Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger (review)

Reviews 101 ulary which Berger helped to bring into self-consciousness elsewhere. DANIEL FINEMAN Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger by Geoff Dyer. London: Pluto Press, 1986. 186 pp. $4.95 (paper). The first book-length study of John Berger's writings has been a long time coming. Berger has been actively engaged as an essayist, art critic, and novelist for more than thirty years, and at least since his winning the Booker Prize for G. in 1972, his name has been among the most prominent in post-war British intellectual life. Doubtless some of the resistance to confronting his work in extenso derives from Berger's own uncompromising politics, which have consistently pitted him against the establishments in art history and criticism and literary criticism. Praise for individual works—along with savage attacks—has not been lacking, but hitherto he has not been thought "important" enough to merit sustained consideration. It is therefore a great pleasure to see that Geoff Dyer's Ways of Telling sets a high standard for future works on Berger—there will certainly be others. Dyer is thorough (only the screenplays written in collaboration with Alain Tanner are omitted from discussion), patient , and sympathetic without falling into hagiography. For instance, regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, it is a mark of Dyer's honesty and candor that he says of The Foot ofClive, that it "is a bad novel that should be a play" (p. 45), and judges Corderk's Freedom "no more satisfactory" (p. 50). Most impressively, Dyer registers the various turns in Berger's career, not only among different genres of writing, but in the different positions Berger has occupied in relation to the art/politics nexus which has been the focal point of his work from his earliest creative efforts—really from his days as a painter whose social realism flew in the face of the regnant abstract expressionism dominating the Anglophone art scene throughout the immediate post-war period. From my perspective, Berger's most impressive work remains the sequence of texts from The Success and Failure ofPicasso (1965), through "The Moment of Cubism," Art and Revolution (his study ofthe Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny), and G. (1972). Most impressive because they opened up a terrain for investigation—a materialist account of European Modernism—that was then and is still of decisive importance for the Marxist concept of art. All accounts of the bourgeois cultural revolution, whether positive or negative, must take into account Berger's fundamental contributions, above all, his acute insight that the formal innovations of analytical cubism remain the horizon of aesthetic achievement for any revolutionary socialist art of the future. Geoff Dyer would probably disagree somewhat with this view of Berger's career. He vigorously defends the subsequent texts Berger has produced and, with some qualifications, makes a case for the comparable value of the project "Into Their Labours." Of Pig Earth, for example, he writes: "Pig Earth thus represents a dual but fully integrated attempt at a preservation of a way of life and a way of telling—a preservation which may turn out to represent progress in both political and 'formal' terms" (p. 126). And on the trajectory of Berger's recent writings, he comments: The danger of Marxism turning itself into theology is utopianism; in place of the consolation in the next world offered by religion it offers consolation in the future: hope for the future leads to despair of the present. Berger's faith by contrast is an affirmation of the here and now; it offers not the negation of praxis but a new condition for it. Vitally, Berger's is a pessimistic faith, (p. 134) Another Marxist thinker in this century put the same insight this way: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." But the decisive problem for socialist politics, how to create the revolution beyond capitalism, is barely illuminated by this remark. 102 the minnesota review In writing about some of Berger's most recent essays, Dyer makes the following claims about Berger's conception of the aesthetic: Far from being an idealist category, the aesthetic for Berger is that part of reality in which...