The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity

By Joseph R. Wiebe

Wendell Berry teaches us to love our places—to pay careful attention to where we are, to look beyond and within, and to live in ways that are not captive to the mastery of cultural, social, or economic assumptions about our life in these places. Creation has its own integrity and demands that we confront it.
 
In The Place of Imagination, Joseph R. Wiebe argues that this confrontation is precisely what shapes our moral capacity to respond to people and to places. Wiebe contends that Berry manifests this moral imagination most acutely in his fiction. Berry’s fiction, however, does not portray an average community or even an ideal one. Instead, he depicts broken communities in broken places—sites and relations scarred by the routines of racial wounds and ecological harm. Yet, in the tracing of Berry’s characters with place-based identities, Wiebe demonstrates the way in which Berry’s fiction comes to embody Berry’s own moral imagination. By joining these ambassadors of Berry’s moral imagination in their fictive journeys, readers, too, can allow imagination to transform their affection, thereby restoring place as a facilitator of identity as well as hope for healed and whole communities. Loving place translates into loving people, which in turn transforms broken human narratives into restored lives rooted and ordered by their places.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781481303880

Book preview

The Place of Imagination

Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity

Joseph R. Wiebe

Baylor University Press

© 2017 by Baylor University Press

Waco, Texas 76798

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of Baylor University Press.

Cover Design by Jordan Wannemacher

Cover image: Windmills in Landscape, attributed to John Constable (1776–1837), acquired in 1946 by the National Museum in Warsaw.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Moral Imagination and Community

1. Imagination

The Poetics of Local Adaptation

2. Affection

Community, Race, and Place

3. Style

Berry’s Fictional Technique

Part II. Biographies of Belonging

4. Jack’s Mind

Regret and the Virtue of Knowing

5. Jayber’s Soul

The Psychology of Magnanimous Despair

6. Hannah’s Body

Grief and the Space of Hopeless Patience

Conclusion

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I graduated from a high school with a tradition: every graduating student writes a letter to him- or herself that the school keeps for ten years, at which time these letters are mailed back to their authors. In my letter, I wrote vitriolic remarks about the suckers interested in undergraduate degrees. Only a fool, I wrote to myself knowingly, would want to attend university. I received that letter after my first year of coursework in my doctoral program. I am grateful to Dustin Wiebe and Jeremy Maron, who, after our shared prodigal phase, went to university and told me to just try it. Sure enough, I was hooked. The main suppliers for my new addiction were Harry and especially Chris Huebner. Chris has continued to be an essential conversation partner, mentor, and friend. Chris also invited me into his Mennonite mafia, with Peter Dula and Alex Sider, without making me feel like I was just tagging along. I have appreciated in particular their ongoing critical engagement with my work, offering comments and questions such as Why is routinization itself a problem? This line of argument isn’t going to convince the critics. Don’t you think that Wendell Berry is a raging sexist? Touché. These have been some of the most formative friendships for what I have thought, read, and written.

In its previous life, this manuscript was a dissertation. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and McMaster University provided the financial support necessary for completing the thesis. These funds made it possible to start a family as a grad student, although I would not recommend that anyone have kids while trying to finish a Ph.D. On a related note, without the big SSHRC scholarship I would not have been able to develop a taste for either Paso Robles Zinfandel or good Kentucky bourbon, both of which were indispensable for completing graduate studies as a father.

My intellectual development happened as much at Duke Divinity School as it did at McMaster. Though there are too many people who influenced me in various ways to name here, several people have figured prominently in my academic life. At Duke, Jay Kameron Carter taught me that every theological project needs to reckon with its racial legacy. Though my forays into articulating this legacy were halting, to say the least, Jay’s reassurance (Joe, I like you because you don’t do white-boy theology) helped me take risks I would not have otherwise. I owe a great deal to Stanley Hauerwas, who unquestioningly adopted me from Chris’ tutelage and then delivered me into the hands of Travis Kroeker (No one is smarter than Travis). Stanley connected me with both Norman Wirzba, whose conversations and support have been invaluable, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger, whose willingness to share his work with me bore much fruit early on. I learned as much from my conversations with Sheryl Overmyer and Isaac Villegas as I did from my courses at Duke, and their influence has persisted after all these years. At McMaster, my colleagues Jeremy Penner, Graham Baker, and Susie Fisher have continued to be both academically and personally supportive. In particular, the conversations with Rob Virdis and Greg Wiebe gave my thoughts direction and consistency.

