Brecht, The 'alienation Effect' And Mother Courage

In his theory of theatre, Bertolt Brecht developed the ‘alienation effect’, a concept that broke severely with the dominant Aristotelian dramaturgy in many ways, rejecting the traditional function of art, and Aristotle’s conceptions of mimesis, catharsis and unified plot. Brecht’s theory stems from dialectical materialism, a philosophical system that necessarily breaks with Aristotelian logic, and is based around the need for art to be actively involved in changing the world rather than merely ‘imitating’ it. Seeing catharsis as a means by which tragedy demobilises its audience and reinforces bourgeois ideology, Brecht used the ‘alienation effect’ as a means of distancing the audience and actors from a play’s action to the point that critical reflection upon the play comes more organically than uncritical emotional involvement. The ‘alienation effect’ is achieved through such methods as the disunity of narrative structure and unnatural representation of characters, betraying Aristotle’s ‘unity of action’ and concept of ‘mimesis’ respectively.

Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children is often said to be a prime example of Epic Theatre, containing many examples of what Brecht meant by the ‘alienation effect’. On the other hand, the play is often labelled ‘tragic’ in literary criticism, is discussed in reference to tragedy and appears as a text on courses dedicated to tragedy. This is all despite tragedy being a genre that Brecht intended to aggressively do away with via the ‘alienation effect’. This paradox emerges because of an inherent difficulty in interpreting any Brechtian play, which is by definition “incomplete in itself, completed only in the audience’s reception of it”.[1] Radically differing ‘effects’ are achieved depending whether you read the play in German, read it in English, view it in East Berlin in 1949 or in New York in 2006. Mother Courage as a read text itself constitutes only a partial implementation of the ‘alienation effect’. Despite including techniques such as fragmentation of the narrative, and interruption of action with song and projected text, the play still holds potential to act as an outright tragedy. This is the only way to explain the empathy with Mother Courage felt by a significant proportion of audience members and critics throughout the play’s history. It is only when ‘alienation’ devices are consciously and correctly implemented in production that the notorious ‘effect’ can occur, with Brecht himself achieving this through set, lighting, and acting among many other things. It is of course impossible to enter the minds of historical audiences and witness the success or failure of Mother Courage in stimulating their critical faculties through ‘alienation’, but it is nonetheless possible to measure the play’s qualities according to those proposed in Brecht’s theory, and this is important to any overall assessment of Brechtian dramaturgy as a whole.

Brecht’s philosophy of theatre

Accurate conceptualisation of Brechtian dramaturgy requires some understanding of his dialectical method, the most important principle of which, for our purposes, is ‘the standpoint of the totality’. Dialectics is, first and foremost, a logic of motion and change, applied by Hegel to the phenomenological development of the forms of thought, and later by Marx in his understanding of human history as driven by intra-societal antagonisms and contradictions. Thus in its foundations, Brecht’s dialectical materialism rejects formal, Aristotelian logic, which asserts laws of identity (A = A) and non-contradiction (A ≠ not-A). To Brecht, such formal logic is ahistorical and cannot account for the fact that “everything that exists is continually turning into something else”.[2] This rejection is significant if we are to understand Aristotle’s Poetics as grounded in his method of logic. Furthermore, the dialectical method explains Brecht as highly self-conscious of his role in history, as a dramatist who seeks a standpoint of totality. What this means is that Brecht refuses to see his theatrical work in isolation from the wider historical context and all interrelations involved, i.e. ‘the totality’. The practical result of this philosophical underpinning is a rejection of passive mimesis and a call for historically potent, interventionist theatre.

Before exploring the ‘alienation effect’, it is useful to expand upon Brecht’s ‘refunctioning’ of theatre and how it entails a rejection of any traditional understanding of theatre’s ‘function’. Philip Sidney, following Aristotle, defines poetry as “an art of imitation… a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth… with this end, to teach and delight.”[3] Brecht passionately disagrees that “the function of theatre was to provide escapist entertainment” to those with the assumed “ideological belief that the world [is] fixed, given and unchangeable”[4]. Instead, for Brecht “the task of theatre is not to ‘reflect’ a fixed reality, but to demonstrate how character and action are historically produced, and so how they could have been, and still can be different.”[5] Thus in Brecht’s theory the “duality of form and content” becomes the “triad of content, form and function”[6], with art’s function prioritised. This ‘refunctioning’ represents Brecht’s dialectical understanding of the ability of art and culture to reflect on social reality rather being limited to mechanical reflection of, to use Marxist terminology, the ‘base’. Robert Leach explains that “Brecht wanted his theatre to intervene in the process of shaping society”[7], therefore Brecht’s theories of the ‘alienation effect’, and how to achieve it, are underpinned by this intended function of his work.

