In writing an essay on the play Saint Joan of the Stockyards to be included in a collection of essays under the title The Cambridge Companion to Brecht, I am acutely aware of the consequence of making an entry into a canon. The writing of the essay cannot be taken in isolation; it will take its place alongside others, some on individual plays, some on aspects of Brecht's stagecraft and dramaturgy. Each essay may be read individually, but they will equally be 'read' as part of the Companion and potentially as part of the construction of a canon of work. In one sense all the contributors to this volume are engaged in the making of an historical narrative. By selecting the essay titles, by deciding the order of those titles, we are party to the construction of a narrative that may be seen as the 'making' of one Brecht. Or even the deconstruction of another Brecht.

No epoch-making artist simply accepts his or her means of art-making as handed down from previous artists. From Aristophanes to Michelangelo to Shakespeare to Moliere to Picasso to Beckett, all can be seen (sometimes only in retrospect) to have engaged in lifelong critiques of their working media. This is never in itself a reliable indicator of greatness, and in twentieth-century art - which, high and low, good and bad, has been preoccupied with reflexivity - it is an especially poor one. Sometimes, however, an artist's critique is so confident, thoroughgoing and persuasive that it causes significant change in the public's idea of what a particular medium is, or can be. As critics have frequently pointed out, Beckett's stage plays actually changed many people's notions of what can happen, or is supposed to happen, when they enter a theatre.

Brecht asserted in a 1935 essay that it was music which 'made possible something which we had long since ceased to take for granted, namely the “poetic theatre'” (BT, pp. 84-90). Music provided him with a powerful mechanism to reclaim and refunction in 'epic drama' the presentational mode of address, long a standard convention in most forms of music-theatre but discarded by modern drama after the 'fourth wall' had been dismantled by naturalism and realism. Brecht's relationship to music, therefore, was as essential as it was complex. Although little interested in musical repertoire or issues extraneous to his efforts in the theatre, ironically Brecht first gained wide public recognition through the musical settings of his works: opera librettos, plays with music, a ballet, dramatic cantatas, an oratorio, musical films, even commercial jingles. By 1931, music critic Hans Mersmann could even proclaim: 'New Music in Germany has found its poet.

‘TEXTS FOR NOTHING’

From the start, Texts for nothing, which Beckett wrote in 1950-i, has been one of the orphans in his oeuvre. Few major critics have adopted it, and its individual texts are rarely anthologized. This has come about not so much from its difficulty as from the location of that difficulty in the course of Beckett's development. The referential uncertainty and drift in the passage above is easily matched by passages in the book Beckett wrote just prior to the Texts:

Mother Courage and Her Children was written in 1938 and 1939 at a particularly difficult time for 'progressive' or 'radical' writers, especially those with affinities with the avant-garde of previous decades. Politically, in the face of rampant Nazism and fascism, Stalin had decreed that Communists must work for a 'popular front' of anti-fascist forces, which seemed to require artists to seek new forms of 'popular culture'. But in Soviet Russia, there was no such 'popular front', and the slightest deviation from the increasingly tortuous 'Party line' was being viciously stamped on. The Great Terror and the Show Trials silenced all dissent at home and left foreign well-wishers baffled.

Meanwhile, the Party's artistic line caused fearsome debate to rage about the nature of progressive, especially Communist, literature, and Brecht found his own ideas frequently denigrated and his work dismissed in circles where he ought to have felt welcome. The debate centred on notions of 'reality', and the writers' relationship to it.

Samuel Beckett's resistance to productions of his plays which depart from the precise stage directions indicated in the texts has attracted public and critical attention through a number of legal disputes between Beckett and a director or company who has flouted the author's directions.The best documented of these is Jo Anne Akalaitis' production of Endgame in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1984, for the American Repertory Theater. The dispute was settled out of court, but both sides presented their case in statements to the audience. Robert Brustein of the American Repertory Theatre argued that

The Threepenny Opera is unique. Since its first performance in Berlin, at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm on 31 August 1928, it has enjoyed a popularity matched only by the best-known Broadway musicals or the most established operas. It has led a protean existence in commercial theatres, in subsidised regional and national theatres and in opera houses. It has spawned a film, a novel and countless recordings of its music by a bewildering range of performers.

Yet it is clearly not an opera in any conventional sense; the word opera in the title implies a parody. Formally the music is too disunited to make it, for its time, a 'proper' opera, even though operatic devices such as recitative, ensembles and choruses are used. Neither is it a musical in the sense that we now accept the term, even though the Marc Blitzstein revival in the 1950s ran in New York for more than 2,500 performances. Successful Broadway musicals tend to have socially conventional plots with plenty of spectacle and picturesque romanticism, not Marxist-inspired social criticism as their motivation.