I am extremely grateful to Jason Peters for his generosity in agreeing to be a member of my committee pro bono. His detailed comments, perceptive suggestions, and acerbic wit (Treat prepositional phrases like tumors; cut them out if you can)—not to mention his nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Berry’s corpus—have been crucial to my work on and understanding of Berry. Charles Pinches not only agreed to be an external examiner but also provided detailed notes. His suggestions were part of the basis for many of my revisions. Because of the seriousness and depth of analysis from these exacting examiners, the defense was an intense and edifying experience.

Carey Newman’s startling enthusiasm got this project off the ground. Everyone at Baylor University Press is exceptional, most notably Emily Brower, whose counsel gave this manuscript the focused coherence and intelligibility lacking in the previous iteration. Her vigor, encouragement, and vision helped me get through the times when I felt like torching the dissertation in a cathartic blaze of pre-Socratic glory. Carey describes the transformation from dissertation to manuscript as an exorcism. To my regret, it feels to me that this manuscript is still possessed by the everyone-is-wrong-but-me demon found in most graduate work. I want to recognize all the help I received working on this project, but I would be remiss if I did not publicly admit that the mistakes, occlusions, and inconsistencies that remain are mine.

It is hard to imagine how this book could have been written without the support of my wife, Kim. More than that, my family is the horizon to which I am oriented. The anxieties, difficulties, and inadequacies of being a father and husband relativize those of being an academic. My children’s unqualified love, and my partnership with the person who knows me better than anyone else ever could, provide pleasures, fulfillments, and satisfactions that eclipse those from my scholastic achievements. The life of the mind has taken me from my home, my birthplace, which I will forever lament; however, the perseverance and flourishing of my small tribe vindicates our collective struggles and sacrifices.

Finally, I wish to thank Travis Kroeker for his generous support of and critical engagement with my work. His guidance and friendship have deeply formed this project and shaped me as a person and scholar. I would also like to thank Zdravko Planinc, from whom I am sure I have learned more than I am conscious of. More than anyone else, Travis and Zdravko taught me not only how to read and write but also the value of literature for religious and political reflection. Both Travis and Zdravko helped me discover a pleasure in scholarship that I did not know existed.

Introduction

I’m not ever, in anything I’ve written, trying to say exactly how anything ought to be done. I mean, I don’t have a program.

—Wendell Berry

The challenge in writing on Wendell Berry’s fiction is to give an account of the Port William community that is neither sentimental nor quaint. Such characterizations can be easy to fall into / hard to avoid, depending on what one assumes about rural communities in general. On the one hand, when thought of as a bastion of virtuous living doomed by the tides of modern industrialization, the rural community names a collective life that is basically distinct from the characteristic features and temperaments of the cultural forces swirling around it. Convinced that there are some things worse than death, that it is better to love and lose this life than to collaborate with or surrender to its assailants, the community is the place of opposition come hell or high water. Difficulty and risk in this understanding of community consist only in the ways its members defy and withstand the various outside efforts to change their way of life.¹

On the other hand, when thought of as a provincial society with blinkered attitudes and practices, the rural community names a group of staid conservatives either viewed as needing to be brought up to date with education and fine arts or condescendingly appreciated as relics of the past. Community shows the loss of the premodern world, and the remaining few are the last testaments to the way things were before they inevitably succumbed to the processes of cultural evolution. The difficulty for this community is finding new ways to revitalize its local culture.²

Both caricatures of rural communities assume a settled way of life that needs either protection or assistance. It is inconceivable that the community might be a place of self-questioning, where members engage with their surroundings, histories, flaws, conversations, friendships, quarrels, jokes, education, economics, churches, and stories with openness and self-criticism. In other words, neither perspective allows for difficulty except to the extent that it is a result of influences that arrive from elsewhere. Whether the surrounding world is evil empire or paternalistic teacher, the negotiations of power, conflicting authorities, obstacles to economic flourishing, and exclusionary or alienating practices are about dealing with the world out there, not about members dealing with one another.

