John Berger: writing with the eyes, looking with the prose

John Berger (London, 1926-Antony, France, 2017) is one of those intellectuals of the 20th century who today seem impossible. Combative and erudite, a staunch Marxist with a highly refined artistic taste, politically militant and intellectually sophisticated, select and popular, Berger achieved, like a contemporary colleague of his who was also an art critic, Robert Hughes, a feat currently inconceivable: to surround himself with an aura of fame without selling out his rigor, squandering his prestige, or allowing his ideas to be adulterated or his priorities to be altered. Both Berger and Hughes achieved fame thanks to two cultural milestones of television, Ways of Seeing (1972) and The Shock of the New (1980), respectively, which brought the visual arts to the general public in a didactic but, at the same time, serious and expert way. What matters, in any case, is that, beyond the television glory, neither Berger nor Hughes ever stopped doing above all what for them were the main tasks: looking, thinking, writing. It is partly for this reason that everything they wrote still seems to us at least interesting.

The author's relationship with language

Most of Berger's texts collected in Confabulations, now published in a Catalan translation by Martí Sales by the essential publisher Arcàdia, are brief, minor in tone, and unfold through an erratic or unpredictable structure, jumping from here to there and not following the course of a line of reasoning to set out a thesis, but rather letting itself be guided by associations, correspondences, intuitions, and verbal impulses. At times it is disconcerting, but that is part of the charm of the book, which has as its thematic and expressive core the author's relationship with language: “For me, writing has been a vital activity: it helps me find the meaning of things and continue”. Furthermore, Berger has such a colossal background (he knows about politics, art, literature, and carries a lot of lived life with him) and has such a versatile and consistent literary command (he wrote narrative, poetry, theater, scripts, essays, journalism) that at the most unexpected moment he is capable of pulling some formidable aces out of his sleeve, such as when he compares a photograph of an elderly Charlie Chaplin with Rembrandt's last self-portrait.

Written in the final stage of his life, the texts of Confabulations are characterized above all by their heterogeneity: there is a somewhat cheesy letter addressed to Rosa Luxemburg, there is a brief and Camus-esque vindication of anti-gregariousness and non-submission to hierarchies, there are comments on current socio-political affairs (Berger's inevitable furious flares against "the totalizing global order of speculative financial capitalism"), there are visits to the studios of artist friends, there are descriptions of works of art, there is a reflection between lyrical and philosophical on the nature of songs, there are references to names as disparate as Johnny Cash, Nicolas Poussin, García Lorca, and Antonello da Messina... And there is an excellent text, Et in arcadia ego, in which Berger evokes his relationship with a Scandinavian painter friend while demonstrating his talent as a visual writer, figuratively precise and chromatically energetic. The book is complemented by a series of delicate little drawings by Berger himself that do not enrich the text much but do embellish the edition.