Selected Essays of John Berger

John Berger was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize–winning novel
G.
John Berger now lives and works in a small village in the French Alps.

ALSO BY JOHN BERGER

Into Their Labours

(
Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag
: A Trilogy)

A Painter of Our Time

Permanent Red

The Foot of Clive

Corker’s Freedom

A Fortunate Man

Art and Revolution

The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays

The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles

Ways of Seeing

Another Way of Telling

A Seventh Man

G.

About Looking

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

The Sense of Sight

The Success and Failure of Picasso

Keeping a Rendezvous

To the Wedding

King

Photocopies

The Shape of a Pocket

Editor’s Introduction

Appendices

Notes

Sources

John Berger’s achievements as a writer are both widely recognised and – because of their diversity – difficult to grasp. Even admirers tend to know him in only one or two of his many incarnations. The questions ‘Which is his best book?’ or ‘Which book should I read first?’ are unanswerable. It is the entire body of work that is remarkable; no single volume represents Berger adequately. However, the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, in November 2001, provided a timely opportunity to try to come up with just such a book.

Throughout his working life Berger has written essays. Far from being adjuncts to the main body of work, these essays are absolutely central to it. Many of the ideas in the ground-breaking book and TV series
Ways of Seeing
– ideas which have since become part of our received cultural knowledge – were presented first and, in some ways, more sensitively, in essays for
New Society.
Polemical, meditative, radical, always original (‘The moment at which a piece of music begins provides a clue to the nature of all art’), Berger’s essays are, of course, extremely wide-ranging. It is not just that he has written on photographers, artists, thinkers and peasants, on zoos, museums and cities he has travelled to; these diverse concerns are often combined in the course of a single essay. Taken together, however, this signature variegation emphasises the continuities that have underpinned more than forty years of tireless intellectual inquiry and fierce political engagement. Viewed chronologically they do not simply show how his views have changed or how his thought has evolved; they add up to a kind of vicarious autobiography and a history of our time as refracted through the prism of art.

More than any other writer of the post-war period, it is Berger who has explored and expanded the possibilities of the essay. Essays by the usually cited contemporary masters of the form such as Gore Vidal or John Updike are marked by apparently effortless eloquence. In Berger’s case, by contrast, we come close to witnessing thought as an act of almost physical labour. Partly this is due to his refusal to separate the two concerns that have dominated his life and work: the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed (the two come together most clearly in his essay on Joyce’s
Ulysses
). Partly it is due to a determination to present complex ideas in the plainest possible language. This has not been without its ironic consequences. In 1980 Berger recommended John Barrell’s
The Dark Side of the Landscape
to ‘all those interested in how class ideology produces cultural codes’. He concluded that, together with T. J. Clark, Barrell lent hope to the idea ‘that an internationally relevant English school of radical art history studies may be in the making’. The prophecy was no sooner uttered than it was fulfilled and betrayed. The ‘radical art history’ that Berger had done so much to usher in quickly barricaded itself in the cultural-studies departments of polytechnics and universities where second-rate Eagletons discoursed away in the confident belief that no one with any sense was likely to be paying attention. Nietzsche was right: ‘Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity; those who would like to seem profound … strive for obscurity.’