For Wendell Berry, community is the mediating third between individual desire and national interests, but it is a broken, not holy, middle.³ Though highly critical of political figures such as Earl Butz⁴ and public institutions such as the University of Kentucky,⁵ Berry has offered suggestions for the Kerry campaign,⁶ promoted the fifty-year farm bill for legislation,⁷ and criticized the acts of total opposition to former president Obama as not political but subtilized racism.⁸ Berry’s opposition to extrinsic agents of community disintegration is not pure but rather part of the negotiation of competing interests that is part of working with the various structures in which a settled life is inevitably involved. The community is not a place of perfect, infinite love but one in which the networks of affection are bound to the community’s exercise and arrangement of power and social structures.⁹ The finite particularity of love means it has to wear the face of a neighbor that you may not like at all. Because this neighbor is not simply suffered as someone who needs you, who needs your help, a real encounter is one in which you’re going to be confronted with opposition and the correction of your own mistakes and suffer a certain amount of humiliation, but you’re also going to learn a lot.¹⁰ Berry’s community consists in the genuine openness of its conversations about itself, which take place between neighbors with varying loyalties and affections that are conditioned by and vulnerable to public temperaments and attitudes.

The community as something undergone is therefore no panacea. And yet Berry says in all earnestness, A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be a restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members.¹¹ Community, for Berry, is not a safe haven or an evasion of political risks but the place where mediation happens. For Berry, the linchpin of community is not its traditions that provide the resources to maintain its nonconformity with the world but its members’ imagination. Survival and flourishing depend on a plurality of true communities that each refer less to who we are than to where we are and emerge from an understanding of the necessity of local differences, and respect, which implies imagination—the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls.¹² For Berry, imagination is not talent, reverie, or conjuring thoughts ex nihilo but a way of knowing things not otherwise knowable; it is the power by which we see the place, the predicament, or the story we are in.¹³ The central faculty for negotiating competing interests, for open conversation, is imagination. It is not that some people (in rural communities) have imagination and others (urban elite) do not but that the routinization of desire eliminates differences that need to be imagined. Community is an answer to Berry’s cultural criticisms not because differences are eliminated but because they are engaged without resorting to exclusion or mistreatment, with the knowledge that any engagement always risks both.¹⁴

How Port William contributes to Berry’s advocacy for the restoration of communities is not straightforward. It is not self-evident that a fictional community possesses the capacity to address existing problems, the resolution of which, Berry says, are actual communities. If changing the organization, financial management, and eating habits of social life mitigates destructive and exploitative habits, then perhaps he should exclusively analyze the status and potential of communities in the world. Maybe Berry is unaware of any communities good enough to rectify modernity’s mistakes, which have become so pervasive in the modern world that virtuousness is unviable. If this is indeed the case, then Berry writes fiction to imagine a pattern or community in speech that can be used as a prototype for instantiating new forms of collective life. Or perhaps Berry laments the irrevocable loss of rural early-to-mid-twentieth-century communities, of which he is one of the last remnants, and offers a public memory with enough verisimilitude to capture its distinctive possibility for an alternative culture. In either case, the imaginative nature of Port William presents a problem of application—that is, the problem with using imagination to design alternative modes of being in these ways is that it ignores the fundamental difference between fiction and reality. It represents either a potential solution or an illusion. Its significance, then, lies not in itself but in the theory that bridges it to the world. In both of these interpretations, the function of Port William is to present readers with a refuge with which Berry protects himself and his followers from disintegrating forces.

Despite their fictional form, the Port William stories are themselves significant for understanding the nature and character of real human experience, which cannot be narrowed down to a principle or moral. Either consciously or unconsciously, reading Berry’s stories for instruction often produces anxiety or disdain. The novels’ imagined condition indicates either that they are outside history, and therefore isolated from reality and experience, or that they are a way of preserving memories of the past, and therefore contribute nothing in and of themselves to present reality and experience. Unsympathetic readers use this assumption to repudiate Berry’s literature as altogether uninformative; sympathetic readers bestow on it a relevance that is exterior to the text itself—on some other reference point beyond literature and imagination.

