G.

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John Berger: G. Roman. Reclam, Leipzig 1990 (title)

G. ( Original English title: G. ) is a novel by the British writer John Berger (1926-2017). It was published in 1972. The experiences of an Italian-British bon vivant in the years 1888 to 1915 are told on the slide of the Don Juan material . The novel was awarded the Booker Prize .

content

The eponymous protagonist G. is born out of wedlock to a wholesaler in candied fruit from Livorno and a 26-year-old, mentally and financially very independent British woman who is close to the Fabian Society . His father wishes that his name should be Giovanni, at school he is nicknamed Garibaldi - what his real name is is not evident from the novel. He grows up in an English country estate with his cousin and his cousin, who have an incestuous relationship with one another, later he goes to boarding school. In the non-linear narrative, interrupted by essayistic reflections, mostly sexual experiences Gs. Are told, which take place against the background of significant historical events, in which G, however, is disinterested. At eleven, when he first met his father, he witnessed the 1898 labor unrest in Milan. A young Italian woman saves him from the troops of General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris , who are using extreme violence against the demonstrators, and he discovers a fascination for them without being able to name them. At 14, he is seduced by his cousin. In 1910 he was present in Brig when Geo Chávez took off in an airplane to cross the main Alpine ridge for the first time and seduced a chambermaid. Shortly afterwards, he is shot by a French industrialist, with whose wife he has also dealt with, and is in the same hospital where Chavez dies after his crash landing. When the First World War broke out , he was in London and was initially happy that so many women could now be approached without a husband or fiancé, but was repelled by the patriotism of war widows. The British Foreign Ministry sent him to Trieste , then Austria , where he was supposed to establish contacts with Italian irredentists who were hoping for Italy to enter the war on the side of the Entente Cordiale . He forges erotic bonds with the wife of an Austrian banker, who generously cedes them to him for a dance ball . Instead, G. comes to the ball with the Slovenian proletarian Nuša, whom he has previously dressed in precious clothes. In return for the company, he promises her his (forged) passport, which she will use to help her brother, who has contacts with Mlada Bosna , to leave the country before the war begins. The couple's appearance at the ball triggers a scandal, Nuša is beaten up by the banker's wife, both have to spend the night in police custody, G. is ordered to leave the country within 36 hours. Instead he hands Nuša his passport as promised. At the same time, the news of the Italian declaration of war on Austria (23 May 1915) led to violent unrest among the oppressed Slovene population, in which G. took part this time. He is then murdered by his Italian contacts at the port. The novel ends with a description of the reflections of light over the waters of the Adriatic .

shape

The novel is divided into four parts and a total of ten chapters, sometimes quotations and subheadings are inserted. It is kept in the present tense throughout , the narrative perspective is predominantly personal , that is, the reader experiences what G. sees, hears and experiences. Berger refrains from psychologizing: What G. feels, how he evaluates and reflects on his experiences, the reader must deduce from his actions. The paragraphs are very generous - as the American literary scholar George Steiner suspects, as an invitation to the reader to add comments, since Berger sees reading as a collaborative act. The narrator himself interrupts the narrative again and again with reflections on his own narration: The description of G's first sexual intercourse is interrupted by a multi-page digression about the impossibility of adequately promising sexual experience, since during the sexual act the body of the other is perceived in its individuality and uniqueness while words always refer to supra-individual signifieds . As a solution, Berger offers simple drawings of genital organs that are interspersed in several places in the text.

interpretation

The British literary scholar Joseph H. McMahon interprets G. as a Marxist novel: The central question is whether there can be a reconciliation between sexuality and society. The novel is dedicated to Berger's wife “ Anya and her sisters from women's liberation ”, an at least potentially revolutionary social movement whose concerns are both authentic expressions of female sexuality and social justice for women. In the search for such possibilities, the novel depicts three possibilities of social life: The first is the world of feudalism , which has outlived itself and only exists in frozen rituals. He is represented by G's cousin on his country estate. The second is that of the modern bourgeoisie , in which women are made property and the lower classes are exploited. The third is the unrealized dream of a society in which revolutionary prospects and sexual energy are inextricably linked. Don Juan could no longer exist in this society - hence G's downfall at the end of the novel.

