Selected Essays of John Berger (74 page)

Nevertheless poems are not simple prayers. Even a religious poem is not exclusively and uniquely addressed to God. Poetry is addressed to language itself. If that sounds obscure, think of a lamentation — there words lament loss to their language. Poetry is addressed to language in a comparable but wider way.

To put into words is to find the hope that the words will be heard and the events they describe judged. Judged by God or judged by history. Either way the judgement is distant. Yet the language — which is immediate, and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means — offers, obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgment when it is addressed by poetry. This judgement is distinct from that of any moral code, yet it promises, within its acknowledgment of what it has heard, a distinction between good and evil — as though language itself had been created to preserve just that distinction!

This is why poetry opposes more
absolutely
than any other force in the world the monstrous cruelties by which the rich today defend their illgotten riches. This is why the hour of the furnaces is also the hour of poetry.

1982

I will begin with two stories.

Recently I was in Moscow. At the airport, when I was entering the country, the customs officer found in my bag some poems typed in Russian. They were my poems, translated by a friend in London. He handed them to a colleague to read. I explained what they were, but the colleague went on with his attentive reading. Finally, along with everything else that they had examined, he gave me back the poems, with a smile that was half-official and half-jocular. ‘Perhaps your poetry is a little too pessimistic,’ he said.

The other day I was speaking to my friend the Swiss film director Alain Tanner. I had just seen a television programme about the German actor Bruno Ganz. Ganz plays — very well — in Tanner’s latest film. The programme I found infuriating because Ganz talked only about himself and his moods. ‘What do you expect him to talk about?’ replied Alain. ‘Do you still expect people to talk about the world? Today the self is the only thing left to talk about.’ I could not agree.

Enter Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). No poet, no thinker, has been more lucidly pessimistic than Leopardi. Lucidly because unlike, say, Kafka, without self-pity. Nor is there any obscurity in his writings. They clarify terribly — like the electric light bulb in Picasso’s ‘Guernica’.

Leopardi was born in the Marches of Rome into a small-time aristocratic family. Perhaps his only positive inheritance was his father’s extensive library. By the age of ten he had taught himself Hebrew, Greek, German and English. For the rest, he inherited solitude, ill-health, an ever-failing eyesight and humiliating financial dependence. He said that he would prefer his writings to be burnt rather than that the reader should believe his conclusions about the human condition were drawn from his personal and wretched experience. I believe he was right to say this.

In an extraordinary way, Leopardi made, out of the pit of his own unhappiness, a tower from which to study the stars and the lives of others, past, present and future. It is difficult for somebody who is not Italian or an Italian scholar to talk with authority about the full quality of his poetry. Many believe him to be the greatest Italian poet since Dante. In every poem he wrote, there is a sustained thought, contributing to, and taking its place in, a global view of life. In this he is classical, like Virgil. But in his attitude to both language and the
immediate
subject (a village, a wedding, a carpenter) there is simultaneously a gentleness and a galactic distance — the downy breast feathers of a fledgling beside the mineral harshness of a meteorite — which produce a lyricism that is like no other.

He also wrote prose, notably a kind of philosophical journal called
Zibaldone
, which he kept between 1817 and 1832 and which was only published sixty years after his death, and a collection of
Moral Tales
mostly published during his lifetime.

Nietzsche, reading these
Tales
, qualified Leopardi as the greatest prose writer of the century. In fact today we can see how deeply he belongs to our century. The irony, the lack of rhetoric, the conversational lightness, and the acute gravity without self-importance of his prose, prophesy much in writers as different from one another as Pasolini, Brecht or Bulgakov.

The
Moral Tales
in their entirety are now available in English for the first time for seventy years, marvellously translated, annotated and prefaced by Patrick Creagh.
¹
Unfortunately it is rare in academic life that, as here, the work of a master finds a scholar who is ready to learn so much, that even the tone of the commentary owes the master a debt. It is surely important that Creagh is a poet in his own right. This new book deserves to be read far beyond the academic readership for which it was principally designed. Anybody, from fourteen to eighty years old, interested in the primary questions posed by the human condition, will find pages to mark, distract and frighten him.

In the
Moral Tales
wit often takes the place of the lyricism to be found in Leopardi’s poetry, but the same approach to life, the same way of thinking, is present in both. Leopardi was a prodigy of the Enlightenment. He saw the world through the eyes of its materialism. He accepted the place that its philosophers gave to Pleasure. He was in agreement with their dismantling of religion and their exposure of the reactionary power of the Church. In his own way he was a populist. But he rejected absolutely the Enlightenment’s belief in Progress. The basis of human equality, as he saw it, could never be a promise of happiness, but always a present suffering.

