A recent literary conference announced its topic as Commitment or Alienation. I take this to mean that the public-relations men believe, first, that these words are the great eye-catchers of the moment and, second, that they represent alternative ways of life for artists today. The Committed artist is one who is publicly protesting against American policy in Vietnam; the Alienated artist is one who is sitting the war out and waiting for Godot in sulky solitude. Artists who are following any other line of action or inaction simply aren’t “with it.”
I start with public relations because that and not the garden of Eden is where things nowadays do start. Also, public relations sheds its aura of unreality on the whole topic, and it is hard to get at the reality without first dispelling the aura. Further, public relations has its own dialectic. Beginning by flattering a subject, lending it importance by means of a glamorous terminology, it ends by throwing suspicion on it, and all persons connected with it. Take the observation I have just made that—once we have uttered the words Commitment and Alienation—artists following any other line of action or inaction would not be considered “with it.” This means that once these words are published in large type, they impel artists to declare themselves Committed or Alienated lest they find themselves in outer darkness. To say this is to impugn the motives of all the committed and all the alienated: nothing is involved, it is suggested, but the desire to be in the swim.
Naturally, in any social movement, there is much mere fashion-following. “I will join if you will, and you will join if the neighbors are joining or if those you look up to think it chic to join.” But this situation is not what I am calling attention to. I am calling attention to the way the situation is now exploited by the publicity racket. They need labels to attract attention. They intend a compliment by using them. But the final result is an insult to the thing labeled.
It makes no difference, by the way, that the public-relations men are often employees of colleges and universities. And of course it is often the case that they don’t regard themselves as public-relations men. Their official titles may be President, Dean, or plain Professor.
Take symposia on TV, especially so-called educational TV. It all begins with the commendable desire to get the best men, and the modish topic is assumed to be what will attract them, not to mention the public. Commitment. Alienation. Theater of the Absurd. Theater of Cruelty. Half-a-dozen celebrities are brought before the cameras. An academic public-relations man mediates between them and the attendant masses. Much smiling. Not much thinking. The millions have heard of theater of cruelty, and it is concluded that there is a Cultural Explosion. (What an apt expression the phrase Cultural Explosion is—suggesting as it does some cultural equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The trick is this: the public is to think the half-dozen celebrities were brought before the cameras for some lofty, cultural reason: if no such reason is apparent, that is because culture is a mysterious business. Actually, the purpose of the whole thing was merely to bring half-a-dozen celebrities before the cameras. In educational TV, that is a self-justifying act. And on commercial TV it is justified, if not by itself, then by the increased audience for the commercials.
I have accepted the word Commitment for my title because I am not willing to have it relegated to TV symposia and Sunday supplements, because, in short, I think more than a mere fashion is involved. Behind the current discussion of Commitment is the perennial discussion as to whether art should teach or give pleasure. Of that discussion I would only observe here that it is full of paradoxes, and inevitably so, since to be taught can itself be a pleasure, while, conversely, to be given a pleasure may also be to be taught something. Over the course of Western history, the didactic view of art has predominated. Aristotle took the view that the purpose of poetry is pleasure but, on the other hand, he divided pleasures into higher and lower; and one man’s higher pleasure is another man’s edification. Also, Aristotle said that the most pleasurable thing of all was the learning process.
Perhaps the relevant question for us is why this subject has become urgent again in the past hundred years. For this period has produced not only the doctrine of Commitment but the theory which stands at the opposite pole—the name was not Alienation originally, but Aestheticism, Art for Art’s Sake. The idea was to keep art pure from the world’s vulgarity, and that vulgarity was seen as covering a great deal of territory. The pure artist is not a philistine, nor a politician, he is not even a man of ideas. Instead, he “walks down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily/In his transcendental hand.” The Pre-Raphaelite image of the artist became dated long ago, but just the other day a British poet protested against all the Commitment in modern England with the remark that he thought poets should be nightingales, and one of the great efforts at tragedy in 20th-century drama—Hofmannsthal’s The Tower—has as its subject the losing fight which in our time the artist puts up to preserve his human purity. The poet, Wallace Stevens, said: “In the conflict between the poet and the politician the chief honor the poet can hope for is that of remaining himself.” So strong was Mr. Stevens’s commitment to non-Commitment.
His words could be taken another way. Everything depends on time and place. Suppose we heard that the two Soviet writers who recently went to jail had said: “In the conflict between the poet and the politician the chief honor the poet can hope for is that of remaining himself”? We would then find the pronouncement utterly political and conclude that the speakers were committed to liberalism. Similarly, what some consider the aestheticism of Pasternak was an active anti-Stalinism. We have grown used to conceding that silence is an act, and an act of cowardice, when speaking out in protest might do some good. We have to concede also that silence is an act, and an act of courage, when speaking out in conformity and flattery is expected of one. The “aesthetic” Pasternak withdrew into his “ivory tower”; was silent for a long time; then came out with highly “aesthetic” poetry and fiction. This sequence indicates a Commitment, a protest against politics that itself implies a politics.
