Saturday, October 14, 1972 Ar G., by J o h n Berger. Viking Press, $7.95. By NIGEL GEARING If John Berger now seems Eng- land's most stimulating art cri- tic, it is above all because he has never stopped short at the "mere- ly" aesthetic and the art object per se, because he has never played that game of specialist, fragmented analysis which - in literature as in the visual arts - has kept the universities huh- ming but has too often relegated the vital manifestations of a cul- ture and a whole way of life to the museum catalogue or the proseminar reading list. By bringing to the work of Pi- casso (The Success and Failure of Picasso) a Marxist framework attendant to art as 'the sum to- tal of man's spiritual and phy- sical nature, not as separate, iso- lated activity, he was thus able to produce the most discriminat- ing and coherent critique to date of a genius who has invariably led his admirers down the path of idolatry and barely concealed hero-worship. In his brilliant es- say The Moment of Cubism, he was thus able to define, and pro- ceed from, a critical methodol- ogy we need to hold on to now more than ever: an apprehension of the arts in a situational con- text which, restoring that totality of human nature and experience, goes on to recognize a richness of possibilities-those alternatives which, at their intersection, pro- duced this instant of creativity, this moment expressive of past tradition, present mores and fu- ture aspiration. In short, to adopt a ready- made phrase, it is the search for a "structure of feeling" beyond the artistic foreground that in- forms his essays with their char- acteristic vitality, just as it does his novels-Corker's Freedom, for example, where the book turns on the related dialectic be- tween a person's imaginative ex- perience and the received cul- ture of the time. Such concerns are taken up again in Berger's new book G. (Viking Press, $7.95). Described as "a novel on the theme of Don Juan," it explores the tension between a latterday incarnation of the Giovanni "free spirit" and the conflicting ideology of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Born four years after Gari- baldi's death, the protagonist "G." is defined against a back- drop of social and political up- heaval which embraces the Ital- ian revolutionary fighting of 18- 98, British colonialism in Africa, the first flight over the Alps and the beginning of World War I. G.'s illegitimacy will perely an- ticipate a life-long alienation: like the hero of the earlier Ber- ger novel A Painter of Our Time, he is in a condition of exile more ideological than geographical. From the age of fifteen, when he is seduced by his aunt, it will be- come clear that for G. the sex- ual act is more than a metaphor of personal and social freedom in a constrictive environment; it is a reach for the totality of life which the prevailing bourgeois spirit is seeking to destroy. By its very nature it will place him at odds with the milieu in which he moves-in immedate terms, a shooting incident and other social skirmishes: in the long run, a rejection of his role as Tolstoyan superfluous man and (however. unintentional) an association with direct political activism. This final alliance will allow his con- temporaries to rid themselves of a figure who, always an embar- rassment to the social definitions he eludes, can now clearly be seen as a threat. G., caught up at the announcement of war in the agitation of a. Trieste work- ing class, is classified an Aus- trian agent helping to mobilize the Slays: "Everything which had been mysterious about him became instantly clear. With this certitude of interpretation came an equally satisfying certitude of decision . . . . To put an end to G." If the labeling is too glib, the novel as a whole is concerned with the fallacy of false classi- fication. The protagonist militat- ing against the prevalent norms is also the writer fighting the strictures of his form. Describ- ing one of G.'s many sexual en- counters, B e r g e r continues: "Sexual desire, however it is provoked or produced circum- stantially, and whatever its ob- jective terms and duration may be, is subjectively fixed to two points in time, our beginning and our end . . .. At the moment of orgasm these two points in time, our beginning and our end, may seem to fuse into one. When this happens everything that lies be- tween them, that is to say our whole life, becomes instantane- ous." And elsewhere G. solilo- quizes in the presence of an Ital- ian capitalist, "Why should I fear you? It is you who speak of the future and believe in it. You use the future to console THE MICHIGAN DAILY Pace F;ve Pn4+ Fi vc qp each for totality Grounds for satisfaction culous and monstrous continu- ity." The stridently personal-and particularly sexual - emphasis which transcends the capitalist's continuity is also for this writer the richness of the unique mo- ment which cannot be linearized to novelistic ends without some considerable loss. How, Berger asks, can an intensity of the mo- ment - a vertical apprehension, if you like - be expressed in a mode of seeing we might term horizontal? "I have little sense of unfolding time. The relations which I perceive between things -and these often include cas- ual and historical relations-tend to form in my mind a complex synchronic pattern. I see fields where others see chapters. And so I am forced to use another method to try