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Barthes's Semiological Myth of Brecht's Epic Theater ELLIS SHOOKMAN Dartmouth College

"The movement of his work is tactical: a matter of displacing himself, of obstruct- ing,.., but not of conquering.... This work would therefore be defined as: a tac- tics without strategy."

-Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

"To show is more than to be." -Brecht, Schriften zum Theater

I

In one of the eclectic vignettes composing his autobiography, Ro- land Barthes defines 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 general or repetitive. Vague generalities are hard to avoid, though, he knows, and almost always reduce such discourse to abstract babel. By contrast, Barthes thinks that his own critical language is not distinct enough from politics. Even though he would like to be an active political sujet, politics therefore remains "foreclosed" to him. This cryptic comment makes sense when one knows that it is Barthes's way of explaining why he seems to ignore Brecht's advice 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 Barthes felt guilty for good reason. Not only does it demonstrate the German playwright's steady importance in Barthes's chameleonic career; it also shows how willfully-albeit how creatively, too-Barthes misun- derstood Brecht's "epic theater." Reviewing the first performances that Brecht's Berliner 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 1989 by The Board of Regents of The University of Wisconsin System



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welcomed that theater as a socially responsible alternative to the existentialist anguish and theater of the absurd then current in France. Se- miology soon appealed to him more than Sartrean engagement, though, and he redefined Brecht's theater to stress its style more than its substance. Even after it had lost its semiotic charm for him, moreover, "epic" theater remained crucial to Barthes's major writings, where he enlisted its basic concepts for other critical causes. Late in life, finally, he expressed deep personal admiration for Brecht the thinker, writer, and dramatist. In this shifting course of his criticism, Barthes increasingly ignored Brecht's politics. Indeed, his paradoxical lifting 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's reception in France.' Schol- arly work on Barthes himself frequently slights it, too, though not without suggesting contexts for further research on his use of Brecht: existentialism, Marxist aesthetics, alienation, and semiology.2 In these several contexts, studying Brechtian notions in Barthes becomes an issue of ques- tioning critical language generally. We all therefore have an interest in Barthes's creative filching from Brecht.

That interest derives from Barthes's need for Brecht, which determined the early years of his critical life. It was acute for reasons clear in Writing Degree Zero (1953), where Barthes redefined the politics of literary language just one year before the Berliner Ensemble 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, preferring instead 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 area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language."3 This social choice of a literary language is one of formal consciousness, not political action, and Barthes quickly adds that it is not directly revolutionary. Indeed, he thinks such choices tragic, since even neutral, se- mantically "colorless" writing like Camus's cannot 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 political writing-which is alienated because it implicitly evaluates what it pretends to denote-as well as to intellectual writing-which is duplicitous



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Barthes's Myth 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 politics itself fundamentally transforms language, when political discourse starts a new form of discursivity, or when an author knows enough about the effects of language to write singularly aesthetic political texts. These three exceptions occur, respectively, Barthes thought, only in the work of Plato, Marx, and Brecht. His turn to Brecht after Writing Degree Zero thus seems a rare attempt to reconcile literature and 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-reproach in the name of Brecht so clearly recalls his initial skep- ticism, moreover, that his statements on epic theater provide a running commentary on the political limits of his own intervening criticism. My focus will therefore be those statements themselves.

II

Both the political limits of Barthes's criticism 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 experimental prose. Reviewing the Ensemble's Parisian production of Mother Courage that year, he thought that Brecht's social criticism reinforced his own ideal of "th6etre desali6n6"--theater rescued 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 dramaturgical freedom, thereby raising audiences' historical consciousness without resorting to intimidation or mere rhetoric. Convinced that the theater itself furthered Brecht's moral message, Barthes could thus declare such theater civilly justified. He explains such justification in terms recalling both his initial interest in popular-rather than epic, critical-theater and his intellectual debt to Sartre. "Mutter Courage," 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 mercantile causes-Brecht teaches theatergoers to make history, Barthes argues, rather than passively suffer its imposition. Brecht thus solves what Barthes polemically calls a traditional aesthetic "problem of participa- tion." We share Mother Courage's blindness to the economic causes of



