Pig Earth, and: About Looking (review)

123 REVIEWS John Berger, Pig Earth. London: Writers and Readers Cooperative, 1979. 213pp. John Berger, About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. 198pp. Since the publication in this country of John Berger's prize-winning novel G. in 1972, his reputation here among leftists, and leftist artists especially, has grown steadily; and with good reason. Today, the example of his work over the last twenty-odd years (beginning, significantly enough perhaps, from around the time of his departure from Britain's stifling CP) constitutes, in effect, the first major set of standards for Marxist literary practice, and creative cultural practice in general, in the English-speaking world. Of this achievement, and this set of standards, at least two elements seem particularly distinctive, both of which are amply in evidence in the two works under review. First, the example of Berger's openness to a variety of cultural practices, a willingness to open out to radical possibility, which manifests itself not only in the range of Berger's work —he has written, to date, four novels, three "photo-texts" or documentary essays (with Jean Mohr), four collections of essays on art, culture, and politics, three film-scripts (with Alain Tanner), and Pig Earth, a well-nigh unclassifiable work of fiction, poetry, and commentary — but in his rare commitment to finding moments of such possibility outside those places where they are conventionally expected to be. Thus, in his classic essay, "The Moment of Cubism," he describes that movement not as a slide into modernist, elitist decadence on the part of a few terminally alienated, apolitical painters, but as a literarally revolutionary moment in the history of western consciousness whose innovations, thanks to the failure of political revolution in the west and its petrifaction in the east, still await our full understanding and assimilation. Thus, within a character like G. 's Beatrice, the wife of a proto-sadistic military officer in the midst of the Boer War, he is able to find and describe an understanding of herself in relation to imperialism which is enacted wholly privately, even wordlessly. She is aware that there is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can never see. She is being seen in that way now. Her mouth is dry. Her corsets constrain her more tightly. Everything tilts. She sees everything clearly and normally. She can discern no tilt. But she is convinced, she is utterly certain that everything has been tilted. (C, New York: Viking Press, 1972, pp. 102-3) Secondly, as this quote suggests, there is the matter of Berger's rootedness in what can now be called a tradition of overlapping radical and phenomenological concern. It is this concern that makes Berger's art criticism so accessible and vital, combining a dual emphasis on both the artist's and the viewer's perceptions with a sensitivity to the historical fields in which both operate. And it is this attention to the politics within the smallest, most apolitical actions, and the most private perceptions, that may well be Berger's most enduring contribution to the practice of radical literature, as in this excerpt from his essay on the European industrial migrant: He looks for the photo among the over-handled papers stuffed in his jacket. He finds it. In handing it over, he imprints his thumb on it, almost deliberately, as a gesture of possession . . . The photo defines an absence. Even if it is ten years old, it makes no difference. It 124 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW holds open, preserves the empty space which the sitter's presence will, hopefully, one day fill again. (A Seventh Man, New York: Viking Press, 1976, p. 16) Yet readers of this piece so far will probably be aware of something odd in my choice of quotes from books other than those under review. And if they sense a certain reluctance to confront these two new works by Berger— a reluctance, at any rate, to take them up outside the context of his previous work — they are right. For the first thing that must be said of both Pig Earth and About Looking is that both are...