Contraband

On the Shades of John Berger

Abstract

In this paper, I trace and unfold John Berger’s enduring fascination with the aesthetics of places and his preoccupation with ghosts and haunting. Starting in Bologna our itinerary takes in Lisbon, London, Paris, rural Poland and a remote village in the French Alps. In Berger’s company, we are treated to the tastes and ambiences of these diverse places and to encounters and conversations with a plethora of benign spectres. Three leitmotifs serve as our guiding spirits: terroir (the distinctive qualities of locales); the rendezvous (‘here is where we meet’); and contraband (the illicit crossing of borders). In Paris, Berger enters into the paintings of a neglected artist, Rostilav Kunovsky, and invokes two figures who vainly sought to transgress that ultimate prohibition, the separation of life and death: Orpheus and Eurydice. Elsewhere, it is also for the sake of love, that Lucie Cabrol returns to haunt her one-time lover, Jean. She smuggles herself as contraband back into the world of the living. Ghosts are contraband. For Berger, any place without ghosts is bereft of memories. The un-haunted is uninhabitable, unendurable, inhuman. To live is to join and jostle amidst a crowd, a city, of shades.