Reading Berger, Responding to the Literary Richard Turney PhD University of York English May 2015 Abstract This thesis performs original close readings of a number of texts by John Berger, responding in particular to the work's literary qualities. It is the contention herein that the critical heritage has consistently failed to account for the richness and distinctiveness of Berger's work, attempting to place him within the context of Marxist thought and literature: both applying to the texts pre-exisiting models for writing and reading politically engaged work, and using the texts as illustrations of, and an opportunity to debate the merits of, Berger's own explanations for his work. This approach has consistently failed to account for the richest moments and works in Berger's oeuvre. In the course of the readings in this thesis, a number of hitherto underemphasised themes and qualities in the work are raised to prominence: Berger is a consistent and inventive writer of himself, both dramatising and referring to himself by naming characters 'John' and its etymological cousins, among other strategies. His fiction is also fascinated by representing the problems of searching, discovery and doubt. At its richest, the work contains within it both the impression of a search and the restriction of that search by the limits of what is knowable, readable, legible, or interpretable. He is an obsessive writer of animals. He is also a writer of patterns of figures that exist in an idiolectic vocabulary of symbols that shift and alter somewhat with every iteration. He is an inventive writer of dreams, and an original writer about sex, and a writer seemingly energised by working between genres and traditions, and by probing the spaces between various oppositions: the material and metaphysical, the present and the absent, life and death, historical and personal. This thesis is also among the first able to make use of the manuscripts and correspondence contained within the John Berger Archive in the British Library. 2 Contents Abstract 2 List of Illustrations 4 Acknowledgements 5 Declaration 6 Introduction: Literary Berger 7 1. A strange borderland: A Painter of Our Time 26 2. A dog's life: The Foot of Clive 55 3. What they know but cannot think: Anguish and Inarticulacy in A Fortunate Man 79 4. Birds like Letters Fly Away: G. 100 5. We and her: Berger's women 128 6. Everything is precipitous: Pig Earth and Once in Europa 145 7. Dancing on the ruins, spectres of hope: Here is Where We Meet 182 Drawing conclusions 214 Bibliography 217 3 Illustrations 1 Front cover of the first edition of A Painter of Our Time (1958) 33 2 Detail of back cover of first edition of A Painter of Our Time (1958) 34 3 Diego Velázquez, Detail of A Portrait of Aesop (1639-41) 43 4 Detail of the back cover of first edition of Keeping a Rendezvous 1992) 44 5 Francis Bacon, Dog, 1952 (1952) 63 6 Francis Bacon, Fragments of a Crucifixion (1950) 63 7 Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea, Russia (1992) 72 8 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 85 9 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 87 10 Don McCullin, Vietnamese father and daughter wounded (1968) 89 11 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 92 12 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 93 13 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 94 14 Jean Mohr, Untitled photograph from A Fortunate Man 97 15 The first of two title pages of the first edition of G. (1972) 101 16 The second of two title pages of the first edition of G. (1972) 102 17 Georges Braque, Bottle, Pipe, Newspaper and Glass (1913) 104 18 Page layout of the first edition of G. (pages pictured 34-5) 126 19 Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman (1931-2) 132 20 James Fitton, Ruskin Spear, John Berger and John Minton judging the Daily Express 'Most Beautiful Woman Competition,' 1953 139 21 Marisa Camino, Untitled photograph, (before 1995) 209 22 Abidin Dino, Yüzler (faces) (1992) 211 4 Acknowledgements Many thanks to Daisy, to whom this study is gratefully and lovingly dedicated, and to my parents, Jan and David, for their love and support. John Bowen's advice and example has been inestimable, and the four years of supervision meetings have been wonderfully energising and inspiring. Many thanks also to Hugh Haughton, for his generous encouragement and enthusiasm, which always came at just the right moment. 5 Declaration I declare that the work in the thesis is my own and has not been submitted for examination at this or any other institution for another award. 