Although he echoes Sartre's call for writers to assume political responsibility, Barthes makes socially committed literature a matter of form more than content. He dislikes the bourgeois realism merely re- hashed by hack Communist authors, preferringinstead the modernist prose of writers like Camus. No kind of writing can pretend to describe nature exactly, Barthes argues, since every literary form implies social value. A truly committed author must therefore consciously choose a mode of writing that Barthes defines as the morality of form: "Writing [#criture]is thus essentially the morality of form, the choice of that social areawithin which the writerelects to situate the Nature of his language."3 This social choice of a literarylanguage is one of formal consciousness, not political action, and Barthesquickly adds that it is not directly revo- lutionary. Indeed, he thinks such choices tragic, since even neutral, se- mantically"colorless" writing like Camus'scannot help becoming quickly routine. Even new ethical prose can thus seem meaningful but be ex- tremely alienated. It thereby loses its shock value as an antidote to po- litical writing-which is alienated because it implicitly evaluates what it pretendsto denote-as well as to intellectualwriting-which is duplicitous
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes'sMyth of Brecht's Theater 461 because it takes its language alone as sufficient engagement. This sad division of formally refined prose from morally correct politics runs through Barthes's writing for the next thirty years. In the late Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, he allowed only three exceptions: when pol- itics itself fundamentallytransforms language,when political discourse startsa new form of discursivity,or when an author knows enough about the effects of languageto write singularlyaesthetic political texts. These three exceptions occur, respectively, Barthes thought, only in the work of Plato, Marx, and Brecht.His turn to Brechtafter WritingDegree Zero thus seems a rare attempt to reconcile literatureand politics more op- timistically than he himself first thought possible. Like Brecht, Barthes therefore wrote texts studying the aesthetic effect of political language. His self-reproachin the name of Brecht so clearly recalls his initial skep- ticism, moreover, that his statements on epic theater provide a running commentaryon the political limits of his own intervening criticism. My focus will thereforebe those statements themselves.
II Both the political limits of Barthes'scriticism and his reasons for imposing them become apparent in the course of his many comments on Brecht's"epic" theater. In numerous reviews and essays written not long after the Berliner Ensemble's first trip to Paris in 1954, he greeted Brecht as an answer to his own problem of finding committed politics in experimentalprose. Reviewing the Ensemble'sParisian production of Mother Couragethat year, he thought that Brecht'ssocial criticism rein- forced his own ideal of "th6etre desali6n6"--theaterrescued from the alienated and duplicitous language just bemoaned in Writing Degree Zero. Brecht helped "dis-alienate"theater, Barthes argues, by achieving a synthesis of political rigor and dramaturgicalfreedom, thereby raising audiences' historical consciousness without resortingto intimidation or mere rhetoric.Convinced that the theater itself furtheredBrecht's moral message, Barthescould thus declare such theater civilly justified. He ex- plains such justificationin terms recallingboth his initial interest in pop- ular-rather than epic, critical-theater and his intellectualdebt to Sartre. "MutterCourage," he exclaims, "is an entirely popular work, for it is a work whose profound intention can be understood only by the people."4 By showing both the evil of war and its social remedy-attack on its mercantilecauses-Brecht teaches theatergoersto make history, Barthes argues,rather than passively sufferits imposition. Brechtthus solves what Barthes polemically calls a traditional aesthetic "problem of participa- tion." We share Mother Courage'sblindness to the economic causes of
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 462 Shookman war, Barthesexplains, but we also see that same blindness, since we are at once "passiveactors" caught in the fatality of war and "freespectators" led to demystify it. This stress on freely "demystifying"one's seemingly fatal historical plight distinctly recalls Sartre, especially when Barthes sums up Brecht'sstyle in no less existentialist terms of freedom and fate: "It's the splitting of fatality from the spectacle and of freedom from the spectator that constitutes Brecht's theatrical revolution."'5The distance that Barthesaccordingly posits between an audienceand the events shown on Brecht'sstage shows how well he understoodthe effect of epic theater. Indeed, by inviting such audiences to identify-even if only halfway- with the "epic" characters that they see, Barthes gauges the effect of Mother Courage even better than Brecht himself, who was stymied by audiences that insisted on admiringits socially incorrigiblebut tenacious title character.6Barthes more fully appreciatesthe immediate emotional appeal that Mother Couragecan have for "the people" whose cause she champions. In his zeal to justify the theater on civic grounds, Barthes thus states the aesthetic case for Brecht uncannily well. By the time Barthesreviewed the BerlinerEnsemble's Mother Cour- age again in 1957, both his populist and existentialist tendencies had ebbed. His praise sounds no less lavish, but it treats Brecht's politics more gingerly.While liking a set of photographsfor revealing significant