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Gestus, or "gest," as John Willett preferred to translate it, is one of Bertolt Brecht's key aesthetic notions.1 He insisted on regarding poetic and theatrical language as "gestic" and even on requiring gestic music.2 It was the "gestic material" (gestisches Material)3 that the actor must interpret (auslegen) in order to convey the (variously translated) "fable," "narrative," "plot," or 11 story- line(s). " He considered the narrative line to be the main business of any theatrical event (Veranstaltung).4 That narrative line, for which I shall choose the term "fable" (Brecht uses Fabel, in italics, in the German original of his "Short Organum"), he defined as the entirety of "all gestic activities" that make up the composition of a play as produced.5 It is this reading of fables as "coherent compositions," giving insights into societal structures and processes, that has contributed much to a widespread understanding of his theatre as over-didactic and purely rationalist. Hence his aesthetic has often been treated as the epitome of a closed system, and his approach to society and the arts has been filed away as old-fashioned, one-dimensional, and essentialist, regardless of his numerous emphases on incessant, ever-regenerating, contradictory, and thus open-ended change as the basic element or driving force of history, of societal processes and individual behaviour, and - not least - of the type of theatre he had in mind and tried to realize.6
1 would like to read both Brecht's interpreters' and his own often-articulated understanding of the relationship between fable and gestus in a different way, or, put radically, to reverse it. I shall argue that his plays should be viewed and produced as complex sets of mutually contradictory and self-contradictatory sequences of events. As to the phenomenon "Gestus," instances of it should be regarded as presentations of separate, even apparently incoherent, clusters of gestic activities rather than as whole compositions or fables with an all-encompassing coherent narration conveying a "message" that could be summarized in one or two sentences, according to the fabula docet principle, so essential to the drama and theatre of the European Enlightenment. Brecht himself gave influential examples of such fabula docet summarizing - for instance, in the ground-breaking publication Theaterarbeit (1952)7 - that were emulated by many interpreters later on.
To approach Brecht...