Ways of Seeing: On John Berger’s “Cataract”
John Berger, with drawings by Selcuk Demirel | Cataract | Notting Hill Editions | November 2023 | 68 Pages
There is the idea that reading and writing, when committed to as something more than a hobby, will be repaid with a wearing down of the eyes. Like tires, thinned on lengths of tarmac. It isn’t really important how much truth there is to this. The idea has a more mythic, or religious, distinction, and the degree of visual decline reflects, somehow, the martyrdom of the writer. On a more mundane level, it leads to the need for glasses. I realised I would need them when I was twenty-one in a library café, and couldn’t see anything clearly beyond my own table. The large, white room, which until then had seemed perfectly visible, shuttered around me, as if a shower curtain had gradually lowered over my head. The reward for rolling my eyes over small words, coarsening one type of sight for the sake of another.
This is the offer, then, within the mythos of the reader or writer’s vision: that if one is willing to squander retina health for the sake of literary work, then that work might expand another kind of sight, broadening imaginative, aesthetic and historic landscapes. This is the ideal. But it is dependent on so much, of course: on ourselves, on our experiences so far, on our luck that we come to that particular author or book or revelatory phrase at a unique moment or age (right place, right time). Belief in this promise skirts the border of the religious, which is only correct. Not worship but certainly revelation.
And at some point in my early twenties—perhaps the perfect age—I wore down my eyes a little on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. I discovered Berger by way of Susan Sontag, whose essays beguiled me as a student, whose books and lines of thought equally clarified as they obscured, much escaping over my head, so that for years I returned to Against Interpretation to read the essays anew. Sontag represented for me (whether or not correctly) the popular New York intellectual, the liberal American polymath, the academic without the academy. Berger, meanwhile, seemed more grounded, his prose of a more practical bent. [1] There seems to be dirt beneath the fingernails of his work. Geoff Dyer describes this effect in his essay “The Most Comprehensive Sense,” writing that in Berger’s work, “we come close to witnessing thought as an act of almost physical labor.”
“Seeing comes before words,” Ways of Seeing begins, and from there on, Berger speaks not from above but across the room, over the kitchen table. “Yet this seeing which comes before words, and can never be quite covered by them, is not a question of mechanically reacting to stimuli (it can only be thought of in this way if one isolates the small part of the process which concerns the eye's retina). We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. […] We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.” Berger bids us look again, suggesting that the sheer act of seeing art is available to anyone, so art history, too, should be democratised.
It cannot be overstated how important this revelation is to the reader with no learned apparatus to regard visual art. Without this book, the mechanical act of sight can seem entirely disconnected from seeing, so that instinctive responses to a painting are not even second guessed; they are rejected; they have arrived too easily and, so, are passed over. For many who fall under the brackets of working or lower class, relation to a da Vinci, for example, is unlikely. Not impossible, but this is a matter of confidence and history. Or there is a relation between the thing (the painting) and the self, the same that might be found looking at a priceless jewel. How do we know the jewel is priceless, or of so high a price that it is completely beyond our reckoning? An expert tells us so. And so a painting becomes not a work of art but a monetary value.
What Berger suggests is that personal response is of more purpose and pleasure than a work of art explained back to us. His essays give permission to look and by doing so, bring art into close proximity. “When we 'see' a landscape, we situate ourselves in it. If we 'saw' the art of the past, we would situate ourselves in history. When we are prevented from seeing it, we are being deprived of the history which belongs to us.” To really see a painting this way (or indeed any form of art) is to understand that each image comes from a shared memory; it is as if in seeing the painting - situating ourselves within it - we are shocked into re-cognition. Emerson, who also wrote so passionately about understanding what we see, expressed it best: “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this."
It is both within the custom of writerly sight, then, and a cruel irony, that Berger, whose popularity is most connected to Ways of Seeing, would later come to develop cataracts in both eyes. Cataract, originally published in 2011 and reissued this year, is Berger’s essay on his own experience with the titular condition. Accompanied by drawings from Turkish illustrator Selcuk Demirel, the book is brief and sparse, each spread containing at most half a page of text, and an ink sketch. “Cataract from Greek kataraktes, meaning waterfall or portcullis, an obstruction that descends from above,” Berger writes, and inverse to the opening of Ways of Seeing, words now come before sight. “Portcullis in front of the left eye removed. On the right eye the cataract remains.” Beside this, a man made from rough lines, his head resting on his arms, both eyes collected like marbles in the right socket. What follows in both form and content documents the sensory experience of Berger’s clouded and later corrected retinal health. The portcullises are one by one lifted in surgery; the writing delves deeper into the connotations of light and dark, of “the experience of looking.”
Demirel’s drawings elaborate, expound, and colour Berger’s observations. While the illustrator’s collaborations with Berger tend to be on the lighter, tongue-in-cheek side—sometimes the writing and drawings combine to resemble New Yorker cartoons—here Demirel begins with a naive hand. His images take on the charm of a child’s sketch, developing with Berger’s eyesight from cataract to clarity, from shaky outlines to illustrations filled with the pleasure of light and colour returned.