With some understanding of the broader philosophy behind Brechtian dramaturgy, we can now look at the specific theory of the ‘alienation effect’, which seeks to break with Aristotelian tragedy, its structure and ‘cathartic’ effect, and to produce historical awareness in the audience. While Brecht did not reject the notion that theatre should be entertaining, he deeply loathed Aristotle’s theory of catharsis, the “purging of emotions by self-identification (empathy) with those of the actor,” which he considered essential to “hypnotic, anti-critical theatre”[8]. Brecht wanted to avoid traditional mimesis, the drawing of the audience into an enthralling illusion of reality, taken as ‘real’ rather than as a social ‘product’, preventing “an audience from reflecting critically on both the mode of representation and the actions represented.”[9] Thus Brecht, in 1927, wrote:

The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator’s reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things.[10]

Practice of the ‘alienation effect’

The ‘alienation effect’ becomes Brecht’s “means of breaking the magic spell, of jerking the spectator out of his torpor and making him use his critical sense.”[11] To break the spell of catharsis, Brecht developed several theatrical innovations that sought to distance, or ‘alienate’, audiences from a play’s action.

Brecht saw the fragmentation of narrative structure as critical to creating the ‘alienation effect’, a position that shattered any loyalty the unified plot structures of the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle asserts that plot “should imitate a single, unified action – and one that is whole”[12], with “whole” referring to “that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.”[13] Consequently, in his crusade against “conventional illusion of reality”, Brecht attacked a necessary element of it, “the ‘single chain’ of a ‘timeless’ narrative”[14]. Brecht wanted plays that were “formally uneven, interrupted, discontinuous, juxtaposing… scenes in ways which disrupt conventional expectations and force the audience into critical speculation on the dialectical relations between episodes.”[15] One method of achieving such montage is outlined by Jean Genet, who wanted each scene, or each section of each scene, to be “perfected and played as rigorously and with as much discipline as if it were a short play, complete in itself”[16], leaving no indication, if viewed alone, that anything in a wider plot should precede or succeed it. Another method is the interruption of plot by different art forms, such as song, dance and film, “which refuse to blend smoothly with one another, cutting across the action rather than neatly integrating with it.”[17]

The ‘alienation effect’ encourages non-traditional techniques of acting, such as the not/but element, which simply involves an actors’ verbalization of action and decision-making: “I did not _____, but did _____.” This breaks with tradition firstly because the actor does not “naturally” portray human thought processes and decision-making; this produces constant awareness in both the actor and the spectator of the artificiality of character, helping to create the “distance” necessary for critical judgment. Furthermore, the not/but element destroys the sense of inevitability that permeates Aristotelian tragedy. It makes explicit the role of subjective intervention, of human choice, into the plot, engendering a sense of evitability. In doing so, this acting technique is utilised with the intention to influence the spectator’s social consciousness.

At its core, the intended effect of all techniques of ‘alienation’ is the overcoming of reification; this goes hand in hand with the destruction of organic, mimetic unity that characterises Aristotelian drama and mystifies the commodity form of modern theatre. From a Lukácsian perspective, one aspect of reification entails that the ‘objective’ world of commodities and their movements on the market “confront us as invisible forces that generate their own power”[18], rather than as products of human labour. Fredric Jameson applies this concept to the ‘hypnotic’ form of tragedy to which Brecht was opposed: “The well-made production is one from which the traces of its rehearsals have been removed (just as from the successfully reified commodity the traces of production itself have been made to disappear)”[19]. Brecht’s ‘alienation effect’ is an attempt to ward off such commodity fetishism, and engender consciousness, amongst producers and spectators alike, of theatre’s status as a constructed entirely by social labour. Theoretically, with the ‘alienation effect’ theatre’s spectator is no longer the passive consumer of a mystical commodity, but is critically engaged with the themes of the play and conscious the role of human activity in shaping reality.

