Rupal Bhandari

Modern European Drama: Bertolt Brecht

14th April, 2015
(Final Submission)

Starting from the concept of Szechwan itself, briefly

access Brecht’s use of alienation device to redefine the
concept of goodness in The Good Person of Szechwan.

Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, first performed in 1943 in

Switzerland, revolves around the character of Shen Teh/Shui Ta, playing on
the idea of goodness. Shen Teh is good, or at least that is what one is
supposed to see her as, and Shui Ta is bad. But the binaries become
complex when the play contextualizes them with historical materialism,
capitalism, religion, altruism, and the various definitions of contemporary
morality. The definition of goodness that the play attempts to project then
depends upon the reaction of the audience to the action on stage, based on
their subjective perceptions of it.

Wang the water-seller opens the play with the Prologue, searching for
lodgings for the Gods that have descended upon the city of Szechwan to
search for goodness. Shen Teh the town prostitute agrees to offer it. The
Gods perceive it as a sure sign of goodness, and give her a thousand silver
dollars as a compensation for their lodging. She uses this money to buy
herself a tobacconist’s shop. Running the shop and staying “good” turns out
to be trickier than she imagined, and the shop soon turns into a poorhouse
that attracts vagrants, crime and police supervision. As Christopher
McCollough observes in his essay The Good Person of Szechwan, “she now
enters the cut-throat world of commerce and… she soon discovers that the
means of survival may also provide the seeds of disaster”. The play embodies
the realities of the lives of the poor, struggling to stay afloat amidst the
currents of industrialization and capitalism. Goodness, which seems to be
the dominant concern of the play actually takes a second place, with the
aim of the play being to observe and not so much to moralize. As Brecht
states, talking about the epic theatre in his text Brecht on Theatre, the play
seems to “not in fact [be] speaking in the name of morality, but in that of the
victims”.

The flawed system has turned most characters into victims of a

capitalistic world. The play, as Sanjay Kumar says in his essay The Good
Person of Szechwan: Political, Dramaturgical and Pedagogic Concerns, “forces
the readers/audience to work out notions of goodness from the midst of this
multitude, and in the absence of any essentialising notion of goodness
participate in the subversion of mainstreaming notions of goodness”. As far
as the mainstream notions are concerned, Shen Teh is “good”. She brings
rice for Mrs. Shin, gives free smokes to a poor man, and lets the family of
her old landlord move in with her. But her goodness buries her under the
weight of obligations she can’t possibly fulfill. She is soon faced with her
landlady Mrs. Shin asking for a reference of character, the carpenter
showing up to demand immediate payment for the shelves, and the
extended family of her first landlords moving in with her in her small
tobacco shop. Shen Teh dons the costume of a man, turning into her
fictional cousin Shui Ta, to shield herself against all that. Shui Ta solves her
problems, but the mainstream notions also deem him evil, a direct contract
to her “goodness”. This protagonist, who is the site of both good, and the
evil, problematizes the very notions of goodness, the notions of what it is the
Gods were looking for.

Three Gods descend on the town of Szechwan, in search of a “good”

person. But, as Kumar notes, we never get to know the motive of the quest—
why are they searching for a good person. We are also not told what
constitutes this good person; the ingredients to the “commandments” by
these Gods. As McCollough observes, “we should recognize that what the
Gods mean by goodness is something more than good actions”. They seem
to have only an abstract notion of goodness, only a hunch about what they
are looking for. They make “inflexible moral demands on society, without
reference to what is practical and what is not”. Further these Gods are also
a part of the social dynamics, and have an existence that doesn’t quite seem
God-like. These Gods get black eyes from being a part of a human brawl,
lose their legs in foxtrots, and end up barefoot with visibly tattered garbs.
They get exhausted, and show symptoms of prolonged travel and other nasty
human experiences. They accept the importance of commercialization, and
pay for their lodgings. Far from being omniscient, their inability gets
highlighted in their failure to recognize that Shen Teh and Shui Ta is the
same person. Brecht seems to be using these Gods to problematize the
concept of religion. The idea of goodness is then one that has been isolated,
and the characters as well as the audience are left grappling with it.

