SOURCE: Ruppert, Peter. “Brecht and Frisch: Two Theaters of Possibility.” Mosaic 15, no. 3 (September 1982): 109-20.

[In the following essay, Ruppert contrasts the aesthetic orientations of Bertolt Brecht and Frisch.]

With few exceptions critics have approached Frisch's experimentation in the theater as an extension of Brechtian forms.¹ Claims of continuity and influence are generally based on the brief personal friendship of the two playwrights, on their shared thematic interests and concerns, and especially on their use of the “model” or parable form.² The image of Frisch emerging from these comparisons is that of a somewhat reluctant exponent of epic theater who is attracted by Brecht's formal theories but who resists Brecht's ideological commitments. Thus Frisch is often characterized as “wider Willen—ein Brecht-Adept.”³ Generally overlooked in these comparisons are Frisch's quite unBrechtian assumptions about the nature of dramatic art. In focusing on political and ideological distinctions, critics have minimized fundamental differences in the esthetic orientations of the two playwrights, differences that reflect fundamentally opposing poles in the modern theater and opposing perspectives in modern art in general. Although parallels do exist in these orientations, they stem from altogether different philosophical premises and divergent views on dramatic theory and praxis. These deep-seated differences become clear if one compares Frisch's views on possibility, as he formulated them for his “theater of permutation,” with Brecht's views on possibility expressed in his discussions of “dialectical theater.”

Frisch's central quarrel with Brecht rests on premises that stress the incommensurability of words and experience. Like many writers for whom language has become a “prison house,” Frisch questions the capacity of language to express the complexity, the ambiguity and the continual flux of existential experience. In an early entry in his Tagebuch 1946-1949 he writes that language “carves away all that is not mystery, and all narrating signifies a distancing. It should not shock us therefore that everything, when reduced to the word, devolves into a certain emptiness.”⁴ For Frisch any narrative recounting of experience through language involves an inevitable reduction of the rich contingency of life itself to a finished model of experience. While such reduction provides a narrative text with specificity and dramatic intensity, it eliminates the sense of contingency and possibility from which human action is “carved.” As he sees it, instead of a comprehensive representation of human experience, narrative art provides an artificial linguistic model that inevitably distorts experience.

Because of this gap between word and world, Frisch believes that mimetic art (as an attempt to record reality) is postulated on a fundamental misunderstanding. Mimetic theater (Imitiertheater) is for Frisch “a total mistake,” for it perpetrates the “illusion” that members of the audience, “as voyeurs, take part in reality” and thus constitutes a fundamental fraud.⁵ This apodictic separation of art and life is the key to Frisch's esthetic; theater is poesis, not mimesis. According to Frisch, ancient drama, medieval drama and Shakespearean drama were not imitative, and he applauds the battle against mimetic theater exemplified in the work of Peter Handke, Dürrenmatt, Beckett and others. Even Brecht's plays, Frisch argues, do not reproduce the world but instead present a “model of the Brecht-Marxist thesis, the desirability of a different, non-existent world: poetry.”⁶

This rejection of mimesis on the basis of the reifying tendencies of language is consistent with Frisch's Pirandellian dread of any “form” that denies the possibilities of consciousness (whether ideology, myth or “graven image”) and his fascination with the dramatic expression of chance and permutation. Although theater cannot reproduce “reality” without falsifying it, it can nevertheless explore its essential nature—its fictiveness—playfully. Thus a highly selfconscious theater becomes desirable for Frisch because by revealing itself as artifice it avoids the problem of transcribing “reality” in the first place and further works to subvert the tradition of mechanistic patterns and plot-structures which, in Frisch's view, generate misleading conceptions of causality and necessity.

Frisch's views on causality are best seen in the context of his objections to the Brechtian parable form—on which he had earlier consciously constructed his plays Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958) and Andorra (1961). He expresses his dissatisfaction by noting that even though the parable is not mimetic and “does not claim to be a story about something that actually happened,” its temporal/causal structure—in reducing change, contingency and permutation—gives the impression of necessity to a sequence of events simply because they are presented in a linear fashion (“Interview,” p. 2). He refers to the dramaturgy of the parable as a “Dramaturgie der Fügung” and relegates to this category not only Brecht's plays but his own work prior to Biografie: Ein Spiel (1967) as well as most of western drama.⁷ According to Frisch, this “dramaturgy of necessity” is based on views of causality and chronology that are fallacious. As long as the spectator is allowed to perceive only one of the possible outcomes of any event, the impression he receives is one of necessity and determinism, and the open-endedness and possibility that saturate human experience are lost. In short, in the well-made world of the well-made play chance and contingency are eliminated as structural flaws. By contrast, a theater of permutation would build chance and contingency into the narrative structure itself.