The problem of Mother Courage

A major problem for Brecht as a theatre practitioner arose when a production of Mother Courage was responded to as a cathartic tragedy, an outcome that the ‘alienation effect’ sought to avoid. As we have seen, Brecht’s dramaturgy was fervently anti-Aristotelian and consciously opposed itself to the tradition of tragedy. Catharsis was seen as objectionable in its engenderment of hypnotic empathy with the tragic figure, and thus the ‘alienation effect’ was the practical attempt to bring critical engagement to the forefront of theatre: “To alienate an incident or a character means to take from that incident or character what makes it obvious, familiar or readily understandable, so as to create wonderment and curiosity”.[20] Hence, in writing Mother Courage, Brecht wanted “no tragedy… and no catharsis, since he believed that such a purging would incapacitate the audience for political action”.[21] However, after Mother Courage’s premiere at the Schauspielhaus Zürich Brecht was disgruntled when audience members described his play as “a Niobe tragedy” conveying “the amazing vitality of the maternal animal”.[22] Fiona Shaw, who played Mother Courage in 2009, correctly describes the character’s constant self-contradiction:

She curses the war, then in the very next scene says that poor people do much better in war than in peace. She speaks in every scene with whatever point of view she has at that moment, which is generally the practical, amoral, politically incorrect point of view.[23]

Brecht intended such anomalies to compel the audience to criticise her behaviour as “inconsistent and self-defeating”,[24] but Ronald Hayman claims that the unintended result of exploring such contradictions in character is the play’s strong focus on Courage’s individuality; “We get to know her more intimately than any of Brecht’s other characters, and we identify with her”.[25]

Mother Courage of course has not been universally perceived as tragic, with various critics describing its engagement of reason over emotion, and insisting that it stands as an authoritative implementation of the ‘alienation effect’. In keeping with his conception of ‘interventionist’ theatre, Brecht claims to have written Mother Courage in “white heat”[26] as a response to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Its social function is made clear in its “theme of the devastating effects of a European war and the blindness of anyone hoping to profit by it”.[27] As such, it has been praised in its ability to make a viewer “consider the consequences”[28] of little people trying to make big profits in wartime, to make us recognise “that her business interests prove to be incompatible with her second avowed concern which is to bring her three children safely through the conflict”.[29] Indeed, when Mother Courage succeeds in producing this anti-tragic response, it is usually attributed to the fact that “Brecht had never made better practical use of his ideas about Epic Theatre than in writing Mother Coruage”.[30]

A paradox has become apparent: more than any of Brecht’s plays, Mother Courage has a history of being labelled tragic and analysed through tragic discourse, but is simultaneously “regarded as the masterpiece of Brecht’s concept of Epic Theatre”.[31] To determine the extent to which Mother Courage stands as an implementation of Brechtian theory requires an assessment of the ‘alienating’ devices, and their effectiveness, present in the text and in production.

Alienation in the text

In assessing the implementation of alienating devices in the text itself, the play’s narrative structure is an important place to start. In twelve scenes, Mother Courage spans over a large time period, from 1624 to 1636, and geographic region, with action occurring in Sweden, Poland and Saxony. The scenes are relatively episodic, assisting Brecht’s attempt to present the contradictory interests of Courage at different moments and “force the audience into critical speculation on the dialectical relations between episodes”.[32] For example, at the end of scene 3, Courage “suppresses every natural feeling”[33] and allows the Sergeant to “chuck [Swiss Cheese] in the pit”.[34] This is juxtaposed with the beginning of scene 4, in which she is prepared to voice anger at soldiers who “slashed everything in me cart to pieces”,[35] highlighting the prioritisation of her commodities over her son’s life before the ‘Song of the Grand Capitulation” reminds her that “offending the authorities is never good for business”.[36] A more explicit example of this structural technique occurs with the juxtaposition between scene 6’s end – “war be damned”[37] – and scene 7’s beginning – “I won’t have you folk spoiling my war for me… war gives its people a better deal”.[38] We are shown the process by which Courage adopts “whatever stance her business interests require in the situations as they arise,” revealing “to the audience the false principles that underlie her actions”.[39] Such narrative fragmentation, where Brecht envisions “each scene [as] self-contained”,[40] assists the “alienation effect”, placing the reader/viewer at a critical distance rather than evoking empathy with Courage’s ideology.

While narrative structure assists the ‘alienation effect’, the text itself does not constitute a comprehensive implementation of this device. The episodic structure itself harks back to Shakespeare’s history plays,[41] and Hayman goes as far as to claim that, far from self-contained scenes, in Mother Courage “one [scene] leads to the next, as fortune’s wheel inexorably pushes her downwards”.[42] It is not a stretch to argue that, considering the incessant worsening of her situation, her suffering is “closer to tragedy than [Brecht] intended”.[43] Certainly, Lukács interpreted Courage as a tragic figure “who goes to meet her doom subjectively, because her actions show her to be in direct contrast to the objective tendencies and significance of the play’s general social trend”.[44]

One Brechtian response to the allegation of Mother Courage as tragedy might be to cite ‘alienating’ devices in the text apart from the narrative structure, such as the narrative’s interruption by text and song. Brecht produced “a set of summaries to be projected on a screen or displayed on a banner before each scene”,[45] which not only situate each scene historically and geographically but also indicate the dramatic content of each scene. Thus before scene 3 even plays out, we are made aware that Courage “manages to save her daughter, likewise her covered cart, but her honest son is killed”.[46] Furthermore, songs frequently interrupt the play’s action to focus on themes, comment on incidents and give the audience “time to judge and form their opinions regarding the episodes presented to them”.[47] However, it could just as easily be argued that such interruptions are compatible with tragedy; Lucius sings a song to Brutus in Julius Caesar, for example, and the audience of Romeo & Juliet are certainly made aware of the play’s tragic content in the prologue.

