On a spring afternoon in 1915, G. and a woman named Nuša are sitting “in the overgrown garden of the Museo Lapidario” in Trieste. Scattered around the garden are various architectural fragments and inscribed stones of great antiquity. Italy has just declared war on Austria-Hungary, which will open a southern front in the Great War. G. is traveling on a fake Italian passport, half-heartedly spying for an old friend in the British Foreign Office, an assignment he took only as an excuse to get out of London. (“I do not believe,” he explains to his friend, “in the Great Causes.”) For a variety of reasons, G.’s life is in danger, but he’s strangely indifferent to his own safety.
Nuša, a poor Slovenian immigrant, is the sister of one of the Young Bosnians, a revolutionary network responsible for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Nuša wants G.’s Italian passport in order to help her brother. G. probably wants to seduce Nuša, but he has also been busy seducing Marika, the wife of Wolfgang von Hartmann, a powerful Austro-Hungarian official whom G. is determined to humiliate. In the middle of G. and Nuša’s exchange, amid this swirl of amorous and political forces,
a butterfly alights in the grass near her hand. Its flight, its stillness, wings upright and congruent, and then again its tremulous movement belong to a time scale so remote from Nuša’s and G.’s that if it was applied to them, they would seem like two statues.
Narrative time is suspended by a butterfly. Its lifeworld, its temporal and spatial perspective, contrasts with the human, rendering our characters as distant, as inanimate, as the stelae and sculptures that surround them. At first this change of scale vivifies the butterfly—its brief stillness, the angle of its wings, its trembling—while freezing everything else, including the novel’s action. But the effect is paradoxical, or maybe dialectical: if Nuša and G. are like statues to the butterfly, then perhaps what we perceive as mere statues, as relics of a dead past, are also in a sense alive; we just have to apply the right time scale. By making the humans into stones, the butterfly has brought the stones surrounding Nuša and G. in the museum gardens to life. (It’s mere coincidence that “lepidoptera” is so close to “lapidary,” that “lepid-” means the scale of a fish or a butterfly wing and “lapis” stone, but Berger as a stylist, with his movements between delicacy and density, is a butterfly catcher one second and a stoneworker the next.)
It’s far more pronounced elsewhere, but even in this paragraph you can perceive the tension between lyricism and abstraction that is a hallmark of Berger’s prose. A “butterfly alights” near the potential lovers, to whom we might transfer its “tremulous movement”—the language is Romantic. On the other hand, there is a “time scale” “applied to them”—these phrases are drier, more schematic. Both modes have their clichés, but together they begin to vibrate, the way painters speak of using red to increase the vibrancy of green.
And Berger’s novel G. is a field of vibrations—of oscillations, of rapid movements between the instantaneous and the epochal, between the sensuous and the abstract, between the historically particular and the mythological, between realism and the laying bare of the device. Even the moniker “G.” both individuates and deindividuates, only almost giving our protagonist a name. This is fitting for a character who alternates between being a distinct historical person, the son of a candy merchant from Livorno and his English mistress, and a literary trope, a modern variation on Don Juan.
The book follows G.’s amorous career across Europe, from his fascination with an unnamed girl who saves him during the 1898 food riots in Milan—the eleven-year-old G. slipped out of the hotel and into the streets while his parents slept—to those last convulsive days in Trieste, where rioters and soldiers will again face off. (There are often crowds assembling around G.—individuals dissolving into a collective subject—while G. is pursuing what Berger, in another context, called “the shared subjectivity of sex”; the possible relationship between these two modes of intersubjectivity is one of the novel’s organizing questions.) We follow G., but it’s never clear how well we know him.
One moment we have intimate access to G., and the next we confront his opacity. Early in the book the young G., who has been sent by his mother to live with relations in the English countryside, is thrown from his horse, knocked unconscious; when he comes to in an old laborer’s cottage, Berger interrupts the fiction of omniscience:
The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.
What the old man says I do not know.
What the boy says in reply I do not know.
To pretend to know would be to schematize.
And while G.’s first sexual encounter with Beatrice is described in intense detail, we are barred from his internal experience: “To describe the nature of his memories of Beatrice would require a book with its own uniquely established vocabulary. (It would be the book of his dreams, not mine or yours.)”
