John Berger's Disappearing Peasants

Robbins 63 Bruce Robbins John Berger's Disappearing Peasants John Berger probably doesn't require much introduction to the readers of the minnesota review. The journal has already published some of the finest criticism of Berger, including Fred Pfeil's review of Pig Earth and About Looking (N.S. 15, Fall 1980) and David James' "Cubism as Revolutionary Realism: John Berger and G. " (N.S. 21, Fall 1983). For any reader whom the hunger for politico-literary fellowship has led here to these pages, Berger would have been hard to miss. In his writing, genres, themes, and interests that are most often channeled into separate disciplines and separate lives come together monumentally and almost uniquely. A selfdescribed "permanent red" who achieved national prominence in Britain for his novels (G. won the Booker Prize in 1971) as well as his art criticism, especially the televised series Ways of Seeing, he has also produced filmscripts (in collaboration with the Swiss director Alain Tanner) and innovative works of prose documentary (in collaboration with the photographer Jean Mohr) such as A Fortunate Man (1967), on the life of a country doctor, and A Seventh Man (1972), on European migrant workers. Over the past few years the publication and republication of his books by Pantheon—most recently, And Our Faces, My Heart, Briefas Photos (1984), The Sense ofSight (1985), and Once in Europa (1987)— have reminded people that Berger's ongoing projects are among the liveliest and most intriguing around. The project that has provoked the most talk is a proposed trilogy, titled "Into Their Labors," which deals with French peasants in the Alpine village where Berger has lived for many years. The first volume, Pig Earth, was published in 1979. Once in Europa, from which "The Time of the Cosmonauts" is taken, is the second volume. The epigraph that explains the trilogy's title is from John 4:38: "Others have labored and ye are entered into their labors." There are interesting ambiguities in this epigraph—among them, the question ofwhether Berger considers himself a laborer as well as an enterer, and what the erotic sense of "entering" (as in the final story of Once in Europa) might have to do with the other senses of drawing benefit from or joining oneself to. Ambiguities like these invite and reward the closest ofreadings: witness, below, Pamela McCallum's discussion of the erotic in G., and Peter de Bolla's and Williams Quillian's divergent views of the relation between the observer and his subjects. But if they give Berger's writing a rich modern dissonance, these ambiguities cannot entirely erase its resemblances to other celebrations of disappearing peasant life. From the epigraph onward, Berger unambig- 64 the minnesota review uously understands the labor of peasants as an ontological ground or essence of the human condition. Peasants themselves are the common denominator of Being itself. Anywhere in the world peasant villages are more or less the same, Berger writes; it makes little or no difference whether the society around them is capitalist or feudal. And so on. If that's what the peasantry is, then it must belong to the past, and both the observer and even the actual peasant can only exist in exile from it. All it can do when actually looked at is disappear—which is what Berger sees it doing. In Pig Earth, Berger says the three volumes of "Into Their Labors" will be addressed to the "threat of historical elimination" of the peasantry. In Once in Europa, this threat becomes an affidavit. The plan of the whole trilogy is presented as follows: the first volume is "set against the traditional life of a mountain village," the second is "a collection of love stories set against the disappearance or 'modernisation' of such village life," and the third "will tell the story of peasants who leave their villages to settle permanently in a metropolis." By volume three, the paradigmatic peasantry will have melted into the crowd of its urban observers, lost its distinctiveness , ceased to be. With the publication this year of volume two, therefore, we find ourselves teetering suspensefully on a very familiar brink: on the verge ofdisappearance, where empirical evidence of...