Review of "The Caucasian Chalk Circle"

First thing first, I'm aware that the picture of this book is of startlingly appalling quality. However, as England has become a seat of darkness already this Winter, there's only a very small time period in which decent photos can be taken. As I'm really conscious at the moment of how long it's been since I've written something (over a week, whoops) I really wanted to get this out today, so we'll have to deal with the poor quality picture. Hey, at least it matches the battered copy my student loans graced me with right? 

Anyway, let's talk about the play. Although I should have already read some Brecht, my general lack of motivation (aka laziness) as a first-year student meant that I *cough* overlooked reading Mother Courage and Her Children. So, The Caucasian Chalk Circle is really my first experience of reading Brecht. I have to say, I massively enjoyed it. If you haven't read any, or really feel like reading something that will make you ask questions about modern life this play is brilliant.The quotation above is just a small sample of thought-provoking and often terrifyingly accurate analyses of modern life that the play contains.

The play itself tells you what's going to happen within the prologue, so I can't really spoiler anything, The Caucasian chalk circle, as narrated by Brecht, is a circle which is drawn around an infant when there is a dispute over who the mother is. The two women in question are asked to tug on the infant - whoever pulls him out of the circle hardest and fastest is the legitimate mother. However, there is a twist. Although the judge of the action states these rules, the real mother is in fact the one who lets go - she cares about the child enough to choose his safety over her emotional attachment to him.

The plot follows the story of Grusha, a servant girl working for a governor and his wife. There is a revolt in the city they live in. The governor is killed and the wife, in her haste to save her dresses, runs away and forgets their infant son, Michael. Grusha runs away with the baby, pursued by soldiers who want to kill him. She eventually reaches her brother's house, but her safety is not secured there....

The second half of the plot sees Azdak, a simple man, become a judge during a revolution. Almost like a Robin Hood-esque character, he has a distorted sense of justice, which for once doesn't help the rich and powerful!

There's so many things that could be said about this play that I'll just never be able to articulate. So, I'll just give a brief account on my thoughts, There is a really interesting interplay between the role of women in capitalist society and commodities. Grusha herself is set up to be a commodity from the start: she is a servant, whose sole worth in the mind of her employer is her ability to follow instructions and perform certain tasks with accuracy. She is then further commodified in her ability (or lack thereof) to produce milk for the infant. She views her breast as something that exists to produce milk, but it sadly serves as a reminder to the reader that she is unable to mother the baby on a physical as well as an emotional level. 

There are many provocative moments in the play. I'm not going to bore you, but some of the most potent aspects I found were the connection between the exchange of money and sexual acts/sexual presence, and the idealist understanding of socialist principles. 

What did you guys think? Have you read it?

Love and Light

Steph

A Copernican Psychoanalytic Reading of "Hamlet"

            In Freud’s article titled A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis he outlined three blows which he believed to have been inflicted upon human narcissism. The first blow came from Copernicus, and a history of other scientists before him, who suggested that the earth was not at the centre of the universe. This displaced humans’ importance in the cosmos, and thus was termed the “cosmological blow” to human narcissism. The second came from Darwin who showed that humans were not created in the way in which they exist today, but evolved from other creatures. This removed humans from their pedestal over other animals, and thus was termed the “biological blow” to human narcissism. The third, Freud suggested, came from himself when he suggested that “the ego was not master in its own house”. This is the psychological blow to human narcissism. The ego is the part of the mind, in Freudian terms, which oversees what is going on and channels thoughts into either the conscious or unconscious depending on whether they cohere or go against the needs and wishes of the individual. In suggesting that the ego does not hold power in the mind, Freud indicates that the unconscious does. If one then follows a Laplanchian way of thinking the unconscious is an internal other, which does not come from within the individual, but is created through intromission from the adult to the infant in the primal scene. This primal scene is a scene of seduction, usually one in which the mother places her breast into the child’s mouth. She is consciously telling the child by doing this that she wishes to feed him, but unconsciously is sending enigmatic signifiers (enigmatic because neither child nor adult can translate them) which are sexual. This is a Copernican approach to psychoanalysis because it focuses on the importance of the external other in the creation of one’s unconscious, and indicates that the unconscious is not formed internally, but from the outside.

            To examine Hamlet in a Copernican way his relationship with his mother and father must be examined. The primal scene in this play occurs not between an infant and his mother, but between Hamlet and his father when the ghost comes to Hamlet and tells him of his murder. Intromission here happens through Hamlet’s ear. The ghost is consciously telling Hamlet to kill his uncle, but unconsciously sends an enigmatic signifier regarding Hamlet’s mother’s sexuality. Hamlet’s uncle killed the King and as a result gained the Queen’s (Hamlet’s mother’s) sexual desire; if Hamlet kills the King by the same logic he would gain her desire. This message cannot be translated by Hamlet and so is repressed into his unconscious, but it does drive the action of the play. He uses sexual and violent language to talk to his mother in the closet scene which not only suggests that he is considering her in a sexual manner, but also that he is repressing it. Indeed, during this scene, he stabs Polonius; in a Copernican reading this can be interpreted as him not doing it out of his own fear or suspicion, but it is a sexual act in which he is proving himself for his mother as his sword can be understood to be a phallic symbol.

            Moreover, a Copernican reading of Hamlet would also decentre the protagonist’s Oedipal desires in driving him to act, but instead focuses on his internal other, the unconscious. Hamlet is said to become insane in the play, but another interpretation of this could be that his ego loses control over his unconscious. His Oedipal complex (in which he loves his mother and feels a paradoxical love and hatred towards his father) is only thinly disguised as his need for some kind of justice for his father’s death. Hamlet delays in killing his uncle not because he does not have the means to, or does not wish to kill him, but because to kill his uncle would be a realization of the repressed wishes of his unconscious, placed there by the other. thus his internal other represses his need for revenge because of this reason, but his conscious self cannot see that and believes that he is delaying the murder for logical reasons.