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war, Barthes explains, but we also see that same blindness, since we are at once "passive actors" caught in the fatality of war and "free spectators" led to demystify it. This stress on freely "demystifying" one's seemingly fatal historical plight distinctly recalls Sartre, especially when Barthes sums up Brecht's style 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."'5 The distance that Barthes accordingly posits between an audience and the events shown on Brecht's stage shows how well he understood the 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 admiring its socially incorrigible but tenacious title character.6 Barthes more fully appreciates the immediate emotional appeal that Mother Courage can 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 Barthes reviewed the Berliner Ensemble'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 photographs for 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 signification that the detail is so important there."7 Barthes 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, signification itself outweighs Brecht's larger political message here in the same methodical way implied by Barthes's seemingly warm welcome of "the Brechtian Revolution" in 1955. He then agreed with Brecht that theatergoers should be encouraged to 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 suggesting less than total engagement. The pseudo-scientific cogency 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 difficult to apply perhaps, but which possesses at least an indisputable and salutary virtue of 'scandal' and astonishment."8 The evident theoretical rigor of Brecht's "system" plainly intrigues Barthes here, and though its social effect of mere scandal and surprise presumably relates to politics indirectly, as had his socially conscious &criture, Barthes overrates its strictly theatrical locus: "To the degree that Brecht's theatrical revolution challenges our habits,




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 history, 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."i0 Such high praise of Brecht's theories should be understood in its historical and aesthetic context as Barthes's averse reaction to Socialist Realism, which he thought ruined revolutionary art by yoking Marxist ideology to traditional literary style. Brecht's alternative to such a "Zhda- novian impasse" was at once aesthetically innovative and ideologically sound, Barthes wrote, because it took from Marxism only a general method 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 dramaturgy postulates is that today at least, the responsibility of a dramatic art is not so much to express reality as to signify it. Hence there must be a certain distance between signified and signifier: revolutionary art must admit a certain arbitrary nature of signs, it must acknowledge a certain "formalism," in the sense that it must treat form according to an appropriate method, 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 action must increasingly cohabit, and in an almost institutional fashion, with the norms of bourgeois and petit-bourgeois morality: problems of conduct, and no longer of action, arise."'2 At the same time he rails against the false "pseudo-Physis" supplied by bourgeois realism and its Socialist descendent, Barthes thus limits Brecht's counter-aesthetics to working



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only within capitalist society. Such reduction of Brecht's social message to personal advice not only oversimplifies epic theater; it also pales beside the political leverage that Barthes himself found in Brecht's plays before becoming captivated by their semiotics.

Such contradictions inherent in Barthes's semiotic concept of Brecht become more glaring in reviews and essays composed in the late 1950s. Barthes then wrote both that Brecht's theory, texts, and productions formed an indivisible whole and that the poor condition of contemporary French theater required performing his plays simply as best one could, despite the misunderstandings that would inevitably arise from making mere exposure to Brecht more important than any "Brechtian ortho- doxy."'3 Such willingness to sacrifice the coherence of Brecht's "system" may well have been necessary, but it could only undercut the theoretical logic that Barthes himself found to be Brecht's strongest attraction. Barthes likewise settles for less when he elsewhere elaborates on his strict distinction between epic theater and Socialist Realism. Brechtian theater 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 corresponding claim that epic theater does 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:

One sees that Brecht's theater is not a historian's theater, even a Marxist's: it's a theater that invites and obliges an explanation, but that does not give one; a theater that provokes History, but does not divulge it; that acutely poses the problem of History, but does not resolve it (... Brecht's work is never more than an introduction).'4

As in his insights into the semiological distance central to Brecht's style, Barthes here reveals subtle understanding of epic theater. To say that Brecht's plays show only a tentative vision of history, though, is to observe them much too narrowly. Although hardly crude, most of them make clear reference to other, radically better, ways of life. Furthermore, rather than calling history an object to be manipulated, as he had when first greeting "the Brechtian Revolution," Barthes now argues that Brecht makes it seem merely a "general exigency of thought.""'5 Such reflection nullifies Brecht's politics in Barthes's review of the Berliner Ensemble's adaptation of Maxim Gorki's novel The Mother (1907) in 1960. Calling Brechtian theater 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;



