Midweek Review
An epic history of reason
Brecht’s Life of Galileo:
By Laleen Jayamanne
Andrea: Unhappy the land
hat breeds no hero.
Galileo: No! Unhappy the land
that needs a hero.
Brecht in Sri Lanka
It is interesting that while three of Brecht’s plays were translated into Sinhala and successfully performed, The Life of Galileo (as far as I know), has not been translated. It was directed by Percy Colin-Thomé in English, with the Aquinas University College theatre workshop, in 1969. A Professor of Physics, Arthur Weerakoon, played Galileo with unabiding interest. The unusual back projections of text and the lively Italian Carnevale scene are still vivid in my memory. I remember revellers in masks and a figure dressed as the sun around which a child dressed as green earth, danced to the cheers of the crowd who well understood what the skit meant. The telescope, an invention Galileo modified and trained on the stars, was sold cheaply as an optical toy in the city streets. The Carnevale scene showed that the astronomer Galileo Galilei’s momentous discovery that the earth moved around the sun had reached the marketplace. Popular pamphlets about it were distributed, songs sung. A new age, they thought, had arrived.
I am now wondering why this play about the struggle between scientific reason, ethics, religious myth and superstition promoted by the all-powerful Catholic Church, failed to interest progressive Sinhala theatre folk of the 1960s. Might it interest Lankan theatre folk and students now, as they struggle to grapple with the current political, economic and ethical turmoil in the country and the role an ethnoreligious state ideology plays in it?
The Second World War – 1939
Brecht wrote his four major Epic plays in exile in Denmark and the US, after he fled Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. The first of these was The Life of Galileo written in three weeks in late 1938 in Denmark where Niels Bohr was working on the problem of splitting the atom. Unlike his other plays, which were based on parables, Galileo was based on a famous historical figure. Bohr’s assistants advised Brecht on Ptolemaic cosmology which presented the universe as a ‘crystal sphere.’ A model of it became an important prop in the play. It is this ancient static model of the universe (accepted by the church of Rome), which Galileo challenged with his dynamic theory of a heliocentric universe. The history of writing, translating and revising the play is linked to major world historical events. In 1940 when Hitler invaded Denmark, Brecht and family escaped, via Finland, Moscow and Vladivostok to California.
Hiroshima – 6 August 1945
Later, while Brecht worked on the play with the brilliant English actor Charles Laughton in LA in 1945, the US dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his diary Brecht writes of the horror and mourning expressed by ordinary Americans on the streets, though it meant the end of the war and return of their husbands and sons, victorious. Brecht’s play, which shows the birth of the ‘New Scientific Age’, carried a dark premonition. It also demonstrated the way Galileo betrayed his own rational discovery, by recanting his ideas so as to escape torture and death as a heretic.
Death of Stalin – 1953
The Holy Inquisition of Rome
The 17th Century papal court in Rome was a vast bureaucracy, which controlled knowledge, wealth and the people in a hierarchical pre-ordained structure, just as they imagined the universe to be. In fact Brecht referred to that Church, not entirely ironically, as a ‘secular institution’ in its comprehensive pursuit of power and policing of thought. Pope Urban VIII (who summoned Galileo to the Inquisition), was himself a mathematician. They agreed that Galileo’s math was correct but not the radical conclusions he drew from it, which contradicted church dogma of the earth’s centrality in the universe. Still, for the Church, Galileo alive (as the preeminent and famous astronomer and physicist of Europe) was more useful than burnt-alive as a heretic. This way Italian merchants could use his star charts to navigate the seas. If he was burnt as a heretic all of his knowledge would be proscribed, unable to be put to practical commercial use. The church was a political organisation that kept the peasantry in their impoverished place, as it was preordained in the Bible. Galileo, according to the play, did not join the new mercantile bourgeois class even when he had an opportunity to help form a resisting power block, but instead bowed to Church power and Princely feudal social relations through fear of physical torture.
Brecht in America
California is where a large number of German Jewish refugees went to flee Fascism, hoping to find work in the Hollywood film industry. Many of the highly trained technicians from the sophisticated German Weimar film industry did get employed, enriching Hollywood cinema, as did a few directors. But ironically, some of the Jewish actors had to play bit-roles as German Nazis in Hollywood anti-war films, because of their German accents and poor English! Charlie Chaplin befriended some of these artistes and was deeply concerned about what was happening in Europe, which is what prompted him to make The Great Dictator (1940).