details of the play, for example, he extolled the details themselves and their power to signify as special hallmarks of Brecht's style: "The detail is the site of signification, and it's because Brecht's theater is a theater of significationthat the detail is so important there."7Barthes still links such significant details to the political sense of Brecht's plays, and he explains the distance created by Brechtian actors' gestures as a rapport of form and content, not just a matter of form alone. Nevertheless, sig- nification itself outweighs Brecht's larger political message here in the same methodical way implied by Barthes'sseemingly warm welcome of "the Brechtian Revolution" in 1955. He then agreed with Brecht that theatergoersshould be encouragedto think of society as no less subject to their own, scientific control than nature, but he envisioned their re- sulting control of history in terms suggestingless than total engagement. The pseudo-scientificcogency of Brecht's theoretical writings seems to have fascinated Barthes for its own, non-political sake when he praised them as "a strong,coherent, stable system, one difficultto apply perhaps, but which possesses at least an indisputable and salutaryvirtue of 'scan- dal' and astonishment."8The evident theoretical rigor of Brecht's "sys- tem" plainly intrigues Barthes here, and though its social effect of mere scandal and surprisepresumably relates to politics indirectly, as had his socially conscious &criture,Barthes overrates its strictly theatrical locus: "To the degree that Brecht's theatricalrevolution challenges our habits,
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes's Myth of Brecht's Theater 463 our tastes, our reflexes, the very 'laws' of the theater in which we live, we must.., face up to Brecht."9 Breaking customary theatrical "laws" was certainly the first step that Brecht, too, urged audiences to take toward social action, but he did so more forcefully and in the explicit context of political life far beyond the theater itself. Barthes curtails Brecht's social concern much more sharply in "The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism" (1956), where he first defines epic theater in explicit terms of semiology. Brecht's systematic rigor attracts him yet again when he defends epic theater for exposing the historical sources of social evils wrongly assumed to be natural and therefore beyond repair. Brecht, too, often drew such a strict distinction between nature and his- tory, but in practice he was far less attached to his own "system" than Barthes, who here respects the ideological content of Brecht's theater primarily because it is "coherent, consistent, and remarkably orga- nized."i0Such high praise of Brecht's theories should be understood in its historicaland aestheticcontext as Barthes'saverse reactionto Socialist Realism, which he thought ruined revolutionary art by yoking Marxist ideology to traditionalliterary style. Brecht'salternative to such a "Zhda- novian impasse" was at once aesthetically innovative and ideologically sound, Barthes wrote, because it took from Marxism only a general meth- od of explication, not particular theses or overt propaganda. Barthes even further removes Brecht from Marxism by redefining epic theater in terms of Saussure's linguistics: What Brechtian dramaturgypostulates is that today at least, the respon- sibility of a dramaticart is not so much to express reality as to signify it. Hence there must be a certain distance between signified and signifier: revolutionaryart must admit a certain arbitrarynature of signs, it must acknowledgea certain "formalism,"in the sense that it must treat form accordingto an appropriatemethod, which is the semiological method." This semiological distinction between expressing and signifying quite apt- ly describes Brecht's self-conscious style of acting, but the arbitrariness and formalism mentioned here restrict the effect of Brecht's plays, since Barthes adds that the "moral structure" of those plays should be isolated to observe how they help people behave. Such issues of personal conduct do not sound revolutionary, he admits, but they are valid during the evolution of French political life in the late 1950s: "Capitalist society endures, and communism itself is being transformed:revolutionary ac- tion must increasinglycohabit, and in an almost institutional fashion, with the norms of bourgeois and petit-bourgeoismorality: problems of conduct,and no longerof action, arise."'2At the same time he rails against the false "pseudo-Physis"supplied by bourgeois realism and its Socialist descendent, Barthes thus limits Brecht's counter-aestheticsto working
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 464 Shookman only within capitalist society. Such reduction of Brecht's social message to personaladvice not only oversimplifiesepic theater;it also pales beside the political leverage that Bartheshimself found in Brecht'splays before becoming captivated by their semiotics. Such contradictionsinherent in Barthes'ssemiotic concept of Brecht become more glaringin reviews and essays composed in the late 1950s. Barthes then wrote both that Brecht's theory, texts, and productions formedan indivisible whole and that the poor condition of contemporary French theater required performinghis plays simply as best one could, despite the misunderstandingsthat would inevitably arise from making mere exposure to Brecht more important than any "Brechtian ortho- doxy."'3Such willingness to sacrificethe coherence of Brecht's "system" may well have been necessary,but it could only undercutthe theoretical logic that Barthes himself found to be Brecht's strongest attraction. Bartheslikewise