To learn from Berry’s fiction, then, begins with a reminder of how not to read it. The truth Berry speaks, what he reveals about the way things are in their nature, is known by imagination—that is how he knows it; that is how he knows how to communicate it. Theologians and philosophers looking for a formula to implement Berry’s vision of community are left empty-handed, and instead of questioning their own presuppositions—that there needs to be theory, map, blueprint, recipe, DIY manual—they either find sophisticated-sounding ways to call this lack a deficiency or they turn to Berry’s fiction. When not dismissed as sentimental, romantic, nostalgic, or idealistic, Port William becomes the illustration for his idea of community. Even if it is chimerical, as proponents sometimes concede, it is what actual communities should aspire to look like, embody, and enact. Novels are judged according to their ability to point to social institutions that make their fictive quality a reality. That is, they function as tracts: political and religious ideas easy to read, easy to spread.¹⁵

In short, Wendell Berry’s Port William community is not a model. His characters, comments, and arguments concerning membership are neither idealistic nor nostalgic. Berry criticizes agrarian communities of old and has explicitly disavowed the desire to return to them. Much of Berry’s writing defends and promotes the locally adapted community as the basis for an authentic multiculturalism in North America, and the Port William stories are all about characters conscious of their membership, aware as they are of the implications and significance of friendship. But Berry is clear that the stable, locally adapted community he envisions hasn’t existed in America yet.¹⁶

Accordingly, supporters and critics of Berry alike more often than not read the Port William stories as templates meant for imitation. They assume that Berry’s fiction perfects and displays the arguments in his essays and that he constructs these images of community life as exemplars to realize in the real world. Berry’s remarks on this matter are more ambivalent than his disclaimer about Port William representing communities of the past. On the one hand, he is clear that his fictional characters are not embodiments of precepts—they are not puppets furnishing an aesthetic that expresses the communitarian ideal—but rather, like artistic creations, they belong to the reality of the world I live in.¹⁷ On the other hand, he admits, There is a sense in which my work idealizes certain relationships.¹⁸ Perhaps it does; however, that his concession is registered in partiality indicates it does not undercut his stronger conviction that all art participates in human life.¹⁹ At the heart of Berry’s fiction is his view that imagination does not produce illusions, copies of reality, or artificiality.²⁰ As imaginative creations, Port William and its members are none of these. In whatever sense Berry might extol certain relationships, they are not meant to be templates.

Nevertheless, there is still something to be learned from, not merely about, the Port William stories. Berry is quite emphatic on this point, banishing to hell . . . any value anybody may find in it ‘as literature.’²¹ What readers interested in establishing locally adapted communities can learn from Berry’s fiction is the centrality of imagination for such endeavors, which is revealed in the way Berry’s idea of community informs his fiction. Commenting on his short story Fidelity, Berry says it is not merely an illustration of an idea of community but rather a story that’s informed by an idea of community.²² This could be said of all Berry’s fiction. One way of making the distinction between images that are illustrative of and those that are informed by an idea is to say that the former stand in for the idea while the latter stand for it; to stand for something is to be representative as a measure for understanding and perceiving it in the world.²³ As told through imagined stories, Port William does not represent any past or present community, nor does it stand in for community as such; its meaning does not depend on its correspondence with an preexisting social structure or an independent aesthetic judgment of value.²⁴

The stories of the Port William membership, then, should be read as parables—that is, as expressions meaningful for understanding the human experience of reality despite their self-consciously fictive stance, which is a requisite form for conveying imagination. Each of Berry’s fictional stories should be read on its own rather than interpreted according to its applicability or relevance for an agrarian political movement. In other words, parables reveal the truth that cannot be determined or portrayed on other grounds. The meaning of parables comes more from what they explain or analyze about society and the nature of reality than from what they symbolize or signify. With respect to imagination, parable is a way to describe the vision of the world that is registered in fiction, which can be nevertheless investigated and thereby reveal a vision of readers’ manner of being in the world.