I have summarised here the initial pleasure of Cataract—the aesthetic novelty of a slim book designed to be lingered over, so that the combination of Berger’s textual clarity, and Demirel’s cartoons—surrounded by white space, the ambiguity of which imitates both the limits of injured vision, and later the brightness of vision returned—might be properly enjoyed of and for themselves. As with their editions of Smoking, and What Time Is It, Notting Hill Editions produce Berger and Demirel’s work as clothbound pamphlets. The emphasis lies on a kind of high-quality brevity, something I imagine Berger appreciated.
But what is perhaps the most interesting aspect is the privileged access, the insight it provides to Berger’s direct experience of blindness. Here are perhaps the extreme examples of the two sides of sight, internal and external, poetic and biologic: a man who has dedicated his career and life to public and private expansion of the former, arriving at the clouded limits of the latter. A profound misfortune but also an opportunity for a writer so steeped in the philosophy of looking. “I play,” he writes early in the book, “looking at an object and then closing first my left eye, then the right. […] Define the difference(s).”
It is in this sense of opportunity, of a writer essaying to describe their relationship with ailing sight, that Cataract shares much with Borges’ “On Blindness.” Borges’ loss of sight was of course of a much more permanent kind, although one he refers to as “modest” because he retained partial sight in one eye. Blindness being as varied and subjective as a writer’s prose, Borges’s attitude toward the condition vacillates. When recalling the moment he became too blind to see the printed word, he declares it “pathetic,” chalking up the loss particularly to the modes of “reader’s and writer’s sight.” Later in the same essay, however, he comes to what seems to be the original impetus for writing it – the opportunity it offered to discover a new sight. In his case, this led to an education in Anglo-Saxon language and poetry. “I owe to the darkness some gifts,” he writes. Like Berger, his attitude towards blindness is as an experiment, an adaptation, or as he memorably puts it, “one of the styles of living.” One of the ways of seeing.
We return here to the mythic relationship writers have with their eyes, as if they might be the price paid for imaginative sight. As Borges reminds us in his essay, John Milton suggested as much about his own deteriorating vision. Warned by his physician to avoid strenuous literary effort, Milton thought the price only correct: “by a certain fatality in my birth, two destinies were set before me, on the one hand, blindness, on the other, duty - that I must necessarily incur the loss of my eyes, or desert a sovereign duty.” In Cataract, Berger writes,“Light exists as a continuous everlasting beginning…Darkness, by contrast, is not, as often assumed, a finality but a prelude.”
Perhaps it is fair to say that, for a writer, everything can be prelude; life held in store, from which material can later be gathered. Borges speaks of exactly this notion further on in his essay: “I too, if I may mention myself, have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.” To convert experience into words; to sacrifice sight for sight. The conversion, it is hoped, will form the experience anew, and be renewed each time a reader finds the text. Each reading, a way of seeing. In this way, writing and reading resemble the fall of light—each perception of ray or letter an original translation. Light and words on a page; the two things blinded writers mourn and reminisce over the most.
“On Blindness” and Cataract share the same deference paid to the light and colour that remains – Borges retains yellow in particular, the kind that shines in a tiger’s fur, and both writers describe how blue lingers. In his repaired left eye, Berger is able to see “All these blues playing with the light create the shine of silver or tin.” But part of the opportunity Berger finds in his cataracts—in noting the changes they and the surgeries make to his vision—is possible only because he has an eye in both worlds, the blind and the seeing. “Behind my right eye hangs a burlap cloth; behind my left eye there’s a mirror.” While Borges’ blindness fell over a number of years and was permanent, like Milton’s, Berger passed through blindness as through a waterfall or veil. This is what makes Cataract so particularly rewarding: to be able to see with Berger how the light changed for him, receded and renewed, fell and rose.
In this way, Cataract can be read as a distillation of Berger’s philosophy: that we all see through a certain quality of light. All art is made of surface and reflection, Berger says again and again in his work, whether that surface is a painting or a memory. In committing to looking as his life’s work, Berger became his own philosophy in continuous action, and Cataract appears then as a fitting bookend to his essays. The hope, always, is to move from an obscurity of vision to a distinct, personal clarity; to return to the way we saw light as an unencumbered child. “With both cataracts removed,” he writes near the end of the essay, “what I see with my eyes is now like a dictionary which I can consult about the precision of things. The thing in itself, and also its place amongst other things.” And yet, this dictionary of sight belongs only to Berger, related to how light dressed his particular world. Our task is to build our own, to realise that a particular gleam of colour and light has never been seen by another person before, and will never be reproduced again.
[1] This stylistic difference between Sontag and Berger, whose work so often paralleled the other’s, is illustrated perfectly in their conversation from an episode of Voices, in 1983.