We still don’t have a great vocabulary for this species of literary self-reflexivity. Berger’s experiments have little to do with the playful metafictions that were once referred to by that now archaic-sounding term “postmodern.” The counterpoint between third-person narration and the author’s first-person meditations on its limits brings historical time and the time of writing into felt relation. Berger often surfaces from the fiction to offer essayistic passages and vignettes that pertain to his own life, not G.’s, as when, after G.’s sexual encounter with Beatrice, a new section suddenly begins with Berger in Paris—“It is eight o’clock on a December morning…. I have just left a laundry.” That’s Berger’s I, Berger’s temporality. And it makes composition itself an emotionally charged drama. Some of the most affecting moments in the book are when the novelist’s “I” separates from its subject, hesitates, and is reabsorbed back into the world of the story.
Consider this scene from the middle of the book. It is 1910 and crowds have assembled in the Swiss town of Brig to witness a historic event. A pilot named Chavez—a friend of G.’s—is attempting to become the first man to fly across the Alps. To be present for such a dangerous feat offers
a very primitive satisfaction, connecting the time of one’s own life with the time of one’s ancestors and descendants. The great pole of history is notched across at the same point as the small stick of one’s own life.
But instead of joining the crowds and witnessing Chavez’s crossing (which Berger indelibly describes from the pilot’s perspective), G. is ensconced in his hotel room, entangled with a housekeeper named Leonie. The sexual encounter is also a kind of flight: “She had the sensation that wherever his hands went they lifted her and took away some of her weight.” Eventually we again run up against the limits of language:
Armed with the entire language of literature we are still denied access to her experience. There is only one possible way of, briefly, entering that experience: to make love to her. Then why do I want to describe her experience exhaustively, definitively, when I fully recognize the impossibility of doing so? Because I love her. I love you, Leonie. You are beautiful. You are gentle. You can feel pain and pleasure. You are tiny and I take you in my hand. You are large as the sky and I walk under you. It was he who said this.
I quote the passage in part because it contains much about G. that I find discomfiting: the idea that sexual penetration counts as entering, however briefly, the experience of the woman; that a male writer’s desire to “enter” the experience of a female character is analogous to the sexual act; or the suggestion—throughout the book—that, for the women of his time, sex with G. is a way, maybe the only way, of being momentarily liberated from the disfiguring constraints of class and patriarchy. (“Alas,” Jennifer Allen wrote of G., “the poison is difficult to distinguish from the antidote.”) But I also find the passage powerful, particularly the way that the writer’s voice falls from the schematic heights (“Armed with the entire…”) back through the pronominal clouds until it lands in G., in a bed in the Alps in 1910.
You are tiny, you are large—sex in G. is fundamentally a way of confusing, of suspending, of obliterating scale. That’s why sex also collapses narrative levels. Along with the borders of the body, it obliterates time. “The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself,” Berger writes in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance (2007). The erotic—in all of Berger’s writing—is a political force, or a force that needs to be harnessed by the political: it is a bearer of alterity, a momentary experience of an outside to what passes for immovable reality. Berger is a materialist, but for him that means taking sensuality seriously, not just offering dry analyses of class conflict. “All generalizations are opposed to sexuality,” he says in G., generalizing.1
Many of the sexual experiences in G. are narrated from the perspective of women. After his pioneering Ways of Seeing (1972), an early and influential account of what would become known as the male gaze—“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”—critics such as Marina Warner have understood Berger’s fiction as an attempt to “think of the person inside the female sign or image”; the women in Berger’s fiction, Warner says, “are being thought through rather than gazed at.” Warner is writing about the trilogy of novels collectively known as Into Their Labours (1972–1990), Berger’s exploration of modern European peasants and migration, but this is also the avowed project of G., which was published the same year as Ways of Seeing and is, according to its dedication, “for Anya and for her sisters in Women’s Liberation.”
In Into Their Labours, Warner detects
a note of idolisation of women that’s rooted in a kind of sex mysticism that would clash strongly with post-war feminism and, indeed, with Berger’s own sharp insights into the nude and its negation of women as persons.2
Certainly passages of G. involve “a way of seeing women that’s intensely yearning and mystificatory,” even if Berger also makes “an honest attempt to do justice to them and the structure of their world.” I’d simply note that it’s an argument for the relevance of G., not its datedness, that it activates these contemporary questions of projection and appropriation, of what it means to speak through or for another, and that G.’s aforementioned self-reflexivity—the fluctuations in Berger’s access to his characters, how he foregrounds the novel’s constructedness—incorporates these questions into the very form of the book.