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It was not only with the generation of Stevens and Pasternak that aestheticism came to be a form of Commitment. We see something parallel in the life and creed of Oscar Wilde. Wilde said art was perfectly useless. He meant that he didn’t want art reduced to the role of little moralistic mottoes on Auntie’s mantelpiece. He was attacking the exploitation of art by a narrow and philistine utilitarianism. He actually considered art the most useful thing in existence, so far as the good life and the making of a good world are concerned. Only, since art itself provides an image of the good life, and the world an image of the bad life, he wanted the world to learn to be useful to art, not art to be useful to the world. He was the most committed of men. He not only preached anarchistic socialism; his parading of the aesthetic way of life was his form of direct action. As an anarchist he refused to leave the changing of the world to history and to movements and insisted on creating a small new world wherever he personally trod.
Am I arriving at the conclusion that all artists are committed? Well, all serious authors are; but that is not what is meant when we speak today of Commitment with a capital C. We mean a political Commitment. And we do not only mean that an artist has political views; we mean that his political views enter into his art.
Translators of Sartre have been explaining that the French word, engagement, which they render as Commitment, has two implications: first, that one is involved in politics willy-nilly; second, that one voluntarily accepts the consequences of a particular political stand. Uncommitted writers are those who don’t concede the willy-nilly involvement or who don’t concede that it makes any difference. They also are apt to reject a particular political stand on the grounds of its unpleasant attendant circumstances. By declaring allegiance—the Uncommitted are quick to complain—you make yourself an accomplice of the crimes and errors of your leaders and associates. Committed authors retort that the Uncommitted are accomplices of the crimes and errors, of whatever leaders, in which they have merely acquiesced. Inaction is also a moral posture. Being in the world at all entails complicity. The Uncommitted consider themselves innocent because they have not done certain things. That their abstention from these actions may have had terrible consequences is something they won’t consider. That their non-abstention may have been indispensable if the good was to result is something else they won’t consider. The Committed say with Sartre in his letter to Camus:
. . . to deserve the right to influence men who struggle it is first of all necessary to take part in their struggle; it is first of all necessary to accept many things if one wishes to try to change several of them.
Sartre’s play Dirty Hands is the classic presentation of this point. Its main message, surely, is that we have to be willing to get our hands dirty, i.e., bloody.
Is the literature of Commitment by definition on one political side rather than another?
This is a historical question, and speaking historically one would have to answer it in the positive. Relative to the general social situation, the literature of Commitment is radical. It is a literature of protest, not approval, of outrage, not tribute. This proposition is only reinforced by the fate of attempts to disprove it in practice. There was a Jesuit play written to defend Pius XII against Hochhuth’s The Deputy. That is a doomed kind of project, whatever the talent of the author, because the roots of the Hochhuth play are in a sense of outrage pre-existing in the playwright and other people. Saying they shouldn’t be outraged is beside the dramatic point. If the counter-playwright should succeed in presenting a Pius who is not outrageous, he will thereby be producing a play that is not dramatic.
You could have a viable play against J. Edgar Hoover, but not one in favor of him. The Commitment of literature could easily be to Robin Hood but never to the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Again, you can be for Goliath against David. In politics, today, that is called being pro-American. But Goliath cannot find a literature of Commitment to back him; David always could—only in fact from that literature do we know his story. Poor Goliath!
In the 1930’s, the Commitment of many writers was to anti-Hitler literature. It is true that certain writers supported Hitler, and that some of them attempted to produce a literature of Commitment in support of the Fuehrer, but they got nowhere, for essentially what Hitler wanted was sycophancy. Failing that, he would settle for . . . Art for Art’s Sake.
Take the theater. After 1933 the radical authors couldn’t be performed any more. But this did not mean that the theaters were flooded with Nazi plays. There weren’t enough Nazi plays to make a trickle, let alone a flood. The German theater chiefly stages classics, and continued to do so in the Nazi period. The classics had suddenly become all the more necessary. And so the Nazi regime cherished the classics, at any rate when the classics had no offense in them, that is, when they were pure, that is, when they were apolitical. So Art for Art’s Sake had a second lease on life—with of course a second, somewhat revised significance.
It would seem that Art for Art’s Sake is very often what the Attorney General’s office calls a front for other activities. In Oscar Wilde’s case, it was, if you insist, a front for anarchism. In the case of the Germans of a generation ago, it was a front for Nazism and made a special appeal to the German cultured philistine who likes his art noble, archaic, and reassuring. Such was the “reaction-formation” following upon a great era of uncomfortable modernism. It is remarkable but, in that era, going to a Mozart concert could be a gesture directed against the “Jewish conspiracy in world music” (i.e., Schoenberg or, if you prefer, Kurt Weill).
What about Alienation? It is not my subject, but if it can be journalistically touted as the opposite pole from Commitment it may have some place in a discussion of the latter that would like to be dialectical or at any rate not one-sided. The term was taken by Marx from Hegel, and applied to the divorce of the laborer from the fruits, and from the significance, of his labor. From there it has declined—in recent years rather sharply—into signifying merely the younger generation’s feeling that it has been left out of things by its parents and teachers. That the term Alienation popularly has this rather unsubtle meaning only makes it the more surprising that Commitment should be popularly regarded as its opposite. When there is a relationship between the two it is surely not of opposition at all but directly temporal and causal: after being Alienated, and because one is Alienated, one the more readily Commits oneself. I am of course thinking now of the American youth who passes from merely negative revulsion against parents and teachers into espousal of a cause. But that is such a simple and old and well-known sequence that the big words, ponderously if lovingly translated from the revered German and French respectively, are not needed to describe it.