The series of sketches parabolically instantiating membership can be analyzed through literary analysis, though the results are not exhaustive, reductive, or equivalent—they are just meant to uncover the underlying dynamics of the text as a caution against superficial interpretations.²⁵ Literary criticism, in this context, shows how experiencing the community of creation through imagination is communicated indirectly by way of images rendered in affection, but also shows that these images should not be imitated.²⁶ Stories engage the imagination to create an insight into the underlying unity of reality so that what might be learned can be made flesh again in new ways. Analyzing the characters in their dramatic roles and literary context is the way to access Berry’s moral imagination, to see the constitutive qualities and experiences of an imagination in place.

Central to Berry’s imagination in place is a mystical experience that his return to Kentucky from New York in 1964 precipitated. He says, I just suddenly saw the country as if for the first time. I saw it in detail. I saw that there was just more here than I had ever dreamed there was, and I really liked it.²⁷ The return itself is not what is primarily instructive about this event. When talking about his homecoming, Berry says, I don’t think of myself as exemplary, I am not offering myself as an example. . . . I didn’t decide to come home because I wanted to do the work that I turned out to have done there. I didn’t have any high motive.²⁸ While many rightly point to this watershed moment as definitive for both Berry’s character and career, few if any discuss what difference it makes for reading his fiction—the conditions that made it possible for Berry to see the country anew, the significance of gratuitous detail and affection, the dark history of the place (When I got home I knew that I was taking on problems and forms of wickedness that belonged to me, that I was born into),²⁹ and how this place is preserved through imagination. William Carlos Williams’ poetry inspired Berry’s return, providing the poetics that informed and made possible Berry’s revived imaginative receptivity of his place. Also because of the way Williams’ poetics structures Berry’s engagement with his home, the experience of return is fraught with the racial violence inherent in the details. It is this experience, however, that forms the basis for Berry’s idea of community—that we are all members, including enemies, misfits, strangers, and nature. Berry’s imagined characters are useful not as ideals for how to be in the world but as clarifying the constitutive experiences and qualities of an imagination in place.

Berry’s fiction is able to communicate the mystical nature of community because of the way he writes. Berry’s style shows the darkness of character: what is not easily explained, rationally accounted for, or understood but nevertheless remains an unrelenting fact of existence. The Port William stories about this darkness, about alienation and loss, reveal its reality without being purely descriptive. There is always something more to community—people are more than their faults, and history is not inevitable—because its reality is grounded in divine affection. And yet the love that makes everyday people into complex living souls is vague in Berry’s fiction. Berry’s religious ambivalence pushes him toward a mysticism in which there is a depth to reality behind surface appearances, which can be glimpsed but not known. Berry’s narrative technique is a meandering, wandering method without end or terminus. There is still much revealed in the process that is invisible but real, which is missed by those preoccupied with controlling characters—those realists for whom character is reduced to only what can be described. The meaning of the eternal context is always left indistinct: it is not found in institutional Christianity but is still religious; it is not an ideal but still something whole; it is not the community in the past but something that has been historically revealed. This indeterminacy is what gives Berry’s novels their emotional weight. Readers are attracted to the truth Berry’s style admits because it is a mystery left intact.

These dynamics of narrative voice are revealed in the rhythms of Jack, Hannah, and Jayber as ambassadors of Berry’s moral imagination. They are not ideals, but they clarify what it means to have a place-based identity. What they all have in common is that they are works of imagination about affection in a disintegrating community in a world at war. They are all characters of resistance that also show what is involved in belonging to a place, being at home in the world.³⁰ The different personal aspects, qualities of character, and experiences of suffering reveal their respective significance and meaning in a way that changes the reader’s understanding of them—thus taking a different shape and functioning differently in the reader’s life.³¹

Though Berry focuses on individual dramas, the upshot of his imagination in place is far from individualistic. The mystical experiences to which movements of affection lead requires practices in common that lead to community. Activities in Port William include more than just farming; people eat together, worship together, sing together, get drunk (in the right way) together. Port William is highly social, and sustains itself through education and training, but politics as statecraft is largely absent in it. Politics is ad hoc and fragmentary—there is no mayor, they do what they can to stop members from killing each other, take turns supervising the town’s public health, and make economic decisions through conversation. It is not, however, that Port Williams is antipolitical or even apolitical but rather that its politics, as expressed through cultural institutions, are radically democratic.

