Brecht in Asia and Africa 
 
 
and, but this is an analytically separable part of an indivisible move, of

the social unconscious of the audience which so constructs such 
characters. The layers of perception in the construction of character or

subjectivity in Brecht are analogous to the capacity of the multi-layered

Noh theatre, or to take a topical European example, of the 
presentational separation of the complexities of socially constructed 
subjectivity in Mnouchkine's theatre. 
     The failures in understanding Brecht's plays, so often countered by

theoretical explanations that compound the problem, often stem from a 
blinkered, endemic, Western realism, the ineradicable naturalist 
psychology, which is unable to differentiate between various levels of 
voices or externalizing gesture. The dynamics in the structuring of 
subjectivity in the Sezuan play are constantly misunderstood, and we 
are then confronted with a one-dimensional, sentimental, utterly naive 
reading. I saw a production in Beijing by the students of the Central 
Academy of Drama which, not burdened by a dominant realist aesthetic, 
had no difficulty separating these layers between conscious calculation 
and the social unconscious. Somebody in the audience said to me 
afterwards: "I never realized that Brecht knew so much about China."
I 
replied by smiling. This complex seeing is inescapably obvious through 
the distribution of voices in The Caucasian Chalk Circle which literally

takes the mind apart. I must pass on! 
     What of the audience? It is addressed in so many ways. Let's look 
 at Arturo Ui. The standard charge is that it does not do justice to either

 the complexities of recent history, for the Chicago parody traduces that

 reality, or Hitler's character, the vegetarian persuading himself he could

 not kill, the psychotic modelling reality to his own dreams. The 
 Brechtians counterargue: it is not meant to be about "Hitler";
Brecht is 
 not trying to represent historical facts accurately, the play is a satire,

 the caricature deliberate, and just as much "about" Al Capone
as Hitler, 
 for fascism is the product of reactionary capitalism. 
      But of course the play is not "about" either Hitler or Al
Capone, it's 
 "about" the audience, history's participating audience and us
as 
 interpreting participators. What Hitler represented and accomplished 
 was possible because he channelled the force of the economic 
 unconscious of the capitalist system, which believed it could control 
 him and the historical unconscious of his culture, interwoven with the 
 forces that constituted that system. The suggestion that the play 
 distorts historical reality in turn implies we might be repressing potential

 or actual complicity in the construction of that historical reality. Hitler

 did not march to Stalingrad alone, it is well known that he refused to go

 there, but "his" armies did because he had released the force
of four 
 hundred years of his own culture's unconscious. Hitler himself was an 
 externalization of his culture's unconscious which he instinctively 
 exploited in others, and that is why he was able to do so. The play does

 not reduce the dimensions of Fascism, as Adorno argued, unless you 
 mean it fails to show every one of them. Hitler's psychosis was 
 contained as a potential within and, when it become an historical force,

 was produced by the economic and historical unconscious of 
 capitalism, whose expression "through" Hitler was of course particular

 
 
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