Into Their Labours (trilogy)
After moving to Quincy in 1973, Berger spent the following seventeen years producing a trilogy that constitutes his most sustained fictional and documentary work. The three volumes move through the cycle he identified: the life of the Alpine village in Pig Earth, the transition of peasants to industrial laborers in Once in Europa, and the arrival of peasant descendants as migrants in the European city in Lilac and Flag. Taken together, the trilogy traces the dissolution of a way of life across the second half of the twentieth century — not as elegy but as witness, grounded in the specific authority of someone who lived in the village, helped with the work, and paid attention over years.
In the AI Story
Pig Earth is the volume most often read, and its preface — titled An Historical Afterword — is one of Berger's most important short essays. He argues there that peasant culture is structurally a culture of survival, organized around the expectation that each generation will inherit the capacity of its parents to survive. The dissolution of peasant life is not the extinction of a picturesque tradition; it is the destruction of a specific relationship between labor and continuity that shaped most of human history. The modern experience of work — as career, as advancement, as the pursuit of future possibility — is historically recent and geographically narrow.
The stories themselves are specific. A woman who has spent her life on a farm dies and is carried to the cemetery through snow. A grandfather teaches his grandson how to kill a pig without causing it unnecessary fear. A young man leaves the village and returns for his mother's funeral, understanding for the first time what he has left. The specificity is the argument. Berger does not generalize from the stories to abstract claims about peasant life. The stories are the claims, and their authority derives from the quality of the attention they record.
The trilogy's relevance to the AI discourse is oblique but sharp. The question Into Their Labours poses is: what happens to a form of life when its conditions are removed? Not the dramatic question of extinction by violence, but the slower question of dissolution by convenience — young people leaving for cities that offer what the village cannot match, knowledge dying with the last practitioners because the next generation has no use for it. The peasant's eye is the epistemological core of the trilogy; its loss is the trilogy's underlying subject.
The same dissolution is now underway in knowledge work. Not dramatic replacement but the quiet erosion of the conditions under which certain forms of skill and attention were possible. The engineer who no longer debugs; the writer who no longer wrestles with sentences; the designer who no longer sketches. Each individual adoption is rational. The cumulative effect may be the extinction of forms of knowing whose loss will not become visible until the last practitioners are gone and no one is left who understands what they understood.
Origin
Berger began the trilogy after moving to Quincy in 1973, drawing on the lives and testimony of his neighbors. Pig Earth appeared in 1979 and established the project's method: close attention to specific lives, refusal of generalization, the integration of essay and fiction in ways the conventional genres do not easily accommodate. The trilogy was substantially complete by 1990 with the publication of Lilac and Flag, though Berger continued to return to peasant themes in later essays and stories.
Key Ideas
Peasant life is organized around survival, not advancement. The expectation is continuity across generations, not the expansion of possibility that defines modern experience.
Specificity is the argument. The stories do not illustrate a thesis. They constitute an epistemological claim: that this form of attention, directed at these specific lives, is how certain truths can be told.
Dissolution is not extinction. The trilogy documents a slow, uneven loss that cannot be reduced to a single cause or moment.
The storyteller has authority because she was there. Berger's authority in the trilogy derives from his having worked alongside the people whose lives he records, not from any external credential.
The questions the trilogy poses outlive its subject. What happens when a form of life dissolves? What knowledge dies with the last practitioners? These questions now apply, in displaced form, to knowledge work in the age of AI.
Debates & Critiques
Some readers found the trilogy sentimental — too gentle with its subjects, insufficiently attentive to the contradictions within peasant cultures. Others argued it romanticized hardship. The defenses have been numerous and varied, but the most durable has been Berger's own: he was not making claims about peasant life in general; he was recording specific lives in a specific place, and the test of the work was whether the recording was accurate. The charge of sentimentality has not stuck in the way it sometimes does, because the stories themselves are too precise to be dismissed as idealization.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- John Berger, Pig Earth (Pantheon, 1979)
- John Berger, Once in Europa (Pantheon, 1987)
- John Berger, Lilac and Flag (Pantheon, 1990)
- Geoff Dyer, Ways of Telling (Pluto, 1986)
- Joshua Sperling, A Writer of Our Time (Verso, 2018)