A Writer of Our Time by Joshua Sperling

Author:Joshua Sperling
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

And yet there is a problem. As most serious critics of the novel have noticed, G. is not really a character. He barely speaks. He is not described. He is never given a name. He is quite literally a man without qualities, or, as Ian Fleming said of James Bond, ‘an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened’.26 G. is a desiring and travelling and seducing machine. But he is not a self.

Neither are the secondary characters, but in the opposite sense. While G. is an existential blank slate, everyone else is so socially fixed as to verge on stereotype. They all represent their nation and class, and are analysed as such: the gruff Italian capitalist, the prim Victorian gentleman, the feckless American heiress, the repressed French housewife, the stiff Austrian banker. Robert Musil, whose essayistic fiction was such an inspiration, nicknamed himself ‘Monsieur Le Vivisecteur’, and Berger’s intent was similar. There is an almost medical register at times: Beatrice’s face ‘tends to be laterally overstretched—as though her ears are constantly pulling her mouth into a smile’.27 The relation of author to character, at least with this secondary cast, is one of examiner to specimen. The sociocultural insights can be animated, but the characters are taxidermied artefacts: they were never alive to begin with.

All of these roads lead to a startling conclusion. After Umberto and Laura make love, G. is born on the page: ‘What has been conceived are the essentials of the character about whom I wish to write.’28 When Chávez and his plane reach the precipice of the Gondo Gorge, his engine stalls. So does the text: ‘Here there could have been no question of conscious decisions. Here I cannot calculate as I write.’29 There is a compelling reversal enacted in these passages, as in others. The shadow of the writer, which is to say John Berger, becomes the hero of the book, so immersed is he in the experience of its composition. G. is, in this sense, doubly a bildungsroman, eliding its own formation as a novel with the novel of formation. The five years Berger spent working on G. were five years he spent using the novel in much the way protagonists of novels (from Tristam Shandy to Stephen Dedalus) are said to use life: as a fund of experience, an ‘adventure of interiority’, a means to test questions of value and fate. Berger was writing himself into a long tradition. ‘I continue to live the life for which Joyce did so much to prepare me’, he said a half-century after his boyhood copy of Ulysses was taken from him, ‘and I have become a writer. It was he who showed me, before I knew anything, that literature is inimicable to all hierarchies and that to separate fact and imagination, event and feeling, protagonist and narrator, is to stay on dry land and never put to sea.’

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.