The concept of omniscience of the idea of goodness gets problematized

because, as Kumar notes, Brecht’s characters “are often social stereotypes
that serve a function that is almost metonymic—that of being a specific and
narrow representation of forces that are larger and more amorphous”. One
of these characters is Wang. Provider of the only narratorial figure in the
play, Wang is the manifestation of the victim of capitalism. A water-seller by
profession, he seems to have a soft spot for Shen Teh. Seemingly the only
“good” person in the play, who never takes an “evil” stand, he fails to
impress the Gods. In fact he disappoints them, because he uses a magnet
under his carrying pole, making money via corruption. Also the fact that he
sells water problematizes the notions of “goodness” behind his character.
“How they’d all shout give me water/ How they’d fight for my good graces/
And I’d make their further treatment/ Go by how I liked their faces./ (Stay
thirsty, you devils!)” Lines from the ‘Song of the Water Seller’, these lines
speak for the dehumanized part of his character. Having become the
manifestation of capitalism at its worst by making water, a basic necessity
for human survival, a commodity for consumption, he is ironically left
defending Shen Teh to the Gods, demanding that they “do not ask for
everything at once” from her. When he breaks his hand, and no one speaks
for him in front of the authorities, one feels bad for him. When he carries his
carrying pole trying to sell water while it is raining, one feels bad for him. It
is the fact that one feels bad for him that shows that regardless of his
profession, goodness seems inherent in him.

“Goodness becomes contextual, and Szechwan becomes the town this

goodness is contextualized in,” as Kumar opines. The names, of the people
and that of the town, are suggestive of the setting being Chinese. But the
semi-Europeanized setting of the play point that the play is set in Brecht’s
“here and now”. While on one hand it seems to be an abstract for a setting
where rampant exploitation occurs, on the other it seems a signifier of
success and prosperity, pre-dating even the onset of capitalism, as Kumar
notes. It serves to instill on the audience/reader, a sense of the exotic,
serving the idea of taking the action out of an obvious setting, alienating it,
and making it more impactful.

One such example of alienation is the portrayal of business in the

play. “What has business to do with an upright and honorable life?” asks
the First God in the second Interlude. Having opened a factory in Mr. Shu
Fu’s place, Shui Ta is the embodiment of this brutal business instinct. The
tobacco factory he establishes is a success in terms of making him money,
and thus cementing his social place. But what happens inside the factory is
far from his “respectable” image. The workers are exploited and the aim of
every action is to earn profits for the owner Shui Ta. It’s his “wisdom and
discipline” that runs the place. It introduces hierarchy and disallows
solidarity by turning Sun into the eager and compliant worker who wants to
become the manager. The factory ends up being elevated to more than
human existence, and its needs are made more important than those of the
people involved. The idea of goodness here is then not directly critiqued, but
critiqued by the audience’s reaction to the action on stage. As Kumar notes,
“Brecht’s techniques are geared to hold a mirror tp our face showing us how
capitalism makes us do things that we can not ethically do in the name of
survival”.

Watching these characters fight for survival, “the spectators are no

longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience by means of uncritical
(and without practical consequences) empathy with the characters in a
play,” says Brecht. The Good Person of Szechwan takes the characters and
the instances out of the obvious setting, and puts them through a process of
alienation. One, as a reader/audience, feels sympathy for the characters,
but not empathy. As Peter Brooker notes in his essay Key Words in Brecht’s
Theory and Practice of Theatre, Brecht’s theatre represents that the “puzzles
of the world are not solved but shown”. To realize its aim, “as a fully
dialectical materialistic theatre, it required that the contradictions it
revealed be taken up beyond itself, in the material world outside that walls
of the theatre”. It is this alienation that allows one to critically analyze the
presentation, the characters, the socio-economic-political setting that the
play is a critique of.

Elaborating on Brecht’s technique, Brooker discusses Verfremdung,

the link between the exposition of the story and its communication by
suitable means of alienation. Alienation of an event of a character, Brecht
says, is “stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality, and
creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them”. The indirect
use of a narrator, the use of interludes and songs, or magical elements like
deus-ex-machina, in The Good Person of Szechwan serve this purpose.
Brecht, unlike the common tendency which has been to empty gest of any
social content, places the social context in the gest, in the gestures. He
seems, as Brooker notes, to be aiming at a socially situated performance,
rather than at penetrating a character’s inner life. He doesn’t care if Shen
Teh is a prostitute, he cares only about the social implications it would
generate for the play. Gestus, and Verfremdung then historicize the
incidents portrayed, producing a jolt of surprise and illumination as “the
familiar and predictable” were not only seen afresh but “seen through”.