settles for less when he elsewhereelaborates on his strict distinction between epic theater and Socialist Realism. Brechtiantheater rests on the ambiguity that results from proving one version of history false without also providing another that is true, he explains. It thus should not be confused with the standard Marxist notion of historical theater-realistic and tendentious slices of social life. Barthes's corre- sponding claim that epic theaterdoes not answer the historical questions that it poses starkly contrasts with his own earlier remark that Mother Courage showed not only social evils but also their remedy. He now writes far less stridently: Onesees that Brecht's theater is not a historian'stheater, even a Marxist's: it's a theaterthat invites and obligesan explanation,but thatdoes not give one;a theaterthat provokes History, but does not divulgeit; that acutely poses the problem of History, but does not resolve it (... Brecht'swork is nevermore than an introduction).'4 As in his insights into the semiological distance central to Brecht's style, Barthes here reveals subtle understandingof epic theater. To say that Brecht'splays show only a tentative vision of history, though, is to ob- serve them much too narrowly. Although hardly crude, most of them make clear referenceto other, radicallybetter, ways of life. Furthermore, ratherthan calling history an object to be manipulated, as he had when firstgreeting "the BrechtianRevolution," Barthesnow arguesthat Brecht makes it seem merely a "generalexigency of thought.""'5Such reflection nullifies Brecht's politics in Barthes'sreview of the Berliner Ensemble's adaptation of Maxim Gorki's novel The Mother (1907) in 1960. Calling Brechtiantheater one of consciousness, not criticism, Barthes divorces even that tendentious play from Marxism: "Of course Marxism is in- dissolubly linked to the play; [but] Marxism is its object,not its subject;
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes'sMyth of Brecht's Theater 465 the subject of The Motheris, quite simply-as its title says-maternity."'6 Barthes sounds casuistic here because he embraces Brecht's politics so half-heartedly.To be sure, Brecht himself found his production of The Mother proof that the effect of epic theater was "mediate," teaching its spectatorssocially criticallessons by firstchanging their attitude toward- and within-the theater. Barthes's desire to raise only "nascent con- sciousness," though, stops short of the effect that Brecht wanted The Mother to have: a specific and practical"change in the world."'7 Barthescontradicts Brecht even more roundly in the essay "Liter- ature and Signification" (1963), which recalls epic theater as one of Barthes's several former interests, one now current only insofar as it demonstratessemiotic concepts. Just as he stressed the abstract notion of maternityin his review of The Mother,Barthes here relies on the even more abstractterm "theatricality,"which he defines as an "informational polyphony"and a "density of signs." Brechtjustified the semiologically "semanticstatus" of the theater,Barthes adds, with his intellectualsystem of signifiersand his correspondingconcentration on the "materialityof the spectacle." These striking coinages show how completely Barthes came to think of Brecht in terms of semiology.'8Indeed, his summation of Brecht'simportance shows surprisingdisregard for the effect of epic theater beyond its self-conscious signs: Brechtdivined the varietyand relativity of semanticsystems: the theatrical signdoes not appearas a matterof course;what we callthe naturalnessof an actor or the truthof a performanceis merelyone languageamong others.., and this languagedepends on a certain mental context, i.e., a certainhistory, so thatto changethe signs(and notjust whatthey say)is to give naturea new apportionment..., and to basethis apportionment not on "natural"laws but, quitethe contrary,on man'sfreedom to make things signify.'9 As usual, Barthes here undercuts an otherwise trenchant insight into Brecht'stheater by exaggeratingits semiotic qualities. Brechthimself, for example,also thoughtthat actors'gestures should convey alternativeways of imagining a given scene, but neither did he mean to expose simply the "consciousnessof unconsciousness"suggested by Barthes,nor did he want to demonstrate what Barthes the semiologist thought "the tauto- logical status of all literature."20On the contrary,Brecht expressly refuted any such idea that changingsigns was significantapart from manipulating things: Ourrepresentations must take second place to whatis represented,men's life together in society; and the pleasure felt in their perfection must be convertedinto the higherpleasure felt whenthe rulesemerging from this life in society are treated as imperfect and provisional. In this way the
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 466 Shookman
theatreleaves its spectatorsproductively disposed even afterthe spectacle is over.2'
In earlier reviews and essays, Barthes had shared this pragmatic concept of epic theater. By isolating the theatrical signs of which Brecht here requires extra-aesthetic consequences, however, he increasingly came to overlook concrete political messages sent by Brecht's plays. Those mes- sages sometimes seemed unclear-thanks in no small part to their author's masterful craftiness, both as a playwright and as a public figure in East Germany. His plays, however, and the theories that he proposed to ex- plain them plainly convey social concern much stronger than Barthes's semiology implies. Writing about the Berliner Ensemble, Barthes thus stressed the semiological form of Brecht's theater at the expense of its political content.
