CLASSICS REVISITED
Grace under pressure
RAVI VYAS
Chaplain: I see how you got your name.
Mother Courage: The poor need courage. They're lost, that's why. That they even get up in the morning is something in their plight. Or that they plough a field in wartime. Even their bringing their children into the world shows they have courage, for they have no prospects. They have to hang each other, one by one and slaughter each other in the lump, so if they want to look each other in the face once in a while, well, it takes courage.
Bertolt Brecht: "Mother Courage and her Children"
THE key to Bertolt Brecht, the greatest German playwright of the twentieth century, is a phrase he used in looking back on the production of his "The Three Penny Opera" (1928):
Complex seeing must be practised... Thinking above the flow of the play is more important than thinking within the flow of the play.
Put another way, it's the idea, the mould of form that matter. Things that look the same are really different. Differences matter; the margins matter. No story is ever told as if it is the only one; the sub-text changes as time passes by.
Between sympathy and revolt
"Complex seeing" is the basic commentary on a persistent Brechtian theme: the choice between sympathy, accepting a local reality, and revolt against the existing order, contradicting both the local reality and the world as it is, and the immediate human need and convenience. Brecht was so directly concerned with the contemporary political world that he turned often to fable and history to achieve "complex seeing". In all his major plays, like "Mother Courage and her Children", he is able to isolate, especially from history, a particular form of crisis in which men "create" themselves and their situations in a rather special way.
Although, as a Marxist, Brecht was ostensibly concerned with a whole range of historical developments and practically concerned with most of the forms of contemporary social crises, he concentrated his energies on analysing a particular crisis and its ramifications. For this he made fable and history where the qualities of good and evil and justice, as defined by the needs of life, are predominant. Fable and history also became a device of distancing himself from the harsh political realities where censorship ruled: anger was forced underground, transformed into irony, sarcasm or an icy calm from which it was often hard to deduce the fury that lay concealed behind it.
"Mother Courage and her Children" is set against the background of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), which were a series of political and religious wars caused mainly by the political rivalry between Catholic and Protestant princes in Germany and the interest of foreign powers in German affairs. The War devastated Germany and a part of the play deals with the underlying reasons, in a highly ironic tone, for Germany's collapse. The main characters in the play are Mother Courage; Kattarin, her dumb daughter; Eilif, her elder son; Swiss Cheese, her younger son; officers and foot soldiers of the army; and the innocent peasants who get caught up in the whirl and muddle of war.
Complex figure
The play revolves round Mother Courage who is a complex figure. Brecht doesn't present her as a mother who is unable "to protect her children from the vicissitudes of war". For Brecht, she is the "merchant mother" who is "disfigured and transformed beyond recognition".
In the First Act itself we are given a glimpse of the mad world in which Mother Courage finds herself when the recruiting officer bemoans that "there's no loyalty left in the world, no trust, no faith, no sense of honour. I'm losing my confidence in mankind." And his boss, the Sergeant, adds, "what else can we expect with peace? You know what the trouble with peace is? No organisation. And when do you get organisation? In a war. Peace is one big waste of equipment. Anything goes, no one gives a damn."
As a trader, peddling her wares of knick-knacks on a wagon, she imbibes the philosophy of the times which she spells out in Scene 7:
Mother Courage: I won't let you spoil my war for me. Destroys the weak, does it? Well, what does peace do for `em, huh? War feeds its people better. She sings:
If war don't suit your disposition
When victory comes you will be dead.
War is a business proposition:
Not with cream-cheese but steel and lead.
The bourgeois world of easy make-believe was turned upside-down.
Mother Courage labours through the war zone. She is a basically persistent figure: her courage lies in her persistence, which could also be depicted as wickedly opportunistic because she is merely interested in selling her wares. That separate moral judgement is precisely where the play confounds. It is not an attitude but an experience that drives through the action: what can be done, here, in the war across Europe? The formal submission to an uncontrollable power; the preservation of life by going on with the system, dragging the cart after the armies?
These not only seem but are inevitable; they have to convince, as experience, before the full dramatic shock sinks in: that life isn't preserved; that a family before our eyes is destroyed; that the cart is dragged on, but the dead are multiplying. It isn't abstract questions, "Are they good people?" or "What should they have done?" that we need to ask. What we ask, in despair, is "What are they doing?", "What is being done to them?" So, when Mother Courage fails to recognise the body of her son, the literary critic, George Steiner described it "as the same wild cry with which the tragic imagination (of classical Greece) first marked our sense of life. The same wild and pure lament over man's inhumanity and waste of man. The curve of tragedy is perhaps unbroken". Or the death of the dumb Kattarin where she gives up her own life to awaken the nearby city by her drumming that Eric Bentley (drama critic and translator of Brecht's plays) called "possibly the most powerful scene, emotionally, in 20th Century drama".
Mother Courage's wanderings in the war zone takes courage: not the isolated moral quality, but her character, her actions. Forget the justifications, the excuses, "the bad luck", the inevitabilities, but her actions — a mother destroying her family with the aim of preserving life — to see what is happening, to be able to bear to see it. If she weren't so strong and persistent, there would be no life at all; at the same time, because she is strong and persistent, in a destructive environment, she destroys the life she has herself created.
Working with duality
This deep and complex image of Mother Courage and her actions is Brecht's central structure of feeling. As Raymond Williams says, "it is by looking this action, this character in the face, that we see what we are doing: the essential contradiction; the destructive acceptance in the name of life; the persistent vitality in a continuing destruction. The desperation, the real preservation of life is expressed only in the drumming of the dumb girl, to waken and save the city: a defiance that gets her killed, but that is as natural as her mother pushing on with her cart. It is to this experience, as well as to the other experience, of a desperate acceptance, that the soldiers sing:
And though you may not long survive
Get out of bed and look alive.
The vitality and the danger cannot be separated; the reality and the pretence, until the action is gone through are indistinguishable. The conflict is pushed through from all sides until it connects with our own feelings."
When all is said and done, what then, did Mother Courage's courage amount to? "Grace under pressure" originating from the Latin motto, "strong in deed, gentle in manner?" Or, the ability to hold two or more opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function? You can work out the various meanings yourself.
Plays 2, Bertolt Brecht, first published 1936-39 and translated by Eric Bentley, 1955, Metheun.
Other books consulted:
Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Raymond Williams, The Hogarth Press.
Brecht: Twentieth Century Views, Peter Demetz, Prentice Hall.
The Life and Lies of Bertolt Brecht, John Fuegi, Flamingo paperback.
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