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.

A Sense of the Future: The Work of John Berger

Reading Berger : responding to the literary

erhaps the best introduction to prevailing interpretations of John Berger’s fiction is Georg Lukács’s pronouncement on the primacy of event over character in the epic: “In epic, the individual is, so to speak, subject to the event; the event over-shadows the human personality by its magnitude and importance, drawing attention away from him by the interestingness, diversity and multiplicity of its images” (34, emphasis added). In approaching Berger’s fiction, critics frequently invoke the primacy of event over character. Yet in this context, the dominant event concerns not particular happenings but the irresistible pressure of social and economic circumstance that define the peasant world of which Berger writes. Here, character is subordinate to event, but event itself is subordinate to a larger historical framework. Raymond Mazurek formulates this critical approach compactly: “Berger both depicts contemporary French peasant society and works toward the larger task associated, especially in the Marxist tradition, with critical realism: to situate actions and events within a broad historical frame, representing the social totality in which we live” (136, emphasis added). Although many critics, such as Joseph McMahon, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Peter Hitchcock, have explored the notion of sociohistorical context in Berger’s work in Marxist terms, other critics, such as Kiernan Ryan and Mazurek, interpret it through the lens of The Country and the City by Raymond Williams—a work that construes the rural country as a symbol of “other values” through which “people make other settlements and attachments” distinct from those of capitalism. Parallel to these studies are those that adopt variant approaches to the questions of social class (Jerry Herron, Fred Pfeil) and ideology (Michael Messmer) in Berger’s work. Their common project is to clarify what A. R. Bras terms “Berger’s unequivocal opposition to the

A Sense of the Future: The Work of John Berger

Citations

Reading Berger : responding to the literary

"Seeing That Eye": Tragedy and the Vision of Vision in John Berger's Pig Earth

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