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the subject of The Mother is, 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 spectators socially critical lessons by first changing their attitude toward- and within-the theater. Barthes's desire to raise only "nascent consciousness," though, stops short of the effect that Brecht wanted The Mother to have: a specific and practical "change in the world."'7

Barthes contradicts 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 demonstrates semiotic concepts. Just as he stressed the abstract notion of maternity in his review of The Mother, Barthes here relies on the even more abstract term "theatricality," which he defines as an "informational polyphony" and a "density of signs." Brecht justified the semiologically "semantic status" of the theater, Barthes adds, with his intellectual system of signifiers and his corresponding concentration on the "materiality of the spectacle." These striking coinages show how completely Barthes came to think of Brecht in terms of semiology.'8 Indeed, his summation of Brecht's importance shows surprising disregard for the effect of epic theater beyond its self-conscious signs:

Brecht divined the variety and relativity of semantic systems: the theatrical sign does not appear as a matter of course; what we call the naturalness of an actor or the truth of a performance is merely one language among others.., and this language depends on a certain mental context, i.e., a certain history, so that to change the signs (and not just what they say) is to give nature a new apportionment..., and to base this apportionment not on "natural" laws but, quite the contrary, on man's freedom to make things signify.'9

As usual, Barthes here undercuts an otherwise trenchant insight into Brecht's theater by exaggerating its semiotic qualities. Brecht himself, for example, also thought that actors' gestures should convey alternative ways of imagining a given scene, but neither did he mean to expose simply the "consciousness of unconsciousness" suggested by Barthes, nor did he want to demonstrate what Barthes the semiologist thought "the tauto- logical status of all literature."20 On the contrary, Brecht expressly refuted any such idea that changing signs was significant apart from manipulating things:

Our representations must take second place to what is represented, men's life together in society; and the pleasure felt in their perfection must be converted into the higher pleasure felt when the rules emerging from this life in society are treated as imperfect and provisional. In this way the



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theatre leaves its spectators productively disposed even after the 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 messages 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 communication that deforms and alienates the 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 perfectly natural in the same manipulative way that Barthes disliked in praise of Brecht's theater. Indeed, a prime example of myth-one not noted by Barthes-is the "culinary" emptying of philosophical and political 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 subordinated to the culinary principle that their sense was in effect tottering and was soon absorbed in sensual satisfaction. Once its original "sense" had died away the opera was by no means left bereft of sense, but had simply acquired another one-a sense qua opera.22



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Here rejecting conventions of socially vapid theater, Brecht himself for- mulated the essential definition of myth that Barthes gives in the theoretical appendix to Mythologies, where he explains that "myth is depol- iticized speech."23 Many of Barthes's other remarks on myth no less strik- ingly agree with the most basic concepts of Brecht's theater.24 When he rejects bourgeois confusion of nature with history, for example, Barthes distinctly echoes Brecht's statements on how to obviate dull empathy with dramatic characters. "What is 'natural' must have the force of what is startling," Brecht had declared, adding that this startling effect was one of alienation "designed to historicize the incidents portrayed" on his stage. Barthes's plan to expose the ideological abuse suffusing quotidian life in France similarly sounds like Brecht's central remarks on alienation, "a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labelling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural."'25 Brecht 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 alienating something," he explained, "is that normally applied to customs and moral principles."26 Conversely, Barthes claims that Mythologies combines semiotic demontage with ideological critique-the same double-edged tactic that he admired in epic theater. Such parallels show how closely Barthes followed Brecht's example as a critic of fossilized thinking in bourgeois society.