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Do the terms Commitment and Alienation serve to describe the two current ways of writing drama? At any rate, if someone said they did, one would know what plays were being referred to. The Committed playwrights are Brecht, Sartre, the social playwrights of modern England, such as John Osborne, and the new generation of German playwrights, such as Rolf Hochhuth, Peter Weiss, and Martin Walser. The Alienated playwrights are those otherwise coming under the rubric, Theater of the Absurd: Beckett, Ionesco, Genet. Peter Weiss’s Marat /Sade might even be seen as a battleground on which the armies of Commitment and Alienation fight it out. In which case, was Peter Weiss himself Committed or Alienated when he wrote that play? There has been fierce debate on the point, and this again makes me wonder if the terms must be used antithetically. No doubt not all persons seen as Alienated must also be seen as Committed. If a Commitment, as I have suggested, properly implies a radical protest, then it is not likely to be made except by those who have already made a radical break. And what we call making a radical break could also be seen as a process of recognizing that a break has already occurred: one was alienated, one was repulsed and rejected, and, knowing it, one rose up, a rebel against the alienators, against the alienating society. I am now trying to give the words back a little legitimate dignity so that they might again refer to something more than adolescent tantrums and sulks.
The alienation Marx spoke of is reflected in the literature of the epoch he spoke of and the epochs that have followed. That is well-known. Nonetheless, pure alienation would not produce art at all. The absolutely alienated worker is a desolate, a spiritually annihilated creature. He can only either languish and die or let rage give him back a portion of his humanity and rise in revolt. After the revolt, alienation will be ended in this world; and even before the revolt, it has been mitigated, rendered less complete, by revolt itself. Literature, for its part, may express and dramatize alienation in images unutterably blank and painful, yet it is exposed to the paradox that the act of doing this is not itself blank and painful. The writer takes pleasure in expressing alienation, and his audience takes pleasure in responding to the expression. Any “literature of alienation” is therefore a partial conquest of alienation, just like the fighting worker’s efforts on the barricades.
In Samuel Beckett, the positive, or non-alienated, element is not limited to factors one could isolate as purely technical or purely aesthetic. His work also has features which show moral conviction and, secondly, revolt. Godot may not be coming, but that does not diminish our moral approval of the two tramps who kept their appointment. The philosophy is firmly stoical, and the humor of the whole proceeding suggests cool defiance.
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Is this to say that Beckett is not Alienated but Committed? Not under the definition I am using, which insists on political Commitment. But could not Waiting for Godot be political theater all the same? When Jan Kott was asked: What is the place of Bertolt Brecht in the Polish theater? he answered: “We do Brecht when we want fantasy. When we want sheer realism, we do Waiting for Godot.” The most apolitical of writers—as we have already seen—can become political in given political circumstances. To be apolitical may indeed be to take a political stand, just as—notably in Poland—to be religious may be to take a political stand. And so it has been the paradoxical destiny of Godot to express the “waiting” of the prisoners of Auschwitz; as also the prisoners behind the walls and barbed wire of Walter Ulbricht; as also the prisoners behind the spiritual walls and barbed wire of totalitarian society generally; as also the prisoners behind the spiritual walls and barbed wire of societies nearer home. And there is no doubt a lesson in the fact that these things had not really ever been expressed in works that tried to express them more directly. As A. Alvarez has written:
The real destructive nihilism acted out in the extermination camps was expressed artistically only in works like Beckettt’s Endgame or Waiting for Godot, in which the naked, unaccommodated man is reduced to the role of helpless, hopeless, impotent comic, who talks and talks and talks in order to postpone for a while the silence of his own desolation.
But this is to put it too negatively. Estragon and Vladimir do not only wait. In waiting—the original title is “En attendant Godot”—they show human dignity. They have kept their appointment even if Godot has not kept his. A lot of comment on Beckett has gone wrong in taking for granted that Godot will not come, but hope does spring eternal, and even Auschwitz prisoners hoped to get out. In this element of hope lies the politics of the play. Without it, Godot would be anti-political, inviting its audience to lose itself in complete despair or to seek redemption from despair outside the world depicted (presumably in the other world of religion).
Many a play acquires urgency through special circumstances, and one should think of political drama less in terms of the script alone, than in terms of when and where it is presented, not to mention how.
What I have said up to now is essentially about literature in general, or about the drama as literature, but there exists a drama of Commitment which is not just another instance of the literature of Commitment. It is theater, and puts its message across in a special way, a way that is perhaps specially suitable to the purposes of a Committed author. It also differs from other forms of drama, and especially from the traditional patterns of tragedy and comedy. Let me again—and this time at some length—cite The Deputy.
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A priest was quoted in the press as saying that it would all have mattered so little if only The Deputy had not been a play. This comment suggests, more than anything one is likely to read in dramatic criticism, that a play can somehow both focus and enlarge discontent. Books have been written on Catholicism and the Nazis, some of them with a viewpoint similar to Hochhuth’s, and one more such book would make little difference. The Deputy made a big difference, so we are authoritatively informed, because it is a play. A play—this is the first meaning we derive from the statement—is by definition a “dramatization”: it brings out what is memorable and striking in the material, possibly to the point of sensationalism. Dramaturgy implies a whole armory of devices for bringing order out of the chaos of facts and fictions. Greater intelligibility reinforces greater vividness. The unmanageable becomes manageable, even as the blurred becomes the clear. It is not hard to see what interested parties have to fear. If they have a bad conscience they have to fear the dies irae when the truth will suddenly out and the malefactors will be punished. They have to fear the hard outline which a play can draw around the truth; they have to fear the power of conviction a play can carry. If they have a good conscience they have to fear what they will see as the specious plausibility of the drama. Pirandello has it that life, because it is fact, need not be plausible, but that art, because it is fiction, has plausibility as its sine qua non. How terrible, then, the plausibility of a fiction which poses as fact! Pirandello used to notice how much more cogent were his mad wife’s fantasies than his own recollection of the truth. How ruefully those who consider The Deputy a mad fantasy of Hochhuth’s must think of their own unavailing efforts to counter the play with. their recollection of the truth! They cannot but consider Hochhuth’s recourse to the dramatic form as in itself a trick.