Frisch first experimented with fictional variations in his novel Mein Name sei Gantebein (1964). Here, the key phrase “Ich stelle mir vor” indicates that the events, actions and characters described all occur in the realm of possibility rather than actuality. The novel makes no pretense of recounting how its events actually happened (which we never know) but suggests only how they might have happened, fictionally. Instead of presenting a linear narrative whose events are linked by cause and effect, the novel explores the permutations possible, the variations that—given chance and choice—are potentially as “real” as the events that are presumably actualized. It is Frisch's conviction that “a narrative … can never signify that with the same figures in the same environment an entirely different narrative could not have taken place, a different role (Partie) than the one that became history, biography or world history” (Drama., p. 9).

To incorporate possibility in a similar manner into the play, Frisch has turned to the rehearsal situation. The provisional nature of the rehearsal epitomizes the sense of potential variations that Frisch wants to preserve in the play's final form. His goal is a dramatic structure that retains the variability of gesture, intonation and action still possible in early rehearsals, before the play congeals into determinate, opening-night form. Biografie was constructed on these speculations. The major criticism that has been leveled at the play, however, is that, despite its new dramaturgy, it not only fails to provide the sense of open-endedness and playfulness that the theory promises but appears to contradict even the theory on which it is constructed.⁸

The action of Biografie: Ein Spiel, which Frisch describes as trivial, can be summarized briefly: Professor Kürmann, a behavioral scientist (whose reputation rests on an accidental discovery later proved to be in error) is given the opportunity to go back in his life and to revise his biography by choosing differently at certain critical junctures. His predominant wish is to avoid his unhappy marriage to Antoinette, whom he met at a party celebrating his academic promotion. He attempts by various means to defuse the possibility of this first meeting (for example, he joins the Communist Party in order to prevent his promotion). But no matter how often he repeats and varies the incidents of his biography, he continues to meet Antoinette, and the unhappy marriage ensues. Toward the end of the play, when Antoinette is given the same opportunity to choose, she succeeds rather easily in terminating the marriage by simply walking out. Because Kürmann (ironically “man of choice”) is unable to realize a “biography without Antoinette” on his own, because he repeats again and again the essential pattern of his “original” biography, the overall impression is one of determinism and even destiny.

Frisch's real interest in Biografie is not this “story” of Kürmann's life, however, but the structure of variation theater, which he describes as “a continual rehearsal.” Essentially, Frisch's method is to fragment the performance into episodic, provisional sketches that Kürmann is free to vary as often as he likes. To indicate that a variation is being played, the performance alternates between acting light and working light. Frisch cautions in his Author's Note (published with the play) that “the alternation of acting light and working light does not represent the alternation of illusion and reality. The acting light indicates that a variation is being tried out, a variation of the reality that never appears on stage.”⁹ By presenting only discontinuous fictional variations Frisch sought to cancel the continuity of time and the sense of causality that emerges with the passing of time. We see Kürmann's biography in the form of free floating, montage-like segments in which he is free “to repeat, to try out, to change” any part of his “original” biography. In suspending variations outside of time and prior to action, Frisch attempted to present the playful reflections of consciousness, the fortuitousness of thought itself, before choice and action reduce possibilities to a specific, concrete form.

In trying to account for the apparent failure of this structure to produce a sense of unlimited possibility, Frisch appealed to the inherent illusionistic tendencies of theater (“The stage proved me wrong. The stage has more of an illusionary power than I wished for”) and of language (“an illusion is created over and over again through the dialogue: Now we are taking part in the real thing”). To express possibility more effectively, Frisch concludes, theater must eliminate all vestiges of imitation, even language: “One would have to continue … by digressing much more radically from all, let us call it natural content, from all styles of performance which are still relatively close to imitation. … The theater regains a consciousness of itself by reducing itself to the play of the body, the pantomime, to different kinds of dance. The word does not matter any more, or it matters very little” (“Interview,” p. 3).

