Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger

Abstract

This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger’s work points to a writing that can break free from the curious capacity of capitalism to absorb and feed of its critiques.

Keywords:

• Berger
• capitalism
• fiction
• resistance
• universality
• critique

Notes

1. For example, And our faces my heart, brief as photos (Berger 1984) contains two parts: part one (‘Once’) being about time, part two (‘Here’) being about space. Neither one is inherently privileged, both necessarily faceted together. Hold everything dear (Berger 2007a) mirrors this symmetry of time and space in its ‘Ten Dispatches about Endurance’ and ‘Ten dispatches about place’. Here is where we meet ‘describes as place a moment in which we temporarily dwell’ according to Berger (2007b) in an interview for a German newspaper (‘Es umschreibt als Ort einen Moment, in dem wir uns zeitweilig aufhalten’).

2. Badiou (2006, 34) described them as follows: ‘Today, outside of the grand and petty bourgeoisie of imperial cities who proclaim to be “civilization”, there is only the anonymous excluded. “Excluded” is the name for those who have no name, just as “market” is the name for a world that is not a world.’

3. He elaborates: ‘In the stance I keep referring to, there is something special, a quality that no postmodern or political vocabulary today can find a word for. The quality of a way of sharing that disarms the leading question: why was one born into this life?’ (Berger 2006b, 609).

4. ‘The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of time’ (Badiou 2008, 41).

5. This has echoes of Derrida’s opening phrase of Specters of Marx (1994), ‘I would like to learn to live finally’. It addresses the fear of modern people that they have not really lived, not yet lived or fulfilled their lives, in a world organized to deprive them of that satisfaction.

6. We can trace parallels here with Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitude which was not ‘I have got it right’ but ‘Now I know how to go on’. And then there are, of course, the famous last sentences in Beckett’s (1997) 1953 novel, The Unnamable (with thanks to the editors for pointing this out to me):

 I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know.

 You must go on.

 I can’t go on.

 I’ll go on.