Luckily for their peace of mind, such persons all seem to have found The Deputy quite a bad play. Consequently, though they must resent the fact that Hochhuth resorted to the dramatic form at all, they cannot but rejoice that (as they see it) he failed to exploit that form for anything like what it is worth. Yet even this is cold comfort, since, in the first place, the dramatic form has a special impressiveness even when handled with only moderate skill and, secondly, more importantly, since it is not just a form of writing that is in question but a particularly potent form of presentation: enactment before an audience. Here again, one may have a low opinion of the particular manifestation: one may fault the actors, the directors, and even the audience. But here again there are forces which remain operative when actors, director, and audience leave much to be desired. Theater is sur-real. The little ritual of performance, given just a modicum of competence, can lend to the events represented another dimension, a more urgent reality. And, to the actual, present force of the enactment for the spectators who are there, one must add its symbolic force for those who hear about it. Putting Pius XII on stage at all is a highly charged act; and, so far from being illegitimate, a feeling of shock that he was put on stage is part of the game, and was in the cards from the beginning.
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The Puritans were always right in their apprehensions, whatever one thinks of their ethics, and it was with their usual well-grounded fear that they always tried to stop this or that from being represented on a public stage. And the Puritans’ anti-type, Queen Cleopatra, agrees with them that the worst way of being exhibited for disapproval would be to be exhibited on a public stage. Once again, the feeling arises that a swindle is involved. On stage, falsehood is not merely uttered, it seems to become truth. You see Pius XII in three dimensions actually doing those dreadful things which, actually—but this second actually is weaker than the first—he did not do.
To the fear of the theatrical occasion, add fear of the theater as an institution. Again, those who feel the fear do know what they are afraid of. A churchman readily understands the power of the theater because it is a power that resembles his own. Putting it brutally, both church and theater lend themselves to demagogy. Each one at its best tries to inspire and edify but, when not at its best, is content to seduce and degrade. Men on a stage, like men in a pulpit, have their histrionic opportunities maximized, while those in the plush seats or wooden pews are placed in a position of maximum vulnerability. A maximum of eloquence and magic from those in charge, with an audience or congregation that is not allowed to answer back! Neither church nor theater has evolved in an atmosphere of rationality, let alone of give-and-take.
What must be especially galling to the churchman today is that the stage sometimes has the edge over the pulpit. For one thing, the modern theater audience is not limited to a particular congregation but is general. It, and not the church, is truly catholic. There had been criticism of Pius XII among the faithful but the news had scarcely spread beyond the faithful. Hochhuth was more dangerous because of his general audience, as Cardinal Spellman acknowledged in his devious way when accusing the playwright of stirring up strife between Christian and Jew. No doubt there are advantages in the church’s holiness, real or assumed, but, where criticism is concerned, the greater advantage lies with harsh secularity. That the theater may have its origin in religion, and has sometimes kept company with religion, should not prevent us from seeing how thoroughly secular an institution it still is and how inclined it is to take full advantage of its secularity. Thus the theater takes Pius XII out of the dim candlelight of the church and turns its spotlight on him. He may never recover. Naturally, those who revered him were offended: it was their reverence that had kept him in twilight. Of course there is fearful vulgarity in a Pope’s becoming a topic of chitchat at Sardi’s and the Algonquin, but from Hochhuth’s standpoint that is the price to be paid for the right to discuss Pius with eyes no longer closed in prayer, in tones no longer hushed by awe. There is no need for a theater of cruelty, for theater is itself cruel. . . .
If only The Deputy had not been a play! That is one of the two most pointed things that can be said about it. The other is: but is The Deputy really a play?
People putting this second question have generally had in mind that The Deputy is inordinately documentary. Hochhuth has unloaded bucketfuls of factual reports, and actual quotations, into his dialogue. That, we say, is not drama but history. However, our saying so turns out to be a criticism only of particular passages. The fault which people find in the play as a whole is that it is not historical enough. They find it, on the contrary, too melodramatic. They complain that this is a stage villain of a Pope, whereas the actual Pius XII had pleasingly human traits that are not shown in the play. Actually, then, their complaint is not that The Deputy is not a play, but that it is only a melodramatic play.
Since evidently what is being called for is an unmelodramatic Deputy, we are entitled to ask what such a work would be like. Presumably it would be a play in which Pius’s bad traits were balanced by good traits. The laws of dramatic structure would then bring it about that Pius’s antagonist, Father Fontana, would also have his good traits balanced by bad ones. At least one critic actually observed of The Deputy that Bernard Shaw would have given the Pope a case. Now a “case” implies a good deal more than some pleasant character traits. A man might be pleasant, or even good, and still not have a “case” in the historical situation described. So, to characters of mixed good and evil, we must add—in this prescription for a Deputy which is a “real play”—a theme of mixed good and evil, a problem in which there is a case for both sides.
