To live in linear time, the critic and novelist John Berger suggested, is to content oneself with a kind of continuous grieving. “The body ages. The body is preparing to die,” he writes in his slim book from 1984, “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos.” “Death and time were always in alliance.”
Berger, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety, initially trained as a visual artist, a practice he never fully left behind. Though his best-known work is from the nineteen-seventies—his BBC documentary “Ways of Seeing,” which polemically surveys art history, and his novel “G,” which won the Booker Prize, both appeared in 1972—he was enormously prolific throughout his life, producing dozens of volumes, from studies of individual artists to plays to experimental fictions. His activity sometimes seemed like proof of concept for his ideas: an astute art critic, he was also a theorist of art’s practical purchase, fascinated by its capacity to transform the physical stuff of the world.
He was attentive to the materiality of other forces as well. In “Brief as Photos,” an elegant fusion of philosophy, memoir, and poetry, he calls himself a storyteller—and storytellers, he says, are “Death’s Secretaries.” It’s an apt phrase, suggesting someone who is at once in the thrall of and subordinate to our mortality. In one section of the book, Berger thinks of a cremated friend while walking through an orchard where villagers are burning leaves. Breathing the ashes in, he realizes that little separates this carbon—“the prerequisite for any form of life”—from that of his friend’s body. “Ashes are ashes,” he writes. “Physically his body, simplified by burning to the element of carbon, re-enters the physical process of the world.”
This emphasis on materiality is essential to Berger’s writing. “Ways of Seeing” famously opens with a sequence in which he slices a section out of a framed Botticelli painting. Though the canvas is a copy, it looks real enough on television, lending the act an almost sacrilegious quality. Berger, attentive and careful as he cuts, nonetheless exudes a kind of reverence throughout. Discussing art on the airwaves, he sought meaning in the materiality of the objects on view—showing that, even in reproduction, they were irreducibly physical, rather than ethereal or transcendent. They belonged to the world.
In the print companion to the series, Berger stresses that visual art is a way of reckoning with entropy and loss. “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent,” he writes. When we are separated from the people and things that we love—whether by oceans or by years—works of art testify to both their enduring gravity and their distance from us. Those works also generate new kinds of proximity. All paintings, Berger writes in “Brief as Photos,” “are prophecies of themselves being looked at”—they anticipate the viewers who will stand before them, long after they were made. That anticipation collapses distinct moments into one another, defying the absences that time creates.
We might conclude, then, that art stands in contrast to death, that it serves as an attempt to overcome mortality. But in Berger’s work, art and death correspond more often than they come into conflict. They both call attention to something shared, if only to our raw material correspondence with one another.
Berger was a committed Marxist—“Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible,” he wrote in “Ways of Seeing,” a representative statement that still seems remarkable in a book produced to accompany a popular television series—and his attention to materiality had a political aspect. His writing often focussed on problems of labor; artists, Berger reminded his readers, are actors in the world, each creation a worldly performance. As Robert Minto puts it, “Berger takes art out of the sanitizing temples where we store it and drops it firmly back onto the easel, in a messy studio, where a sweaty artist bites her lip and stores her way of looking in an object.”
Berger’s writing on death likewise took on a political character in its attention to the capacity of bodies, and what they can do while they’re living. Hence one of the most striking aphorisms in “Brief as Photos”: “What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes.”
Hope, Berger proposed, is what we counterpoise to the essential revelation of history—that we’ll decline, that we’ll die. “To decide to engage oneself in History requires, even when the decision is a desperate one, hope,” he writes in “Bento’s Sketchbook,” one of his last volumes. Hope names a commitment to change the world, against the fact of finitude. It was hope, I think, that allowed Berger to write so beautifully about death without eliding the tragedy of it. Consider the haunting anticipatory elegy that concludes “And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos”:
Berger always returned to the possibility of proximity, seeking to cross the distances that divide us. Throughout his work, every way of seeing starts with a look, and every look promises to become a touch—fumbling hands reaching across the void. The thought of death brings us back to the body, calling on us to act, with and for one another.
