Customer Reviews

Brecht and Method

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Relatively accessible as this book is in Jameson's oeuvre--short, under 200 pages, 20 bite-sized chapters--it also has all the drawbacks of Jameson's usual dense thinking-out-loud style. His casual erudition is overwhelming, and he comes up with great idea after great idea; but because he's there in the room with you, wracking his brain for the next insight, what he does with his great ideas is uneven. Sometimes he reduces one to a list that belabors the obvious; other times he hits a deadend, and instead of backing off and rethinking and rewriting, he just burrows deeper. The book often has the feel of a Balzac or Dickens novel, scribbled hastily and torn page by page from his hands and rushed to the printer. There are odd errors that make Jameson sound like a non-native speaker of English: "That it might well be possible to reconcile both alternatives is illustrated by THE play like The Good Person of Szechuan." He provides Brecht's original German and an English translation for every quotation, often enough his own; when he borrows an existing translation, he often edits it without indicating that he has done so, often substantially, often strangely. For example, when Brecht writes "so m?ssen wir annehmen, dass wir hierbei an Interessen teilnehmen, die tats?chlich allgemein menschlich waren," and John Willett translates that as "we have to conclude that we are partaking in interests which really were universally human," Jameson tacitly changes that to: "we must suppose that in doing so we are sharing interests that are actually universally human." Some of those emendations are more or less synonymous (conclude>suppose, partake>share, really>actually), no big deal to change, but it IS ethical to indicate such editing; changing Brecht's past tense ("waren") to the present tense ("are actually universally human") is more problematic. Does Jameson really believe that Brecht believed that these interests ARE universally human? We could argue about what Brecht's tense shift (teilnehmen>waren) means, but at the very least it points to a complex temporal dynamic that Jameson either uncritically or puristically eliminates. He's also careless in typing Brecht's German into his book: in that same quote on p. 176, for example, he inserts "Arbeit" for "Art" in "Es findet da eine Verallgemeinerung interessantester Arbeit [should be Art] statt." Each of these cases is fairly minor, but such cases are everywhere, and the cumulative effect is (for me, anyway) to undermine Jameson's credibility.

The biggest problem for me in the book, though, is that Jameson's odd eclectic form of structuralist Marxism seems ill-suited to Brecht's theory and practice of theater. He argues, for example, that Brecht rejected empathy because empathetic identification simply never happens, doesn't exist: "`third-person acting' ... is the result of a radical absence of the self, or at least the coming to terms with a realization that what we call our `self' is itself an object for consciousness, not our consciousness itself: it is a foreign body within an impersonal consciousness, which we try to manipulate in such a way as to lend some warmth and personalization to the matter." This isn't Brecht; this is Jameson's Prison-House of Language, the dogmas of depersonalized death-of-the-subject structuralism. And Jameson doesn't even bother to develop the point out of Brecht--to read it out of some early dismissive remark about emotion and reason (plays "ought to be presented quite coldly, classically and objectively. For they are not matter for empathy; they are there to be understood. Feelings are private and limited. Against that the reason is fairly comprehensive and to be relied on"); he just states it as a bare fact, and uses it to impose a Greimasian model on Brecht. Brecht himself moved from a complete rejection of empathetic/emotional appeal, through various middle stages, to a reluctant willingness to oscillate between empathetic and estranging appeals, to a recognition that even estrangement is a form of empathetic or "infectious" appeal--something that, needless to say, Jameson never mentions.

One last point: in his review on this page, Martin Carrillo calls Jameson's book "the first serious attempt since Benjamin, to interpret the methodology of one of the more important playwrights and formal experimenters of our century." This is absurd, unless what he means is "the first serious attempt by a scholar lionized by current thought." There is a whole Brecht industry interpreting his methodology, and it is very serious. And while it may not have the clout of a Benjamin or a Jameson, it's often far more solidly grounded in the study of Brecht, his theories, his plays, his influences, and his reception, than either Benjamin or Jameson.

Jameson's recent writing is very uneven, earlier writings seem more focused and thought through. I wouldn't reccommend this book to anyone interested in interpretations of Brecht--go back to Benjamin if you want that or look at the debates in the 1980s in the journal Screen. This book doesn't seem to add much that is new to the established literature that I can fathom. It is rambling, kind of stream of consciousness style, with some interesting insights here and there but no sustained argument or clear point of differentiation.

This work by Jameson is perhaps the first serious attempt since Benjamin, to interpret the methodology of one of the more important playwrights and formal experimenters of our century. Jameson's seminars and work at Duke University are captured here in an elegant and intricate map of the Aesthetic which revolutionized theatre and, subsequently film and new media. Jameson understands how important the notion "Brecht" is outside of the man whose personal life remains controversial and open for debate. An excellent piece.