University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series (Feb 2022)
THE SOCIO-POLITICAL AND SPATIAL-TEMPORAL UNDERPINNING OF CULTURAL CONFLICT IN JOHN BERGER’S INTO THEIR LABOURS
Abstract
Keeping in mind the European context of the final two decades of the twentieth century, this paper addresses the social, cultural and artistic relevance of the British writer and intellectual, John Berger (b. London, 1926). I intend to analyse the socio-political and artistic approaches adopted by Berger in the trilogy Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1983) and Lilac and Flag (1990), published in a single volume in 1992 under the title Into Their Labours. The author presents in this trilogy the coexistence in time of two cultures: on the one hand, a ‘culture of survival’, the peasant one, which he considers to be a traditional, exploited minority culture in decline. On the other hand, Berger refers to a capitalist ‘culture of progress,’ generated by modernisation, technological advances and the processes of globalisation, which threaten to make the former culture disappear. We will have the opportunity to explain how the peasant culture of survival conceives the future as a series of repetitive acts, in contrast with the cultures of progress that see the future as the possibility of expansion. As I attempt to demonstrate in this paper, both cultures can be identified and analysed in two distinct, though contemporary, spatial-temporal contexts; two forms of culture, and their different and singular relationships with time.
