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of all crimes against humanity, there came a point where Mr Kis ‘started imagining the events as they
might have happened
’. Then he moved into fiction; the fable is no less powerful than fact.
    Books don’t really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. The book, as we know it, took shape with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century; it was the tool of the dissemination of humanism but can, just as easily, spread the antithesis of humanism. ‘In point of fact,’ says Danilo Kis, ‘sacred books, and the cannonized works of master thinkers, are like a snake’s venom: they are a source of morality and iniquity, grace and transgression.’ He is wise, grave, clever, and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.
    (1989)

•   5   •
John Berger:
Pig Earth
    In a formal sense,
Pig Earth
is innovatory. John Berger uses three kinds of writing – fiction, poetry, and exposition – to precipitate in the reader a precise awareness of a specific kind of life, that of a contemporary French peasant community in the Alps.
    This community is the village in which Berger himself lives. Though he does not invoke his own presence as an actor in any of the stories, the section of exposition titled ‘An Explanation’ relates his work as a writer, a professional storyteller, to the storytelling and gossip that makes life in the village what he calls a ‘living portrait of itself’, a continuous narrative that ‘confirms the existence of the village’.
    Pig Earth
is devoted to the imaginative exploration of a way of life rooted in what Berger calls a ‘culture of survival’, as opposed to the ‘culture of progress’ which is the urban imperative of all classes. He is, in part, attempting to crystallise and define this ‘culture of survival’ at the very time when it may not, in fact, survive.
    The three kinds of writing in
Pig Earth
fit together to make a three-dimensional picture of a village which is also artistically three-dimensional. That is to say, the heightened lyricism of the brief poems illuminates the straightforward verismo of the stories in a way which recalls Hardy’s dry observation – how Farmer Oak was not, as the sophisticate might think, insensible to the beauties of nature.
    The polemical nature of the two sections, ‘An Explanation’ and ‘Historical Afterword’, informs the physical landscape and the landscape of labour through which the reader has travelled in thecourse of the book with a sense of urgency that removes
Pig Earth
altogether from the genre of bourgeois pastoral, which is the consolatory celebration of a fictive ‘rusticity’.
    Berger says: ‘Nobody can reasonably argue for the preservation and maintenance of the traditional peasant way of life. To do so is to argue that peasants should continue to be exploited, and that they should lead lives in which the burden of physical work is often devastating and always oppressive.’ But his culminating assertion is that the elimination of the peasantry is the final act in the destruction of the experiential reservoir of the past, so that it can no longer be part of the totality of the present. This destruction Berger sees as the ‘historic role of capitalism itself, a role unforeseen by Adam Smith or Marx’.
    Once history is destroyed, all energy may be concentrated on what is about to occur, the future, which, as every grammarian knows, does not exist; though the old man who, in the story, ‘The Value of Money’, plants apple trees he will not live to see bear fruit,
can
prepare for a hypothetical future because he has certain knowledge of the past.
    The ‘Afterword’ gives a depth of focus to the stories which precede it. Some are spare, lucid accounts of events – the slaughter of a cow, the birth of a calf, the mating of a