III
Despite-indeed, due to-its semiological bias, Barthes's singular reading of Brecht had far-reaching consequences for his own cultural, literary, and textual analyses. Indeed, many of Barthes's texts not directly concerned with epic theater develop Brecht's seminal thoughts in brilliant new ways. Such is the case most tellingly in Mythologies (1957), where Barthes broadly applies Brecht's so-called "alienation effect." He wittily criticizes aspects of French daily life that repress the historical sources of seemingly natural habits, suggesting the term "myth" to describe such hidden, bourgeois ideology. Myth, he explains, is a mode of communi- cation that deformsand alienatesthe sense of what it denotes. It therefore may be explained as a secondary semiological system, one that takes as its signifiers the entire signs of some primary system. Myth accordingly creates new signs in a "metalanguage" juggling forms instead of referring clearly to objects. It thus transforms sense into form, making history seem perfectlynatural in the same manipulativeway that Barthesdisliked in praise of Brecht'stheater. Indeed, a prime example of myth-one not noted by Barthes-is the "culinary"emptying of philosophical and po- litical sense from traditional opera, as Brecht described it in contrast to his own, radically different opera The Rise and Fall of the City ofMa- hagonny (1929): Of course there were elements in the old opera which were not purely culinary .... And yet the element of philosophy, almost of daring, in these operas was so subordinatedto the culinary principle that their sense was in effect totteringand was soon absorbedin sensual satisfaction.Once its original "sense" had died away the opera was by no means left bereft of sense, but had simply acquiredanother one-a sense qua opera.22
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes'sMyth of Brecht'sTheater 467
Here rejectingconventions of socially vapid theater, Brecht himself for- mulated the essential definition of myth that Barthes gives in the theo- retical appendix to Mythologies,where he explains that "myth is depol- iticizedspeech."23 Many of Barthes'sother remarkson myth no less strik- ingly agree with the most basic concepts of Brecht's theater.24When he rejectsbourgeois confusion of nature with history, for example, Barthes distinctly echoes Brecht's statements on how to obviate dull empathy with dramaticcharacters. "What is 'natural'must have the force of what is startling,"Brecht had declared,adding that this startlingeffect was one of alienation "designed to historicize the incidents portrayed"on his stage. Barthes'splan to expose the ideological abuse suffusingquotidian life in Francesimilarly sounds like Brecht'scentral remarks on alienation, "a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayedand labellingthem as somethingstriking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural."'25Brecht even likened producing this socially critical "A-effect"to ordinary re-enactment of habits and tacit rules of behavior such as those studied in Mythologies: "A simple way of alienatingsomething," he explained, "is that normally applied to customs and moral principles."26Conversely, Barthes claims that Mythologies combines semiotic demontage with ideological cri- tique-the same double-edgedtactic that he admiredin epic theater. Such parallelsshow how closely Barthesfollowed Brecht'sexample as a critic of fossilized thinking in bourgeois society. Despite this similarity in their respective forms of social criticism, Barthesdid not expect alienating convenient "myths" to prove as polit- ically effective as Brecht thought epic theater should be. Although he employed the same mix of ideologicalponderance and semiologicallevity with which he once thought Brechtdisalienated the theater,Barthes him- self failed to see any such handy solution to the everyday problem of alienation:"I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand,in a very generalway, the search for the inalienable meaning of things)."27Barthes's searing criticism of "myth" accordingly rests on deep misgivings about the enunciations of "mythologues"like himself. Such critics' attitude toward the world can only be sarcasticand destructive, Barthes notes, since they are "condemned" to oblique me- talanguageand must therefore remain alienated [Cloignd]from politics. Their iconoclasm thus assumes social detachment that prevents them from taking an active part in politics. Indeed, a mythologue's "metalan- guage"is surprisinglylike the parasiticcommunication meant by "myth" in the first place. Such hollow metalanguageis exemplified by Barthes's own, non-political use of a Brechtian term to define mythology itself, which "harmonizeswith the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself(Brecht had for this an efficientlyambiguous word: Einverstandnis
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[sic], at once an understandingof reality and a complicity with it)."28 This citation is far more important than its parentheticcontext implies, since it not only betrays Barthes's indebtedness to Brecht at the most basic criticallevel of Mythologiesbut also offersevidence of how Barthes redefinedthe vocabularyof epic theater.By Einverstindnis,Brecht meant politically informed consent to change the world, even if doing so meant dying for Communism.29Barthes rules such drastic action off his my- thologue'scritical limits, robbingBrecht's term of its political sting. Given that Barthes'sself-appointed task in Mythologies is to expose precisely such de-politicization,this misstatement of Einverstiandnisseems strik- ingly paradoxical. Does his own effort there itself deserve the name "myth"?Compared to Brecht's theater, it, too, is semiotically alienated and thereforepolitically insidious. Barthesconfirms this self-contradictionwhen he applies his theory of myth in the first of the essays collected in Mythologies, "The World of Wrestling."He expresslycompares wrestling to theaterin generaland- tacitly-to epic theater in particular.Wrestling makes reality seem per- fectly intelligible,he explains, because wrestlersact in ways usually seen in spectacles rather than in sports. Both the "truth" of such histrionic wrestling and the moral message that it delivers are also found in tra- ditional theater, Barthes argues:"There is no more a problem of truth in wrestlingthan in the theatre.In both, what is expected is the intelligible representationof moral situations which are usually private."30Beyond this generalmoral likeness of wrestlingand acting, Barthesalso observes specificqualities of wrestlingcomparable to elements of Brecht'sless staid theater. Like spectacles, he explains, wrestling abolishes both motives and consequences,thus forcingits fans to make sense of each of its passing moments without their tryingto intuit any integral,larger meaning. This sporting mood distinctly recalls Brecht's similar remarks to readers of his play In the Jungleof Cities(1927): Youare about to witnessan inexplicablewrestling match between two men and observethe downfallof a family.... Don't worryyour headsabout the motivesfor the fight,concentrate on the stakes.Judge impartially the techniqueof the contenders,and keepyour eyes fixedon the finish.3' Brechtlater revised the emphasis laid on fightingto a finish here, adding that epic dramaturgymoved only toward an end, not to any specificgoal. Like Barthes on wrestling,though, he explained that each scene existed for its own sake in his plays, which should thereforedirect their audiences' attention to their episodic course rather than final result. This apparent agreementbetween epic theaterand Mythologiesproves only partial,how- ever, when Barthesadds that wrestlingconveys only rhetoricaland eth- ical-not political-significance.32Similarly, Barthes'swrestlers seem like
