CLASSICS REVISITED
Brecht: Galileo's universe
RAVI VYAS
Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett, Metheun Plays, £8.99.
Also consulted: Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Raymond Williams, The Hogarth Press.
|
Complex seeing must be practised.... Thinking above the flow of the play is more important than thinking within the flow of the play.
Bertolt Brecht: "The Threepenny Opera"
BERTOLT BRECHT, who was deeply interested in the contemporary political world, often turned to history and fable to achieve a complex seeing which was necessary because intellectually "everything is in motion", in flux, in metamorphosis. His complex reconstruction of the life of Galileo, the 17th century Italian astronomer's validation, then recantation, of the Copernican model that the earth moved round the sun, not the other way around, is sharply topical today. In "Life of Galileo", as in his major plays, "Mother Courage", "The Good Woman of Szechwan" or "The Caucasian Chalk Circle", Brecht was able to isolate in history, a particular form of existential crisis that had a relevance for all times: the survival qualities of goodness and evil; the definition of justice by the needs of life. These have a centrality in Brecht although he was ostensibly concerned with the whole range of historical development and practically concerned with most of the forms of contemporary social crisis. But his main creative energy went into the realisation of a particular crisis that provides cases for debate because the issues are looked at in new ways: the simplest, most discursive form of complex thinking.
"Galileo" is perhaps Brecht's greatest play and it is necessary to trace its long and involved history in order to understand why, and its relevance for our times. There are three versions of the play. In the first version, (written in the 1930s against the background of the rise of fascism) Galileo was a hero and a martyr (even if a fallible one): under pressure, he renounces what he knows to be the truth.
Complexity of choices
By doing so, he gains two things: his physical continuity and the satisfaction that he must be let off, and also the time to secretly copy his Discourses which are smuggled out to provide some light to the darkening world of the Inquisition. But in saving his world, he has destroyed a connected life; in saving his science, he has altered it. The dramatic method is not merely historical reconstruction: Galileo and the action surrounding him are specifically created, so that we can see, the complexity of real choices, how difficult they can be. Galileo, stripped to the waist, explaining the rotation of the earth with an apple, is simple and direct so that the common man can understand. It is there for everyone to see, except that a corrupt system denies it.
Metaphorically, we are "torn into two": the tearing happens between the body and the mind, satisfaction and truth, but both are still in one person, one head, one consciousness. What is brilliant is that the unbearable tension is overcome, as it must be in life, by a specific distortion: a compromised life extended until it is a false but effective consciousness. Galileo had asked: "Could we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists?"
Science and power
The answer is Yes, but you become in the process scientists of a different kind. In the beginning there was a connection between truth and the solar system: a falsehood in one had been used to maintain oppression in the other. Galileo, in challenging one, is challenging both: "The most solemn truths are being tapped on the shoulder; what was never doubted is now in doubt. And because of that a great wind has arisen, lifting even gold-embroidered coat-tails of princes and prelates, so that the fat legs and thin legs underneath are seen; legs like our legs."
The second version of the play, written in the 1940s, resonates from the dropping of the atom bomb and the revelations of the excesses of Stalinism but there is a Brechtian twist: the events are the same but it isn't the science that is emphasised but recognising what science stood for. Science for its own sake was meaningless — its point was not "to open the door to infinite knowledge but to put an end to infinite error". One day, Galileo predicts the gap between science and mankind will yawn so wide that "your cry of triumph at some new discovery will be echoed by a universal cry of horror".
Truth and ideology
But "Galileo" is not about the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church or about the excesses that unbridled science can lead to. It is an examination of the problems that face not only scientists but also the spirit of inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of governments/ ideologies/ or the power elites of the 21st century capitalism or the MNCs. Brecht had no illusion about the nature of authority or about human frailty: he knew about the blandishments of power and how little it takes to corrupt people. At one stage, the new Pope, a mathematician, says irritably that it's impossible to sanction the use of Galileo's star charts, as sailors were demanding, while condemning the theory they are based on: "Why not?" replies the Inquisitor. "It's the only way."
The need to be sceptical
What then is "Galileo" about? It is not just a hymn to reason but on the need to be sceptical, to doubt. It is doubt that would save us from errors; and it is doubts that would initiate and further the process of inquiry that would enrich our understanding. "Disbelief can move mountains", Brecht says elsewhere, and the pleasure and pain of doubt occur everywhere in the subtext in the play. "Galileo" is "an optimistic tragedy", if you can learn how to doubt the "big shots". "Unhappy is the land that has no heroes," says a follower when Galileo recants. "No," says Galileo, "Unhappy the land that needs heroes."
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