Alienation on the stage

The fact that Mother Courage as a text can be considered tragic reveals the problem of assessing Brecht’s plays in abstraction from their performance onstage. Unlike Lukács, Brecht “is not in the least interested in Mother Courage as a tragic figure; what matters is that the audience realizes why she goes to her doom”.[48] Thus in Brecht’s direction of Mother Courage, particularly the revised version for the Berliner Ensemble that emphasises “the villainous side of Mother Courage’s character”,[49] numerous aspects of production contribute to a practical implementation of the ‘alienation effect’.

The most immediately noticeable aspect of staging was the “bare grey stage” with “merely had enough scenery and properties to show where the scene was taking place, and to ensure that there was a chair to sit on or a roof to climb on when the text required it”.[50] This starkness surprised “an audience that expected a detailed, realistic set”,[51] and was compounded by the simple Brechtian technique of “turning every available light full on”.[52] Whether the stage conveyed a Swedish spring afternoon or a winter dawn at the Fichtelgebirge, Brecht flooded each scene with a bright, white light that was said to be “surprising and sobering”[53] for the Berlin audience. These techniques, among many others, sought to remind the audience “that they were being exposed to the techniques of theatrical production, so that they would apply their critical faculties to the events they were seeing”.[54]

Certain techniques that sought the same end as those aforementioned were innovative in Brecht’s time but are commonplace today, strengthening the case that a Brechtian play such as Mother Courage cannot be assessed as a single unchanging work. Among these include the scene changes in the Berliner Ensemble, where actors would openly walk on and off stage carrying parts of the scenery, a technique now employed in the usually curtainless productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company.[55] There is also the use of the songs, which under Brecht’s direction invited actors to “step out of their roles and address themselves to the audience”,[56] thus breaking the fourth wall and intending to produce awareness of events as theatrically produced. The golden age of American musical theatre normalised this process and limited its ability to be ‘alienating’ in the contemporary theatre setting. Thus Hugh Rorrison suggests that the models of the ‘alienation effect’ established by Brecht’s work in East Berlin “can become progressively duller if fresh new equivalents are not found”.[57] Therefore, in keeping with Brecht’s conception of historical materialism, Mother Courage can only constitute an implementation of the ‘alienation effect’ when both its production techniques and the wider context in which these techniques occur are taken into account.

In practice the ‘alienation effect’ rests largely on the performance of actors, necessitating observation of acting techniques employed in Mother Courage under Brecht’s direction. A strong example of ‘alienating’ acting occurred with Helene Weigel’s performance as Courage at the end of scene 3 following the revealment of Swiss Cheese’s corpse. This scene was among the most problematic for Brecht, as he could not rewrite this ‘tragic’ scene “in such a way as to destroy all sympathy for her in her grief”.[58] Only with Weigel’s ‘silent scream’ did this incident achieve a truly Brechtian ‘alienation effect’. After the death, Weigel adopted a purely physical posture “without a trace of emotion”, with “her drooped jaw, mouth agape with head thrown back and eyes closed, shoulders shrugged and hands lying in the lap”[59] an image said to have been “inspired by a photograph of a mother mourning her child’s death after a Japanese attack on Singapore”.[60] This anti-naturalistic performance makes Mother Courage’s mourning seem as alien as a newspaper photograph of a far-off war crime.

Conclusion

The ‘alienation effect’ calls for a merciless subversion of the principles found in Aristotle’s Poetics, and of the long tradition of tragedy consciously or unconsciously influenced by these principles. From its dialectical foundations, Brechtian theatre consciously takes on a raison d’être entirely incompatible with that of all preceding tragic theatre, from Sophocles to Goethe. Brecht conceived of catharsis, unified plot and traditionally mimetic acting as forming an ideological hindrance to critical (in his words, ‘scientific’) thought and historical self-awareness. Thus the ‘alienation effect’ turns all of these elements on their heads in an attempt to ‘alienate’ the audience from the production and do away with the uncritical emotional involvement demanded by the traditional tragedy. Ultimately the ‘alienation effect’ attempts to produce unceasing recognition of the play as a play: not as a reified illusion of reality abstracted from the totality of society, but as a consciously constructed agent within that totality.