Despite this similarity in their respective forms of social criticism, Barthes did not expect alienating convenient "myths" to prove as politically effective as Brecht thought epic theater should be. Although he employed the same mix of ideological ponderance and semiological levity with which he once thought Brecht disalienated the theater, Barthes himself 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 general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things)."27 Barthes'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 sarcastic and destructive, Barthes notes, since they are "condemned" to oblique metalanguage and 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 "metalanguage" is surprisingly like the parasitic communication meant by "myth" in the first place. Such hollow metalanguage is exemplified by Barthes's own, non-political use of a Brechtian term to define mythology itself, which "harmonizes with the world, not as it is, but as it wants to create itself(Brecht had for this an efficiently ambiguous word: Einverstandnis



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[sic], at once an understanding of reality and a complicity with it)."28 This citation is far more important than its parenthetic context implies, since it not only betrays Barthes's indebtedness to Brecht at the most basic critical level of Mythologies but also offers evidence of how Barthes redefined the vocabulary of epic theater. By Einverstindnis, Brecht meant politically informed consent to change the world, even if doing so meant dying for Communism.29 Barthes rules such drastic action off his mythologue's critical limits, robbing Brecht's term of its political sting. Given that Barthes's self-appointed task in Mythologies is to expose precisely such de-politicization, this misstatement of Einverstiandnis seems strik- ingly paradoxical. Does his own effort there itself deserve the name "myth"? Compared to Brecht's theater, it, too, is semiotically alienated and therefore politically insidious.

Barthes confirms this self-contradiction when he applies his theory of myth in the first of the essays collected in Mythologies, "The World of Wrestling." He expressly compares wrestling to theater in general and- tacitly-to epic theater in particular. Wrestling makes reality seem perfectly intelligible, he explains, because wrestlers act 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 traditional theater, Barthes argues: "There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private."30 Beyond this general moral likeness of wrestling and acting, Barthes also observes specific qualities of wrestling comparable to elements of Brecht's less staid theater. Like spectacles, he explains, wrestling abolishes both motives and consequences, thus forcing its fans to make sense of each of its passing moments without their trying to intuit any integral, larger meaning. This sporting mood distinctly recalls Brecht's similar remarks to readers of his play In the Jungle of Cities (1927):

You are about to witness an inexplicable wrestling match between two men and observe the downfall of a family.... Don't worry your heads about the motives for the fight, concentrate on the stakes. Judge impartially the technique of the contenders, and keep your eyes fixed on the finish.3'

Brecht later revised the emphasis laid on fighting to a finish here, adding that epic dramaturgy moved only toward an end, not to any specific goal. Like Barthes on wrestling, though, he explained that each scene existed for its own sake in his plays, which should therefore direct their audiences' attention to their episodic course rather than final result. This apparent agreement between epic theater and Mythologies proves only partial, however, when Barthes adds that wrestling conveys only rhetorical and ethical-not political-significance.32 Similarly, Barthes's wrestlers seem like



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Brecht's actors only up to a critical point. They help their audience "read" their wrestling by 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 knowledge that their deliberate gestures were being closely watched. As helpful but also obscurant thespians, Barthes's wrestlers thus perform only half a Brechtian actor's role. They can therefore be neither ironic nor revolutionary, as such Brechtian actors should.

Such discrepancies between Barthes's wrestlers 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 Baudelaire with which he prefaced "The World of Wrestling" confirms how metaphorically Barthes regarded those gestures: ".. . The grandiloquent truth of gestures on life's great occa- sions."33 Such highly emphatic truth proves to be paradoxical in wrestling, which Barthes thinks significant due 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 separates Good from Evil."34 Brecht, too, often notes the extreme mean- ingfulness of gestures, but he wants them to seem more substantial than those simply aped by Barthes's wrestlers. Epic theater expresses something direct and didactic, he claims, by "basing everything on the gest."35 Brecht defines such theatrical gestures as corporeal, facial, and vocal attitudes determined by yet another, underlying gesture that expresses social relationships. The gestures of epic actors should therefore be meaningful and typical copies of actual human ones while outwardly expressing the characters' inner emotions. Brecht expects such gestures to be character- istic of individual scenes and even of whole plays, moreover, which he thinks should graphically convey a social message in a single "basic gesture" [Grundgestus]. Finally, epic theater results in a "gest of handing over a finished article." These several kinds of gestures are aimed at social life far beyond the theatrical significance 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 dramaturgical concepts ever produced.36 In 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 "primary gesture," adding that &criture both derived from such a "meaningful gesture" and demonstrated a writer's "essential gesture as a social being."37 Despite this social significance, such gestures were remote from politics because ecriture was "free only in the gesture of choice."38 Barthes therefore qualifies his own



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ideological critique and semiological iconoclasm in Mythologies when he calls them "the two attitudes [gestes] which determined the origin of this book."39 His limited concept of"gesture" restricts not 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 &criture as well as his own critical language genuine but futile gestures.