Not only is language unable to record the contingency of experience without fatally reducing it; Frisch now sees in its linear, consecutive quality an inducement to the false sense of causality inspired by illusionistic performance. Because events presented on the stage succeed one another in time, the spectator's impulse is to establish a cause and effect relationship between them. Frisch had hoped that a theater of pure permutation which presented not actuality—not the events themselves—but only the possibility out of which choices are actualized, would free the spectator from the sense of necessity and create in him an awareness of the potential variations in any event before it becomes actual, that is, before it becomes history or biography. His experience with Biografie convinced him that ultimately only the elimination of language itself could produce the sense of diffusion, potentiality and contingency that he desired. Appropriately, Frisch uses the term “Bewußtseins-Theater” (theater of consciousness) to describe the kind of possibility he was seeking—a theater that would make substantial not action, but the very consciousness of possibility (Drama., p. 18). The difficulty is that in eliminating language from the theater, Frisch would also severely limit theater's cognitive function. The fact that he is willing to do this is an indication of his divergence from Brechtian dramaturgy.

On the surface, Frisch's attempt to reveal the variations inherent in any event shares obvious features with Brecht. What could be more Brechtian, after all, than to demonstrate the error in the view that a biography or a history expresses an inevitable progression of events? Furthermore, Frisch's strategy of presenting possible variations in Kürmann's life seeks the kind of defamiliarization and critical reflection that Brecht advocated: stimulating the spectator to an awareness of alternate possibilities. The aim of Brecht's dialectical theater was to make the spectator aware that he is not merely an observer of a reified world on the stage but an agent acting in an open world that has been formed by men and can be transformed by men. To this end Brecht, too, tried to make transparent the possibility that permeates human existence. The tension in many of Brecht's plays is precisely the tension between “what is” and “what could be.” Situations in his plays, no matter how hopeless they may seem, always suggest possible alternatives, and events, no matter how constraining, are saturated with contradictions and thus with possible permutations. Brecht understood the importance of this tension in his plays when he advised his actors to “act in such a way that the alternative emerges as clearly as possible, that [the] acting allows other possibilities to be inferred and only represents one out of the possible variants. … Whatever [the actor] doesn't do must be contained and conserved in what he does.”¹⁰

What distinguishes Brecht's views on possibility from Frisch's is the historical context in which he sets them. In Brecht's dialectical approach to history, possibility interacts with necessity: there is potentiality insofar as the future is open to variation, but there is an unavoidable measure of necessity insofar as that future can grow only out of the present situation with its historically conditioned horizons. Thus possibility implies necessity: the individual has the capacity to enact variations (and the world has the potential for change), but these variations emerge from a present actuality as it has been historically created and as it opens in a moment suspended between what is no longer and what is not yet. And this historical perspective insists on the necessity of change since it posits a future incapable of repeating the past.

Failing to recognize the central importance of the category of the future, most Brecht critics see him as directing his attacks against the injustices of the present and scoffing at utopian speculation on future possibilities. To correct this view, Jost Hermand has argued that “the category of the anticipated future has a central meaning for [Brecht]. … For whoever begins to think about the process of history and develops into a consistent dialectician with the help of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and others cannot avoid giving attention to the future, along with the past and present. That is, if one of the three components is omitted from this three-step model, the result is unhistorical and therefore undialectical thought.”¹¹ For Brecht, then, variations are historically and dialectically conditioned, and it is the movement of history into a future that makes variation possible.

Frisch's theater of possibility, by contrast, lacks a future dimension altogether—a curious quality in a dramaturgy that seeks to explore alternate possibilities. Frisch likens Biografie to “a chess game played backwards” (“Interview,” p. 3). A journey into time lost, the play looks backward from an end already known. Since the action of the play centers so completely in Kürmann's consciousness, the play has been read as an interior monologue in which the hero, dying of cancer, looks back from the protracted hour of his death and reflects upon possible variations of his biography, variations that must now remain unrealized.¹² Thus, instead of being situated in a lived continuum—in a present arrived at through choices of the past and opening to variant options toward a future—Kürmann speculates about episodes of an accomplished lifetime that might have occurred differently.

Moreover, Biografie focuses on chance, randomness and the arbitrariness of events in producing variations rather than on existential choice and action. Frisch has acknowledged that his theater of possibility is intended to make “chance plausible” (Drama., p. 9), and the few variations that Kürmann achieves are the result of chance rather than of conscious choice. For example, his joining the Communist Party fails to have the desired result (a life without Antoinette) because of random developments in world history. Kürmann's inability to control the events of his biography leads to his eventual hypostatizing of the role of chance. Instead of possible alternatives in the present or future, Kürmann's speculations resemble a series of “if/then” clauses in the past tense, speculations in the subjunctive mood.

