The Place of Imagination

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

Joseph R. Wiebe

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781481303880
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

WendellBerry teaches us to loveour places—to pay careful attention to where we are, to look beyond and within, andto 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, JosephR. 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 brokencommunitiesin brokenplaces—sites and relations scarredby the routines of racial wounds and ecological harm.Yet, in the tracing of Berry's characterswith place-based identities, Wiebe demonstrates the way in which Berry's fiction comes to embody Berry'sownmoral 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 ashope 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.

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, as a moral object in need of another’s moral agency. It is rather to see particularity with reverence—with a respect that makes a claim on me.

Places shape character through imagination, and this is a central process of local adaptation, or what some refer to as having fidelity to place.2 Berry’s fiction delves into this moral formation, tarrying in an imagined community to explore the manifold ways that good qualities are habituated by being at home in the surrounding flow of life. As works of imagination, Berry’s Port William narratives are less about prescribing resource management or agricultural techniques than they are about making sense of a place’s coherency and integrity.3 The morality of his fiction is in its attempt to participate in the life of his place—to become part of both the life and the underlying relationships going on around him—and yet its practicality is not in the call to change the world according to Berry’s vision. Like other artists, Berry uses his imagination to shape his own experiences into stories that say something about the way the world is.

Berry has been explicit about what he thinks imagination is, but has admitted ignorance about how it works, particularly with respect to the influence of place.4 Berry’s definition of imagination largely reflects Samuel Coleridge’s theory of imagination as the faculty by which we perceive and make sense of the unity underlying the world’s chaos; however, Berry’s analysis and praise of William Carlos Williams’ poetry reveal how imagination works.5 Williams is crucial for Berry as an artist who refuses to succumb to the claim that the mind is its own place.6 Berry strays from Coleridge’s influence in insisting that the effect of literature is registered on one’s imagination rather than will. Williams’ poetry shows how a writer uses imagination to become locally adapted. According to Berry, Williams’ mind is conditioned by and engages with its locality. Having place as the mind’s context and condition enables a perception that breaks the determinative hold that permanent categories such as politics, ethnicity, race, and class have on identifications.

Williams’ poetics—what his poetry says, how it is made, and why it is beautiful—is inseparable from Paterson, imagining his place in New Jersey with a devotion that cultivates respect. This poetics shows Berry how imagination works in five ways: it perceives both the particularity and unity of things; it strips away artifices by exploring both invisible depth and problematic details; it involves the writer in the life of things—how they make claims on him—through a dispossession of desires to control; it facilitates insight into and contact with the creative energies animating the world; and it is connected to reader and place through rhythm. Ultimately, what imagination reveals about the world cannot be spoken of directly, or represented in logic and analysis. What Berry learns from Williams forms the basis for understanding Berry’s own Port William stories as parables. Read as a series of parables, the Port William stories both instantiate communal life as well as make visible Berry’s imaginative engagement with the world; both the form and content are significant for what is communicated. The effect Williams’ imaginative works had on Berry shows their developmental influence, their moral practicality, which informs a fidelity to place without giving a DIY manual on things like land usage or water management.

Imagination Defined

On the one hand, imagination is the faculty that perceives singularity. It grasps qualities and depth of character.7 Imagination has “nothing to do with either clever imitation or ‘dreaming up.’” Rather,

To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly with “the mind’s eye.” . . . By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.8

To imagine is to recognize the unique qualities of a place in such a way that they are acknowledged. Seeing a place this way evokes a response that forms a connection, a relationship, involving obligations that are felt, which is to say, consciously thought.9 The interconnection between immaterial and material reality bears upon practical rationality, forming judgments in light of inconspicuous place-based knowledge such as the cultural history of a region, the religious significance of a landmark, the intergenerational succession of a farm, or the pleasurable experiences a specific geography affords.10 Imagination makes real the life of a place, which simultaneously reveals the various claims a particular environment makes on those who share its life.

On the other hand, imagination perceives the underlying unity of the world. It does not passively receive information about the world but organizes the superficially random and distinct features of the world into the coherent unity humans experience.11 Imagination makes sense of distinct objects and their otherness in relational terms, but it also makes sense of the underlying harmony of relations. For Berry, this underlying coherence is the divine presence in creation.12 All of creation is God’s unnecessary outpouring of himself into otherness for his own pleasure.13 In this sense, creation is held together in God’s imagination: the order that makes creation intelligible is neither material nor static but the relational interplay between the infinitely diverse elements of God’s life.14 Just as God’s primal creative act produces order out of chaos in love, imagination comprehends human experience amid the infinite variety of life. Human imagination, as a repetition of divine creativity, is the imago dei. That the underlying unity is God’s relationship with himself shared with what is created means that a godlike image of imagination is the activity of knowing itself in what is other without objectivizing it, or using it instrumentally.15 Imagination does not use objects to know itself but sees itself in the other, seeing their shared place within the unity of God’s creation. The act of imagination thus engages the agency of the other—its activity, its internal life—to know itself in terms of what is other to it. Imagination is the central faculty in the relationship of exchange and interpenetration—between subject and object, self and other, humans and nature—the archetype of which is God’s act of creation.

