Pig Earth

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TERRY EAGLETON reviews Pig Earth by John Berger, published by the Writers and Readers Cooperative, price £4.95.

'There are many people in this world' remarked Leon Trotsky in Literature and Revolution, 'who think as revolutionists and feel as philistines.' So much so, in fact, that when reading most Marxists on art the old back-handed compliment about the dog walking on hind legs leaps instantly to mind: it isn't done well, but it's surprising it's done at all.

Peasants

John Berger, untypically, has been writing excellently on art as a Marxist for many years; and Pig Earth, a collection of poems, short stories and essays about the French peasants among whom he has lived for two years, is the latest product of that long exploration.

Not that Pig Earth is about art: it is art; and this points to another of Berger's untypicalities.

In a class society where the division of intellectual labour between 'artist' and 'critic' has been rigidly enforced, Berger is notable for his contempt of that frontier.

One of his earliest, and best, books was a study of Picasso-itself a remarkable achievement, for a Marxist criticism which has always been deeply contaminated by the Stalinist suspicion of avant-garde art as mere decadent death-throes.

Defy categories

But he has also published novels (G, for example), and a whole range of works which defy set academic categories.

A Fortunate Man, IoT instance, is a kind of parttextual, part-visual account of the daily life of an unknown country doctor; but whether it's fiction, biography, psychoanalysis or documentary is hard to say.

A Seventh Man records the plight of immigrant workers in Europe, and some of it seems 'fictional'; but as you turn the page you stumble, unannounced, on passages from Marx or Walter Benjamin, slid unobtrusively into the text.

Ways of Seeing is a Marxist analysis of painting, but it cuts up its text with photographs in unpredictable ways, and a whole section of the 'analysis' consists just of a linked set of photographs of paintings, with no written word to 'guide' the reader.

What Berger is doing, in fact, is nothing less than challenging the whole orthodox bourgeois notion of 'book'.

It isn't just that he writes Marxist 'content'; it's also that he is out to question the whole form of bourgeois intellectual production.

Transform

And in this he takes his cue from the great German Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, who insisted that revolutionary culture couldn't consist just of pumping new kinds of material down the same old channels.

The whole point of revolutionary culture is to transform the means of cultural production themselves-and so to transform the social relations between writers, audiences, distributors, readers and critics.

It's logical, in this light, that Ways of Seeing isn't really written by John Berger: it's produced by a whole collaborative group of critics, of whom Berger is merely one.

One thinks back to the great theatrical experiments of Bolshevik Russia and Bertolt Brecht's Germany, where plays were written by whole teams of contributors and the bourgeois nation of the 'individual author' dramatically overturned.

Analytical essay

Pig Earth follows this pattern in its attempt to challenge the smugly watertight distinctions between 'fact' and 'fiction' Most of it consists of poems and stories, but it ends with a long analytical essay on the plight of the world peasantry.

The stories themselves are for the most part trenchantly 'realist' • and this represents both Berger's strength and weakness.

Berger has what one might describe as a finely materialist imagination: he is superb at rendering in words the feel, rhythm and texture of routine material processes.

But this means that the stories are a good deal better at portraying, say, the slaughter of a cow than they are at dramatising the complex political situation of the peasantry.

Experimental

To do this successfully, Berger would need to break radically with his realist forms-to stop placing himself within the daily consciousness of the peasantry, and find instead some more experimental method by which he could project an 'overview' of the situation.

As the book stands, that 'overview' has to be banished from the art and relegated to the final analytical essay.

It is a good example of how artists committed to historical materialism often feel, instinctively, that realism is its appropriate literary form.

But why should it be?

Whatever the Stalinist critics may believe, there's no necessary virtue in artistic realism, as against, say, abstract or Cubist art-forms.

Indeed, in so far as such art-forms strive to break up the surface 'realist' appearances of social life, to expose the governing patterns and mechanisms beneath it, they may be considerably more 'revolutionary' in their effect than those kinds of dismal 'socialist realism' which stay locked within the world 'as it is' Berger's closing essay on the peasantry is indeed an 'overview' of sorts; but what it lacks is as glaring as what it says.

The economic and social conditions of the peasantry are emphasised at the expense of a genuinely political analysis, which would raise questions of the revolutionary party, and the nature of petty-bourgeois nationalist struggle in its contrast with proletarian Instead of a truly dialectical study, which would grasp the peasantry not just in its present conditions but in its historical role and relations, Berger offers us a sociological survey: the world peasantry as an 'object' to be studied.

It is not accidental, then, that Berger's political formation was Stalinist.

Though he has broken with that history to some extent, it remains an active impediment within his writing.

For a genuinely revolutionary account of the peasantry, we would need a different kind of art, and a different kind of politics.

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