TITLE:

FROM THE COUNTRY TO THE CITY: THE PEASANT’S LOSS OF IDENTITY IN JOHN BERGER’S TRILOGY

Author:

José Manuel Estévez Saá

Institution:

Universidad de Sevilla

E-mail:

estevezsaa@us.es  

In his trilogy Into Their Labours, as well as in his books on photography and in his collections of short stories, the British writer and intellectual John Berger vindicates the peasant world and its values. Focusing on the peasant’s animadversion to progress, Berger discloses the peasants’ astuteness at foreseeing the dangers of modernisation, technology and urbanisation.

Taking into account the complex relationship existing between Berger’s condition as “witness” of the peasant culture and his experience as a peasant of “adoption”, the author has found the literary strategies that best enable him to reveal the truths of the peasant world whose fears have been confirmed with the events that have taken place in the last decades of the twentieth century.

The rural world is not depicted in Berger’s fiction in utopian terms and the figure of the peasant is not idealised. The writer evinces how the private world of the village is progressively menaced by the consequences of progress and how the peasant is forced to renounce his own cultural and social identity with his/her inevitable exile to the city. Once in the city, the uncertainties and phobias of the peasant with regard to the world of progress are confirmed and the truths of their ancestors’ warnings are ratified.

This paper analyses the different narrative techniques employed by Berger so as to portray the progressive loss of identity of the peasant once he/she is forced to emigrate to the city. Consequently, the trilogy evolves from the mainly realist narrative of the two first volumes, that describe in detail the peasants’ world, to a more experimental type of fiction in the third volume, which highlights the blurring of the identities of the new inhabitants of the city.