Mother Courage and Her Children constitutes an implementation of the ‘alienation effect’ only to the extent that any given production allows it to do so. The text itself, although displaying certain Brechtian devices in its narrative structure and its use of text and song, is only partially ‘alienating’ in the Brechtian sense and even ceases to be anti-tragic when readers and literary critics empathise with the title character. The same response was garnered by early productions of the play, with Brecht dismayed by the audience’s identification of Courage as a ‘tragic hero’ and failure to see her as villainous in her pursuit of petit-bourgeois interests. It was only when, with the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht allowed Mother Courage to reach its full potential as an example of the ‘alienation effect’, with the stage design, lighting, acting, songs, scene changes and every aspect of production geared toward the purpose of destroying the tragic illusion of reality.

[1] Eagleton, T. Marxism and Literary Criticism, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 62.

[2] Brecht, B. ‘Fluechtlingsgespraeche’, Aufbau, East Berlin, February 1958, p. 182.

[3] Sidney, P. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1965, p. 101.

[4] Eagleton, op. cit., p. 60.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Leach, R. 1994. “Mother Courage and Her Children“. In Thomson and Sacks, The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, 1994, p. 130.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Willet, J. The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht, London: Methuen & Co, 1959, p. 172.

[9] Eagleton, op. cit., p. 60.

[10] Willet, op. cit., p. 168.

[11] Willet, op. cit., p. 172.

[12] Aristotle, Poetics, London: Penguin Books, 1996, p. 15

[13] Ibid., p. 13.

[14] Brooker, P., Bertolt Brecht: Dialectics, Poetry, Politics, London: Croom Helm, 1988, p. 62.

[15] Eagleton, op. cit., p. 61.

[16] Genet, J. 1966. Letters to Roger Blin. In Reflections on the Theatre and Other Writings. Trans. Richard Seaver. London: Faber, 1972. p. 25.

[17] Eagleton, op. cit., 61.

[18] Lukács, G. History and Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1983, p. 87.

[19] Jameson, F. Brecht and Method. London and New York: Verso, 1998, p. 11.

[20] Rorrison, H. “Commentary”. In Brecht, B. Mother Courage and her Children, London: Methuen Drama, 1983, p. xxxi.

[21] Gray, R. Brecht: The Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 82.

[22] Ibid., p. 92.

[23] Kushner, T. “Mother Courage is not just an anti-war play”, The Guardian, 9 September 2009 <http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/sep/08/tony-kushner-mother-courage>.

[24] Hayman, R. Bertolt Brecht: The Plays, London: Heinemann, 1984, p. 60.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Völker, K. Brecht Chronicle, New York: Seabury Press, 1975, p. 92

[27] Willett, J. “Introduction”, in Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays, vol. 5. London: Vintage Books, 1972, p. xi.

[28] Rorrison, op. cit., p. xviii.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Hayman, op. cit., p. 59

[31] Saikia, G. “Bertolt Brecht and the Songs in his Dramas: with special reference to Mother Courage and Her Three Children”, International Journal of Scientific Footprints, 2014; 2(1): p. 22.

[32] Eagleton, op. cit., 61.

[33] Rorrison, op. cit., xxx.

[34] Brecht, B. Mother Courage and her Children, London: Methuen Drama, 1983, p. 42.

[35] Ibid., p. 43.

[36] Rorrison, op. cit., xxx.

[37] Brecht, op. cit., p. 59.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Rorrison, op. cit., pp. xxx-xxxi

[40] Hayman, op. cit., 62.

[41] Loehlin, J. N. “Brecht and the rediscovery of Henry VI” in Shakespeare’s History Plays: Performance, Translation and Adaptation in Britain and Abroad, ed. Hoenselaars, T. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 136.

[42] Hayman, op. cit., p. 62.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Völker, op. cit., p. 244.

[45] Rorrison, op. cit., p. xxxi.

[46] Brecht, op. cit., p. 21.

[47] Saikia op. cit., p. 23.

[48] Völker, op. cit., p. 244.

[49] Esslin, M. Brecht: A Choice of Evils, London: Methuen, 1984, p. 212.

[50] Rorrison, op. cit., p. xxxii.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Gray, op. cit., p. 122.

[53] Rorrison, op. cit., p. xxxii.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid., p. xxxiii.

[57] Ibid., p. xxxii.

[58] Gray, op. cit., p. 126.

[59] Ibid.

[60] William, J. M. “Helene Weigel.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. (Viewed on June 8, 2015) <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/weigel-helene&gt;.

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