Such shortcomings did not keep Barthes from making creative use of Brecht in writings subsequent to Mythologies. On the contrary, later references to Brecht in works not directly concerned with him make plain the enduring-indeed crucial-importance of epic theater to Barthes. Such references are especially clear in On Racine (1963), S/Z (1970), and The Pleasure of the Text (1973). Comparing the passive reception of Racine by bourgeois audiences with an infant's relationship to its surrogate mother, Barthes adds a psychoanalytic twist to Brecht's disdain of traditional theater as an opiate of the bourgeoisie. Barthes's admiration of oriental theater as a model for reviving Racine no less surely recalls Brecht's essay "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting" (1937). In an account of Far East- ern theater resembling Brecht's epic kind, Barthes notes both that oriental acting conveys symbolic "distance from oneself to what is said" and that Racine needs to be kept at such distance from modern audiences.40 Basic concepts of epic theater likewise underlie Barthes's narrative vivisection of Balzac's Sarrasine in S/Z. His opposition of "readerly" texts only passively consumed to "writerly" ones demanding a reader's active vo- lition clearly echoes Brecht's similar attempts to rouse audiences that traditional theater had lulled into cultural complacency. The rhetorical "codes" that Barthes discerns in Sarrasine, moreover, cut across "a structure which is strictly Aristotelian,"41 a phrase that distinctly recalls Brecht's frequent definitions of his own "non-Aristotelean dramaturgy." 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 narrative fact about Sarrasine with an explicit reference to Brecht:

In what Brecht calls dramatic theater, there is a passionate interest in the d6nouement; in epic theater, in the development. Sarrasine is a dramatic story .... but the drnouement is compromised in 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 elsewhere expresses in no less Brechtian terms: "I ask only this: that someday in France, someday soon, we might have novels corresponding to Brecht's theater."43 To Barthes, Brecht's plays thus served



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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 apolitical bliss is not as surprising as 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.46 His 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 politically 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, others than he were thinking. That is true thought'."49 In this same Brech- tian spirit, Barthes composed much of his autobiography in 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 speaking about myself in the manner of the Brechtian actor who must distance his character: "show" rather than incarnate him, and give his manner of speaking a kind of fillip whose effect is to pry the pronoun from its name, the image from its support, the image-repertoire from its mirror (Brecht recommended that the actor think out his entire role in the third person).5o



Dean Kriel

Dean Kriel

Dean Kriel

Dean Kriel

472 Shookman

In "Brecht's reproach of R.B.," we have found Barthes claiming 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 recalls Brecht to speak detachedly of himself further reinforces 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-reflection purely for reasons of self-analysis. Barthes himself once suggested how he could put Brecht to such highly original use: "The vision that I have of Brecht, of Brechtian dramaturgy, 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 something new."' As we have seen in his major writings, Barthes indeed read Brecht in new ways, semiology first and critically foremost among them. In retrospect, then, Barthes acknowledged both 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, Barthes thus put Brecht's epic theater to constant-though con- stantly changing-critical use. With help provided by Brecht's plays 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, regarding epic theater as a concept more and more remote from Brecht's concrete social concerns and fluid theatrical practice. Since Barthes thereby gutted Brecht's vocabulary in much the same misleading way that he himself found semiotically suspect in Mythologies, much his own criticism appears self- contradictory. This seeming contradiction nonetheless proved to be a creative misunderstanding crucial to Barthes's major writings, which ap- propriated basic concepts of epic theater as part of far different theoretical projects. The aesthetic and historical background of such projects was larger than Barthes's specific interest in Brecht, of course, but their reflection in his criticism passed through the political lens supplied by epic theater. As I have shown, moreover, Barthes's critical 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 critical shadow over Barthes. Indeed, Barthes's criticism might be summed up in one of the many Brechtian terms semiologically altered to fit his "myth" of epic theater: in political light of Brecht, whom he so greatly admired, Barthes's work seems a series of self-critically grand but deliberately empty gestures.