In making these technical changes in the play we would change its philosophy and remove its raison d’être. No affront would have been offered to Pius XII. Faults, in a context of non-faults, only make a man the more human, and so the more amiable. If in his turn the good Father Fontana has some notable faults, the score is evened up, and Hochhuth’s play has been made over into something completely innocuous, proving only what would be conceded in advance, and enunciating the world-shaking principle that none of us is perfect.
And yet the theory of drama behind the criticism of Hochhuth is a well-proven one. It is true that Saint Joan (for example) becomes a better play because of the weight Shaw gives to the other side. Saint Joan does show a conflict of right with right, and a fascinating kind of conflict it is, and one which the art of drama is well suited to present.
In a sense, the play Hochhuth’s critics wanted him to write had already and triumphantly been written. It is Schiller’s Don Carlos. On the face of it, Philip is the villainous tyrant, Posa, the virtuous rebel. But Schiller then does just what, as students of the drama, we may wish him to do: he gives Philip a kind of Tightness and some endearing personal traits, while he offsets the more obvious Tightness of Posa’s arguments with a personal arrogance which can only horrify us. Indeed, the play is in the end more damaging to Posa than to Philip, and it could be that critics of Hochhuth who have limited their demands to more sympathy for Pius really wanted no sympathy at all for Father Fontana.
I have implied that if The Deputy humanized Pius, and stated a case for him, then the play would be affirming something as interesting and significant as ten minus ten equals zero. But why should this be so? The statement would not apply to Don Carlos. There, the humanizing of Philip, and the statement of a case for him, adds to the meaning and to the dramatic tension. What is the difference?
We can get at it, I think, by asking what would happen if Don Carlos were rewritten on the lines of The Deputy. Philip would then be pure tyrant, Posa, pure idealist. Thousands of German readers and spectators have actually taken them this way, and enjoyed the play very much. It disturbed no preconceptions; on the contrary, it made a very reassuring melodrama. Polemically speaking—and we are speaking of polemics—Hochhuth’s project is very different. He is taking a respected figure, and removing every reason why we should respect him.
Is it fair to remove even objective evidence that there were things about Pius to respect? If this were a biography, it would simply be unfair. But drama is not only more selective than biography, it is selective according to different principles. It never lays claim to an interest in all of a man, but only in that part of him that is manifest in a chosen and partially fabricated action. A playwright may start with a historical figure, but that does not absolve him from the job of putting him through the mill (or sausage machine, if you insist) of the drama. By all means, if a Shavian drama on Pius XII were planned, then a case for Pius would emerge: Shaw would even invent positive and likable traits for him, as he did for Cauchon, but the net result in a Shavian drama with this subject-matter would be to excuse, at least in some measure, what Pius did. Let some Shavian playwright try it: speech is free. Meanwhile, is it not also legitimate to plan a play, not in extenuation of Pius’s actions and non-actions, but in condemnation of them?
And is melodrama the best word to describe what happens if we do? I have just said that many Germans have taken Don Carlos as melodrama, and have enjoyed it as such. The last clause is essential. To convert material into melodrama is to rearrange it for our delectation: it must be fun. Is The Deputy fun, and should it be? Was Hochhuth’s aim a stirring narrative, spiced with a facile appeal to conventional notions of right and wrong? Surely we are not approaching an understanding of his enterprise by this route. Let us try another.
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Let us ask: from what realities does Hochhuth start? Clearly, with the realities of the Nazi era and the Nazi regime. Now if he had put Hitler onstage, one can imagine how monstrous the characterization would have been. Consequently some people would have said: “This is very unfair. The Fuehrer actually loved dogs and children. He was nice to Eva Braun. Some of his social policies brought real welfare to thousands of people.” A playwright could indeed bring in enough of such items to balance exactly the negative traits. In that way, certain demands could be met. I could argue that, even as truth, a portrait of that man conceived in hatred might be more valid than one written according to the dogma that all men are a blend of good and evil, but my point here is that the aim of a play is not portraiture, and that the choice of such material as this does not arise from the desire merely to state what went on.
It is not likely that a play would be written about Hitler in the first place except to express, not merely disapproval, but outrage. Bernard Shaw did try to represent him in the Shavian vein: the efforts (in Geneva) has very little value or significance. Charlie Chaplin’s effort (in The Great Dictator) has more value and significance insofar as Chaplin was outraged, but has limited value and significance in that the outrages of Hitler cannot find adequate expression in the art of Charlie Chaplin. . . .
Two things stand out in our time: first, that gigantic outrages against mankind are constantly being committed and, second, that mankind is not outraged by them. As the outrages themselves increase in scope, our ability to respond to them diminishes. Have we got used to them? Have we grown bored by them? Can we tell ourselves someone invented them, and they didn’t really happen? Were they at least vastly exaggerated? These questions are all active in our little brains and nervous systems, mingling with each other in a fashion logically indefensible but psycho-logically irresistible.
