430
PARTISAN REVIEW
Career
of
the Man Baal
steps outside the character to treat him as an
abnormal case. While rewriting, Brecht asked himself how the
events of the play might have been reported in a newspaper. He was
instinctively doing what he would later ask actors to do in rehearsal:
to stand back, thinking of the character not in the Stanislavskian first
person but in the third person, while making the dialogue less
dramatic - more like narrative - by interpolating "he said."
It would be simplistic to suggest that he betrayed his characters
in the same way that he betrayed his friends, but whether by
rewriting, reinterpreting, or altering a production, he tried to con–
duct sympathy away from Kragler (in
Drums in the Night),
Macheath,
Mother Courage, and Galileo . Unlike the hero of
The Threepenny
Opera
(1928) , the Macheath of
The Threepenny Novel
(1934) is middle–
aged , bald , double-chinned, and glamourless, a businessman who
runs a chain of shops as an outlet for stolen goods. Polly marries him
because she cannot afford an abortion to terminate a pregnancy
started by another lover. In the original characterization of Galileo
(1939), there is some self-portraiture and even an element of
apologia
pro vita sua.
"As a confirmed materialist," wrote Brecht in one of his
working notes, "he insists on physical pleasures ... he works in a
sensual way ." Like Brecht , this Galileo surrounds himself with
disciples, learning himself from the Socratic questions he asks them.
He is not prone to feelings of guilt and believes in survival, and there
is no condemnation of his guile. We are meant to agree that he did
well to outwit the Inquisition and write the
Discorsi.
What sense
would there have been in dying as a martyr? The first version of the
play was only just finished when the uranium atom was split, and six
years later, revising the play after Hiroshima, Brecht tried to con–
demn Galileo as a traitor to humanity. In the new version the
balance of sympathy is shifted. The audience is intended to believe
him when he says that as a scientist he had a unique opportunity: if
only he had held out against the church, scientists could have evolved
"a covenant to devote their knowledge exclusively to the good of
mankind." Marx believed that no individual could ever determine
the course of history , but Brecht is irrationally blaming Galileo for
the way in which scientific investigation has not always been
motivated altruistically . And with this new Galileo, the physical self–
indulgence is meant to seem unattractive.
Kragler (in
Drums in the Night)
and Mother Courage are two
other characters in whom the lust for living, like Baal's, was originally
seen as a virtue and later discredited, as if Brecht regretted the
amount of libido he had invested in the characterization .
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