Berry’s fiction incarnates his affection for his place, which is animated by God’s creative pleasure. Narrative provides insight into the divine presence in creation. Berry shares in the tradition of fiction writers who do not divide the appreciation of imagined worlds from formative experiences; literature serves a purpose. Berry’s purpose is to write about a small farming community in an abused part of America, imagining its invaluable particularity over against the broken coherence of an American culture that derides its “provinciality.” Reduction is the opposing force to this imagination, condensing and quieting the innate vivacity of people and places into categories and types. Reduction usually serves exploitation as part of the process of realizing an objective extrinsic to the subject in question and formulated before engaging it. Imagination resists reduction.16 The oppositional force of Berry’s writing comes from his continual attempt to align himself—his desires, hopes, and practices—with the pleasure, the otherness, of the life he discovers in creation. The practicality of Berry’s literature for his readers lies not in its ability to incite imitation; he is skeptical of followers and sycophants. Rather, the usefulness of his literature is its revelation of Berry’s experience of being at home in the world. The combination of Berry’s affection for his particular place with his sense of God’s underlying pleasure animating all creation gives “home” and “fidelity” a refreshing, particular meaning.17

Berry’s advocacy of affection against the forces of reduction is a plea to take imagination seriously in environmental ethics. There are several additional arguments for how imagination helps people think about ecological issues as both moral problems as well as proper responses to those issues. One such argument is that imagination is the attentive awareness to the particularity of nonhuman others that produces sympathy.18 Its contribution to ethics is a creative construction of what the perspectives of these others might be, which stimulates guidelines for uses of land and animals as, in part, responses to their interests. These constructions are not a flight from reality but an engagement with its depth and complexity. Another argument is that the role of imagination is to make environmental concepts intelligible and meaningful.19 Stories make moral concepts communicable and persuasive within narratives that personify possible practices.20 Yet another way to argue for the role of imagination is to maintain that it produces alternative forms of identity through cognitive reorientation. Exemplary stories are those that adjust habits of seeing and thinking. As such, these stories analogically present the possible changes in culture and politics that might come from environmental policies and practices.21 The differences between these arguments notwithstanding, they share two sensibilities with Berry that clarify the significance of imagination for environmental ethics: imagination is not secondary to reason but names an attentive perception foundational to environmental ethics; and literature—constructions of imagination—does not merely support theoretical knowledge but itself contributes to moral reasoning.

How Imagination Works

Berry’s analysis of William Carlos Williams’ poetics outlines the proclivities and labor of Berry’s own imagination.22 Berry’s interpretation and use of Williams establish the dilemma of writing that is cognizant of the constant risk of exploiting its subject, which is managed by the struggle toward local adaptation. Becoming locally adapted includes adjusting ideas to things through local language and an artistic style that elevates these ideas above mere description. Poetry can be useful for the poet and reader in this local work insofar as it is connected to the creativity of creation, which is the active presence of the divine in the world. This connection invokes multiple layers of meaning because poetry is both inspired by something beyond the poet’s consciousness and resonates with the reader’s own experiences. The structure of imaginative engagement is descent and ascent, which is a movement that confronts the despair of failure and the fragility of life rather than avoiding it. As such, poetics can be therapeutic.23 Therapy for environmental destruction and cultural exploitation consists in adapting one’s inner life to one’s place. Neither Williams nor Berry has a program or prescription for how anyone can become locally rooted in a habitat. Hence, their writings offer a kind of therapy, not a panacea. Instead, they incarnate in their writings the experiences of their struggles to adapt and preserve their places.24 Berry’s analysis of Williams’ work outlines a poetics through which one can see how his own literature presents an imaginative activity that opens up a noncategorical, noncompetitive way of seeing the world.

Approaching the world as a conquistador cannot be avoided by simply deciding against it. Exploitation and misuse are ever-present dangers, for one must use things. In order to use them well, Berry begins with close observation and a disciplined description of details. This task is difficult without a “settled, coherent culture” to constrain its scope and adjudicate its success.25 Without order, specific things are vulnerable in a nation whose general manner is one uncommitted to anything that cannot be transformed into legal tender. Berry admires Williams for his dedication as a poet and doctor to attending to the life of his native place. Particularity is in the details: “details of geography, of daily work, of local life and economy, and . . . the details of an imposed industrialism and its overwhelming power to uproot, alienate, and corrupt.”26 Features of a local life need a language and order that make them intelligible to nonnatives lest they be converted into raw material and absorbed by distant economies. Yet describing details in a foreign context will be imperfect and could fail to do them justice.27 Berry’s task to see, appreciate, and describe things adequately in order to use them well in his writing hazards the danger he wants to stave off.

Williams’ poetry provides the method by which Berry communicates the details of his place. Specifically, Williams’ poetic work of local adaptation...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Moral Imagination and Community
• Part II. Biographies of Belonging
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index