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes'sMyth of Brecht's Theater 469
Brecht'sactors only up to a criticalpoint. They help their audience "read" their wrestlingby making its moral intention clear through their highly stylized gestures,but they cannot allow such excessive clarity itself to be perceived as intentional. By contrast, Brecht demanded that epic actors show their own knowledgethat their deliberategestures were being closely watched.As helpful but also obscurantthespians, Barthes'swrestlers thus performonly half a Brechtianactor's role. They can thereforebe neither ironic nor revolutionary,as such Brechtianactors should. Such discrepanciesbetween Barthes'swrestlers and Brecht's actors would seem minor if Barthes did not also call literary language as well as his own work "gestures"like those shown by his only half-Brechtian wrestlers.The fragment from Baudelairewith which he prefaced "The Worldof Wrestling"confirms how metaphoricallyBarthes regarded those gestures: ".. . The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life's great occa- sions."33Such highlyemphatic truth proves to be paradoxicalin wrestling, which Barthesthinks significantdue to its excessive gestures,but which he adds should show no other such gestures than those that its audience expects. Only by removing the ethical as well as semiotic ambiguity of daily life so superficially can wrestling seem "the pure gesture which separatesGood from Evil."34Brecht, too, often notes the extreme mean- ingfulnessof gestures,but he wants them to seem more substantialthan those simply aped by Barthes'swrestlers. Epic theater expresses some- thing direct and didactic, he claims, by "basingeverything on the gest."35 Brecht defines such theatricalgestures as corporeal,facial, and vocal at- titudesdetermined by yet another,underlying gesture that expressessocial relationships.The gesturesof epic actors should thereforebe meaningful and typical copies of actual human ones while outwardlyexpressing the characters'inner emotions. Brecht expects such gesturesto be character- istic of individual scenes and even of whole plays, moreover, which he thinks should graphicallyconvey a social message in a single "basic ges- ture" [Grundgestus].Finally, epic theater results in a "gest of handing over a finishedarticle." These several kinds of gesturesare aimed at social life farbeyond the theatricalsignificance celebrated by Barthes.In theory, Barthes admired this social notion of gesture both as a moral principle that ought to determine the cut of dramatic costumes and as one of the clearest dramaturgicalconcepts ever produced.36In practice, however, the many critical "gestures"that he himself describes seem much less consequential. In Writing Degree Zero, he labelled the engagement of formally sophisticated writers their "primarygesture," adding that &cri- ture both derived from such a "meaningfulgesture" and demonstrated a writer's"essential gesture as a social being."37Despite this social sig- nificance, such gestures were remote from politics because ecriturewas "free only in the gestureof choice."38Barthes therefore qualifies his own
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 470 Shookman ideologicalcritique and semiological iconoclasm in Mythologieswhen he calls them "the two attitudes [gestes]which determinedthe origin of this book."39His limited concept of"gesture" restrictsnot only his wrestlers' movements or writers' social commitment, then, but also the political reach of his own criticism. It thus confirms the problematic continuity of that criticism: both before and after his short interlude with Brecht, Barthes called &critureas well as his own critical language genuine but futile gestures. Such shortcomingsdid not keep Barthes from making creative use of Brecht in writings subsequent to Mythologies. On the contrary, later referencesto Brechtin works not directlyconcerned with him make plain the enduring-indeed crucial-importance of epic theaterto Barthes.Such referencesare especially clear in On Racine (1963), S/Z (1970), and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). Comparingthe passive reception of Racine by bourgeoisaudiences with an infant'srelationship to its surrogatemoth- er, Barthesadds a psychoanalytictwist to Brecht'sdisdain of traditional theater as an opiate of the bourgeoisie. Barthes'sadmiration of oriental theateras a model for reviving Racine no less surely recallsBrecht's essay "AlienationEffects in Chinese Acting" (1937). In an account of Far East- ern theaterresembling Brecht's epic kind, Barthesnotes both that oriental acting conveys symbolic "distancefrom oneself to what is said" and that Racine needs to be kept at such distance from modern audiences.40Basic concepts of epic theater likewise underlie Barthes'snarrative vivisection of Balzac's Sarrasine in S/Z. His opposition of "readerly"texts only passively consumed to "writerly"ones demanding a reader'sactive vo- lition clearly echoes Brecht's similar attempts to rouse audiences that traditionaltheater had lulled into cultural complacency. The rhetorical "codes"that Barthesdiscerns in Sarrasine,moreover, cut across "a struc- ture which is strictly Aristotelian,"41a phrase that distinctly recalls Brecht'sfrequent definitions of his own "non-Aristoteleandramaturgy." Finally, by dividing Sarrasine into discrete "lexias," Barthes follows Brecht's example of focusing critical attention on individual scenes in the theater.He even sums up the essential narrativefact about Sarrasine with an explicit referenceto Brecht: In whatBrecht calls dramatic theater, there is a passionateinterest in the d6nouement;in epic theater,in the development.Sarrasine is a dramatic story.... but the drnouementis compromisedin a disclosure:what hap- pens,what constitutes the denouement,is the truth.42 Barthes here admits that Sarrasine falls short of his "writerly"ideal, which he elsewhereexpresses in no less Brechtianterms: "I ask only this: that someday in France, someday soon, we might have novels corre- sponding to Brecht's theater."43To Barthes, Brecht's plays thus served
This content downloaded from 137.158.158.60 on Thu, 23 Jan 2014 06:05:44 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Barthes's Myth of Brecht's Theater 471 as models for French novels as well as French theater. Barthes just as clearly takes recourse to Brecht in The Pleasure of the Text, where he cites him to help define even non-political language: "There can be tran- quil moments in the war of languages, and these moments are texts ('War,' one of Brecht's characters says, 'does not exclude peace... War has its peaceful moments... .')."44 Brecht's presence in a book so devoted to apoliticalbliss is not as surprisingas it might seem when one knows that Barthes had meanwhile come to relish epic theater as sumptuous, se- ductive, voluptuous plaisir.45 Thus seeing in Brecht the basic concerns of his own nomadic criticism-politics, semiology, psychoanalysis, and textual plaisir-Barthes could truly claim that he had always been faithful to Brecht.46His major writings cited here reveal such loyalty to be du- bious, since they show how sharply it discounts Brecht's politics. Such one-sidedness in no way diminishes Barthes's criticism, but it does suggest that he had good reason indeed to reproach himself for writing less po- litically than Brecht thought wise.
