Another Quiet Day

Why I Dislike Brecht

Tom demonstrates once again that he's a better writer than me:

I’m not setting out each day to write big sentences that impress me the moment my fingers stop typing, but now and again I hit a full stop and know that’s the Sentence for today..

“Bertolt Brecht maintained that the fallacy of Aristotelian poetics was that the audience was continually immersed in the narrative, and were denied the opportunity to step back and think critically about the ‘meta-level’ story elements unfolding around them. For Brecht, this was a significant obstacle to be overcome, and while his, and later, Augusto Boal’s work, challenges and reworks the familiar elements of Aristotelian drama in an explicitly ergodic manner, might a ‘third way’, working between these two extremes be the answer to interactive authorship?”

On the other hand, I'm much better at being an annoyed, bile-spewing, grumpy arsehole.

To wit, the problem with Brecht is that Brecht was the biggest shoveller of pretentious, self-righteous boredom in existence (excepting possibly that one occasion when the hippopotamus at the San Diego Zoo decided to make a nest out of the complete works of Lord Archer.)

Brecht was guilty of a category error when he wrote about Aristotle. The Poetics is, specifically, about the structure and details of classicist tragedy. Even in the middle ages Europe was full of alternative drama forms and structures that could have provided the basis of Brecht's experiments (in the same way that Shakespeare's plays are in direct lineage from miracle plays and thusly have a much more strongly religious basis than greek).

Brecht ignored Europe's long tradition of carnivalesque parody of author figures and those in power, which should have played directly into his political, socialist agenda.

Goes to show that despite Brecht's avowed agenda of fighting for the enlightenment and liberty of the common man, his real fight was with the institutions of art and drama and the forms of plays that they represented.

Which makes Brecht a self-referential twat that made boring plays only staged by pretentious drama students who could do with a gentle whipping with a tire-iron wrapped in barbwire.

Boal, otoh, is cool.

Brecht would be cool if his plays where actually watchable. Or even readable. You could put an edition of his plays on a table in a room full of six year olds on ephedrine and they'd fall asleep just from the ambient dreariness.

Update: Bear in mind that I just ate, which generally means that I'm less grumpy and aggressive than usual. Quite happy, actually. Brecht is just one of the people that really tick me off (a list that includes Tom Cruise, Creationists, Ricky Gervaise, Joseph Campbell, Freud, Socrates (a.k.a. Prime Wanker), and Robert Heinlein)

Baldur Bjarnason – 16/8/06