The Tragic Vision

 As a teenage socialist I turned to Brecht's Mother Courage hoping to find there some good Marxist dogmatics-- a real-life instantiation of Brecht's theoretical commitment to abolishing the individualism and fatalism of the bourgeois theater. Yet, when the play was done, I found that the scene that lingered longest and moved me the most-- as it has perhaps many prior readers-- was one that concerned a highly individual action: it is the moment when the deafmute Kattrin-- knowing that an army is about to ambush and massacre a town of sleeping villagers-- climbs into a tree and beats a drum in order to warn the civilians; putting herself on the firing line in order to save the lives of innocents. 

What strikes one about the scene is not only its poignancy-- but also its utter incompatibility with Brecht's ostensible commitments. I suppose one can say that it serves the play's overarching antiwar message; but it does so in a humanistic way that by no means aligns with the theory of "epic" and revolutionary theater that is supposed to govern the whole. After all, in his didactic mode in the same play, Brecht generally scoffs at sacrifice (think of the song "How Fortunate the Man with None"). He mocks morality as null when faced with the problem of an empty belly. All such "noble suffering" and individual self-immolation is supposed to be made unnecessary by a coming world which-- instead of demanding martyrdom-- instead renders it unnecessary by abolishing the conditions that called it forth. 

Yet Kattrin's final act undoubtedly moves us precisely because of its sacrifice. More than that: it is a basically futile one. Kattrin herself dies in the effort to save the villagers; and even if her drumbeats saved some of them for one day, perhaps, the army could easily return the next. The beauty and the dignity of the act lie precisely in its futility. Clear enough to all who accept the outdated and unreconstructed human soul under conditions of capitalism-- but bearing simultaneously, we must concede, all the hallmarks of "bourgeois sentiment" and similar hindrances that were supposed to be eliminated from a truly revolutionary theater. 

An illustration. In his essay on the "political theater," (Koffler trans.) Nicola Chiaromonte quotes some of Brecht's dicta on the topic: "The spectator of the [traditional, bourgeois] dramatic theater says: 'Yes, I too have experienced this feeling-- Yes, I too am like that-- Well, this is natural-- It will always be like that-- The suffering of this man moves me, because there is no other outcome for it[.]" By contrast, he foresees, the spectator of his reconstituted, revolutionary, and Marxist "epic" theater will say: "You ought not to do this like that-- It's surprising, almost inconceivable-- It can't go on like that-- The suffering of this man moves me, because it might have turned out differently!" 

Brecht's vision in these passages is the opposite of the tragic one. In the worldview of, say, Thomas Hardy-- who sought to transpose into the novel the classical Aeschylean tragic themes-- what moves us in, say, Tess's fate, is precisely its inevitability. There is, at last, no solution for the human plight, placed as we are into an indifferent or perhaps hostile universe, and this is what provokes our pity, as well as our admiration for the endurance of the human spirit. As Chiaromonte argues, the essence of drama (or, I might add, tragedy, whether embodied on the stage or not) "is its necessity [...] the rigor with which it proceeds toward its outcome and the inevitability of the outcome in view[.]" (Hamilton trans.). 

Tragedy would not be tragedy if its characters were permitted to escape from Nemesis in the final act. There is no relief in the form of a last-minute stay of execution before the curtain descends. But this also does not mean the tragic form is wholly lacking in redemption; if there were not meaning wrung from the inevitable destruction, after all, then theater would not be able to achieve the catharsis at which it aims. The meaning of the suffering comes from the fact that a character gains by it a truer understanding of the human condition in the world. And having achieved this "revelation," as Chiaromonte calls it, the tragic protagonist is "not diminished," but rather "risen to the full dignity of man" by what they have endured. 

Chiaromonte, again, confined this insight to the dramatic form. But it is surely the same fundamental emotional structure one finds in a novel like, say, The Mayor of Casterbridge. And the revelation that awaits Oedipus, say, which even as it "shatters" him-- in Chiaromonte's telling-- simultaneously breaks his pride and thereby raises him to "the full dignity of man"-- surely finds its counterpart in a passage of Hardy's when, having realized and acknowledged to himself at last that the sequence of events he set off by a single selfish choice decades ago has resulted-- ultimately and inevitably-- in the loss of everything and everyone he loves-- Henchard declares: "I—Cain—go alone as I deserve—an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!"

According to a strict Brechtian doctrine, of course, all this is quite dangerous stuff. It is a means of channeling and purging ourselves of the pity we feel at human suffering and of thereby rendering the emotion politically useless. We say: "how sad; but it could be no other way!" Hardy himself states as much in his authorial interludes: such is the work of the gods, he says; of fate; of necessity; of the cruel universe, etc. And Brecht would no doubt see Hardy as shedding a kind of crocodile tears in doing so: the Victorian bourgeois is enabled to displace and nullify the pity he feels at the image of Tess being exploited and destroyed by a vicious and hypocritical society, without feeling obliged to do anything about it (because all purposive effort would be useless anyways). 

Instead of the crocodile tears, Brecht is saying, the theater should rouse us to action. It should fill us with the opposite of the tragedian's conviction. Instead of saying that it could only be this way and no other-- that the whole drama proceeded according to Chiaromonte's laws of necessity-- we should say, "this is so contingent and unnecessary! Why do we allow this to happen? We must change it!"

Yet, when Brecht came to apply his own principles to the stage he gives us... a classically tragic vision. In some way, Brecht must have builded better than he knew. For Kattrin's sacrifice in the tree does not in fact fill us with the conviction that this could have been otherwise. Instead, it persuades us that this is the inevitable consequence of the act of individual courage. It is the quintessentially noble yet futile, and therefore anti-"historical," gesture. And it is its very futility yet nobility by which Kattrin is redeemed and "raised to the full dignity" of humankind. 

