survival of the fittest
George Buchner, with his degree in biology and anatomy, seems the logical choice to have written (though never completing) Woycezk. The historical background for the play is described in the introductory notes in our text, and it is interesting to see how Buchner used that material while at the same time making the play his own invention.
Of immediate interest is the style. Bertolt Brecht (you may want to look at his Mother Courage and Her Children in our text) is often credited with this real/surreal style that combines short scenes, coarse representations of middle-to-lower class life, traditional folk elements. But clearly he owes much to George Buchner.
Since the style is the subject of this week's discussion topic, we'll reserve that for the message board. In any case, the content of the play is equally interesting.
For one thing the author isn't very sympathetic with any of the characters. The title character may be imprisoned in poverty and a weak body, and his love is sleeping around, but there is nothing noble about Woyzeck or his bloody murder of Marie. He is just insane. His opening speech reveals his paranoia:
"Something's moving behind me, under me [Stamps on the ground.] Hollow--you hear that? It's all hollow down there. The Freemasons! (1994)
Fear of conspiracies by governments, banking institutions, fraternal orders, and other organizations is clearly not new, and Woyzeck fears the international Masonic order has eyes and ears everywhere, listening, plotting. Marie, the doctor, the captain all recognize Woyzeck is out of his mind; and we see him riddled with anxiety:
I've got to get out of here. Everything's spinning before my eyes. How hot their hands are.... I've got to get out. It's so hot in here.(2002-3)
As his outrage over Marie's infidelity builds, he has crazy dreams of murder:
On and on! On and on! Shh--music. [Stretches out on the ground]
Ha--what, what are you saying? Louder, louder--stab, stab the bitch to death? Stab, stab the bitch to death. Should I? Must I? Do I hear it over there too, is the wind saying it too? Do I hear it on and on--stab her to death, to death....Andres! Andres! I can't sleep--when I close my eyes, everything starts spinning, and I hear fiddles, on and on, on and on. And then there's a voice from the wall.... and it floats between my eyes like a knife. (2004)
Unlike Shakespeare's Othello whose suspicions are fueled by the lies of his evil advisor Iago, Woyzeck's obsession is a product of his deep-rooted madness. He is driven on to commit a cowardly, violent murder by voices in his head, paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations. He is not misguided, he is mentally ill.
Marie is not despicable; there's just not much to like about her. She is unfaithful, to be sure, but Woyzeck is not exactly a prize, so her straying is, perhaps, understandable.
The captain, on the other hand, is preachy and judgemental; he is quick to find flaws in others, particularly Woyzeck, but he is not so sound mentally either. His thoughts about time are far beyond philosophical musings; he is genuinely obsessesed:
You're going to finish early today--what am I supposed to do with the extra ten minutes? Woyzeck, just think, you've still got a good thirty years to live, thirty years. That's 360 months, and days, hours, minutes! What are you going to do with that ungodly amount of time? Get organized, Woyzeck.... I fear for the world when I think about eternity. Activity, Woyzeck, activity! Eternal, that's eternal, that's eternal--you realize that, of course. But then again it's not eternal, it's only a moment, yes a moment.--Woyzeck, it frightens me to think that the earth rotates in one day--what a waste of time, what will come of that? Woyzeck, I can't look at a mill wheel anymore or I get melancholy. (1998)
The captain lacks direction, purpose, a sense of goal. Time is just something that needs to be filled, and then, after activity piled upon activity, life just ends. Perhaps Buchner intended to satirize the military mind that has to reduce death to just logistics and strategy and tactics, numbers rather than lives of substance. But he does not have the calm rationality of a man who will dispassionately send numbers (not men) to their deaths; the slightest things carry him to depression:
Doctor, I'm afraid for the horses when I think that the poor beasts have to go everywhere on foot.... I'm so melancholy, I get so emotional, I always start crying when I see my coat hanging on the wall--there it is. (2001-2)
His character is really ahead of his time; he reveals the sense of the meaninglessnes of life that will later characterize some of the existentialists in the 20th century. As a leader, he certainly doesn't inspire confidence.
The drum major is a strutting beefcake and a bully. Smug and self-absorbed he proudly marches in front of Marie and encourages her compliments. He is quite full of himself:
Sundays when I have my plumed helmet and my white gloves--goddamn, Marie! The prince always says: man, you're quite a guy! (1999)
Not only is he proud of his physical prowess and chiseled good looks, he is quite happy to drop names to show that he is on the "A" list.
The doctor, who should be a compassionate healer, is a parody of the mad scientist. He has Woyzeck on a diet of peas and imagines that he's "revolutionizing science" (2000). His patients are experiments. He even wishes the captain will have a stroke or become a vegetable so that they can "make immortal experiments" (2002).
And even the minor characters, such as the court clerk at the end of the play, are callous, even ghoulish:
A good murder, a real murder, a beautiful murder--as good a murder as you'd ever want to see. We haven't had one like this for a long time. (2009)
This consistent pattern of reducing the human condition to a series of dark actions, of animal instincts and urges to be studied, is a reflection of the ideas of social Darwinism--the notion that the survival of the fittest demonstrated in the lower orders of animals translates to human interaction as well. It's this idea, this struggle that is at the heart of the Naturalist movement.
Those with advantages survive on the backs of the less fortunate. The rich eat well while the poor work to keep them fat; meanwhile, the poor die young of disease and hunger. The powerful enjoy freedom of action and mobility while they create rules to control the masses. A ruling class which is educated and ruthless thrives as the unskilled poor barely subsist (with not even enough money to buy a gun Woyzeck has to settle for a cheap knife to commit murder).
Certainly the wrestling match, if it can be called that, between the drum major and Woyzeck is suggestive of the physical animal struggle--the superior physical specimen defeats the weaker of the species.
The educated (the doctor) and the highly-placed (the captain) also have advantages--they are able to push Woyzeck (with little education and no position) around to suit their whims. Institutional powers (the courts that declared the real-life Woyzeck sane and competent to stand trial) gave the people the execution (much like the bread and circuses of ancient Rome) they wanted to keep them quiet and content.
There are several scenes in the play that place humans squarely in Darwin's realm; the most noteworthy is the Carnival scene:
Gentlemen! Gentlemen! [Points to a monkey.] Look at this creature, as God made it: he's nothing, nothing at all. Now see the effect of art: he walks upright, wears coat and pants, carries a sword! Ho! Take a bow! Good boy. Give me a kiss! [Monkey trumpets.] The little dummy is musical.... He shoots a pistol, stands on one leg. It's all a matter of upbringing; he has merely a beastly reason, or rather a very reasonable beastliness--he's no brutish individual like a lot of people.... Observe the progress of civilization. Everything progresses--a horse, a monkey, a cannery-bird. The monkey is already a soldier--that's not much, it's the lowest level of the human race! (1995-6)
Equating humans with monkeys is not really an accurate analysis of Darwin's Origin of Species; still, the idea that increasingly-sophisticated life evolves from simpler forms and that humans are linked to other primates is consistent with his work. It's no accident that Buchner sees "civilization" as a very thin veneer of learned behaviors and that the monkey is described in terms that remind us of the drum major. The play shows people with all of their beastly reason manipulating one another in their struggle to survive.
Naturalism, taking its cue from Nature, depicts the survival of the fittest.