As McCollough observes, “gestus is not a simple action located only in

terms of the fiction on stage, but more a specific act/action/event located in
social time and space that may be seen to be inextricably bound up with
larger events and by so being, may be seen as exemplary of a whole set of
ideological issues”. The ‘Song of Green Cheese’ is one such attempt at
gestus. Arguably the most philosophical song in the play, it exposes a
Marxist-leftist point of view, projecting oppression as a never ending cycle,
linked here specifically to socio-economic frameworks. It makes its point by
juxtaposing two things that will never happen—“and the moon shall be
made of green cheese” so that “a child of low birth shall inherit the Earth”—
the song presents a critique of the society which rests mainly on a
management of resources. These resources are unequally divided, with the
rich having a lot more than they would ever need, and the poor struggling to
survive. It is this imbalance that causes the problems in a society, and
which has been analyzed via a Marxist critique of the play.

Another instance of gestus, ‘The Song of the Eighth Elephant’, offers

us a critique of the capitalist framework of the society. “Seven elephants
worked for Major Chung/ and an eighth one followed the others. /Seven
were wild and the eighth was tame/ and the eighth had to spy on his
brothers.” This song, ironically sung by the workers in Shui Ta’s factory, is a
critique on the hierarchical structures in an industrial and capitalist
framework, where one is placed over the other. In such a framework, the
capitalist no longer needs to directly interfere, because his interests are
being taken care of by the managerial layer of the framework, while he reaps
the benefits of the hard work of the labour classes. Not only does it speak for
a sense of ‘divide and rule’ amongst people where solidarity must rather
exist, but also of a sense of betrayal in an environment where everyone is
watching only their own back. This aims to raise serious questions about
the ideals of “goodness” and the meaning of it, by alienating the
audience/reader.

Perhaps the most important instance of gestus is the play’s ‘Epilogue”.

“We know this ending makes some people frown… To close the play, leaving
the issue open.” The play ends with Shen Teh begging the Gods to help her,
to let her retain the persona of Shui Ta. But the Gods disappear, waving and
smiling, seemingly detached from the problem at hand, and ironically from
even attempting to provide a solution. The play keeps the audience/reader
from reaching catharsis. Instead it raises important questions, not only in
terms of the play, but on greater socio-economic, political and philosophical
levels. But instead of answering any of them, in the most dialectic manner,
it leaves them to ponder: “What is your answer? Nothing’s been arranged./
Should men be better? Should the world be changed?/ Or just the gods? Or
ought there be none?”

Another one of Brecht’s plays that comes closest to the question of

goodness, like The Good Person of Szechwan, is Mother Courage and Her
Children. It is the story of Mother Courage and her children travelling in
order to survive, through a European war. Unlike Shen Teh, Mother Courage
is not depicted as an inherently noble character. In most of the scenes—like
when she is holding on to the money and not simply giving it up in order to
save her son Swiss Cheese, and when her mute daughter Kattrin is on the
roof, about to die—as audience/reader, one feels bad for her. But, one is not
given enough time to develop sentimental feelings for the characters, and
thus one does not empathize with them. One can only sympathize with
them, like with the characters in The Good Person of Szechwan.

To conclude the study of the idea of goodness, I believe the idea comes
to rest solely on the figures of the Gods. “The three Gods [then],” as
McCullough notes, “function as the intermediary between heaven’s abstract
ethics and the world of Szechwan, where attempts at goodness require the
temper of pragmatism if survival is to be maintained”. They seem only to be
representatives of religious conventions and conservatism, who, at last
disappear without having solved the problems at hand. The definition of
goodness in the play is then undefined at best. It is subjective, left to the
perceptions and the reactions of the individual in the audience/as a reader,
and Brecht’s use of alienation devices only serves to make his socio-
economic-political critique more impactful.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Person of Szechwan. Methuen Drama Edition ed. London:
Bloomsbury PLC, 2013. Print.
2. Brecht, Bertolt. "Brecht on Theatre." Modern European Drama: Background Prose Reading.
New Delhi: Worldview Publications, 2012. Print.
3. Brooker, Peter. "Key Words in Brecht's Theory and Practice of Brecht's Theatre." Cambridge
UP, 2007. Print.
4. McCollough, Christopher. "The Good Person of Szechwan." Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.
5. Kumar, Sanjay. “The Good Person of Szechwan.” Delhi