Maybe you’ve had the same introduction to essay-writing that I had when I was in high school. A good high school essay comes in three parts: it announces what it’s going to say, it says it, then ends by reminding the reader what it has said. For the few students who use the essay form beyond high school, this approach serves well enough even if the students go on to literary degrees where (one supposes) more subtlety is expected of them. For English lit undergrads, it’s like showing up with a sledge hammer to a Habitat for Humanity build; a sledge hammer may be a bit blunt for the job, but as long as you don’t swing your arms too much, you can still drive a nail without knocking down the wall. Newspaper rules of writing give us another blunt tool: load the most important information in the first sentence, then proceed by descending degrees of relevance. Your job is to convey information; leave your art—whatever that means—at the door.
Since the shift to digital platforms, the rules haven’t changed. The only thing that’s changed is an intensification of the craft. That intensification comes from the competition for clicks, which is driven by advertising, which is driven by capitalism, which is driven by greed. On digital platforms, then, writing is successful to the extent it grounds itself on a highly specific view of what it means to be human: we are all self-interested actors motivated by our most immediate desires as expressed through the twitch of a finger.
In a way, writing is meaningless; its sole use is to provide a pretext for the click-through. You have a facial blemish that worries you. My web site includes a post about acne. You land on my page and note an ad in the sidebar for a special anti-bacterial cream. You click through and make your purchase. You’ve barely read the words on my page. In all likelihood, I’ve barely written them. If I haven’t “harvested” the words from somewhere else, I may have used a tool to automatically generate them. At the very least, I’ve run them through a plugin that assesses their Flesch-Kincaid readability score. The most important thing is to optimize the words for indexing on major search engines. One day, I imagine university English departments will treat SEO as a core criteria for evaluating student writing. And they’ll offer courses like “Monetizing the Poem in the Late Modern/Early Post-modern Period.”
The thing about search engine optimization is that its effectiveness increases to the extent we agree on the meaning of key search terms. If I think a horse is a three-toed animal that hangs from trees and you think a horse is a quadruped that provides us with milk products, the search term “horse” is going to offer up disappointing results. Search companies have tended to force matters by flattening our definitions. They have solved the problem of Plato’s forms. We know where to find the horseness of the horse; it resides on Google’s servers. We no longer tolerate idiosyncratic definitions. They undermine the efficiencies that capitalism needs for it to function properly.
The thing about John Berger is that if we are thoroughly enculturated in the way words work on digital platforms, then his writing will baffle us. For one thing, John Berger had Marxist leanings and consequently found little use for the extreme capitalism that was arising towards the end of his life (he died in 2017). In part, his politics were driven by his personal view of what it means to be human, which had nothing to do with consumption or unfettered self-interest. If, like me, you have come to Berger through his Ways of Seeing, an epigrammatic, almost Zen, meditation upon visual arts and photography (see also the BBC documentary), then you will understand how he regarded our image-making habit as a way for human beings to communicate with depth and feeling, not as a tool to facilitate the flow of capital. You can find a fuller articulation of Berger’s seminal and quietly subversive thoughts in Geoff Dyer’s compendious anthology.
What Berger holds to be true of our image-making habit he holds as equally true of our words. So, in To The Wedding, he presents characters who are not bound by simple adjectives, like hashtags or indexing terms, but behave in ways that are complicated, paradoxical, even mysterious. The young woman, Ninon, is HIV positive in the mid-90s at a time when the prognosis for a woman so infected is an uncertain matter. She cannot understand how Gino could have fallen in love with her and want to marry her even though he knows they will have only a short time together. In a passing moment of darkness, Gino’s father considers murdering his prospective daughter-in-law to spare his son a certain grief. Riding his motorcycle south through Italy to the wedding, Ninon’s father pauses at a small museum where he contemplates stealing an ancient necklace as a wedding gift. Meanwhile, Ninon’s mother finds it easier to disclose her greatest cares to a stranger on a train than to the people she loves. Precisely because of their humanity, there is something inscrutable about their behaviour.
Berger’s writing has a quality about it that I call opacity. It is language that conceals as much as it reveals. It is the opposite of hashtag writing or search engine writing, irreducible in a way that algorithms can never parse. Berger trusts his readers to apply their powers of inference. It reminds me of a photograph where most of the action happens outside the frame; we see only a small segment of a whole scene and must use our imaginations to see the rest of it. This is a quality I’ve found in other writing, too. Joan Didion’s Democracy, for example, or Don DeLillo’s Zone K. I have wanted to write at length about these works but in both cases I have been left speechless, and in more than one sense of the word.
At any given instance, we can’t be sure who is telling us what. Apparently, the narrator is a blind Homeric figure, fitting given the kind of reading Berger demands of us. We must use our other senses to figure out what is going on. Berger drops us into the middle of scenes without preparation. We read narration and realize it’s a character (but which one?) who has taken over from the narrator. The shifty unstable voice is playful but disorienting. And then we arrive at the wedding where everything is supposed to be gathered together in a holy union. Except that the journey To The Wedding has been so shaken by subsonic tones of anxiety that we can’t help but ask: What happens next? What lies beyond this narrow frame?
To The Wedding, by John Berger (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), introduction by Nadeem Aslam, 2009
If you like this post, you might also like The Ideal Palace, a reflection inspired by an essay by John Berger.