The crassest rationalization of all is that outrage is a name for what others do to us, and never for what we do to them. A factor Americans have not understood about German anti-Semitism is that the Germans at the time felt too outraged by the Jews to feel outraged for them. You will retort that they had no right to feel that way, and I will retort that that is just my point, and applies to the lack of widespread outrage in America over the bombing of Hiroshima. Americans at the time were full of the horrors, real and imaginary, which the Japanese had perpetrated against Americans.
Each country, today, has a bad conscience, and particularly the great powers, but each is very concerned to disown it by the diversionary maneuver of incessant talk about the misdemeanors of others. The others may in each case have much more than a mote in their eye, yet that is no reason for denying the beam in one’s own. The politicians are not concerned to cure this disease, they are concerned to exploit it, and so what would like to regard itself as a dialogue between East and West is only a recriminatory harangue. The other side is bad, and responsible for everything that is wrong. Our side (whichever our side is) is good, and even its most hideous actions are necessities imposed by the other fellow’s iniquity. If you are looking for melodrama, my friends, don’t look in Hochhuth’s The Deputy, look in your morning newspaper.
Luckily for our sanity, there have been objections, and especially from men of religion and men of thought, from Pope John to Martin Buber, from Martin Luther King to Arnold Toynbee, from Bertrand Russell to Walter Lippmann. And the young people are in eruption. As for artists, Hochhuth can be taken as representative of those among them who see their task at this time to lie in what we may call declarations of conscience. Of course, the aim is not to show that Hitler had a human side. The reason for presenting Hitler would be to show that a human being can, to all intents and purposes, become unhuman and monstrous. That is Outrage Number One. And Outrage Number Two is that so many men were not outraged—are not outraged. Some worshipped Hitler. Some gave him sneaking respect. Many thought that, well, he wasn’t as ineffective as a lot of other people. Some merely accepted him, whether from fear of the alternative, inertia, or completely openminded skepticism.
What Hochhuth believes to have been the attitude of the historical Pius XII entails a particular outrage. Pius was no Nazi: his conscience might have been clearer if he had been. Pius loved reactionary, old Germany, and dreaded more than anything else atheistic, new Russia. Things he would hear about what his Germans were doing would make him nervous, but he would not let himself become their enemy like the Russians. Was he not Christ’s Deputy in the war against anti-Christian Communism? So Pius XII left the Jews to their fate. Auschwitz was liberated by his enemies, the Russian atheists.
For Hochhuth, Pius embodies a double offense. Politically, he falls into the trap, or remains in the rut, of imagining that all will be well provided only we are always and exclusively anti-Communist. Morally, this representative of Jesus turns out to be a Pontius Pilate, washing his hands of the moral issue that faced him. So finally he does not represent Christ but, instead, represents all those in our time who, while refusing open, enthusiastic support to the Monster, give him an acquiescence that is really carte blanche. Americans who give carte blanche to Presidents to wage unjust wars have no grounds for feeling superior to Pius.
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I have mentioned that a play was written in Pius’s defense, and I have suggested that that kind of thing is doomed to failure, because all that can be brought to Pius’s defense is an argument. Anyone who would write a counter-Hochhuth has already made the mistake of assuming that what The Deputy presents is an argument against Pius. But the real “offense” of Hochhuth is precisely that he takes for granted that Pius is indefensible and that no argument could make any difference. That is the kind of play The Deputy is. Of course, Hochhuth makes assumptions that not all can accept. Of course, his play is not addressed to everybody. Yet, in one sense, it is addressed to everybody, for it assumes that right and wrong are known to the human heart, and that if we choose to brush aside all ideology and opinion and current politics, we will recognize an outrage when we see it. To make the outrage visible, Hochhuth concentrates upon it, isolates it, shows his Pope Pius as wholly outrageous. And in an unexpected way. Hochhuth bypasses the argument most readily available to him: that Pius was afraid of Hitler. Cowardice would make Pius little but it would also make him human. This Pius is un human in that he is cold, callous, cut off from others, lacking in imagination about them. He cannot feel. He is a non-human human, and, in the circumstances, of all human types the one least able to represent Jesus Christ. To the extent that the Hochhuth portrait is thought of as the historical Pius XII, it is an even more terrible indictment than Catholic spokesmen have realized.
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If Don Carlos and Saint Joan are precedents, the prototype is Antigone. But for my present purposes we need to imagine an Antigone more primitive than that of Sophocles, which is after all a late and highly sophisticated reading. Sophocles may not, as some moderns think, have made Creon as sympathetic as Antigone herself, but he did offer him a partial sympathy, and when we do that we are on the road toward Schiller and Shaw, at the end of which road stands Anouilh with an Antigone who is simply a neurotic and a Creon who is a rather sensible chap. With Brecht’s Antigone, in which the heroine is wholly right, and Creon an inhuman tyrant, we are starting out again where we may presume the story to have originated in pre-Sophoclean days.
Those who tell us that this spells melodrama rather than tragedy should not take us aback. We should, on the contrary, let them spur us on to look at what happens when tragedy is not attempted. Take the question of how plays end. Tragedy, and for that matter comedy, farce, and melodrama end with a suggestion of either pessimism or optimism. A pessimistic ending tells us that nothing can be done. An optimistic ending tells us that nothing need be attempted: since everything is already all right, we should feel reconciled to the All. It is in fact hard to put an ending on a play that does not have some such conclusiveness, optimistic or pessimistic. Yet an attempt—often known as the bitter ending—has been made from time to time, and it is bitter because it is not a true ending at all, but is open at the end. We associate it with tragicomedy, and it has a special point in activist drama, polemical drama, drama of Commitment, because it says: what happens after this is up to you, the public.