For playwrights or theatre practitioners to have their names turned into adjectives is a somewhat dubious accolade that is rarely accorded: in the last hundred years we have acquired Chekhovian, Shavian, Stanislavskian, Artaudian, even Beckettian and Pinteresque, but not Reinhardtian, Piscatorian, Brookian or Genetesque. But the one adjective that lifts most easily off the tongue, the one that sounds least like an Armenian exile, is undoubtedly 'Brechtian'. Alone among Germans (except for the somewhat arcane 'Schillerian'), Brecht enjoys, both as writer and director, a privilege which can be misleading and misappropriated: 'Brechtian' can legitimise; it can also limit; it can certainly distort.

Writing in the 'Sacred Cows' series, published in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1977, Sheridan Morley complained:

The period immediately after the First World War was a time of unprecedented upheaval throughout Germany, and nowhere more so than in Bavaria. After defeat in the war (for which the German propaganda machine had failed to prepare the public), and the abdication of the Kaiser, Germany experienced its abortive revolution, which included the establishment of a Soviet State of Bavaria. When this had been brutally suppressed (ironically by a socialist government in Berlin), the country staggered from crisis to crisis during the Weimar Republic until, eventually, Bavaria became the power base of the Nazi party. So, as he was setting out on his career as a writer, Brecht experienced, albeit indirectly, both fighting in the trenches of a world war and fighting on the streets during a failed revolution.

The sacrifices demanded of his generation during this period affected the young Brecht profoundly, encouraging in him a detached view of humankind, both individually and in society, and an enduring mistrust of all forms of idealism. It is against this turbulent background, and to give expression to these developing social and aesthetic attitudes that the (sometime medical student, sometime vituperative theatre critic) son of the manager of an Augsburg paper-mill wrote his first three full-length plays: Baal (1918-22), Drums in the Night (1919) and In the Jungle of the Cities (1921—4), an early draft of which was produced in Munich in 1923 under the original title, In the jungle (Im Dickicht).

If Beckett had written no other works than the four nouvelles and the 'trilogy' of novels, these alone would have secured for him in this century the eminence won in earlier times by Dante for the Divine comedy, by Milton for Paradise lost, and by Goethe for Faust. Those works expressed the unspoken consciousness of their age as Beckett's trilogy speaks to ours. They all describe a borderline between the salvation of an epoch and its destruction. Beckett's fictions confront a civilization which is the theatre of (amongst other things) a conflict between two powerful forces. One is the rationalizing) principle, cogito, abstract reasoning, the conscious mind, will and design, determinism, positivism, the imposition of extrinsic order.

Beneath, above and against this force, is the opposite force, often hidden, as yet inaccessible to conscious will: a sense of the primordial spring of life, which does not respond to analysis; the stream of which the archetypes are the only fit indicators; the mystery of birth and death, of which biology illustrates only the grossest mechanism; the actual unfoldment of existence, that is, something which we know, as living beings, but which is beyond our powers of comprehension. Its expression can only be in organic or symbolic forms; for instance, the life principle can only be experienced in its becoming, manifesting as, human, animal or plant, but not as a concept or structure of ideas. In psychology, this force was the province of Jung’s theory. Its world-view is the synergetic, integral or holistic. Its philosophy is the esoteric tradition. Jung’s understanding of the unconscious saw it as empowering the whole cosmos, whereas Freud's reduced the unconscious to the individual alone.

Beckett studies, despite a phenomenal growth over the last three decades or so, has only just begun to articulate clearly and fully the essential 'differences' - in the traditional as well as more specialized meanings of the word - with which it is engaged, particularly with reference to the vexed but fundamental question of Beckett's relationship to the philosophers. Is Descartes, with or without the Baroque Rationalism of the Occasionalists Geulincx and Malebranche, critical in dealing with this issue, as the early period of criticism in English affirmed? Or is the 'Cartesian' question basically irrelevant, as is implied by those who chose to focus on Logical Positivism or Existentialism? Or are both of these approaches hopelessly passé in the context of Post-Structuralist critical theory? The whole question of Beckett's relationship to the philosophers is pretty obviously in need of a major critical reassessment.

BECKETT’S ‘DRAMATICULES’: THE DYING AND THE GOING

When, in 1978, the actor David Warrilow asked Samuel Beckett to write him a play about death, he would appear to have been guilty of a fortunate tautology. Fortunate, because the playwright's generous response to the request was the beautiful miniature A piece of monologue (1979), whose opening is surely his most chillingly paradoxical statement of the chosen theme: 'Birth was the death of him' (CSPL, 265). But a tautology nonetheless, at least according to the play's protagonist, Speaker, who - as if in reply to the actor - denies that any other topic is even thinkable, or speakable: 'Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going.' Or to put it another way, to ask Beckett for a play on death was like asking, say, Petrarch for a sonnet on love: as if he might have written one that was not. All of Beckett's drama, especially his later drama, insofar as it is 'about' anything, is essentially 'about death'.