to place and de- fine events. A method which searches for co-ordinates exten- sively in space, rather than con- sequentially in time . . . . One of the ways in which I establish co- ordinates extensively is by liken- ing aspect with aspect, by way of metaphor. I do not wish to become a prisoner of the nomi- nal, believing that things are what I name them." This false consciousness -_ which, of course, in the book's content reduces G to that revolu- tionary his enemies can feel justified in exterminating-must also be excised from the book's form if, like Berger's character Beatrice, we are to feel any- thing "between the interstices of formal social convention." For Berger, as it should for us, the social inevitably implicates the literary; elsewhere he as- serts, "I cannot continue this ac- count of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon a fin- al full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become in- coherent . . . The writer's de- sire to finish is fatal to the truth. The End unifies. Unity must be established in another way.' If, in all this, we hear an echo, the immediate correlation is of course with John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, but the problem of articulating what runs counter to a language of social sharing has confronted English novelists at least as far back as Emily Bronte. The more efficient a novelist's exercise of his form, so much the more, arguably, is he concealing what has always been an arbitrary code. As Berger writes: "The third person and the narrative form are clauses in a contract agreed between writer and read- er, on the basis that the two of them can understand the third person more fully than he can understand himself. "The diffi- culty begs an approach beyond that of Fowles's novel, which, to this reader at least, recognized the issue without finally con- fronting what such recognition must predicate: a truly radical reassessment of the bases from which a conscious twentieth-cen- tury prose writer must proceed. The French Lieutenant's Woman, with its juxtaposition of Victor- ian romance and self-conscious rumination on the inherent de- ceptions of the novelist's art, its alternative endings and its twen- tieth - century commentary on nineteenth - century manners, must always seem more ampli- fied critique than organic crea- tion, more signpost than destina- tion. There is, to be sure, a sense in which this criticism can be leveled at G. also. Where, I think, it escapes such criticism is where we return to Berger's essential grasp of totality. "One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is." This minute, which can em- brace all conceivable directions, may be explored by the "central intelligence" of writer and/or protagonist, but it must finally be relinquished to the temporal span from which it has been snatched. In Berger's novel, the Today's Writers... Nigel Gearing, the first half of our all-Anglo team today in what might become the Midwest's leading transatlan- tic review, studies mathema- tics. David Kozubei is one of those rarest of all known crea- tures, a literate bookseller, and can be found these days at Border's New Improved Bookshop. apprehension of this waters a way of seeing which combines both historical sense and, finally, a modesty in the face of the mysterious; proceeds to the out- er limits of analysis and turns back in deference to that whole 'complex still remains to be ex- plored. What, for instance, is the precise significance for the child G. - clearly primary -- in the killing of the dray horses? What is the essence of that moment by the fountain which clearly determines so much of the pro- tagonist's later life? ("The reve- lation is as wordless as the wa- ter she threw was colourless.") What is it that for Beatrice makes the earth seem to tip? ("She is aware there. is another way of seeing her and all that surrounds her, which can only be defined as the way she can n e v e r see.") Why should a Marxist art critic writing a per- iod novel see as seminal to what he is creating a friend's death, a recent dream, the prank played on him by the son of an old ac- quaintance? We must rest hap- py in the confidence that the his- torical sense at least registers such resonances, even if it can- not explain them. We must rest happy in our notion of a dialectic to which we ourselves are a contributing factor: "A 'mo- ment's introspection," argues Berger, "shows that a large part of our own experience cannot be . adequately formulated: it awaits further understanding of the to- tal human situation. In certain respects we are likely to be bet- ter understood by those who fol- low us than by ourselves . . . . They will change our unformu- lated experience beyond our recognition. As we have chang- ed Beatrice's." The novel thus emerges as a genuine expression of that cultural flux which, un- derlying us, also underlies our art-forms -- among these latter the very novel we are consider- ing. G. is as difficult as it is re- warding. There have for sure been recent novels more pol- ished than this, also claiming to tackle problems of personal as- similation and cultural under- standing, but one wonders if tnir polish does not betray a certain lack of seriousness in the task on which they are supposed- ly intent. If, as we are being told, the novel is on its death bed, it will not be for any lack of conviction or sincerity in the efforts of