Updated Don Juan
SCHNEIDER, SUSAN
Updated Don Juan G. By John Berger Viking. 310 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Susan Schneider The illegitimate son of a wealthy Italian merchant and his Anglo-American mistress, G. is raised, and...
...She became your myth...
...Furthermore, Berger's serving as the first-person narrator to relate the story of G. distances both reader and author from the protagonist, accentuating his mythical dimensions while diminishing our impression of him as an ordinary man...
...At the same time, it notes her necessary complicity in creating a role satisfying to her man's fantasies: "In order to console you for the loss of all or nearly all the other women in the world, she had to become an ideal...
...Chauvinistic as that may be, it is a natural assumption for a Don Juan to make and probably a reasonable one in the context of Victorian Europe...
...In addition, Berger focuses on a crowd or a city the same kinesthetic awareness he uses to describe a woman, portraying with equal verity the transmutations of reality that occur in mob scenes and in sexual intercourse...
...But he must be a stranger, for the better you, as you actually are, know him, and likewise the better he knows you, the less he can reveal to you of your unknown but possible self...
...She collaborated with you in the choice of the qualities to be idealized...
...G. wants to free his women from their status as objects, to have his affairs with them be awakenings, and he is successful in the four relationships Berger explores: Each woman comes to regard G. as an object and sees herself as subject, thereby regaining her sense of ego...
...The book's structure resembles a series of prose cantos: at the beginning each one centers on a single subject...
...G. is the extra-personal force who, as Don Juan, releases women to themselves: "The stranger who desires you and convinces you that it is truly you in all your peculiarity whom he desires, brings a message from all that you might be, to you as you actually are...
...In the tradition of Andre Gide and John Fowles, those other autocritical novelists, the author keeps himself in full view and in obvious control of the "coordinates" of his story, scrambling the reader's time-sense by his very presence...
...As the novel moves from G.'s boyhood to his maturity, the parallels between sex and political action become more pronounced, and the pace quickens...
...It is a dazzling virtuoso performance...
...Implicit in G.'s mission is his belief that women are incapable of achieving any degree of self-consciousness without a male catalyst...
...Accordingly, Berger explains, in writing G. he has chosen to deny the linear perception of reality, substituting for it a "complex synchronic pattern" formed through an accretion of associations, the simultaneity of events (for example, G. and a chambermaid making love while nearby Geo Chavez' plane is crossing the Alps), and the yoking of seemingly disparate experiences...
...descriptions of what Milan or Trieste felt like in 1898 or 1914 form a matrix out of which G. acts...
...She suppressed aspects of herself which contradicted them...
...Despite the explicit descriptions of the hero's lovemaking, we learn little about his innermost feelings, except for his hostility to the false and limiting perceptions the sexes have of one another...
...Dedicated to "Anya and her sisters in Women's Liberation," the book presents one of the most sympathetic descriptions in fiction of woman as a victim of other people's expectations...
...by 1914 the transitions from personal to historical events occur in the space between paragraphs...
...Berger juxtaposes them in finely balanced counterpoint, so that finally the man and his historical moment are merged...
...at 23 he is present at the conclusion of the first trans-Alpine flight...
...Berger holds that, like all exploited people, women who conform to myths live in a continuous present, with neither a consciousness of past identity nor the freedom to create their own future...
...at 27 he takes part in the events at Trieste that mark the beginning of World War I. Around these three focieach paralleling a sexual encounter with a moment of revolutionary change in history that gives the participants a new consciousness of their identity????john Berger, the British art critic and writer, constructs his latest novel...
...She emphasized these for you...
...I write in the spirit of a geometrician," he says...
...Events of the past are brought quivering into the present...
...G., who describes himself as a Don Giovanni, moves through life free of conventional attachments, committed only to his own restraints and ideals...
...His passionate urge for freedom of selfhood, which he fosters in the women he seduces, reinforces his identification with the legendary freethinking womanizer...
...At 11 he witnesses the brutal repression of workers' riots in Milan...
...You chose Camille's innocence, delicacy, maternal feeling, spirituality...
...Yet G. remains little more than a vehicle for Berger's historical theories and his observations, reminiscent of D. H. Lawrence's, on sexuality and liberty...
...Reviewed by Susan Schneider The illegitimate son of a wealthy Italian merchant and his Anglo-American mistress, G. is raised, and seduced in adolescence, by his upper-class cousin Beatrice on the remnants of an English estate...
Vol. 55 • November 1972 • No. 23