SSome prior studies of the two authors do, of course, help put Brecht's importance to Barthes into historical and critical perspective. Various scholars have found both the-



Barthes's Myth of Brecht's Theater 473 atrical practices and philosophical concepts similar to Brecht's "alienation effect" in the work of French authors as dissimilar as Sartre and Ionesco: Edith Kern, "Brecht's Epic Theatre and the French Stage," Symposium 16.1 (1962): 32; Reinhold Grimm, "Brecht, Ionesco und das moderne Theater," German Life and Letters 13 (1960): 224. Brecht is also said to have furnished a model of objectivity missing in existentialism and thereby to have supplied a practical as well as theoretical alternative to French theater of the Absurd: Victoria Williams Hill, Bertolt Brecht and Post- War French Drama (Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1978) 26, 39. By the early 1960s, Brecht enjoyed considerable posthumous success in France, which Agnes Hiufner regards as consistent with French efforts to organize a national theater responsive to leftist politics. Barely known in France before or just after the war, Hiufner explains, Brecht became more popular after Barthes and his fellow writers for the periodical ThLdtre populaire hailed the systematic character of epic theater during the Berliner En- semble's first trip to Paris for the theater festival Thbetre des Nations in 1954. The Ensemble then performed Mother Courage. Its subsequent productions in Paris of The Caucasian Chalk Circle (in 1955) and Galileo (in 1957) reinforced Brecht's popular reputation but also prompted differences of political opinion about it. The high point of Brecht's reception came in 1960, Hiufner adds, when the Ensemble performed Galileo, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui, and The Mother. Paradoxically, the Ensemble dropped out of Thbitre des Nations in 1963-the very year in which Brecht's theoretical writings first appeared in French trans- lation: Anges Hiufner, Brecht in Frankreich: 1930-1963: Verbreitung, Aufnahme, Wirkung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968). Brecht's reputation in France suffered, according to Andr6 Gis- selbrecht, from the merely lukewarm Marxism of friendly critics like Barthes, who rightly resisted anti-Communist devaluation of epic theater but himself wrongly divorced Brecht's aesthetics from Marxism: Andr6 Gisselbrecht, "Brecht in Frankreich," Sinn und Form 20 (1968): 999f., 1006f.

2 Susan Sontag comments on Barthes's "elusive relation to politics" and tempers his taste for Brecht's intellectual didacticism with his sensitivity and imaginativeness in han- dling Brecht's texts: Susan Sontag, ed., "Introduction," A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) xxii, xxix; Susan Sontag, "Preface," Writing Degree 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":Stephen Heath, Vertige du dcplacement: Lecture de Barthes (Paris: Fayard, 1974) 179, and Phillip Thody thinks that Barthes's basic interests in Marxism and the societal function of signs allowed him to mount a "veritable campaign in favor of Brecht": Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (London: Macmillan, 1977) 29. Brecht, Thody explains, acted as a catalyst in Barthes's own notion of what theater should be: "If Brecht had not existed, Barthes would surely have had to invent him" (30-31) While Thody speculates that Barthes's enthusiasm for Brecht was an attempt to compensate for his own political inactivity, Annette Lavers surmises that Brecht, together with Sartre, served as Barthes's surrogate father: Thody 6; Annette Lavers, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After (London: Methuen; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) 211. Brecht embodied Barthes's view of formally and politically responsible literature, Lavers adds, even though Barthes himself furthered his own critical fame by later diffusing such political dimensions of his work (122-23). Like Lavers, Jonathan Culler relates Barthes's interest in Brecht to Sartre, whose simplistic view of language and dramatic form Barthes rejected in favor of the more refined icriture that he found in Brecht's writings: 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's notion of Verfremdung" (51). The lessons that Barthes learned from Brecht might not always correspond to Brecht's own theory, Culler concedes, but they nonetheless defined the elegant political program that Barthes himself advocated for literature (54).