In Biografie variation is possible only in an atemporal dimension. The performance is continually suspended, repeated, suspended again and discussed, replayed, etc., so that the sense of possibility conveyed (or at least the sense that Frisch evidently wished to convey) is of possibility not delimited—as in the natural course of things—by choice and action, but of possibility never diminished. Because of the play's “natural content”—the retelling of significant points in an individual lifetime—it nevertheless becomes clear that possibility is continually eroded by time in the sense that an individual's actions and choices delimit other possibilities. This process of delimitation—the gradual shaping of a biography—constitutes the real subject of the play, which Frisch identifies in the Author's Note as Professor Kürmann's “relationship to the fact that with the passage of time one inevitably acquires a biography.”

But Frisch, as playwright, is no less reluctant than his protagonist to accept this delimitation of possibility, even if it is in the nature of things. It is the “natural content” of the play that he has identified as the primary obstruction to the success of his experiment in “theater of possibility,” and this can signify only that Frisch's interest in possibility is an interest in a pure philosophical category. In fact, Biografie succeeds very well in demonstrating the interplay of possibility and necessity in the actualization of human choice. Kürmann recognizes very early in the “game” that changing certain episodes in his life creates significant consequences for others and limits other possibilities for himself. For example, he realizes that leaving out his first marriage would mean that his son would not be born and that staying with a girlfriend in America would mean that he could not help a Jewish refugee family escape in 1940. He gradually recognizes that an individual's biography is influenced by random events in time that are entirely contingent, and that these events mesh and interconnect in complex and determining ways with other events and other people. In identifying naturalistic performance and dialogue (language) as destructive of the sense of possibility on the stage, Frisch failed to see that his subject matter itself—the shaping of a human biography—invites this outcome. For, while the temporality of human existence is the very ground of possibility (since it is the temporality of existence that makes change possible), human beings can ground their existences only by forging choices of themselves out of the existential openness—the possibilities—of consciousness.

It was, apparently, to avoid mimetic theater that Frisch constructed Biografie on a series of purely fictional, atemporal variations and emphasized chance so heavily. But, presenting us with a world in which anything can be revoked and varied and yet, curiously, with a protagonist who is unable to make any meaningful modifications, Frisch seems merely to have increased the number of mirrors on the stage, mirrors that reflect few variations and a great deal of repetition.

Brecht's parables can also be seen as an attempt to produce an alternative to mimetic theater. Certainly, for Brecht there can be no question of theater merely copying or reproducing the world. This is evident in his well-known response to the question: “Can the present-day world be reproduced by means of theater?” Brecht replied: “The present-day world can only be described to present-day people if it is described as capable of transformation.”¹³ For Brecht, the present-day world is a historically produced and socially organized complex of institutions and intersubjective relations that is constantly in the process of changing. The task of theater, then, cannot be to reflect this massive and complex social reality, but rather to provide a cognitive contribution to that reality. As the response quoted above indicates, Brecht shifted the focus from the representational capacity of theater to the perceptual capacity of the audience. Through a variety of estrangement techniques—interruptions, songs, masks and so forth—Brecht disrupted the chain-like structures of classical narrative in order to activate the spectator to conceptualize possible variations to the action and situation onstage. Any potential transformation of the alienated and depraved worlds depicted by Brecht emerges on the reverse side of what is represented—a dialectical permutation that can be produced only by an audience facing an open-ended future. Thus, for Brecht, possibility and variation are not homologous with random, atemporal permutations to be illustrated within a dramatic text; rather they constitute a capacity within the spectator that is aroused by the dramatic text. Unlike Biografie, where purely subjective, psychological permutations result in a paralysis of thought and action, Brecht's plays stress the importance of choice and action within a social context (rather than chance) in producing possible variations to the status quo.