IV
Toward the end of his life, Barthes himself fully realized that his criticism made epic theater seem much different from that intended by Brecht. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, we have found him musing on how far he strayed from Brecht's apparent political path.47 This self- scrutiny includes renewed appreciation of Brecht, whose theater Barthes praised again and whose prose style he emulated. Such clear reminis- cences sum up his selective version of Brecht. Deep admiration of Brecht's plays is evident in his statement that their reconciliation of political sense and aesthetic form had spoiled him for all other theater, which he found comparatively imperfect.48 On an even more personal level, he wished to be remembered as the kind of flexible, lucid thinker respected by Brecht: "I would be so happy if these words of Brecht could be applied to me: 'He thought in the heads of others; and in his own, othersthan he were thinking.That is true thought'."49In this same Brech- tian spirit, Barthes composed much of his autobiographyin the third rather than first person. Using the pronoun "he" to speak of oneself, Barthes explained, clearly demonstrated "epic" consciousness like Brecht's: I am speakingabout myself in the mannerof the Brechtianactor who must distancehis character:"show" rather than incarnatehim, and give his man- ner of speakinga kind of fillip whose effect is to pry the pronoun from its name, the image from its support, the image-repertoirefrom its mirror (Brechtrecommended that the actor think out his entire role in the third person).5o
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In "Brecht'sreproach of R.B.," we have found Barthesclaiming that he could not distinguish his own discourse from politics clearly enough to be the kind of active political subject that Brecht desired. That he here recallsBrecht to speak detachedlyof himself furtherreinforces such a gap between the political and personal force of his criticism. Indeed, this stylistic comment mixes Brecht's alienation with Lacanian notions of self-reflectionpurely for reasons of self-analysis. Barthes himself once suggestedhow he could put Brechtto such highly originaluse: "The vision that I have of Brecht,of Brechtiandramaturgy, is doubtless of a fantastic order;but one can also say that it is simply utopian, and at that moment it can open up to somethingnew."' As we have seen in his majorwritings, Barthes indeed read Brecht in new ways, semiology first and critically foremost among them. In retrospect,then, Barthes acknowledgedboth the idiosyncratic character and the creative vitality of such readings. Indirectly, he thereby confessed that he had invented a myth-that of epic theater recast in non-political terms. For almost thirty years, from the early 1950s until his sudden death in 1980, Barthesthus put Brecht'sepic theater to constant-though con- stantly changing-critical use. With help provided by Brecht'splays and theories, Barthes seemed to overcome his own existentialist dilemma of reconciling committed politics to openly modernist prose. He quickly succumbed to the ever less political lure of semiology, structuralism, psychoanalysis,and textual plaisir, however, regardingepic theater as a concept more and more remote from Brecht's concrete social concerns and fluid theatrical practice. Since Barthes thereby gutted Brecht's vo- cabulary in much the same misleading way that he himself found se- miotically suspect in Mythologies, much his own criticism appears self- contradictory.This seeming contradiction nonetheless proved to be a creative misunderstandingcrucial to Barthes'smajor writings,which ap- propriatedbasic concepts of epic theateras part of far differenttheoretical projects. The aesthetic and historical backgroundof such projects was largerthan Barthes's specific interest in Brecht, of course, but their re- flection in his criticism passed throughthe political lens supplied by epic theater.As I have shown, moreover, Barthes'scritical debt to Brecht was so overwhelming and direct that it troubled Barthes himself for good reason. Nagging at his conscience even as he inspired him, Brecht thus cast a long criticalshadow over Barthes.Indeed, Barthes'scriticism might be summed up in one of the many Brechtianterms semiologicallyaltered to fit his "myth" of epic theater:in political light of Brecht, whom he so greatlyadmired, Barthes'swork seems a series of self-criticallygrand but deliberatelyempty gestures.
