death of a witness
by uzwi
Capitalism, he wrote in Ways of Seeing, “survives by forcing the majority to define their own interests as narrowly as possible”. It was narrowness he set himself against, the toxic impulse to wall in or wall off. Be kin to the strange, be open to difference, cross-pollinate freely. He put his faith in the people, the whole host of us.
The book of his I pick up more & more often as I get older is his collaboration with Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor. I have a beaten-up old paperback–from the early 70s, I think–which doesn’t get any easier to read without it falling to bits; but it’s now available from Canongate with an introduction by Gavin Francis, who describes it in his first sentence as “a masterpiece of witness”. That was what Berger felt like back then, and what he made me want to become: a witness.
the m john harrison blog 
My old paperback of A Fortunate Man got lost at some point, and I replaced it with a hardback copy last year or the year before. The margins are full of thoughtful reading notes in somebody’s minute handwriting. Witness of witness.
He’s a terrible loss; thank goodness we still have his books.
It’s fascinating to think of Berger in relation to your work. Was he part of the impetus behind Climbers? The move away from fantasy and to being a witness? I’ve been watching the amazing chat between Berger and Sontag about story. It’s great, but one of the things I love about it is the way that Sontag insists on the importance of the fantastic. Berger isn’t going to deny this, but you can see that it isn’t really that important in his aesthetic. Partly I think this is a political decision. This got me thinking about fantasy versus reality/realism continuum in your work. And this got me thinking about the cultural context that might have fed into writing Climbers. It seems like such a big jump in your work.
I get a sense, maybe I’m wrong, that there was a time culturally when post-modernism in literature started to seem a bit academic and elitist and not-serious-enough, or not the best expression for a certain political position?
I remember reading an interview with Angela Carter where she seems to be getting tired of what she called her purple prose, and worrying how her fantastical imagery aligned with her politics.Then, by the time Raymond Carver became important, anything that was too fantastical seemed to drain away. Was Climbers partly a reflection of a general cultural climate?
Was writing Climbers partly a political decision? I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I know that you’re bored with the whole is-fantasy-subversive-or-reationary? argument, but the writing of Climbers seems to be an expression of a dissatisfaction with fantasy. If that is true, I wondered if that dissatisfaction was partly political?
Hi paftersnu: metawitness. AFM used to be so difficult to find I had a rule–if you saw it in a secondhand bookshop, you bought it, because your current reading copy was always on the edge of loose-leaf.
kaggsy: it seems right to me, as it did with Bowie & Cohen. We live as long as we can & we leave what we can.
Hi David, longtime no hear. It felt like a personal decision at the time. I was tired of serving the market & yet economically chained to it; I had been locked up in my own head since I was a small boy & was trying to look outwards for the first time; I was physically bored & seeking direct contact with material stuff; & I was reading every kind of observational nonfiction, from travel writing, through science writing and the beginnings of contemporary “nature” writing, to work like A Fortunate Man. It was an enormously fecund environment, and especially complicated by a love affair with poststructuralism. I knew I couldn’t make “realist” contact with the world because every observation is an editorialisation; but I couldn’t rest until I’d done something which at least tried. & while all this was wound up with theory, its origins and its expression were almost wholly emotional & intuitional. After Climbers, I felt I could re-engage with the fantastic, partly because I’d learned that for me the problem wasn’t fantasy versus realism, not even nonfiction versus fiction, but writing versus not writing. Now, after further evolutions, I feel that the whole distinction–certainly when made so sharply & oppositionally–is, sorry for the pun, immaterial. I don’t care how or what I write, as long as it works. If you read across the whole spectrum of Woolf, say, you see immediately that her compartmentalism doesn’t hold up; The Common Reader essays yaw constantly into a kind of fictional reconstruction; while pages of Jacob’s Room, as someone pointed out on Twitter recently, are the most perfect observational writing.
David: My underlying feeling about generic fantasy–as opposed to the fantastic as a mode–is that while you are immersed, you forget your circumstances & don’t try to change them. That’s why the gaoler allows you that form of escape.
& what of the fantastical as a reminder of the possibilities beyond scientific materialism or mere politics? ‘Genre’ writers like Barker whose works toy, however superficially, with metaphysical concepts? Or i am thinking of someone like William Blake, whose vast imaginary landscapes can be read both as an escape from the world and a deeper immersion in it, in an attempt to come to terms with it?
The legitimacy of ‘escaping’ deeper inward, because the outward procedure is unattainable as it would involve outright rebellion against an entire mode of living?
In short, finding breadth in the narrowness, and thereby exactly taking that inner domain away from Capitalism. Ok sorry, i’ll stop now.
Ibrahim: [shrugs] If we see everything in terms of a defense of the utility of fantasy, we can only come to certain kinds of conclusions. Sure, it’s possible to have a long, enjoyable discussion founded on those conclusions. But that’s an implicit act of walling-off, the creation of an inside; & I like Olivia Laing’s reminder that we should “be open to difference & cross-pollinate freely”. I just don’t see fantasy–in its generic, professional & industrial forms–as an outsider position any more. Especially under contemporary capital, where ninety percent of advertising & branding not only involves fantasies about the product but is quite deliberately presented in matrices of out-and-out immersive-world action. (That’s not even to mention the obvious relationship between fantasy & “false news” or the really scary degree to which “scientific materialism” is now in bed with sf.) We need less fantasy, not more.
Ibrahim: 🙂 we shld both stop now.
(Shrugs too) Hell, i don’t even read contemporary generic fantasy & i’ve never even read Tolkien. I was reacting from the position of a draughtsman who is at times acutely aware that a drawing of a tree, however well-observed, is still just a mental image, an abstraction; a fantasy. So sometimes one feels one might just as well be chasing smoke dragons or something… Your ‘writing versus writing’ remark is very helpful in that regard.