Chiaromonte saw the same thing in reading Brecht, and condenses the insight. "[I]t is understood [according to Brecht's theories and his announced didactic intent] that in watching Mother Courage the spectator will be unable not to conclude in favor of proletarian revolution and against warmongering capitalism. [But-- t]his does not, luckily for Brecht the artist, turn out to be the case;" for the play "is in reality a pessimistic fable, indeed, nihilistic and misanthropic, much more than pacifist or anticapitalist." (Koffler trans.) This bleak vision of the world, Chiaromonte goes on, is what makes Brecht "one of the most significant personalities of our time, but not for the reasons he gives"-- indeed, it would seem, for their opposite. 

Much as Blake wrote that Milton was "a true Poet," and therefore "of the Devil's party without knowing it," Chiaromonte seems here to be saying that Brecht was a true dramatist and tragedian, and therefore of the gods' party without knowing it. Or, better to say, of the party of human dignity in the face of suffering, even if he publicly disclaimed the idea. 

After all, Brecht, the Marxist, should regard suffering in fact as the opposite of ennobling. Far from raising us to dignity, he would say, suffering is an unnecessary historical byproduct of a primitive stage of human civilization that will rapidly be superseded. From this standpoint, even the victims of that suffering should be an object of indifference to us. Their pain teaches us nothing; it reveals no truths, other than the grotesque one of how lousy and backward the current state of our means of production is. They, along with their oppressors and expropriators, will soon be swept into the rubbish bin of history, so why spare them a thought? 

Brecht's protest against the bourgeois drama is, then-- at least officially-- a rejection not only of complacency, but also of pity-- what Larry Slade in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh would have called "the wrong kind of pity"-- the politically useless kind that extends in so many directions and that sorrows for such fundamental aspects of the human dilemma that it ends by negating its own capacity for action. It is the view that what is most pitiable in human life is actually at the root of who we are-- our mortality, our finitude, our condition in time-- and therefore not something that can be abolished by any new regime of laws or reconstitution of economic society. It is the opposite of the doctrinaire Marxist conviction Brecht ostensible espoused, which sees pity as unnecessary, since both suffering and its victims belong merely to a temporary condition of human society that is soon to be transcended. 

Yet, when we turn to a poem of Brecht's like, say, "Driving along in a comfortable car," (Constantine/Kuhn translation), what do we find there other than precisely this "wrong kind of pity"? Brecht, the dogmatist, might have written a very different ending to the poem. He might have concluded that his decision to pass by the homeless man without giving him a ride proved the corruption of human fellowship under conditions of capitalism; he might have said that it illustrates the futility and irrelevance of individual acts of compassion in a world where supra-individual economic forces structure our lives. But Brecht, the artist and the honest man, is forced to conclude something quite different: above all, what the episode instills in him is a disgust with "this/Whole world." 

And so, as in Mother Courage, what begins ostensibly as a protest against a particular social structure and class becomes really a universal cry of pity and revulsion against the human fate. And so it is in his poetry as well. As Chiaromonte writes, "it is really the nihilism-- that mixture of dry cynicism and discomfort [...] that constitutes Brecht's originality and modernity. It is to his nihilism and basic unbelief that his success in the postwar period is due, and not to the banal didacticism of his declared intentions." (Koffler trans.)

Brecht, when it came down to it, was unable to convince himself that human suffering and injustice really had a straightforward political solution. (And even if it did, the solution would come too late for the people who have already irremediably suffered throughout the millennia of unremitting pain, poverty, and injustice). He grasped by insight, if not in theoretical dogma, what William James was trying to say when he wrote: "It may indeed be that no [...] reconciliation with the totality of things is possible" and that there may be "forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever." As Chiaromonte summarizes the same insight, which he calls the essence of the "tragic conflict," it is: "the awareness deep down that there are insoluble clashes and insurmountable limits in life, and that on this very awareness the dignity of man's lot is based." 

What are we to conclude from this, though?-- that all true art is inherently conservative and complacent?; or that we have no choice but to weep crocodile tears till the end of time while simultaneously drawing bank dividends wrung from precisely the suffering we claim to deplore? Surely not: for the tragic vision is ultimately just as opposed to the conservative view of the world as the revolutionary one. After all, the essence of conservatism is satisfaction. The world is as it should be. "Whatever is, is right." Whereas the essence of tragedy is Chiaromonte's "discomfort."

The vulgar Marxist viewpoint, meanwhile, is far closer to the conservative in spirit than it is to the tragic. The Marxist and the conservative, after all, share the same attitude, which he can define as (citing Chiaromonte's words again:) a "fundamental optimism as regards the world itself and human nature." If the world is not quite right already, then it is inevitably progressing in that direction and will soon get there. 

The tragic view, by contrast, knows that humanity will never get there; but that our dignity and the meaning of our lives consist in nothing other than struggling to get there regardless. It is climbing into the tree and beating the drum to warn the villagers even though we know we will be shot for it, and that there will be other villages not so lucky, and other massacring armies not so easily foiled. Among other things, the tragic vision-- which Brecht possessed, at last, even as he disclaimed it-- is also the only really lasting basis for political action. For the optimistic waiting for a ready and inevitable resolution will always be disappointed. While a willingness to seek our meaning from a confrontation with this inevitability, knowing full well the consequences, is the only basis on which we can continue.