This is true even in those plays in which Brecht emphasizes accident and chance. In Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis, for example, chance is an important factor in shaping the history of events and the lives of the characters involved. In the play within the play Brecht speculates about a brief “golden Age of almost justice” brought about by a series of chance events that make Azdak a judge. His decisions as judge seem outrageous at first, yet they are based on kindness and reason and in this way foreground the outrages that ordinarily pass for justice. The tension that is produced by these oppositions activates the spectator to think about conditions and possible actions that could make this “accident” a concrete reality. The “new age” represented by Azdak's form of justice becomes not simply an improbable dream, a fluke occurrence, but a possible variation projected on the basis of what is presently “real.” For Brecht, accident and chance cannot simply be dismissed; they can exert powerful influence on history, but they are not ahistorical factors forever beyond the influence of human action. The role of chance can be minimized through deliberate choice and action, as in the outer frame of the play where human reason prevails. The recognition made by the spectator is that the capricious rule of chance can be replaced by the possibility of rational choice.

Brecht's spectator is brought to recognize the importance of choice and action through his interaction with the performance. Another of Brecht's parable plays, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, exemplifies how this dialectical interaction works. In the Epilogue the spectator is challenged explicitly to find a solution to the issues left open in the play itself. As in Biografie the issue focuses on the relationship between self and other, but more specifically here between the desire for personal happiness and the claims of the collective. This opposition produces a series of contradictions that stimulate the audience intellectually and emotionally to generate possible solutions to the unresolved problems depicted, ultimately arousing a desire to act.

Essentially the task set for the spectator is to imagine a social order in which “goodness to oneself” and “goodness to others” are not mutually exclusive. This basic opposition is embodied in the split-character of Shen Te/Shui Ta—two possibilities that exist within the same person. As the “good woman,” Shen Te is kind, generous and compassionate. She shares her possessions freely, loves spontaneously, and is eager to help others. The values that emerge from her actions are friendliness, cooperation, equality, peace. But in the Sezuan in which she lives—a world of strife, hunger, poverty, competition—Shen Te's kindness and generosity are self-destructive, and Shui Ta, her ruthless and aggressive alter ego, proves a timely and necessary corrective. Shui Ta is not evil; he is merely clever, manipulative and exploitative. The apparent contradiction is that in order to be kind and compassionate, Shen Te must resort to the repulsive and coercive means of Shui Ta. Her natural desire for friendliness and cooperation is dependent on the ruthless means of Shui Ta, without which she would not survive. This basic paradox stimulates the spectator to consider a host of implications. Why do humane ends require inhumane means? Is it justifiable to adopt immoral means in order to attain moral ends? Can utopian ends be achieved through nonutopian means? Are Shui Ta's methods, reprehensible as they are, ultimately more productive than Shen Te's naive goodness?

These issues (along with others) remain unresolved in the play. Although Brecht suggests several possible solutions in the Epilogue, no variations are explicitly enacted within the text. Instead, the spectator is provided with an image of a fictional world fraught with contradictions that opens out onto his own world. We recognize our world in this image in spite of its distant and exotic setting. It is not a mimetic reproduction of our world and yet it “mirrors” a social context that seems familiar and is made transparent through a process of defamiliarization. In other words, the dramatic text does not simply replicate the present reality; rather, it achieves an autonomous force in its negation of that reality. Although the play does not provide us with a concrete variation of the world negated, it implicitly and explicitly expresses a hope for a transformed world in which the basic self/other opposition is mediated in a more rational way.

This hope is expressed explicitly through the character of Shen Te and through the cluster of values associated with her: kindness, compassion, cooperation, peace. These values hover over the play, guiding the spectator in his construction of possible alternatives, and suggesting the form such a variation might take. At one point Shen Te expresses the ethos of such a transformed world:

To let no one perish, not even oneself
To fill everyone with happiness, even oneself
Is so good.(14)

In the Epilogue the spectator is provoked to imagine how such a world might come about. Certain options or methods are suggested: chance? dreaming of alternatives? waiting for some external force? or, social action? No closure is provided by the text, but, within the context of the play, only the last option seems efficacious.

Implicitly, the spectator has been conditioned by the dialectical structure of the play to think in terms of the oppositions that inform every scene. By continually contrasting the values and actions of Shen Te with the methods of Shui Ta, Brecht prepares the spectator to think in terms of balancing oppositions and resolving contradictions. This makes the spectator a kind of dialectical partner whose cooperation and participation is required in order to produce imaginative variations to the situations depicted. The spectator is brought to the realization that social relations in Sezuan (and in his own world) are transitory and in need of transformation, and that any progressive variation can come about only through human choice and action.

