In the last three days I read Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children and The Caucasian Chalk Circle. They had an “amazing” effect on me, that is, I am amazed by them, filled with astonishment, a "what the hell is this?" kind of effect, but without knowing why. Much as if I watched an opera in Latin and loved it. The language worked on me, but behind the scenes.

Certainly there are some devices that appeal. The action, the songs interspersed, the faraway worlds where the action takes place with its “epic” feel. The taste of hardship from the characters and the way they are instructed to move about the stage. The constant trickery and grasping and vying for the minimum. These are the arias of a man driven away again and again, on a train of exile that only stops for the last ten years of his life. These two plays, incidentally, were written during his exile before this period.

I am inclined not to read critics who will explain it to me, but continue to read more Brecht plays, allowing the dissonance to hold. Unless maybe it is Northrop Frye or T. S. Eliot, or Frank Kermode among the living, someone who sees his subject from a very high perch. I'm not just being a terrible snob; this state of confusion and desire for knowing what's what is when you have to bring in the big guns. Harold Bloom, who I've read recently on Cervantes and Whitman*, leaves me wondering after he and I are done. Clearly he has interesting things to say but never gets into the upper stratosphere, and is always within sight of the airport. It is as if he doth protest too much in his knowing, and only half convinces me because I am spending a lot of my energy watching him do his tricks. Frye and Eliot describe the particular literary product they are examining always as one part of a wide and deep panorama. They ask themselves questions about Euripedes and Shakespeare and Büchner, and so on, and wonder how Brecht fits, how he speaks for all of humanity, from his place in the first part of the 20th-century, and how that relates to everyone who gets our attention speaking for humanity.

One thought is this: I may not be getting what Brecht is trying to tell me, but something he has done in these two plays is causing me to hear the big voice that speaks for humanity.

* Introductions to Edith Grossman's wondrous translation of Don Quixote (2003), and Walt Whitman, Selected Poems (2003).