King: A Street Story and the Ethics of Attention
Even if it uses the topos of animal narration, John Berger’s King: A Street Story (1999), unlike the it-narratives and circulation narratives that celebrated the rise of the novel and of capitalism in the 18th century, certainly pays no homage to contemporary liberalism. On the contrary, like Wajdi...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2023
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | Even if it uses the topos of animal narration, John Berger’s King: A Street Story (1999), unlike the it-narratives and circulation narratives that celebrated the rise of the novel and of capitalism in the 18th century, certainly pays no homage to contemporary liberalism. On the contrary, like Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima (1012)—which it may well have inspired, the non-human narrator’s unique perspective (as distinct from Anima’s multiple narrators) aims at lending visibility to invisible beings and audibility to inaudible stories. In so doing, it attends to the submerged and the excluded from the official narratives of history. King, Berger’s four-legged narrator, is a figure of attention. He and his narrative attend to the invisible elements of the relegated characters’ ordinary lives that are generally invisible to the common readers or that are too visible for them to notice. The novel thereby performs a defamiliarisation that engages with the readers’ perceptions, making them realise that perception is not a natural category but an ethical and political capacity that has to be educated and re-armed (Le Blanc). On top of being a figure of attention, the narrative is also an operator of consideration (Macé, Pelluchon) in that the dog’s humble position, in his proximity to the ground, allows for the emergence of a humble perspective, far away from the bird’s eye view, as King never looks down upon anybody or anything. Such an apparatus allows in turn for an ethics of the ordinary that helps determine what matters (as distinct from what is good or bad) without moralising or judging. By attending to singular, ordinary situations, the narrative makes for a particularist ethics (Cavell, Diamond, Laugier) through which it is the narrator’s and the reader’s responsibility to determine what matters. Lastly, the dog-narrator figure reminds us that attention is the first component of care, he whose function is to look after and protect his vulnerable owners and friends. |
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