Brecht’s Concept of Character

Abstract

From beginning, Brecht was unable to accept concept of dramatic character as ultimate, absolute, and fatedetermining quality which it had been for traditional European drama, the drama of Renaissance and classicism, as Peter Szondi called it. He had to reject it because that concept is rooted in religious and metaphysical idea of an indivisible and eternal soul. As early as middle '20's man, for Brecht, does not exist as an individual, i.e. as an indivisible and essentially unchangeable person, a point that A Man is a Man tries to make. Yet even earlier, the student of natural sciences, as Brecht called himself, had been willing to see world not as a sum of eternal substances, but as a web of processes. Man could be comprehended not by his soul but by sum total of his modes of behavior. For 22-year-old Brecht, character is sum of gestures and acts of figure. For him to know a character meant to view his successive gestures at one and same time. When he is to drink beer in your play, young Augsburg playwright and drama critic advises himself, then you also have to know how he would eat eggs, read papers, sleep with his wife and kick bucket. Here already, character is not a unity but an ensemble. Conspicuous by its absence is that element from which classical and even naturalistic dramaturgy proceeds, namely, motivation. Motivation, being something invisible, is problematical for Brecht. He proceeds from visible, viewable gesture, observable act of figure. But gesture is ambiguous. We can observe it only by its effects, not by its causes. Since Brecht was not concerned with the good and the evil or with the beautiful and the ugly, but only with the correct, he preferred absence of motivation to erroneously imputed moti-