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Barthes's Semiological Myth of Brecht's Epic Theater http://www.jstor.org/stable/30166263 . Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Wisconsin Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Monatshefte. http://www.jstor.org 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-
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