Q.

) Role of the Gods in the play

The Good Woman of Szechwan (1938-42), is one of the three masterpieces of

Brecht, alongside Mother Courage and her Children (1939) and Life of Galileo
(1937-9; 1945-7).

Brecht explained to Walter Benjamin that the parable was a form of writing in
which the imagination was kept accountable to reason, the tendency towards
autonomy of the aesthetic impulse being held in check by the obligation to write
what was useful. For Brecht it was a genre that aimed at transparency: the
surface of specific events and characters served to point beyond (or behind)
itself towards general, 'abstract' meanings it illustrated 'concretely'. Although
Brecht began writing parables before he became a Marxist, it was a genre that
gained in importance for him once he had adopted this ideology.

In The Good Person, what Brecht called the 'element of parable', the artifice
that makes it clear that the play is not pretending simply to mimic life, is
constituted by the arrival in the Chinese province of Szechwan of three Gods in
search of a good person whose existence will justify the continued existence of
the world as it is. The appearance of the gods attaches this play to an old
theatrical tradition which reached its apogee in Raimund's Viennese magic-plays
of the last century where the juxtaposition of the human (all-too-human) and
divine worlds is used comically, satirically but still not without some remnant of
naive wonderment. The subject of a divine visitation is of course one of the
oldest in world literature. Reinhold Grimm speculates that Brecht based his plot
on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha (Genesis 19): as Lot took in the two
angels and was the only good person of his town, so is Shen Teh in hers. The
motif of the world or town being saved if there are enough good people is
shared. The rest of the story, admittedly, is radically altered. Besides, the
specific element of the prostitute's hospitality to a god is to be found in
Goethe's poem Der Gott und die Bajadere.

The play thus presents itself from the outset as a re-working of an ancient, but
very familiar motif, thereby advertising its own literariness and promoting a
reflective response from the audience by inviting it to compare the familiar
story with the new and, as it turns out, strongly parodistic, version. The search
of the Gods serves to lead the audience through a process of learning or enquiry
into the question as to whether it is possible for a human being both to be good
and to survive. In the end, the enquiry becomes a judicial one, the court scene
being one of Brecht's favourite devices for recapitulating and explicitly
debating the issues raised by the events of a play.

The plot culminating in the trial is itself structured as an argument that

implicitly answers the question raised by the Gods. The action proper begins
when the water-seller, Wang, asks the obliging Shen Teh to give the newly-
arrived Gods shelter for a night. Shen Teh's willingness to help delights - and
somewhat surprises - the Gods, for it seems that they have already found in her
an example of the goodness they are seeking. However, it is revealed that Shen
Teh is a prostitute. Disappointed by the discovery that she is not the
embodiment of untainted virtue they had hoped for, the Gods decide to bend
the rules a little by giving her an enormous payment of one thousand silver
dollars, hoping thereby to enable her to 'sin no more'.

The gods stand for exactly defined moral standards which the individual is
expected to reach regardless of his conditions of life. They are seen
investigating whether it is in fact possible for anyone to reach the standard of
love, justice and honour. Such moral demands made without consideration of
each individual's social handicaps are reminiscent of Kant's categorical
imperative, which places the onus on each person to behave so that his deeds
could be taken as the paradigm of a universal and benevolent law. Such idealism
is to Brecht simply the ideological apologia for capitalism, with its stress on
individual strivings both in the field of money-making and in the field of moral
self-perfection. Brecht wants to examine the Kantian demands against the real
background.

Idealism explains frustrations met by the individual in the pursuit of goodness

by concepts such as that of divine providence testing the individual with a view
to reward or punishment hereafter. Shen Teh's peculiarity is that, rather than
accepting the well-known paradox of a perfect God (gods) creating an imperfect
world and doing her best in such a world, she expects the gods to share her
active, dynamic goodness and back up her single-handed attempt to change the
predicament of the inhabitants of Szechwan. In the 'Song of the
Defencelessness of the Good and the Gods' (Interlude after scene 4) she asks
with increasing force why the gods do not have the armed power to impose
goodness on the world, why good is powerless. This demand to know underlies
the play - but because she unquestioningly aligns herself with her idea of the
gods, Shen Teh cannot perceive the answer, which is that the gods have
disqualified themselves from helping.

The initial appearance of the Gods amidst the misery of Szechwan, “well-
nourished, well-groomed and showing no signs of any employment”, links them
with the privileged classes and sets them up for the 'banana-skin' treatment
they are to receive in the course of the play. After their first appearance in
the flesh, their insubstantiality is then expressed by their appearing only in
dream to Wang. The quality of farce is injected into these scenes by making
their gestus of passing observers in the world of mortals repeatedly take on the
character of a hasty and undignified flight from problems they cannot solve,
until at last they float away on a rosy cloud, chanting a tercet and ignoring Shen
Teh's desperate appeals for the help they cannot give. Their status as
ineffectual clowns is also underlined by their increasingly dishevelled
appearance and by the bruises they acquire in their wanderings through the real
world.

These Gods reflect the moral and metaphysical assumptions that underpin the
socioeconomic status quo in Szechwan (the belief, for example, that powerful
Gods exist, or that there are such things as absolute moral laws). Such 'ruling
ideas', Marx argued, are the 'ideas of the rulers', derived from the social
reality of exploitation and subordination, but designed both to deflect attention
from that reality and to maintain it. Brecht was not interested in exploring
dispassionately this view that morality and religion are mainly instruments of
class hegemony. The play simply assumes the correctness of the view (the Gods
are clearly confidence tricksters from the outset) and employs farce as a
rhetorical device to encourage dissociation from the Gods (and hence from the
ideas with which they are linked).

The arrival of the gods is the catalyst for the action. Dramatically, they form a
deus ex machina, but Brecht is careful to show them in the most concrete
human terms, as thinly disguised members of the ruling class, disappointed by
their subjects and determined to discover that there is still 'goodness' on
earth; furthermore, like the ruling class, they do not understand anything about
the society that prevents such goodness. “As so often in Brecht”, writes
Stephen Unwin, “it is not faith that is being mocked, it is organised religion's
unspoken alliance with the ruling class and its complacency in the face of
injustice. It is hardly surprising that the magistrates in the final scene turn out
to be the gods in disguise”.

The Gods represent a pantheon which refuses any responsibility for economic
affairs, sees earthly life increasingly dominated by economics, and yet would
like to cling to the fiction that it is in authority. This declining class, comparable
to the Church and the feudalists in ‘Life of Galileo’ is disunited within itself as
to what concessions can be made to economic and technical facts: whether they
can admit that floods are due to neglect of dams, not to their wrath (1491; 5;
Prologue) - thus implying that men are masters of their own fate; whether they
can help Shen Teh along or even compensate her for loss of earnings when she
takes them in. They show just that passivity which she does not; in a sarcastic
reversal of the classical concept of deus ex machina they call on a pink cloud at
the end to take them away and save them the embarrassment of trying to
regulate her existence. To admit a flaw in the world and envisage changing it
would be to deny their own divinity. They disappear into nothingness, the
particular end Brecht reserves for what has outlined its historical function and
can be forgotten. They are, to paraphrase Engels, “Supreme Beings shut out
from the whole existing world: a contradiction in terms and an insult to the
feelings of religious people”.