ABSTRACT
At a moment when the poststructuralist critic is busy trying to unveil the latent production of a bourgeois ideology in literary and critical texts it might be interesting to look at the work of a writer who specially constructs texts in which this same ideology is shown as manifesting itself, whose project is to stage an unveiling, to fictionalize this manifesting of a latent content. In terms of poststructuralist theory the famous estrangement effect ( Verfremdungse.ffekt), the gestic style, the appeal to the spectator, may be seen as symbolic devices designed to disrupt the imaginary unity between producer and text, actor and role, and spectator and stage, an enterprise which is similar in spirit to Barthes's project in S/Z (1975) and A Lover's Discourse (1978); in the latter text the titles and marginal notes have an effect he describes as 'a la Brecht' (1978, p. 5), encouraging an estrangement effect at the same time as an identification. For Brecht reality is to be seen as produced by men and women and as transformable by them. The world is not fixed and given. Even contradictions do not exist at the level of the real: only human beings produce them. Whether Brecht's theory and practice is intent on showing that these contradictions can be abolished, or whether he merely suggests that the labour of men and women should be directed towards resolving them is an open question, one which may be followed up in the attempt to unveil the unveiler . As the Series editor's foreword stresses we can no longer rely on a 'clear demarcation between "creative" (primary) writing on the one hand, and "critical" (secondary) texts on the other' (p. vii). The act of 'crossing over' (p. viii) from one to the other is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in the work of Brecht, whose greatest significance for us today, I will argue, lies in his many theoretical works and fragments, as well as in the theory that we can extrapolate from his often contradictory 'pieces' (Stucke), as he calls his plays, which have the fruitful habit of continuing to spawn further contradictions. It is not my brief to write a study which deals with the historical Brecht by looking at the influence upon him of movements, such as expressionism and surrealism; the tracing of influences is not relevant to this kind of reading for it precludes
being historical about the text itself. It is surely more Brechtian to look for a new historical context for the old theories.