Der gute Mensch, then, stimulates the spectator to produce variations to the status quo by imagining a world in which it is possible to be kind, compassionate and generous and yet to survive. Such a world implies the negation of the Sezuan that Brecht depicts so concretely and the construction of a transformed world without poverty, ugliness and exploitation. It is a “utopian” variation in the sense that it does not exist here and now but emerges on the other side of what is presented—a possible variation in an open-ended future. Such a variation is implicitly rooted in the dialectical structure of the play but is left up to the audience to produce.

There are, of course, limitations in Brecht's reliance on the audience to project variations. Brecht's parables allow for a wide range of possible, and often contradictory, interpretations. Many spectators find Brecht's parables to be not only tendentious but reductive and vague. Instead of being stimulated or provoked to imagine alternatives, they see Brecht's oppositions as simplistic and constraining. Some critics, for example, see the means/ends opposition in Der gute Mensch as an insoluble tragic paradox that is inherent in the human condition and transcends any possible historical variation.¹⁵

Such limitations led to Frisch's rejection of the parable form as a vehicle for expressing possibility. For Frisch the structure of the parable remains tightly connected to a sense of causality and determinism that he cannot accept. In setting up a model, the parable becomes a kind of master code capable of explicating diverse features of existing phenomena. Frisch feels that this explanatory power of parable is reductive and mechanical. It results in a determinate “meaning,” an inner truth or essence, that reduces contingency and possibility. This kind of causality is evident in Brecht's Der gute Mensch, where the human relationships that obtain in Sezuan (and in our own world) are causally related to the existing social and economic arrangements. It should be noted that even though the causality of Brecht's parable is not the mechanistic causality associated with the Newtonian world view, for Frisch the parable rewrites or reduces the contingency of history in terms of some deeper, underlying “truth,” and thus establishes determinate relationships.

To avoid even this kind of causality, Frisch's theater of variation concerns itself with pure possibility and indeterminacy. In spite of his doubts concerning the reductive nature of language, Frisch felt that the theater was a place to demonstrate the very indeterminacy of human events, of history and biography; to illustrate the possibilities that exist prior to choice and action; to make palpable the openness at the heart of human reality. Biografie, which remains Frisch's single application of his dramaturgy of possibility, did not in his own estimation succeed. Frisch discovered that language and performance, in enacting one possibility rather than another, constitute choices (no matter how contingent they may be) and therefore delimitations of possibility. The kind of possibility that consumed Frisch's interest was, it appears, an ineffable kind of possibility that cannot be embodied in theatrical performance. Thus Frisch's theater of possibility leaves the spectator with a sense of ever-diminishing options. Further, in situating possibility entirely in the subjective consciousness of an individual, Biografie confirms an experiential gap between the public and the private, the social and the psychological. Kürmann's efforts to change are private and personal. He is sheltered and alienated from the historical events of his lifetime, and he seeks freedom outside the social realm—a merely psychological kind of salvation. The result of this fragmented condition is the paralysis of his thinking about time, change and history.

By contrast, Brecht's “theater of possibility” is a theater of actions and their consequences in a world objectively knowable and changeable through human action. For Brecht, language can describe the objective world of things and the intersubjective world of human relations, and the parable can express fundamental truths about present realities and future possibilities. Proceeding from a dialectical conception of history—in which an irrevocable past informs a present that requires choices of the future—Brecht tries to make the spectator aware of his own role in creating alternatives for the future. The tension in Brecht's plays is between a present moment—a determinate image of injustice and exploitation—and its potential transformation—an indeterminate image of utopian possibilities based on a negation of the present moment. For Brecht, then, history is not an accumulation of random events that results with the passage of time (and a biography is not featureless jelly that can be reshaped in any way at all); rather, both constitute dialectical movements between possibility and necessity into futures that are open-ended and unknown.

These two “theaters of possibility” reflect the divergent views of Brecht and Frisch on history and change and on the theater's capacity to reflect them. In exploring the nature of possibility, however, both seek to induce a more dynamic relationship between spectator and performance. Brecht challenges us with a story that unfolds into a series of contradictions and urges the spectator to find possible mediations. Frisch challenges the spectator by replacing the causal and temporal structures of mimetic theater with structures that reveal their own fictiveness. By exposing the artifice at the heart of these fictional structures, Frisch hopes to jar the spectator into a recognition of the artifice at the heart of all congealed structures. His rejection of the mimetic model is based on his conviction that it turns the spectator into a voyeur, places him in a passive posture that limits imagination and reflection. By setting up a world that is finished, explained and necessary, mimetic theater encourages the spectator to see a “finished” and “necessary” world in the life he returns to after the play. The theater of possibility is designed to subvert such ingrained expectations of order by disclosing the possibility at the core of human experience.

