Book review: Bento’s Sketchbook, by John Berger

Abstract

John Berger Bento's Sketchbook Verso: London, 2011; Xiii + 128pp, 120 colour illustrations: 9781844676842, 14.99 [pounds sterling] I first fell under Berger's spell as a student grappling with different forms of documentary storytelling. I soon discovered that I was not alone, for his work draws warm praise from many distinguished writers, including Susan Sontag and Geoff Dyer. Indeed, Dyer was so smitten by Berger's writing that he made an Alpine pilgrimage to meet his self-exiled mentor, launching his career with a critical study of Bergers oeuvre. His imaginative breadth, vision and style--if not his political engagement--are apparent in much of Dyer's subsequent polygenre success. Berger's latest book is another of his 'collaborations': this time, a collection of text and drawings based around the thoughts of the 17lh-century philosopher and lens grinder Baruch, or 'Bento': Spinoza. Its seemingly random assemblage of anecdote and reflection belong to a singular form of literary documentary ('Bergermentary', perhaps?) that the author has been developing for most of his career. Berger was an artist before becoming a writer, as, apparently, was Spinoza. However, after his death, Spinoza's sketchbook was lost, and for years Berger imagined what secrets it might reveal if it were ever found. Many of the stories here are triggered by sketches recalling past encounters with people, objects and places. Berger being Berger, the act of writing is always political, and he gets straight to Chekhov's point: 'The role of the writer is to describe a situation so truthfully ... that the reader can no longer evade it'. By focusing his thoughts around those of Spinoza --a thinker Berger has admired ever since he was a teenager, discovering that Spinoza was Marx's favourite philosopher--it becomes clear that Berger has several radical agendas he wishes to pursue, including a novel vision of kinship. Ultimately, he wishes to convert us all to mystical materialism: the realisation that we are all one substance with the Universe, and more importantly, with one other, thus squaring the circle of Marxist humanism with pantheistic monism. Spinoza's great intuition was to realise that there are more things in heaven and earth than were ever dreamt of in our own 'philosophies': 'Consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and now through that attribute'. Berger's methodology has always been to show rather than tell, and he carefully infers our shared humanity by means of anecdote, analogy and reflection, each meditation juxtaposed against a judiciously chosen Spinozan quotation. By the end, the anecdotes have melted away, leaving only a series of extracts strung together like exploding firecrackers to reinforce his main themes in the reader's mind--ambitious themes, concerning the limitations of perception, the illusory nature of perfection, the indifference of God, the essence of existence, the composition of the body, and the confrontation of confusion by accepting our human limitation. These intellectual pills are all sweetened by Bergers development of a range of amusing, uplifting and intriguing stories. To cite just one example, he recounts an amusing tale of attempting to draw Antonello's Crucifixion in the National Gallery on Good Friday, which riffs on subjects ranging through Easter, Sicily, Trafalgar Square, wartime piano recitals, perspective, solidity, public spaces, attendants, security, reason (or the lack of it) and a climactic expletive, all bookended by an apposite quote to tease out a suitably oblique moral, like a modern-day Aesop or La Fontaine. …