Writing as he was during the aftermath of Napoleon, his prognosis for the coming century, in which he foresaw money and the new means of communication and demagogy finally distorting everything, was catastrophic. Every historical period, he said, was a period of transition and every transition involved unhappiness. Once, however, there had been consolations — faith, a belief in destiny or redemption; such consolations had now been shown to be illusory, and the modern truth was starker and more hopeless than ever before.

Man was constructed in such a way that, above all, he loved his own life. This love made him believe that his life promised him happiness. This belief was incorrigible, and therefore most of the time he suffered. All this was the work of nature, in whose scheme of things man was an insignificant, marginal detail. (The
Tales
abound in ideas related to current science fiction.) The only possible deliverance from the human condition was the eternal sleep of death. He wrote often about the ‘logic’ of suicide, but he always refused it out of a curious but very deep solidarity with the living.

There is a paradox buried in Leopardi’s work: a paradox which he himself was aware of. In the following quotation he was not so much
claiming genius for himself, as describing what he felt to be the potentiality of the written word:

A Marxist interpretation of Leopardi would place him historically and remind us of all that he leaves out of account: the class struggle, the suffering directly caused by the economic law of capitalism, the historical destiny of man. At the limit, Leopardi, as a thinker, might even be dismissed as representing the despair of the aristocracy whose days were being numbered. Anyone attempting this would nevertheless have to contend with the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro, who has written brilliantly on his behalf.

A year or two ago, at a meeting of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, I was asked to speak about Hopes for the Future. Somewhat mischievously, I played a recording of Beethoven’s Thirty-first Piano Sonata (
Opus
110) and then made the following proposal: political disillusion is born of political impatience and we have all been conditioned to live this impatience because of the overall promises repeatedly made in the name of Progress.

Suppose, I said, that we change the scenario, suppose we say that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary, are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell; what difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? We would be obliged to accept the same obligations and participate in the same struggle as we are already engaged in; perhaps even our sense of solidarity with the exploited and suffering would be more singleminded. All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments. My argument was, if you like, a Leopardian one, and it seems to me to be unanswerable.

And yet we cannot stop there. By force of circumstance, or (and how he would have appreciated the irony of the word!) by privilege, Leopardi was essentially a passive observer. And the unrelieved consistency of his
pessimism was connected with this fact. The connection is named Ennui, boredom.

As soon as one is engaged in a productive process, however circumscribed, total pessimism becomes improbable. This has nothing to do with the dignity of labour or any other such crap; it has to do with the nature of physical and psychic human energy. Expenditure of this energy creates a need for food, sleep and brief moments of respite. This need is so acute that, when it is satisfied or partly satisfied, the satisfaction, however fleeting, produces a hope for the next break. It is thus that the fatigued survive; fatigue plus total pessimism condemns to extinction.

Something similar happens at the level of imagination. The act of participating in the production of the world, even if the particular act in itself seems absurd, creates the imaginative perspective of a potential, more desired production. When in the old (halcyon?) days, a worker on an assembly line, tied to meaningless repetition, dreamt of a colour television or a new fishing-rod, it was wrong to explain this only in terms of consumerism or misplaced hopes. Inexorably, work, because it is productive, produces in man a productive hope. Hence one of the reasons why unemployment is so inhuman.

Leopardi, solitary, childless, incapable of physical work, was condemned to be a spectator of production. His personal condition cannot be used to explain his philosophical position. Yet, because of this condition, there was one thing which he, who knew so much and had such a respect for knowledge, did not know. He did not know how the body, with its terrible mortality, nevertheless comes to the rescue.

‘Those whom the gods love, die young,’ he used to quote as a confirmation of the sombre wisdom of the past. Probably that is still true. Yet what it excludes is the love of one or of both parents, and the hope that the infant — perhaps one of those whom the gods were to love — sometimes inspired in them.

Leopardi would, of course, have dismissed these hopes and the small rescue operations of the body as illusory. And indeed they do not, in themselves, undermine his argument. They coexist with it. Just as affirmation coexists with anguish in Beethoven’s Thirty-first Sonata.

I want now to return to the paradox: how is it that Leopardi’s black pages still encourage? When I said that Leopardi’s life was that of a passive spectator, I was deliberately leaving aside one outstanding fact: the heroic, solitary production of his writings. If, for all their bleakness, these writings inspire, it is because, in their own way, they participate in the production of the world. And by now it should be clear that this term needs to cover, not only production in the classical economic sense of the word, but also the never-completed, always-being-produced state of
existence: the production of the world as reality. It is highly significant that in the
Moral Tales
Leopardi continually refers to, and speculates about, the creation of the universe and the forces, never entirely omnipotent, which lay behind it.