Storytelling: Berger, Sontag and Beckett.

This is the kind of thing you used to see on television. A dialogue, a genuine dialogue between Susan Sontag and John Berger on storytelling, on the nature of fiction and much else. That such a program is today inconceivable is itself a whole essay, an essay of lamentation or attack, or both at once. But I wanted to think about an exchange that happens around 18 minutes in. Berger proposes that every story “has its own subjectivity”, a subjectivity which is not that of the writer (or storyteller) or the protagonist or the reader, but an “amalgam” of the three. This, perhaps, is the “event” of fiction, the emergence from the three substances of a semi-miraculous fourth substance, a tremulous subjectivity which moves through and over the text, a creature of our reading, a thing that vanishes when the “collaboration” (Berger’s phrase) ends.

The transience of this subjectivity and its fragility might tempt us to compare it to a ghost, or something ghost like. But a ghost is typically a trace of something that has been. The subjectivity that Berger speaks of, if we agree with him (Sontag doesn’t), is born and lives with the text, or the act of storytelling.

We disappear into it, yet we are part of the amalgam.

I wonder who has written about this subjectivity - impersonal, or transpersonal, unattached to a body, a flare over the marshes - and what significance it has in terms of subjectivity more generally?

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Berger’s idea that there is a kind of subjectivity – more than a Voice but less than a person – born with the text, with the story, existing only on that particular “surface”, makes me think of Samuel Beckett. 

In Beckett, we have speakers who are, as it were, aware of this. Beings which exist only on stage or only on the page, out of nowhere, and find themselves existing on stage, on the page, surprised sometimes, to be thrown there with meagre resources. It is a "subjectivity" that knows what it is made of.