In 1947 Brecht himself was called to appear at the Senate hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee held against people suspected of being Communists. He left the States soon after. Chaplin, suspected of being a communist, was also called before this committee after he made Monsieur Verdoux (1947), when American audiences turned against him for playing the role of a benevolent murderer. When he requested a visa to leave and return to the US after a promotional tour to Europe, the State Dept. refused it. Then, quite astutely had his considerable wealth transferred to a Swiss bank and left the US for good. The most popular and loved star-director had become box-office and political ‘poison’ in an America driven by the anti-Communist witch-hunt. Many Hollywood directors, script-writers and actors lost their jobs either because they were or were suspected of being communists. Many progressive American artistes had joined the Communist Party during the 1930s Depression.
An Epic History of Reason
“June twenty-second sixteen thirty-three,
A momentous days for you and me,
Of all the days that was the one
An age of reason could have begun
“
The play explores how a ‘new age of reason’ became a ‘new dark age’ when the church suppressed the truth. The creation of scientific reason and ethics, and their accessibility to ordinary people, are major themes of the play. Brecht demonstrates how and why the authoritarian institution of the church controlled both the people and new knowledge. He does so through his newly formulated idea of epic theatre. He wanted theatre not only to be a place where emotions such as empathy and catharsis are experienced (as in the Greek tragedy), but also a forum for thought. He thought that epic devices such as a narrator or interruptions with song or projection of text and images would stimulate sensory thought.
Brecht’s Galileo was first performed in a small theatre in Los Angeles in 1947 with Charles Laughton in the lead and directed by Joseph Losey who had socialist sympathies and had also visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s. There is a very intricate account of their collaboration, in Brecht’s diary, gold for those interested in Brechtian acting and staging, and his thinking on the new Epic mode.
The play is about several aspects of the life of the great scientist. He is presented as a man who has a robust enjoyment of eating, drinking, teaching, observing, thinking and writing. The play opens with him enjoying his bath and talking about astronomy with his maid’s son, Andrea, who is only nine. He is teaching him the new astronomy that ‘the earth moves’ around the sun through a playful demonstration. The play concludes with Andrea (now a physicist himself), confronting his teacher.
Reason in Buddhist Philosophy
Within the history of Indian philosophy Buddhism offered an interrogation and understanding of the human mind, its processes of thinking and of reason. The Buddha rejected traditional Hindu ideas of animal sacrifice, elaborate priestly ritual and faith in revealed sacred texts. He promoted debate and introspective, yet detached examination of mental processes. He spoke to the people in the vernacular Pali, rather than in the language of learning and power, Sanskrit. But when the Buddha’s teaching became a popular religion over many centuries and received political patronage as in Sri Lanka, it became also a source of superstition and myths, used by rulers to propagate their authoritarian power.
Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government created an ideology of the ‘war hero’ (ranawiru), in order to win the war against the LTTE. It was promoted as a war to save Lanka as an exclusive Sinhala-Buddhist nation, headed by a leader who was likened to the celebrated ancient King Dutugemunu who defeated the Tamil king Elara. Through this legend, reinforced by a genre of historical epic films, the heavy militarisation of an authoritarian ethno-religious state was normalised, consolidated and enthusiastically embraced by a large majority of Sinhala folk.
Tisaranee Gunasekara issues a timely warning in her article, Prelude to the Elections (GroundViews, 8/21/22). At first she gives a global historical perspective on religious violence.
“When Pope Francis visited Greece, a Greek Orthodox priest called him a heretic. That charge would have led to a gruesome death by fire in most of Europe just a few hundred years ago. If that past seems not just another time but another universe, it was thanks to the work of Christians who struggled for religious reforms and the secularisation of politics, often at the risk of their lives. It is the inadequacy of such struggles or their failure that creates spaces for fatwas against authors and their brutal implementation”.
Then she focuses on Sri Lanka’s recent ethno-religious politics and offers a reasonable suggestion for the next elections in the context of the ongoing Aragalaya.
“Religion and race played a decisive role in the 2019 and 2020 elections and here we are. Minimising these deadly influences is necessary to ensure that the next election produces a parliament that is more moderate and more rational […] the more moderate parties should form an understanding about not giving nominations to clergy of any religion and keeping religious symbols out of politics in general and electoral politics in particular.”
Galileo Betrays Science
Shown the instruments of torture, fearing death by fire, Galileo recants. He denies the scientific knowledge he arrived at by empirically studying the sky through a telescope for the very first time in history and through his mathematical calculations. Saved from death, he lives in relative comfort, under house arrest in Florence and writes his Discorsi in Italian rather than in Latin, the language of scholarship. While he dictated his book to his daughter, a monk would take away each page of the manuscript daily. But each night he would secretly make a copy and hide it inside a large globe!