A classical instance of such tragicomedy of Commitment would be Brecht’s Good Woman of Setzuan. The fortunes of the protagonist go from bad to worse. There can be no comic denouement, but the author will not provide any final cataclysm either. As soon as the main character’s position is clearly revealed as an impasse, Brecht refuses to stage a final catastrophe, and, as to denouement, asks the audience to devise one—offstage. Which is only making completely explicit what much bitter, activist tragicomedy had been doing for generations. (There is a similar explicitness to the end of Threepenny Opera. John Gay had already indicated at the close of his Beggar’s Opera that what is happening is what happens in Opera, not life. Brecht’s version of things is not complete till the audience understands that the relation of art and life, here, is that of illusion and reality, false propaganda and fact.)
And at this point, to clear up a possible misunderstanding about Brecht might well be to clear up a misunderstanding about the whole problem of drama and propaganda. The term, Propaganda, was often applied to Brecht with no other intention than to damage him. It was inevitable, then, that those of us who came to his defense should take either the line that his work was “not propaganda” or the line that it was “more than” propaganda. And I should add that I still think the second of these lines is correct. But polemics, while always needed, always distort problems, and one way they do so is by luring the polemicist into positions he would never take except in the heat of argument. In this way, those who took Brecht’s part were often lured into implying that there is something deplorable about propaganda as such. Hence if Brecht was “more than” propaganda it could only be “in spite of” propaganda, and even “in contradiction to” the propaganda, not just “in addition” to it.
Brecht the person and Brecht the advocate were not always at one, and some of his plays become more, rather than less, dramatic because the advocate is outdone by the person. There is a tension between where Brecht wanted his sympathies to be and where they actually were. From this tension, his plays sometimes benefit. In stating this much we are on firm ground. But the ground is less firm when we imply that Brecht was well served only by his unconscious, and is only dramatic unbeknown to himself and in spite of himself. How much respect can one have for an intellectual playwright who is so much less aware of what he is doing than his critics are? And is it fair to offer Brecht the backhanded compliment implicit in this kind of criticism without first examining his work in the terms he himself proposes?
It would surely be fair to question the motives of the critics as rigorously as they have questioned the motives of Brecht. I discern a negative motive and a positive one. The negative one is to discredit the doctrinal content of Brecht’s work, the positive one is to vindicate him on entirely traditional lines—and thus make of him essentially a traditional artist working in the principal accepted genres. Stage directors with this viewpoint present Brecht as a “classic,” bearing witness to the unchanging human tragedy and comedy. His plays tend, however, not to get across when presented in this way, and that surely is a rather conclusive, if pragmatic, refutation of the viewpoint.
Suppose that, on the other hand, one were to apply to Brecht the theory which Rolf Zimmermann has applied to Hochhuth? Herr Zimmermann maintains that there exists, beside the main traditions of literature, a tradition of polemic. Having its own aim, polemical theater has its own method. The aim being to recreate the author’s sense of outrage, the method is not to use “rounded,” “human,” equally-right-and-wrong characters, but enactors of the outrageous on the one hand and, on the other, victims of outrage and rebels against outrage. The ending will be the open one of bitter tragicomedy. . . . A Brecht production infused with this idea does get across to its audience, as has many times been proved. I suggest, then, that it would be wise to take his plays (except for the very early ones) as in the first instance Theater of Commitment, whatever else they may be as well.
That Brecht’s plays are Theater of Commitment but other things as well has won him approval of a sort from critics who did not share his commitment, but The Deputy is Theater of Commitment and nothing else, and so Hochhuth is open to attack both by those who don’t share his convictions and by those who insist on the canons of conventional drama. His play has been little praised, and yet one cannot believe that it made the impression it did solely because of its subject. The history of literature is strewn with works on big subjects that make no impression at all. It could even be said that the subject of the Nazis had become boring until Hochhuth came along with a play on that subject. But if we wish to know if Hochhuth’s play is a success we have only to remind ourselves that the purpose of this kind of play is to communicate a sense of outrage. And it has communicated a sense of outrage. Is it not Hochhuth’s sense of outrage that his opponents are upset by? Surely they didn’t get as angry as they did just because they disagreed? The problem, to recapitulate, is that this is, successfully, a play. If only it were a play of ideas, one could handle it by argument. And if it were a play of ideas by Shaw, one could observe what a strong case he had put for Pius. But the author of The Deputy is outraged by Pius, and communicates his sense of outrage in a manner that would not seem to brook No for an answer. You have to enter into it, let your heart respond to it—or move out of its path and be outraged by it.
To whom does the Theater of Commitment address itself? Not to everyone. It has human enemies; and human beings who admire the enemies, or enjoy some kind of solidarity with them, cannot but detach themselves and walk out. An enemy does not make a good audience. What about allies? It could be said that they don’t need preaching to. Yet propaganda can serve the purposes of ritual, one of which is to confirm people in their convictions and prepare them for renewed struggle. But the ideal audience for the Theater of Commitment is, I think, neither one set of militants nor the other, but rather a mass of people in the middle, who may be vaguely sympathetic to the cause preached but are a little sluggish and sleepy about it. They may assent but they are not really committed, and the purpose of the Drama of Commitment is not to be for Commitment but to get people to commit themselves. Could not most of us say we belong to this audience, and does not the Theater of Commitment have, by that token, a large enough clientele?
