The Tragic Imagination, Continued

In my previous post, on Wendell Berry and his tragic imagination, one of the quotations I considered using but left out was from Berry’s interview with Marilyn Berlin Snell in 1992, in which she asked him to comment on his essay “Writer and Region.” She asked him, “What is the importance of the tragic sensibility in both personal and community life?” Berry answered, 

The tragic sensibility simply accepts mortality as an inescapable condition. In a sense, it is the necessary counterbalance to the tradition of seeing the other as a living soul; it applies a sense of time and finitude to our relationships. The tragic sensibility sees and accepts that as we live we are going to live into the deaths of people we love and it accepts that the condition of our love for those people is that we will lose them—or that they will lose us. The practical aspect of the tragic sensibility is that it infuses both a necessary seriousness and a joyful appreciation. (Conversations with Wendell Berry, 2007, p. 56)

Reading this passage reminded me of the Jon Foreman song, “Terminal”: 

We are the living souls

With terminal hearts, terminal parts

Flickering like candles, shimmering like candles

We're fatally flawed, in the image of God

What Berry and Foreman are both saying is that we need to recognize in each and every person that they are simultaneously worthy of dignity and love (on account of having a living soul made in the image of God) and deserving of pity and forbearance (on account of being fallen and finite). 

In fact, on further reflection, “Terminal” is a great song for illustrating the tragic imagination/sensibility at work:

Whenever I start cursing at the traffic or the phone

I remind myself that we have all got cancer in our bones

Don’t yell at the dead, show a little respect

It’s terminal

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).

Love and Death in Pirates of the Caribbean

In my post yesterday, I sketched out a proposed chiastic structure for Dead Man’s Chest, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I identified as the turning point:

Scene X: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

The turning point should be a thematically significant moment if it is to be at the heart of a true ring composition. I didn’t think this one scene could carry that much weight. It’s a major action set-piece, but doesn’t have much going for it narratively. Later in the day I talked with Tim Lawrence about it, and he helped me identify that the turning point should actually be two scenes: this one, and the scene preceding it. So here’s a revised theory of the turning point:

Scene X’: Norrington learns how he can get a pardon from Becket; Elizabeth, using Jack’s compass, realizes she has an attraction for Jack

Scene X”: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

Adding Scene X’ fits with the patterns I’ve already traced. It brings in another key Norrington moment to complement Scenes B’ (arrest warrant) and B” (pardon); it sets up Jack and Elizabeth’s flirtation in Scene G” (which deepens Jack’s betrayal of Will in Scene G’); and it is also relevant to the ring because it involves Jack’s compass, complementing Scenes D’ (compass confused) and D” (compass clear).

But why does the turning point need to include both X’ and X”? It’s because X’ complements A’, and X” complements A”:

Scene A’: A wedding without a groom (teacups filled with rain)

Scene A”: A wake without a body (mugs filled with grog)

The film opens with Will and Elizabeth’s wedding being cancelled because Becket arrests them for treason. Then, in Scene X’, we realize that Jack is another threat to Will and Elizabeth’s ability to marry. Immediately following this, Scene X” gives a preview of how the Kraken will finally destroy the Black Pearl and consume Jack. Then, the final scene of the film shows the survivors grieving that event, a fate they fought throughout the film to avoid. So Scenes X’ and X” really are the twinned turning point scenes of the film because they are also twinned with the film’s bookends.

More than that, this ring composition makes sense for the film—it’s not something I’m imposing on the film arbitrarily—because the whole story, at heart, is about characters who try to avoid marriage, death, or both. The beginning, middle, and end points of the ring only reinforce this. 

The film begins with a wedding without a groom. Something comes in between a man and his commitment to a woman, and all that this commitment would entail: fidelity, stability, fatherhood. In Will’s case, the hindrance was unwanted. But Davy Jones cut his own heart out so he could forsake his beloved, and although Bootstrap Bill stuck around long enough to father Will, he did not stay behind to raise him. Jones and Bootstrap chose the supposed freedom represented by the sea and by piracy over the responsibility of the hearth. In the turning point of the film, Elizabeth realizes she is likewise tempted to bail on her own wedding. For a moment, the desire to be with a pirate (and thus become a pirate herself) is more compelling.

The film ends with a funeral without a body. Yet just as no one can really miss their own wedding, no one can really miss their own funeral. In the film, people keep trying to forestall the inevitable, with disastrous results. Dying sailors sign on to join Davy Jones’ crew so they can delay Judgment Day by one hundred years—and proceed to experience one hundred years of hell on earth. Jack keeps scheming after ways to not have to die in exchange for the extra thirteen years Jones gave him—and how many sailors have to die for his folly before he finally runs out of schemes? The turning point scene in which Will watches the Kraken take down a merchant ship gives Will ideas for how to stop the Kraken from taking down the Black Pearl, but those strategies can only buy Jack a little more time. The Kraken that swallowed Jack’s hat is like the crocodile that swallowed Captain Hook’s clock: a living reminder of the shortness of time and the certainty of death.

But how do these two themes—marriage and death—relate? What’s the connection between the wedding and the funeral, and between Elizabeth’s choice between two men and Jack’s looming appointment with the Kraken? Here’s my theory: marriage is one way of dying to self to serve the good of another, and thus avoid a different and far worse kind of death. Jones, Bootstrap, and Jack each refuse sacrificial love so they can live to serve themselves, and the end result for each of them is death, not just physical but spiritual. A man could skip his wedding, but if that is a harbinger of a life-long pattern of living for himself, the result won’t be a funeral without a body, but a funeral without mourners, and worse, an eternity alone. 

Fortunately for Jack, in the eleventh hour he realizes he cannot abandon his friends and crew, and he willingly risks his own life to save them. This doesn’t keep the Kraken at bay, but it does mean Jack is mourned as “a good man.” In contrast, the heart of Davy Jones locked away in a chest—a refusal of death by love—reminds me of this passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (HarperOne, 2017): 

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and you heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell” (155-156, italics added).

The choice facing all these characters is the same one facing all of us: Death being inevitable, when and how do we want to die? We can either submit ourselves to small daily deaths now, or we can die eternally later.