Changes that shape a person’s affectionate perception to cultivate a place-based identity ripple through a life—body, soul, and mind—and the totality of its relations, but their terminus is not the community. It seems likely, Berry claims, that politics will improve after the people have improved, not before. The ‘leaders’ will have to be led.³² Propriety and the moral authority of people and place may govern the community, but the point of good governance is to establish and maintain a locally adapted economy that forms the basis for the community’s self-determination. A plurality of self-determined communities, in turn, works for better politics, better policy, better representation, better official understanding of our problems and needs.³³ An imagination in place that forms the locally adapted community takes responsibility for land-use problems and social inequalities, working within these quagmires without the pretense that they can be solved.

Berry writes about his rural community because that is where he has been led, where his imagination has taken place, and where the problems are located in which he is mired. The rural community is one kind of community, not the only or paradigmatic kind. In this regard, Berry’s fiction simply follows the imperative write what you know, rather than find your voice. The Port William stories are part of Berry’s support for a plurality of communities as the basis of an unsystematic democratically based change in environmental, economic, and land-use policy. Each community is particular to its specific configuration of land and people, but at the heart of each is a local sense of, and fidelity to, place. This sense and fidelity comes from imagination. Berry’s novels are unique as lessons in this imagination to the extent that they cultivate the capacity to form locally adapted communities. Given the ubiquity of inequalities and the global environmental crisis, all communities are broken. Communal life therefore entails self-questioning, criticism, and uncertainty along with interdependence, familiarity, and desire—all of which are involved in imagination and affection. Community is not a nostrum or magic bullet administered to an unthinking subject or taken passively in pure receptivity. Membership is political; it is difficult and risky.

Berry’s fiction will not save the world, but fictive journeys with characters like Hannah, Jayber, and Jack can articulate to readers what it means to live well in wounded communities and broken places. If people concerned for the deteriorating condition of social and organic life find it difficult to be present and attentive to the world as it is where they are, if they are impatient with the world’s noncompliance and fragility, if they find themselves looking for hope in fantasies of an ideal future or a prelapsarian past, if they find themselves thinking that satisfaction and contentment must be postponed until restoration has been achieved, then they might consider spending a night or two with a tumbler of Woodford Reserve and an artful crank from Kentucky.

Part I

Moral Imagination and Community

1

Imagination

The Poetics of Local Adaptation

The cure for the indiscriminate hatred of a community that is not one’s own can never come from the feeling of community itself. The answer springs rather from the individual case that acquires a general authority—an authority which by metaphysical conviction eventually extends to any person and all persons.

—David Bromwich, The Meaning of Patriotism in 1789

Berry’s moral imagination consists in a relation to place.¹ Its function is to see a place outside fixed cultural and social interpretative frameworks, recognize its integrity in terms of both its internal consistency and its participation in the rest of creation, and invite the imaginer to reflect on the claim this awareness makes. For Berry, imagination opposes the reductionist tendencies that absorb particularity into what is generally done or believed. The primary perpetrators of this kind of reductionism in Berry’s literature are triumphalist empirical science, the national economy, and war rhetoric. Each discourse manipulates sentiments to support its projects. Imagination resists reduction insofar as it sees things stripped of these emotional economies in its own integrity. Imagination is not just a shift in perspective but also a change in character. To be conscious of difference, of how a life does not fit within a stereotype, entails more than tolerating it. Respect involves self-interrogation: assessing my implication in reductionist discourses, gauging how they have formed how I know myself, considering the ways my integrity has been denied the respect I have for others, and discovering how I have been deceived into thinking that socially constructed desires are natural. Imagining the life of a place morally is not to see it as quaint and in need of outside rescue—that is,