CORRESPONDENCE
way the Greeks thought about life;
but why assert they thought as we do?
I also do not understand why Miss
Sontag is so opposed to the judgments
of Bertold Brecht and of
his
plays I
made in the two pieces devoted to him
in my book. Apparently Miss Sontag
is in agreement with the position I
took that the main form of serious
play in our time
i~
what I have called
the metaplay; in fact, throughout her
review Miss Sontag refers to the meta–
play as if it were a dramatic form
whose existence and importance has
to be taken for granted. But Brecht is
perhaps the most important of recent
dramatists to have written serious plays.
What kind of plays did Brecht write?
According to Miss Sontag, Brecht wrote
"didactic plays." But didactic plays
would have to express some moral
message clear enough to
be
recogniz–
able. Now the testimony of most serious
critics of Brecht is that his plays are
morally ambiguous, and ambiguous in
the extreme. As a matter of fact, my
effort in the longer of the two pieces
I devoted to Brecht was to show
some
clear content in his plays. Other critics
deny that there is any.
Miss Sontag remarks that there are
no more "sturdy exponents" of im–
placable values today than the Com–
munists. And Brecht was a Communist.
But I did not neglect
to
show that the
dramatist's one effort to express Com–
munist policy as an implacable value–
I am referring to his play
The Measures
Taken-was
put down. By whom?–
by the Communists. The fact is too
well known for Miss Sontag to have
ignored it; she should have tried to
explain
it
differently than I did.
Miss Sontag asserts that I spoiled
my analysis of Brecht's work by inter–
preting that work ill terms of "callow
cold-war platitudes." Of such "callow
cold-war platitudes" Miss Sontag cites
only one : I asserted that Communists
473
are against the individual. This asser–
tion, says Miss Sontag, is nonsense.
But then apparently forgetting she
said this, Miss Sontag goes on to ex–
plain why the Communists are against
the individual. Her explanation is that
this is not due to Marxist theory-I
never said it was--but to the cultural
conditions of those countries in which
the Communists happen to
be
in power.
Now this surely is a false explanation
for the anti-individualism of the Com–
munists, and an explanation hardly fair
to the cultural traditions of Russia,
Poland, and Germany. But in any
case, even assuming it to be a good
explanation, one wonders about the
reason for explaining a fact when one
has just said that to point to that fact
is nonsense. Why explain what does
not exist?
It will be seen that Miss Sontag,
though very much for my ideas, is also
very much against them. And this has
puzzled me. Looking for an explana–
tion, I have come up with one which
makes some sense, at least to me. No
doubt Miss Sontag has read the very
fine essay on tragedy by Gabriel Marcel
in which the French philosopher makes
the point that tragedy introduces us
into a special order. This he designates
the order of "for and against." What
is this order and what has it to do with
tragedy? In tragedy, says Marcel, one
is forced to be against the hero to the
very degree and in the same sense
that one is for him. I think Marcel's
idea a valuable one; moreover,
it
is
perfectly consistent with the conception
of tragedy I developed in my book,
and it is of course very remote from
any such claptrap as that tragedy
springs from a nihilistic vision of a
world obdurate to moral values. In any
case, it struck me that Miss Sontag
in reviewing my book may have tried
to introduce into her review the very
tragic mechanism she argues for and