Brecht is known for his radical rethinking of the theatre in the light of Marxist thought. He has succeeded in providing a methodology for a materialist critique by deliberately making ideology appear in the theatrical discourse.Political society is to recognise itself as a production rather than as a mimetic representation, but the question is who controls the production? According to Marxism it is the capitalist machine, but according to feminism it is the patriarchal one that is responsible for oppressing at least half of society, namely women. Brecht's presentation of women has not won him much acclaim from feminists. In his work the social positions of both men and women are seen as externally determined - often the exploiting male and the exploited female - while internalised ideals or anti-ideals of femininity and masculinity are reproduced without any distancing devices.

Brecht's Life of Galileo is probably his most popular single work, both on stage and in print: in German, it outsells all other works by Brecht (2.4 million copies up to 1990). Yet it is also by far the most heavily rewritten of all his plays, with at least one turnabout in the ultimate horizon and intended message; Brecht was never quite comfortable with it; and he died in the middle of directing its rehearsals, not having (as I shall argue) fully resolved the play's horizon. The harsh vocabulary in his note of 25 February 1939, three months after writing the first version, can be taken as valid for all the extant versions:

Though Brecht all along believed with good reason that the final selfcondemnatory speech of Galileo's could — 'with a strictly epic performance' — subsume the empathy into this great figure under the necessary estrangement (AJ, 1, p. 27), he was aware that centrally significant ambiguities remained. A sketch of the three main versions, usually called the 'Danish', 'American' and 'Berlin' versions, may be useful here.

INTRODUCTION

Brecht's poetry is remarkable for two things. In a writer who is best known for his plays and his theatre theory, the sheer volume of his output as a poet is surprising. There are some one thousand pages of poetry in volume iv of the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), most of which has been translated in Manheim and Willett's Poems 1913-1956. To this one must add the many poems that have come to light since the publication of the Collected Works in 1967 and have appeared in a supplementary volume and in Gedichteüber die Liebe (Poems About Love). Second, though Brecht maintained that his poetry was a second string to his bow, the quality and range of his verse rank him among the handful of great German poets of the twentieth century. From the beginning, he was an extraordinarily diverse writer, and his poetry reflects this. He began early: if we set aside the juvenilia, Brecht started writing poetry of the highest quality around 1918, when he was only twenty years old. Poetry accompanied all phases of his life and career, right up to his death.

Beyond How it is Samuel Beckett's prose fiction is marked by a series of techniques or strategies brought to bear upon the work in order to perpetuate it. That is, the processes of self-reduction which are formally evident in the late prose texts become the very subject of the texts themselves. This reductionist tendency is not, however, simply a condensing of stylistic detail, but may be observed within the motivation of the prose's content. The late prose texts become increasingly interconnected and self-referential. One text literally generates another. A text may 'defeat' another, in the manner of Enough's opening exhortation, '[a]ll that goes before forget' (GSP, 139), or the torn sheet of writing in As the story was told (AST, 196). Conversely (but amounting to much the same thing) the text may compulsively repeat what has already been written. One might suggest, for example, that Imagination dead imagine evolved, or devolved, from All strange away. Resorting to manuscript materials may support this, but the evidence lies embedded within the texts themselves. The latter text even opens with the title of the former. Again, it is important to emphasize that this is not simply a stylistic resonance, but a re-negotiation of something altogether more solid. It is as if the written has become three dimensional, and must be assimilated from all sides. A return to the text, therefore, will always be a complex repetition, taken at tangents to the original narrative.

Beckett once asserted: 'I produce an object. What people make of it is not my concern [...] I'd be quite incapable of writing a critical introduction to my own works.' Furthermore, whenever directors and critics asked for explanations of Godot, he both side-stepped their questions and revealed his distrust of any kind of exegesis. Two examples will suffice here. To Alan Schneider's question 'Who or what does Godot mean?', he replied, 'If I knew, I would have said so in the play'; when Colin Duckworth suggested that the characters existed in a modern version of Dante's Purgatory, he responded to the 'proofs' offered to him with a dismissive, if generous 'Quite alien to me, but you're welcome.' As is now clearly established, allusions to Dante are present throughout his novels and plays, but Beckett's position remained resolute; he wanted no part in the process of decoding that haunts critical work, preferring to cling to his belief that: 'The key word in my plays is “perhaps”.'

INTRODUCTION: DIALECTICS

The most damaging yet most common error in discussions of Brecht's theory has been to see it as fixed and unchanging, and to view it therefore as either dogmatic, communist-inspired abstraction or revered holy writ. Behind these views lie different perceptions of Marxism and the rights and wrongs of political art. Brecht began to think through the ideas with which he is most commonly associated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His emphasis and terminology changed in these years, as well as subsequently, and many see in his later remarks and essays (especially A Short Organum for the Theatre, 1948) a belated acceptance of the conventions of realism and the realities of emotional experience suppressed by the supposed sterile intellectualism of his earlier years. In this way Brecht has often come to be admired as a great writer, particularly in the West, in spite of his theory: as at once reconciled with his own youthful hedonism and with the forms and verities of an art above theory and politics. In fact, this is simply to read Brecht in terms of one favoured aesthetic ideology rather than another, and to compromise his art and ideas as much, though in another direction, as a protective state socialism ever did.