According to the Anglicist Stefan Welz, the protagonist G. appears as an individual who is not integrated into society: impersonal, distant, fragmented. The alienation in which he lives is intensified by the fact that he was virtually born into exile . He can only find an end to this alienation in sexual intercourse, in which “individualization, originality and concentration on intrinsic value” flow together. For the women he sleeps with, the act also means coming to oneself: in G's arms, the schizophrenia they have acquired , always having to look at themselves critically from the outside, which Berger describes in another Digression, is canceled out : This Don Juan is subversive in that he not only crosses the boundaries of class society and morality , but lets women be themselves. Only at the end can G. get involved in society, which he pays with his life. This last section begins with Berger's personal memory of a masked child who carries the relational headline “The Stone Guest”.

The English scholar Annegret Maack sees the influence of the cultural critic Walter Benjamin in G's change towards social engagement , according to which it is the task of the masses to break open the historical continuum: In Milan 1898 G. remains passive, in Trieste 1915 he participates actively. In Berger's montage of historical events and individual experiences, the passage of time is not simply told down in chronological order; Berger was more concerned with reproducing the elements available to memory, "moments of the past that are brought to mind in the consciousness of an experiencer". In it he follows the historical concept of the British historian Robin George Collingwood , according to which history always consists in the act of consciousness of the visualization of the past. This thought is also quoted in the novel. Insofar as Berger combines history, narrative and romance theory in this sense, she sees G. as a “metahistorical novel”.

Reception and awards

Berger was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize for the novel . He donated half of his prize money of 5,000 British pounds to the Black Panther Party to protest against the continued exploitation of the Caribbean . Booker, McConnell Ltd., which donated the prize, and all of modern Europe have benefited greatly from this and from the slave labor that goes with it since the industrial revolution of the past 180 years.

English literary critics and booksellers criticized the selection of the Booker Prize Committee, the book did not sell well. George Steiner, who had gained the distinction of having looked both fascinating and weaknesses in G . With a Henry James quote he described it as a “loose, baggy monster from a book”, but at the same time it was beguiling and emotionally charged and did not underestimate its readers: “Mr. Berger writes for adults ”.

Of the German literary criticism was G . unanimously praised. When the German translation was published in 1990, Die Zeit called the novel "a formally and content-wise sheer bursting powerhouse of literary modernity". British literary scholar Andy Merrifield praises the book as "ingenious, brilliantly conceived, imaginative, sexy, interesting, a work of great modernity, executed by a master of modernist craftsmanship".

expenditure

literature

  • Annegret Maack: Berger, John - G. In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , 3rd, completely revised edition, JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung and CE Poeschel Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009 ( online on the Hamburg library website, accessed on 4 August 2018.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ George Steiner: Gamesmen . In: The New Yorker, January 27, 1972, p. 92.
  2. ↑ Stefan Welz: Afterword. In: John Berger: G. Roman. Translated from the English by Peter Meier. Reclam, Leipzig 1990, p. 432.
  3. ↑ Anthony Cummins: G by John Berger - review on theguardian.com , May 19, 2012, accessed August 4, 2018.
  4. ^ For Anya and for her sisters in Women's Liberation
  5. ^ Joseph H. McMahon: Marxist Fictions: The Novels of John Berger . In: Contemporary Literature 23, Heft 2 (1982), pp. 202-224, here pp. 216-224
  6. ↑ Stefan Welz: Afterword. In: John Berger: G. Roman. Translated from the English by Peter Meier. Reclam, Leipzig 1990, pp. 431-435.
  7. ↑ In the legend, the “stone guest” is the statue of the father of one of his lovers, who was killed by Don Juan, whom he mockingly invites to dinner - he actually comes and goes to hell with him.
  8. ↑ Annegret Maack: Berger, John - G. In: Kindlers Literatur Lexikon , 3rd, completely revised edition, JB Metzler'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung and CE Poeschel Verlag GmbH, Stuttgart / Weimar 2009 ( online on the Hamburg library website, accessed on August 4, 2018).
  9. ↑ Michael McNay: Berger turns tables on Booker , on theguardian.com , November 24, 1972, accessed August 4, 2018.
  10. ↑ George Steiner: Gamesmen . In: The New Yorker, January 27, 1972, p. 91.
  11. ↑ George Steiner: Gamesmen . In: The New Yorker of January 27, 1972, p. 92 f.
  12. ↑ Johannes Kaiser: On the death of John Berger: "Hope is like the flame of a candle in the dark" . deutschlandfunkkultur.de , January 2, 2017, accessed on August 4, 2018.
  13. ↑ The amalgamation of love. In: Die Zeit vom March 22, 1991 ( online , accessed August 4, 2018).
  14. ^ Andy Merrifield: John Berger. Reaction Books, London 2012, p. 51.