Yet another reason why The Deputy is a crucial instance of Commitment is that Hochhuth writes not only for this audience but about it. This is the play about the Nazis that is not about the Nazis but about those who were “a little sluggish and sleepy” in opposing them. The common view is that the leading Nazis bore most of the guilt, a little of which rubbed off on those who went along. Hochhuth would put far more of the guilt on the fellow travelers, and his presentation forces us to realize how much could have been done against the Nazis which was not done. Now a dramatist cannot but present individual cases and in picking his chief individual target Hochhuth made a choice that was perhaps malicious and certainly audacious: the titular head of our soi-disant Christian civilization. But in Germany, certainly, this Holy Father can easily stand for a lot of other fathers, the fathers of very many of Hochhuth’s own generation. This character “is” many middle-aged and elderly Germans of today who claim a spotless record but who can be shown to have been no better than neutral and maybe quite a bit worse. That, though, is only to say that they are “a little sluggish and sleepy,” that they are you and I, and that they and we are Hochhuth’s audience.
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As long as such an audience exists, and urgent reasons exist why it should be roused from its semi-slumber, there is a place for a literature of Commitment, and as long as certain people live in special dread of plays (“Please, God, let it not be a play!”), there is a place for a Theater of Commitment. Any dent that any theater can make in the world is no doubt small, but theater people who on that account give up the effort as hopeless are generally agreeing to make no dent at all. Writing some years ago about T. S. Eliot’s wish that Murder in the Cathedral might have made inroads on Nazism, I said that this play or any other would have been no use against the SS and the Wehrmacht. There are times when the poet may be called upon to drop the pen and take up, if not the sword, then whatever is the most effective implement of direct action. The years 1942-5 were such times, if such times ever were. And if one were Vietnamese one might well feel that the 1960’s were also such a time. In the United States, the situation is different indeed. Here the point, surely, is not more violence but less. Here the point is to subjugate the machine and tame the beast. Here every action and word in the direction of gentleness and restraint is so much to the good. One could say the need was for civilization, just that. One could say: education. But there is an urgency which neither word suggests, and therefore one must out with it and say: there is a need for propaganda.
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People tell me that America is so far gone in television, radio, and movies, that the poor old stage is as obsolete as the horse and buggy. Obviously that is not true, or our priest could not have been so dismayed to find that The Deputy was a play. The idea that the theater is obsolete reflects the wish of vested interests that it may become obsolete. The theater is a threat but would cease to be so were it swamped by the media. It represents what the powers behind the media wish to have swamped. It is the last refuge, or one of the last refuges, of personal association, of the simple assembly of persons with common interests in something less huge and overpowering than a stadium. A theatrical event is nothing more than itself: it is not simultaneously seen or heard by the nation. There is nothing to it but what each person present can see and hear; it is a self-contained human transaction.
Which is not only part of its charm but part of its value, and is beginning to be felt as such. The young people who are in eruption in America today are not stuck in front of TV sets. It is more often their parents who are to be found in that pitiful posture. The rebellious young have walked out on their parents. They are on the streets outside playing their guitars. These are years that have even produced a theater called Theater in the Street.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with television. When run by human beings for human beings, that invention will be seen to have possibilities. It still won’t duplicate the function of theater. Theater is people present: actors present on stage, spectators present out front, a living contact between the two groups. Everything we call theater is in that electrico-human circuit, which neither TV nor movies will ever be able to set up. Even when improved, TV will be of the new, mechanized, bigscale world, like Clark Kerr’s multiversity. Certainly, theater is old-fashioned in belonging to the old, intimate, small-scale world. More old-fashioned and also more new-fashioned, because the new generation is defecting in droves from what the middle-aged say is modern and up-to-date. There is no substitute for live human contact. Theater has the same appeal as coffeehouses have proved to have, and in fact, in New York today, there is a more lively theater in the coffeehouses than in the Broadway show shops. As William James made clear, there is something bad about all bigness in human organizations, and the anarchists are certainly on to something when they insist on holding on to the small groups, the personal meetings-together, at all costs. The theater, accordingly, is an institution for Jamesians and anarchists, and for the Jamesian and anarchist in each of us, to hold on to.
I see that my subject is shifting, here at the close, from Theater of Commitment to a possible commitment which we might make to theater. What is the connection between the two themes? A theater on the street would not necessarily stage The Deputy. A coffeehouse theater would not necessarily concern itself with Brecht. But there is a degree of “subversion” in the act of theater itself. Wherever “two or three are gathered,” a blow is struck against the abstract, non-gatherings of the TV audience as well as against the gatherings of expense-account mobs on Broadway. A blow is struck for the old and obsolete which—if we are lucky (or just persistent?)—shall be the new and modern. Subversiveness, rebellion, revolution in the theater are not just a matter of program, much less are they to be defined in terms of a particular kind of play.
And as for the particular kind of play I have chiefly been talking about, if it does not have much effect on the world, it may yet have quite a salutary effect on the theater, always provided that the world consents to go on existing. I make no prophecies. I simply remark that, in the drama of the 1960’s, the Theater of Commitment is the principal new presence. There are reasons both political and theatrical to welcome it.
1 Copyright © 1966 by Eric Bentley, printed by permission of Brandeis University.