6 Introduction: Literary Berger 1 This thesis is based upon two assertions: firstly that John Berger's fiction is yet to be satisfyingly or sufficiently read by critics as literature, and secondly that it is a body of work that hugely rewards such reading. The second of these assertions I hope to justify in the chapters that follow, and in doing so help to claim for Berger the more prominent space within post-war British literature that his work undoubtedly merits; what I mean by the first is outlined in this introduction. Berger's fiction has consistently, and with particular intensity until the late 1980s, attracted politically inflected criticism. This trend began with its most hostile example, Stephen Spender's accusation that Berger's first novel, A Painter of Our Time, 'stank of the concentration camps'.1 There are the reviewers who have decided to read Berger as a political opponent, and the politically sympathetic critics who have nevertheless seen Berger's subject matter and aesthetics as failing to fulfil a pre-determined model for literature, (such as socialist realism) or as a betrayal of a set of aims, beliefs or values (see the reception to Pig Earth, discussed in Chapter 6). There is the criticism that has admiringly attempted to read Berger's texts as though they are dramatic illustrations of political certainties. Although there are sophisticated and 1 Stephen Spender, Observer, 9 November, 1958. 7 thoughtful examples of all these kinds, they very rarely begin to account for my fascination with this writer, rarely touch on the aspects of these texts I would most like criticism engage with, and in sum produce a Berger duller and certainly more predictable than I find him to be.2 As examples, these are the opening postulations of two articles, firstly by A. R. Brás: Unlike the vast majority of his literary confréres, [Berger] is an explicitly political author whose oeuvre is marked by a genuine and uncompromising social commitment. Although convinced that the work of imagination is neither timeless nor self-sufficient, he is nevertheless positive that it can be more than mere entertainment; indeed, he is certain that it can be revolutionary.3 And secondly by Joseph H. McMahon: Throughout his career as a teacher, art-critic, television commentator, novelist and scenario-writer, Berger has been a dedicated and open Marxist who has used his writings to bring into high relief the tensions, dramas and disappointments of life in the modern world. Berger has tried to keep his investigations as free as possible of ideological clutter while adhering to a particular ideology which he sustains out of a belief that, if human existence does not make sense on a human scale, then men will live in chaos with themselves and with others.4 To my ear these points of departure reverberate with the sound of doors slamming shut. An open approach to the richness and distinctiveness of each of the idiosyncratic and formally diverse texts within Berger's literary oeuvre is in these examples replaced by reading that is funnelled narrowly through pre-conceived notions about what these texts are, Berger's intentions and explanations for writing them, and what meanings they therefore generate. In the introduction of the most 2 For a strong example of this kind of criticism, see Peter de Bolla's persuasive article 'John Berger and the Ethics of Writing' in Minnesota Review, Number 28, Spring 1987 (New Series), 78-84. 3 A. R. Brás, 'A Sense of the Future: The Work of John Berger' in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, (25:3), 1984, 125. 4 Joseph H. McMahon, 'Marxist Fictions: the Novels of John Berger. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring, 1982), 202. 8 sustained example of the trend to read Berger's work as a case study in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, Duncan O'Connor writes: as well as attempting to show the success and failings of Berger's politics of form as it develops in terms of style, this thesis proposes that the need to read Berger's novels through different critical frameworks is a central dynamic of their form which readers are required to project so as to test the limits of Berger's intentionality.5 As intellectually strenuous as such an approach may be, it produces criticism I confess I don't particularly want to read about books I either struggle to recognise, or that are discussed in the most general of terms. The texts themselves become the grounding, sparingly referenced or almost invisible, for a theoretical discussion about the relationship between literature and society. Such a discussion is of course valuable and potentially fascinating in its own right. It is also fundamental to understanding certain aspects of Berger texts, but for the critic it must not come at the expense of close reading the work itself, in all of its specificity and idiosyncrasy, and with a much stronger sense of the particular characteristics of literature, or literary reading, that make it a case apart.