“Always an Outsider’s View”: The Place of the Writer, Coal, and Collaboration

Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock

In 1973, John Berger was asked to contribute a short film on Émile Zola's novel Germinal to the Open University's course on "The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Its Legacy". The result was a 22-minute film on Zola's novel, on the miners in a Derbyshire colliery, and on the "unbridgeable abyss […] between [the] life of the writer [both Zola's and his own] and the conditions of the lives of those he was writing about". Only shared labour, experiential collaboration, working down the pit himself, would close that gap. - The distance between the writer and his object is a problem that Berger confronts throughout his theoretical, documentary, and fictional work. One may think of the abyss of non-comprehension between human and non-human animals that he discusses in "Why look at animals?", of the aporia of "entering the other's subjectivity" in A Seventh Man, of the all-defining question at the beginning of Pig Earth as to the "writer's relationship with the place and the people he writes about", or even of the attempt to "com-prehend" landscape and place in and our faces my heart brief as photos. In the context of these reflections on the (im)possibilities of appropriate representation, an implicit theory gains contours that I will trace (with reference to ideas and concepts by Bruno Latour and Timothy Morton). In Berger's imagination and thought, the teller of the tale, the political thinker, and the critical theorist are entangled entities. The resulting texts resist simplifying empathy with the individual as much as the elusive security of abstract knowledge. Ultimately, only the text's labour and care, "the bringing-together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective" (and our heart), can contribute to a narrowing of the gap.

Christian Schmitt-Kilb is professor of English literature at the University of Rostock, Germany. In recent years, his research has focused on the field of literature and the environment, including New Nature Writing/Landscape Writing, Ecopoetics and Ecopoetry, ecology and literature of the British left, and fiction, environment, and place in the context of Brexit.