SSome prior studies of the two authorsdo, of course, help put Brecht'simportance to Barthesinto historicaland critical perspective.Various scholars have found both the-
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atrical practicesand philosophicalconcepts similar to Brecht's"alienation effect" in the work of French authors as dissimilar as Sartreand Ionesco: Edith Kern, "Brecht'sEpic Theatreand the French Stage,"Symposium 16.1 (1962): 32; Reinhold Grimm, "Brecht, Ionesco und das moderneTheater," German Life and Letters13 (1960):224. Brechtis also said to have furnisheda model of objectivitymissing in existentialismand therebyto have supplieda practicalas well as theoreticalalternative to Frenchtheater of the Absurd:Victoria Williams Hill, BertoltBrecht and Post-War FrenchDrama (Stuttgart:Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1978)26, 39. By the early 1960s,Brecht enjoyed considerable posthumous success in France, which Agnes Hiufnerregards as consistentwith Frenchefforts to organizea nationaltheater responsiveto leftist politics. Barelyknown in Francebefore or just after the war, Hiufner explains,Brecht became more popularafter Barthes and his fellow writersfor the periodical ThLdtrepopulaire hailed the systematiccharacter of epic theater during the BerlinerEn- semble'sfirst trip to Parisfor the theaterfestival Thbetre des Nations in 1954.The Ensemble then performedMother Courage.Its subsequentproductions in Paris of The Caucasian ChalkCircle (in 1955)and Galileo(in 1957) reinforcedBrecht's popular reputation but also prompteddifferences of political opinion about it. The high point of Brecht'sreception came in 1960, Hiufneradds, when the Ensembleperformed Galileo, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui, and The Mother.Paradoxically, the Ensembledropped out of Thbitre des Nations in 1963-the very year in which Brecht'stheoretical writings first appearedin French trans- lation: Anges Hiufner,Brecht in Frankreich:1930-1963: Verbreitung,Aufnahme, Wirkung (Stuttgart:Metzler, 1968). Brecht'sreputation in Francesuffered, according to Andr6Gis- selbrecht,from the merely lukewarmMarxism of friendlycritics like Barthes,who rightly resistedanti-Communist devaluation of epic theaterbut himself wronglydivorced Brecht's aestheticsfrom Marxism:Andr6 Gisselbrecht, "Brecht in Frankreich,"Sinn und Form 20 (1968): 999f., 1006f. 2 Susan Sontagcomments on Barthes's"elusive relationto politics"and tempershis taste for Brecht'sintellectual didacticism with his sensitivity and imaginativenessin han- dling Brecht'stexts: Susan Sontag,ed., "Introduction,"A BarthesReader (New York:Hill and Wang, 1982) xxii, xxix; Susan Sontag, "Preface," WritingDegree Zero, by Roland Barthes(New York: Hill and Wang, 1968) viii. Stephen Heath has equally kind things to say when he notes that Brecht retained for Barthes "great actuality, even exemplari- ty":StephenHeath, Vertigedu dcplacement:Lecture de Barthes(Paris: Fayard, 1974) 179, and PhillipThody thinksthat Barthes'sbasic interestsin Marxismand the societal function of signs allowed him to mount a "veritablecampaign in favor of Brecht":Philip Thody, Roland Barthes:A ConservativeEstimate (London: Macmillan, 1977) 29. Brecht, Thody explains,acted as a catalystin Barthes'sown notion of what theatershould be: "If Brecht had not existed, Barthes would surely have had to invent him" (30-31) While Thody speculatesthat Barthes'senthusiasm for Brechtwas an attempt to compensatefor his own political inactivity, Annette Lavers surmises that Brecht, together with Sartre,served as Barthes'ssurrogate father: Thody 6; Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes:Structuralism and After (London: Methuen; Cambridge,MA: Harvard UP, 1982) 211. Brecht embodied Barthes'sview of formallyand politically responsibleliterature, Lavers adds, even though Bartheshimself furtheredhis own criticalfame by later diffusingsuch politicaldimensions of his work (122-23). Like Lavers,Jonathan Culler relates Barthes'sinterest in Brechtto Sartre,whose simplistic view of languageand dramaticform Barthesrejected in favor of the more refinedicriture that he found in Brecht'swritings: Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes (New York: Oxford UP, 1983) 50-51. "Even when they do not mention Brecht,"Culler remarks,"Barthes's writings on drama ... reflect Brecht'snotion of Verfremdung"(51). The lessons that Bartheslearned from Brechtmight not alwayscorrespond to Brecht'sown theory, Culler concedes, but they nonetheless defined the elegant political programthat Bartheshimself advocatedfor literature(54). Roland Barthes,Le degrdzero de l'criture (Paris: Seuil, 1953); WritingDegree Zero, trans. Annette Laversand Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968) 15. 4 Roland Barthes,Essais critiques(Paris: Seuil, 1964);Critical Essays, trans.Richard Howard(Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972) 33. S Roland Barthes,"Thbitre capital,"France-Observateur 8 July 1954: 1-2. Qtd. in Genevi6ve Serreau,Bertolt Brecht: Dramaturge (Paris: l'Arche, 1955) 10.
