In Memoriam: Wendell Berry
The author Wendell Berry passed away a few days ago. He is one of the reasons I decided to focus on American literature in my later graduate work, and he is one of the subjects—if not the primary subject—of the dissertation I am currently writing on American short-story cycles set in small towns. In fact, I am now at the point in the process where I am most concentrating on the sections of the dissertation that have to do with Berry and his stories. He has been on my mind a lot lately, so it was even more startling and saddening than it might have been to come across his name while skimming the headlines the other morning.
Despite my long admiration for the writer ever since I first read the stories “Pray Without Ceasing” and “Fidelity” ten years ago, I have to date only read one of his novels (Jayber Crow, multiple times, if you count audiobooks as reading), a bunch of his short stories (my dissertation will have a half-chapter on the collection That Distant Land), and a bunch of his essays (all of the ones in What Are People For? and Standing by Words, as well as several from other essay collections). I have only looked at a few of his poems. The internet will be replete in the coming days and weeks with tributes to Berry from people who read his work more widely and knew it more intimately than I do, and some of the things I could say about his importance and influence would be redundant. So, right here, I will only note one thing in Berry’s writing that has left a strong impression on me, something that may not get as much attention in other tributes: namely, his idea of the tragic imagination.
In reading many of Berry’s essays and interviews to better understand and contextualize the stories I am analyzing for my dissertation, I noticed how often Berry would talk about the importance of the imagination. In the essay “American Imagination and the Civil War,” he explained that “By imagination I do not mean the ability to make things up or to make a realistic copy. I mean the ability to make real to oneself the life of one's place or the life of an enemy—and therein, I believe, is implied, imagination in the highest sense” (Imagination in Place, 2010, p. 30). Imagination is seeing beyond surface appearances and perceiving the underlying realities. It is also, as he expressed it in “Imagination in Place,” seeing things “whole” (pp. 3-4), as opposed to disparate and isolated parts. For Berry, one’s capacity for this kind of seeing is connected to one’s capacity for sympathy and compassion—and, dare I say, in a time when the concept is so controversial, empathy? He told Rose Marie Berger in an interview that
The serious question is whether you’re going to become a warrior community and live by piracy, by taking what you need from other people. I think the only antidote to that is imagination. You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy to happen. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate. If you want forgiveness you must be forgiving. It’s a difficult business, being human. (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 177)
Berry was particularly concerned that the imagination, if it is to help us accomplish the “difficult business” of “being human,” must have room within itself for accepting and assimilating tragedies. In the 1987 essay “Writer and Region”—which for me has been the most formative and important essay Berry ever wrote, and the inspiration for the direction my dissertation has taken—he argued that Americans “have hardly begun to imagine community life, and the tragedy that is at the heart of community life” (What Are People For?, 1990, p. 76). He explained that "Community life . . . is tragic, and it is so because it involves unremittingly the need to survive mortality, partiality, and evil” (p. 77). The problem is that, if we cannot imagine and reconcile ourselves to the fact that community life will always be marred by “mortality, partiality, and evil,” and then tragedy inevitably strikes, then we will not know how to cope with it. One outcome Berry foresaw in that essay is that we will withdraw from others and refuse the responsibility and forgiveness that healthy community life requires of us. He wrote that
What is wanting, apparently, is the tragic imagination that, through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal. What is wanting is the return to the beloved community, or to the possibility of one. That would return us to a renewed and corrected awareness of our partiality and mortality, but also to healing and to joy in a renewed awareness of our love and hope for one another. Without that return we may know innocence and horror and grief, but not tragedy and joy. Not consolation or forgiveness or redemption. (What Are People For? 1990, p. 78)
Berry was an idealist—he had an exacting vision for what it would mean for neighbors and family members to be faithful to one another and the places they inhabit together—but his idealism was tempered by his tragic imagination. He understood his ideals could never be fully realized, and that he and others would constantly fail to live by them. But expecting the worst is a precondition for being able to face it. For example, he said in an interview with Bruce Williamson that “the ideal of loving your neighbor has to take on the possibility that he may be somebody you’re going to have great difficulty loving or liking or even tolerating" (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 10). Imagining the possibility of the neighbor’s transgression prepares us to finally forgive it.
Of all the things I have learned from Berry over the years and especially in the past few months, this is the insight I am most thankful for. It is related to Bonhoeffer’s warning not to impose our ideal vision for community onto actual, fallible ones, and also bears a resemblance to Tolkien’s idea of joining the long defeat. If we are to do life together, we must expect to fail and be failed, wrong and be wronged, and ultimately die on each other. Finally, we must also imagine each other as God sees us in reality: as His image-bearers, dearly beloved. As one character puts it in the story “Pray Without Ceasing,” “If God loves the ones we can’t, . . . then finally maybe we can” (That Distant Land, 2004, p. 70).