Roland Barthes, Le degrd zero de l'criture (Paris: Seuil, 1953); Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and 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.



474 Shookman 6 Cf. Steven Ungar, Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln, NE: U of

Nebraska P, 1983) 104, who argues that Barthes's refusal to distinguish between critical "metalanguage" and its literary objects demands seriously rethinking the pragmatic value of his essays for understanding writers like Brecht.

Roland Barthes, "Sept photo-modbles de Mare Courage," Theatre populaire 35 (1959): 17.

8 Barthes, Critical Essays 38. 9 Ibid. Ibid. 73. " Ibid. 74f. 12 Ibid. 75. '3 Roland Barthes and Bernard Dort, "Brecht 'traduit'," Thsitre populaire 23 (1957):

1, 7. 14 Roland Barthes, "Brecht, Marx et l'histore," Cahiers de la compagnie Madeleine

Renaud-Jean-Louis Barrault: Le th&atre historique 5.21 (December 1957): 23f. 15 Ibid. 25. 16 Barthes, Critical Essays 139. 17 Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bainden 17 (Frankfurt / M.: Suhrkamp,

1976): 1036. 18 Barthes himself later retracted such one-sided terminology when he explained that

the shock caused by seeing Brecht's theater was "antipathetic to the very notion of 'structure'" and therefore less semiological than seismological. The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 214.

19 Barthes, Critical Essays 263. 20 Ibid. 21 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of 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 regarding Brecht's work confirms that of Barthes's

mythologue (179); Thody observes that Barthes, in Mythologies, applies Brecht's tradition- ally Marxist concept of assuming control of history (33f).

25 Brecht on Theatre 125. 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 comrade and the "Control Chorus" that tries those agitators for executing him repeatedly refer to Einverstidndnis as submission to the will of the [Communist] Party. For example, "And so the young comrade demonstrated his agreement [zeigte... sein Einver- stindnis] by effacing his personal features"; "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 / Comprehension of the individual and comprehension of the whole: / Taught only by reality / Can reality be changed." Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken and other Lehrsticke, trans. Carl R. Mueller et 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's actors and with the committed writers described in Writing Degree Zero. Barthes, Mythologies 15. 34 Ibid. 25 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre 36 nl.



Barthes's Myth of Brecht's Theater 475 36 Barthes, Critical Essays 41; Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical

Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985) 93.

37 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero 3, 17, 10. 38Ibid. 16. 39 Barthes, Mythologies 9. 40 Roland Barthes, 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. Richard Howard (New York:

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1974) 129. 42Ibid. 187. 43 Roland Barthes and Maurice Nadeau, "Ou va la littrrature?," Ecrire, Pour quoi,

pour qui?, Dialogue de France Culture #2 (1974); Sur la litt'rature (PU de Grenoble, 1980) 30.

44 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973); The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 29.

45 Barthes praised Brecht as "a great Marxist author who fought tirelessly on behalf of pleasure (Roland Barthes, Le grain de la voix: Entriens 1962-1980 [Paris: Seuil, 1981]; The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962-1980, trans. Linda Coverdale [New York: Hill and Wang, 1985] 163). He furthermore reveled in what he thought the "ascetic sumptuousity" of epic theater, which he enthusiastically described as "at once revolutionary, significant, and voluptuous" (Roland Barthes, "L'eblouissement," Le monde 11 March 1971: 15). Fi- nally, Barthes recalled reading Brecht in indirect terms of plaisir "Every time that I read Brecht, I am seduced and convinced" (Roland Barthes, "Roland Barthes met le langage en question," Le Figaro litt'raire 5 July 1975: 11.

46 See Barthes's last reference to Brecht: "I am still faithful to the ideas of Brecht, so important to me when I was a theater critic" (The Grain of the Voice 320).

47 Ungar 138, remarks that by 1973 Barthes became aware of"residual debts to the values of the recent past" and showed "growing nostalgia for literary values 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. 50 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: Ecrivains de toujours 25

(Paris: Seuil, 1975); Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 169.

5' Barthes, "T~moinage sur le th&itre" 836.



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