Guru and Shishya
In the penultimate scene Galileo’s former student Andrea arrives (on route to Amsterdam to take up work as a physicist), to say farewell. The exchange between the great master and student who felt bitterly betrayed, is emotionally wrenching and crystal clear in conception. It is all of the following; a discourse, a debate, a lament, a lesson, on the betrayal of reason and of its consequences for humanity in the field of science. It is in every sense a brilliant ‘Epic Pedagogic Demonstration’ of what happens when reason is betrayed by unreason, and the irrational rules. Here, Brecht presents science (with its immense destructive modern technology and the atom bomb), as a matter of interest to all of humanity, not just to a clique of rulers and scientists. An epic articulation of this historical event is what is important here.
The full force of Galileo’s clear-eyed response to Andrea’s rebuke, ‘unhappy the land that breeds no hero,’ is felt here. When Andrea is ready to hail him as hero because Galileo has secretly completed the Discorsi, ‘the first important work of modern physics’, the master categorically refuses the exalted status even as he entrusts his manuscript to Andrea for safe delivery to an enlightened Europe. Galileo warns Andrea to be extra careful when he crosses Germany – as though it were now Europa 1940!
Then, Brecht’s Galileo delivers his infamous speech of self-disgust and trenchant critique in response to Andrea’s high praise:
Andrea: Science has only one commandment; contribution. And you have contributed more than any man for a hundred years.
Galileo: Have I? Then welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason: I sold out, you are a buyer. The first sight of the book! His mouth watered and scoldings were drowned. Blessed be our bargaining, white-washing, death fearing community!”
Note the brilliant shift of pronouns, modes of address and use of idiomatic cliché as epic devices.
In recanting Galileo says he betrayed the people who believed that a new age had begun. He knew, he said, that for a short while he was as strong as the church and could have, as a single individual, challenged its immense power but didn’t. He was famous across Europe and scientists were awaiting his latest research. But he adds that no single man can do science, that it is a collective enterprise and should concern everyone. It’s this collective social mission of scientific reason and its capacity to alleviate suffering that he thought he had betrayed. The great secrecy of the process of creating the hydrogen bomb in the Manhattan Project and its links to the US military machine were events with great immediacy for Brecht when writing Galileo. Brecht’s Galileo telescopes 17th Century Enlightenment Reason and 20th Century Instrumental Reason; State Violence and Mass-Destruction.
Christian Witch Burning
The final scene focuses on Andrea who leaves an old and blind Galileo behind settling down to eat a roast goose for dinner. He has refused to give his sullied hand to Andrea who he sees as the future of science. At a border crossing while an Italian customs officer checks Andreas’ box of books for contraband, he openly and avidly reads the Discorsi when shouts from a gang of boys distracts him. They point to a little hut nearby saying there is a witch living there. Andrea lifts a boy up to the window and asks him what he sees. He replies, ‘an old girl cooking porridge at a stove’. But as Andrea clears customs and is about to leave he sees the boys pointing to a shadow cast on the house and yelling, ‘Marina’s a witch, she rides a broom at night!’ A new age indeed! Brecht ends Galileo on this disquieting irrational cry, reminding us of a time when women healers, midwives and just any old woman living alone were burnt as witches by Christian Europe, for not fitting into a patriarchal order, not that long ago.
Neither Hero nor Villain
In Brecht’s modern epic presentation of Galileo, he is neither a hero nor a villain. Heroes pitted against pitiless Destiny defined Greek Tragedy. Instead of heroes and villains or more recently goodies and baddies who we can cheer or boo, Brecht offers something quite rare and mighty strange. He offers scene after scene where the relations between the following dyadic terms are so finely calibrated that we really have to learn the irresistible joy of thinking for ourselves in the theatre.
Here are the dyadic terms:
senses and intellect,
gestures and speech,
subjects and objects,
costumes and movements
time and space,
body and mind,
feeling and thought
The terms on the left are rather more sensory and immediate, while those on the right tend to be more abstract, mediated. They are dyads not opposites, so the relays among them are intricate and complex, keeping us engaged. The mise-en-scène of the play is expansive, both terrestrial and cosmic. There is no longer an unmoving centre to the universe nor within the human brain, according to Galileo. Brecht’s Galileo presents both the cosmos and the human brain as dynamic systems. And Brecht’s modern epic theatrical idiom is the necessarily de-centred formal means adequate to demonstrating this new reality.
New Translations?
On October 31st 1992 (after 359 years) Pope John Paul II formally apologised for the ‘Galileo Case.’ It was the first of many apologies during his papacy. Is such a gesture by a ruler even thinkable in the Lankan context? I feel that Brecht’s Life of Galileo may resonate now with some Lankans engaged in the Aragalaya in the long term, as a process critically evaluating many spheres of Lankan life. I hope some folk reading this piece might think the time is ripe for a Sinhala and Tamil translation of Galileo some time soon.