In its esthetic orientation, its playfulness and pure fictiveness, Frisch's theater of possibility is closer to the kind of possibility we find in Nabokov, Fowles, Barth and Borges than it is to anything we find in Brecht. These writers also attempt to incorporate alternative narratives within the same text. Like them, Frisch is attracted by the pure fictiveness and playfulness of permutation because it liberates him from the awkward problems of transcribing “reality.” Here in the realm of play and fabulation there are no static systems, congealed forms and oppressive structures—and there are no responsibilities. This is Kierkegaard's realm of pure possibility, where everything is possible because no single possibility is actualized. But as Kierkegaard explains, pure possibility leads to despair.¹⁶ In the absence of actuality—of temporality and history—possibilities remain unactualized and hence unreal. To be sure, the attempt to demonstrate the possibility that permeates the human condition can liberate the literary artist to entertain new values and create new forms. But in Frisch's theater of variation, possibility leads to a paralysis no less debilitating than that engendered by a world understood to be held in the grip of necessity.

Notes

1. Two notable exceptions are Martin Esslin, “The Neurosis of Neutrals: I. Max Frisch,” in Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre (New York, 1971), p. 91, and Manfred Durzak, Dürrenmatt, Frisch, Weiss: Deutsches Drama der Gegenwart zwischen Kritik und Utopie (Stuttgart, 1972), pp. 152-54. Both Esslin and Durzak claim that Existentialism is the primary influence on Frisch.

2. Frisch describes his relationship with Brecht in his Tagebuch 1966-1971 (Frankfurt, 1972), pp. 24-44.

3. Representing this view, Marianne Kesting writes that “Frisch remains—against his will—a Brecht-Adept” (“Max Frisch, Nachrevolutionares Lehrtheater,” in Max Frisch: Beiträge zu einer Wirkungsgeschichte, ed. Albrecht Schau (Freiburg, 1971), p. 186. Similar views are expressed by Walter Hinck, Das moderne Drama in Deutschland (Göttingen, 1973), pp. 170-80, and by Marianne Biedermann, Das Politische Theater von Max Frisch, Theater unserer Zeit, vol. 13 (Lampertheim, 1974), p. 166.

4. Tagebuch 1946-1949 (Frankfurt/M, 1950), p. 42. Translation my own.

5. Rolf Kieser, “An Interview with Max Frisch,” Contemporary Literature, 13 (1972), 2-4; hereafter cited as “Interview.”

6. Max Frisch, “Der Autor und das Theater,” in Öffentlichkeit als Partner (Frankfurt/M, 1967), p. 76. Translation my own.

7. Dramaturgisches: Ein Breifwechsel mit Walter Höllerer (Berlin, 1967), p. 12, hereafter cited as Drama.

8. See Hans Heinz Holz, “Max Frisch—engagiert und privat,” in Über Max Frisch, ed. Thomas Beckermann (Frankfurt/M, 1976), pp. 235-60. Holz's conclusion is, “Frisch has wasted a splendid formal idea on an insignificant subject matter” (p. 259). For related discussions see: Brigitte Bradley, “Max Frisch's Biografie: Ein Spiel,” The German Quarterly, 44 (1967), 208-26, and my “Possibility and Form in Max Frisch's Biography: A Game,” Modern Drama, 18 (1975), 349-55.

9. Biography: A Game, trans. Michael Bullock (New York, 1969), p. 3.

10. Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York, 1964), p. 137.

11. Jost Hermand, “Brecht on Utopia,” The Minnesota Review, 6 (1976), 97.

12. Durzak, p. 235.

13. Brecht on Theatre, p. 274.

14. The Good Woman of Setzuan (English Version by Eric Bentley) in Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht (New York, 1961), p. 458.

15. See Walter H. Sokel, “Brecht's Split Characters and His Sense of the Tragic,” in Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Peter Demetz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), pp. 127-37.

16. See Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death, esp. Part III, “The Forms of this Sickness, i.e. of Despair” (New York, 1954). Translator William Lowrie.