III – introduction for the critical years 1929-34. We can see a shift to epic technique and more overt leftwing political engagement in this volume.

St. Joan of the Stockyards: Joan of Arc fighting the good fight in the Chicago stockyards. When the factories close “Hell itself / shuts its gate in our faces” (scene II), which is a curious way to conceive the relation between work and hell. Spectres of Neumann’s analysis of fascism in how “in a gloomy time of bloody confusion / ordered disorder / planful willfulness / dehumanized humanity” (id.).

Joan initially scolds workers for their lack of “higher values,” in that they want “nothing but coarse sensual enjoyments” (id.). The monopolist stockyard owner reconsiders his business for such higher values: “I saw a steer die and it shook me so that I’m giving it all up, and have even sold my interest in the factory” (scene III). He asks Joan, who is set to agitate for the out-of-work employees, if he is right to withdraw: “I don’t know if your question is serious” (id.). He doesn’t care, feeling “as if a breath from another world is wafting toward me” (id.).

We see that a worker has fallen in a meat processing machine, and it is easier for the company that the worker “has to go out in the world as bacon” (scene IV). They try to bribe the worker’s widow with free lunch; when she accepts the bribe to not only drop her claim but accept the company’s excuse, the company offers the anecdote up to Joan that the workers’ “wickedness has no limits” (id.). Joan’s awesome reply is that If their wickedness has no limits, their poverty has none either. Not the wickedness of the poor have you shown me, but the poverty of the poor. (id.) She continues thereafter: Where are their morals to come from, if morals are all they have? Where can they get anything without stealing it? My dear sirs, there is such a thing as moral purchasing power. Raise that and you’ll get morality too. And by moral purchasing power, I mean something very simple and natural: money. Wages. And that brings me back to the facts of the matter. If you go on this you’ll be eating your meat yourselves because the people out there lack purchasing power. (scene v) The plot works itself out in Trading Places, contingent upon the market price of canned meat—ending on a Faustian invocation “Humanity! Two souls abide within thy breast! (scene XI).

The Mother: The chorus opens by calling attention to the protagonist’s attempt to “replace the irreplaceable” and “afford the unaffordable”: “Don’t think the question of why your kitchen’s empty / Will get decided in the kitchen” (scene 1). The narrative involves a son who distributes labor organizing materials at a factory and gets in trouble thereby with the police; this draws his long suffering mother into the labor conflict and woe unto the cappies then, as she becomes progressively more involved and radicalized; the Russian setting makes the allegory for ‘mother’ Russia plain enough. She becomes a committed communist in a place where the workers “are being kept in the dark about the fact that they are exploited, and that this is a crime, and that this crime can be eliminated” (scene 6b). When she is taught to read, Brecht mixes his comedic skill with epic theatre concerns: The Teacher: Right, but you have to start with the simplest, not the hardest. ‘Hat’ is simple.

Sostakovich: ‘Class War’ is a lot simpler.

The Teacher: There’s no such thing as class war. Let’s be clear about that.

Sostakovich: I can’t learn anything from you if you think there’s no class war.

Pelagea Vlassova: You’re here to learn to read and write, and you can do that here. Reading is class war. (scene 6c) Good times. This scene also produces the famous “Hungry man, grab a book: books will be your weapons” (id.). (The Teacher will also move a progression the Mother, from hostility to the left to embracing it.) It includes a demonstration on how jingoism is wedded to the industrialists’ interests by making it a matter of patriotism to oppose strikers and leftists (scene 8b). After an execution: As he went to the wall where they intended to shoot him / He went towards the wall which had been built by men of his own kind / And the rifles they aimed at his breast, and the bullets / Had been made by men himself. Merely absent / Were they therefore, or dispersed; but for him were still there / and present in the work of their hands. (scene 10) She tells us “do not fear death so much, fear an inadequate life” (id.) in disputing with a landlady who would use scripture to evict.

A bunch of one acts follow, some of which are forgettable—but they are selected here as moments of his development toward epic theatre, drawing inspiration from different national traditions. Some interesting moments however, such as in the ‘Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent,’ which argues dialectically that “To refuse help requires force / To obtain help requires force also. / As long as force reigns help can be refused. / When force no longer reigns, there is no need of help. / So you should not demand help, but abolish force. / Help and force form a single whole / And this whole must be altered.” Similarly, ‘He Said Yes/He Said No’ involves a dialectical inversion of how “Many will be found agreeing in error, but he / Would not give agreement to her illness, and / Insisted that illness has to be cured,” which reminds one of Hegelian refusal to defer to the reality of mere facts. wise, ‘The Exception and the Rule’ involves a labor dispute in the context of imperialist mineral extraction. The capitalist kills his employee with a very poor self defense argument, but: Merchant: To assume that the Coolie would not strike me down at the first opportunity would have been to assume he had lost his reason.

Judge: You may have killed a man who possibly was harmless—because you couldn’t know him to be harmless. This happens also with the police at times. They shoot into a crowd of demonstrators—quite peaceful folk—because they can’t see why these folk don’t simply drag them off their horses and lynch them. Actually, the police in such cases fire out of pure fear. And that they are afraid is proof of their good sense. You mean you couldn’t know the Coolie was the exception!

Merchant: One must go by the rule, not by the exception.

Judge: Exactly. What reason could this Coolie have had to give his tormentor something to drink?

Guide: No sensible reason.

Judge: Such is the rule: an eye for an eye. Only a fool waits for an exception. The agambenian thesis writes itself.leftwing-theory of-best-sentence-and-moost-solaas1 Keith823 33

I read The Decision and The Horatians and the Curiatians. Both are, I guess, what you’d call agitprop. The basic theme of both plays seems to be that capitalistic society is killing people so you should happily die for the party. Or something that.

I’ve always said Brecht’s flight from the Nazis diverted his attention from absurd Communist agitprop this, and allowed him to develop what I consider his best plays. Today, the plays in this set seem quaintly ridiculous knowing how it all turned out. It kind of feels a cult.

I didn’t read The Mother, but I can safely say I do not recommend the rest of the plays in the set unless you have a yearning for socialist platitudes.owned partial-read1 Roland1 review7 Read

"Exception and the Rule" was one of the best things I read in college1 AliAuthor 17 books651

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