- Returning to the original texts as a way to go forward. Avoiding the biography of Brecht and the theoretical commentaries on the texts. This play lists the collaborators as H. Borchardt, E. Burri, E. Hauptmann.
- SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS implicitly posits an idea (will frame it here as such in the hopes of avoiding a totalising theory/reading & a discussion of intentions, especially given multiple authors) that the life of a person cannot be represented, but that ideas, attitudes, philosophies, motions of history, economic flows, and conditions in a structural sense, that create the conditions of that life, of the lives of everyone in a society, can be represented, in part because they are themselves representations of a sort, ideas and theories that attempt to describe phenomena occuring in the world (with a basis in written language, a common basic structure with a play).
- These representations can be entertaining too, can be songs, though often the text becomes dominated by dry economic language. Yet there are also moments when the language erupts into vivid and striking diversions, often of a horrible nature. This passage illustrates both styles (content warning really gruesome writing here):
You're finished now and I'll close up and wait
Until the market recovers. I'll clean my yards
And give the knives a thorough oiling and order some
Of those new packing machines that give a fellow
A chance to save a tidy sum in wages.
There's a new system now - the height of cunning.
On a belt of plaited wire, the hog ascends
To the top floor; that's where the slaughtering starts.
Almost unaided, the hog goes plunging down
From the heights onto the knives. You see? The hog
Slaughters itself. And turns itself into sausage.
For now, falling from floor to floor, deserted
By its skin, which is transformed to leather
Then parting from its bristles, which become
Brushes, at last flinging aside its bones -
Flour comes from them - its own weight forces it
All the way down into the can. You see?"
- The characters in this play are hardly characters at all in a conventional sense. Set in the enormous Chicago meat yards in the 1920s the play follows a struggle between the workers and the company owners. The text doesn't particularly bother with filling in details about biographies (so popular in contemporary narratives), few of the characters have names, and when they do that's about all we know of them save for the occasional illustrative anecdote, like Gloomb, the man who loses his hand in a tin can machine.
- Instead a lot of the dialogue is performed by choruses with labels like "The Workers", "The Meatpackers", "The Stockbreeders", "The Wholesalers", "The Brokers", and so on. The text uses these choruses to enunciate (critical) ideas about the way a market economy functions (this is the basis of the representations in the play of ideas and economics rather than characters). These chorus passages are ironically very confusing and it's as difficult here to follow what the comments are on economic phenomena as it is trying to read about stocks and markets generally. However these passages never become boring because the dialogue and arrangements of characters are musically structured into rhythmic stacks of text that build an atmosphere of increasing panic, which read on the page or aloud form a sort of concrete poetry or sound version of the landscape of the block by block American city (the banks are always the tallest buildings).
- At the same time this play relies on a sort of identification with the main character, Joan, who is a stand in for the reader/audience, being pushed and pulled by the various social forces, ideas and arguments in the play until reaching the ones the text probably wants us to be left with (can only ignore authorial intentions for so long)- in this case the message is to join the organised workers and follow orders (Joan fails to do this and the strike is broken). Hence Joan is the only substantial character, except for the super capitalist "Meat King", Mauler. Our relation to him seems to be: these people will never change, do not ever trust them (despite seeming at times to be having a change of heart Mauler ends up richer than before while exploiting the image of Joan as a sentimental martyr figure to keep control of the yards).
- the idea of some notes like these is to look at different texts and works and to figure out how they work, what ideas and strategies they include, what effects these might have, without necessarily claiming any one method to be better than the other. maybe then the notes could be a resource, a bak of these different strategies that people could rifle through. maybe that critical choice or evaluation becomes necessary later but it feels completely wrong now. maybe a representative style is more useful or morally or ethically better, or maybe a play like this is a way forward. maybe closer examination of these different traditions reveals that they are not nearly as concrete as they seem. "The world is various". examining what is happening in an active sense, a practice of writing for constantly changing contexts? rather than an attempt to produce totalising principles and structures? is this just a complete evasion of taking responsibility? guilt is everywhere. hopefully a reader might find some use in these notes, maybe...