G. always stands a little apart from the crowd—and not just the one that watches Chavez crash his plane. He’s there, as I mentioned, as workers riot in the streets of Milan in 1898, which Berger uses to evoke Garibaldi’s army marching on Naples in 1860, and for the rioting in Trieste in 1915. Or G. is both there and not there, often wandering away from historical events in order to make love. This marks him as superfluous, ridiculous. “When you have a dynamic society,” Berger said in an interview, “the energy of a Don Juan would be directed in a different way. He’d fight society, challenge it,” not just pursue sexual liaisons. And yet sex in Berger’s work is too powerful a force for G. to be merely a libertine; each erotic encounter contains a small spark of revolutionary possibility. “In times of political confusion,” Berger once wrote, “it is the sexual field which appears to offer the most basic expressions of the will to freedom.” What you think of G. and G. will turn on what you make of such a claim.
The couple (that is, two people joined in the sexual act) and the crowd aren’t identical in Berger’s work, but they aren’t, as they so often are in literature, opposed—the two lovers who have eyes only for each other as the world burns, etc. For Berger, crowds, in particular mass demonstrations, represent a kind of “rehearsal” of “revolutionary awareness”:
By demonstrating, they manifest a greater freedom and independence—a greater creativity, even although the product is only symbolic—than they can ever achieve individually or collectively when pursuing their regular lives. In their regular pursuits they only modify circumstances; by demonstrating they symbolically oppose their very existence to circumstances.
This is from Berger’s “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” in the magazine New Society in 1968. He adds, “I have been trying to understand certain aspects of the demonstration in the Corso Venezia on 6 May [1898] because of a story I am writing,” which became G.
Even the very different crowd that assembled to watch Chavez—hardly a “mass demonstration”—aspires, by linking “one’s own life with the time of one’s ancestors and descendants,” to defy the mere present, the merely personal. And erotic desire, Berger writes in Hold Everything Dear, “when reciprocal, is a plot, hatched by two, in the face of, or in defiance of, all the other plots which determine the world. It is a conspiracy of two.” The energies of crowds and lovers might need to be captured, redirected, if they’re to become more than symbolic, if they’re to become actual revolutionary seizures or effective conspiracies, but the energies are nevertheless precious. G. is perhaps not as far from the madding crowd as he seems. Two becoming one, a thousand becoming one—it’s the becoming that counts, the dissolution of the self and its scale, a rehearsal for another world.
In many ways, sex in G. is very narrowly conceived: heterosexual, penetrative (and, for that matter, involving only two). But at the same time, what erotic experience enables—the sudden disclosure of different orders of time and space—can be found in a variety of transitory perceptual reveries, not just intercourse. What the young G. feels when he
looks down at the lit windows of the house and dairy is the icy complement to the burning mystery of his own body in bed. Every lit window suggests to him the room within. Through each window he pulls out the drawer of the room. In it is warmth, safety and his own familiarity with the life he is living. But he himself is not in it. He is in the darkness by the beech trees.
You are tiny, you are large. You are inside and outside—of time, of your body, of the house, of society, of the novel. You are outside of circumstances. You are in the light and in the dark. You are a tremulous movement between these things. “The sexual field” thus understood is vast. The shared subjectivity of the crowd, erotic conspiracy, the expansion of subjectivity through certain ways of seeing—the burning mystery has its complements.
What is the contemporary political valence of the erotic, however we construe it? Has Eros—in a catastrophic dance with Thanatos—become the exclusive domain of the right, of disinhibited authoritarians? My formulation is overbroad, begs a million questions, but if you feel a left politics must imagine a new relation to the libidinal, to “the sexual field,” then G. is newly relevant. When G. won the Booker Prize in 1972, Berger’s acceptance speech scandalized his audience. He named the colonial sources of the Booker family fortune and pledged to share his prize money with the Black Panthers. It seems that those who were shocked by Berger’s speech—despite the novel’s trenchant anticapitalist and anti-imperialist passages—had mistaken G. for a book about the past.
English (US) · 