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6 Cf. Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professorof Desire (Lincoln, NE: U of NebraskaP, 1983) 104, who argues that Barthes'srefusal to distinguishbetween critical "metalanguage"and its literaryobjects demands seriouslyrethinking the pragmaticvalue of his essays for understandingwriters like Brecht. Roland Barthes, "Sept photo-modblesde Mare Courage,"Theatre populaire 35 (1959): 17. 8 Barthes,Critical Essays 38. 9 Ibid. Ibid. 73. " Ibid. 74f. 12 Ibid. 75. '3 RolandBarthes and BernardDort, "Brecht'traduit'," Thsitre populaire23 (1957): 1, 7. 14 Roland Barthes,"Brecht, Marx et l'histore,"Cahiers de la compagnieMadeleine Renaud-Jean-LouisBarrault: Le th&atrehistorique 5.21 (December 1957): 23f. 15Ibid. 25. 16 Barthes,Critical Essays 139. 17Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werkein 20 Bainden17 (Frankfurt/ M.: Suhrkamp, 1976): 1036. 18 Bartheshimself laterretracted such one-sidedterminology when he explainedthat the shock caused by seeing Brecht'stheater was "antipatheticto the very notion of 'struc- ture'" and thereforeless semiologicalthan seismological. The Rustle of Language, trans. RichardHoward (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 214. 19 Barthes,Critical Essays 263. 20 Ibid. 21 BertoltBrecht, Brecht on Theatre:The Developmentof an Aesthetic,ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 205. 22 Ibid. 39. 23 Roland Barthes,Mythologies, 1957 (Paris:Seuil, 1970);Mythologies, selected and trans.by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972) 143. 24 Heath notes in passing that regardingBrecht's work confirms that of Barthes's mythologue(179); Thody observesthat Barthes,in Mythologies,applies Brecht'stradition- ally Marxistconcept of assumingcontrol of history (33f). 25 Brechton Theatre125. 26 Ibid. 201. 27 Barthes,Mythologies, 158f. 28 Ibid. 156. 29 See especially The Measures Taken, where both the four "agitators"who direct the young comradeand the "ControlChorus" that tries those agitatorsfor executinghim repeatedlyrefer to Einverstidndnisas submissionto the will of the [Communist]Party. For example,"And so the young comradedemonstrated his agreement[zeigte... sein Einver- stindnis] by effacinghis personalfeatures"; "We agree with you [Wir sind einverstanden mit euch]./ ... Your report shows us what is / Needed to change the world: / Anger and tenacity,knowledge and indignation/ Swift action, utmost deliberation/ Cold endurance, unending perseverance/ Comprehensionof the individual and comprehension of the whole:/ Taught only by reality/ Can reality be changed."Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Takenand otherLehrsticke, trans. Carl R. Muelleret al., (London:Eyre Methuen, 1977) 13, 34. 30 Barthes,Mythologies 18. Bertolt Brecht,Collected Plays, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim,trans. Peter Tegel et al., 1 (London:Methuen, 1970): 118. 32 Cf. Thody 31, who positively identifies Barthes's meaningless wrestlers with Brecht'sactors and with the committed writersdescribed in WritingDegree Zero. Barthes, Mythologies15. 34 Ibid. 25 Brecht, Brechton Theatre36 nl.
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36 Barthes,Critical Essays 41; Roland Barthes,The Responsibilityof Forms:Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation,trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) 93. 37 Barthes, WritingDegree Zero 3, 17, 10. 38Ibid.16. 39 Barthes,Mythologies 9. 40 RolandBarthes, Sur Racine(Paris: Seuil, 1963);On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (New York:Octogon Books, 1977) 148f. 41 Roland Barthes,S/Z (Paris:Seuil, 1963);S/Z, trans. RichardHoward (New York: (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 129. 42Ibid. 187. 43 Roland Barthesand MauriceNadeau, "Ou va la littrrature?,"Ecrire, Pour quoi, pour qui?,Dialogue de FranceCulture #2 (1974);Sur la litt'rature(PU de Grenoble, 1980) 30. 44 Roland Barthes,Le plaisir du texte (Paris:Seuil, 1973); The Pleasureof the Text, trans. RichardMiller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 29. 45 Barthespraised Brecht as "a great Marxistauthor who fought tirelesslyon behalf of pleasure(Roland Barthes,Le grain de la voix: Entriens 1962-1980 [Paris:Seuil, 1981]; The Grainof the Voice:Interviews 1962-1980, trans.Linda Coverdale [New York:Hill and Wang, 1985] 163). He furthermorereveled in what he thoughtthe "asceticsumptuousity" of epic theater,which he enthusiasticallydescribed as "at once revolutionary,significant, and voluptuous"(Roland Barthes,"L'eblouissement," Le monde 11 March 1971: 15). Fi- nally, Barthesrecalled reading Brecht in indirect terms of plaisir "Everytime that I read Brecht,I am seducedand convinced"(Roland Barthes,"Roland Barthes met le langageen question,"Le Figaro litt'raire 5 July 1975: 11. 46 See Barthes'slast referenceto Brecht:"I am still faithfulto the ideas of Brecht,so importantto me when I was a theatercritic" (The Grain of the Voice 320). 47 Ungar 138, remarksthat by 1973 Barthesbecame awareof"residual debts to the values of the recent past" and showed "growingnostalgia for literaryvalues embodied by Gide, Proust,and Brecht." 48 Roland Barthes,"Thmoinage sur le thbitre,"Esprit 33 (1965): 835. 49 Barthes,The Grain of the Voice 195. 50Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes:Ecrivains de toujours25 (Paris:Seuil, 1975);Roland Barthesby RolandBarthes, trans. RichardHoward (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 169. 5' Barthes,"T~moinage sur le th&itre"836.
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