Joseph Wiebe keenly observes that Wendell Berry’s fictional works “are not just lessons about moral imagination but also lessons in it,” lessons meant to transform the moral imagination of the reader (151). The same can be said of his own book The Place of Imagination. By drawing his readers into these fictive journeys, Wiebe too invites them to imagine “what it means to live well in wounded communities and broken places” (10). From the outset, Wiebe recognizes a major challenge in writing on Berry’s fiction, namely, “to give an account of the Port William community that is neither sentimental nor quaint” (1). In his interpretation, the places and the people who inhabit them do not provide ideal models for us to imitate in any straightforward sense. They, like we, are complicated and less than perfect. Nonetheless, he thinks, they exhibit certain virtues that we might emulate, virtues that rectify a vitiated social imaginary marked by racial violence and prejudice, segregation, isolation, waste, war, and exploitation (153–54). There is much to commend about this book. I will begin with a word about the various literatures and conversations that it engages (or might engage), and then pose a couple of questions—first, about moral psychology, virtue, and hope, and second, about the role of agrarianism in the formation of the moral imagination—and conclude with a reflection on reading as an ethical practice.

Through the central themes of this book—making a home of a broken world, suffering, race, place, imagination, affection, virtues, incarnational love, community, and identity (to name a few)—Wiebe fruitfully brings into conversation scholarly literatures that do not always or often speak with one another. Alongside such texts as Willie Jennings’s The Christian Imagination (2010), The Place of Imagination contributes to recent literature on race, place, and moral and theological imagination, which probe the wounds of racial violence that mark the communities we inhabit. At the same time, the book might be seen as a contribution to what Willis Jenkins in The Future of Ethics (2013) has described as a turn to virtue in environmental ethics, as well as what some see as a return to religious communities, values, and ideals, as the way forward. So too, the book adds to emergent literature on Berry’s work, while connecting it to conversations in literature and religion. Berry’s fiction is best read, Wiebe argues, as a poetics and as parables. Likewise, narrative theologians interested in the role that stories, characters, virtue, imitation, and innovation play in moral formation will find much that resonates. The book does not explicitly engage biblical scholarship. Nonetheless, one could make fruitful connections with, for instance, Walter Brueggemann’s work on the prophetic imagination, war, and agrarianism—the prophetic injunction to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. This reader was hoping that Wiebe would add to this impressive range his reflections on gender in Berry’s work. Of those who have taken up this theme in Berry, few have focused on his fiction. Wiebe devotes the second chapter, “Affection: Community, Race, and Place,” to considerations of race. I would have welcomed a similar chapter on gender or a greater attention to gender and race in Berry’s fiction throughout the subsequent chapters. That said, this text is a fertile seedbed for further engagement in these areas.

Our moral imagination and affections are rooted in the communities and places we inhabit and are shaped, for better and for worse, by their legacies. This is one of the key insights that Wiebe examines in Berry’s fiction. At points in the text, the imagination itself appears to be a panacea for the social ills that plague modern societies. But Wiebe knows that the theological, moral, and social imagination can be vitiated or salutary, corrupt or salubrious. The virtues are needed to refine and rectify our affection, perception, and imagination. Whereas part 1, “Moral Imagination and Community,” treats the “Imagination” (chapter 1), “Affection” (2), and “Style” (3) in Berry’s work broadly, part 2, “Biographies of Belonging,” focuses on three characters featured in three of Berry’s fictional works and the virtues that shape them: “Jack’s Mind: Regret and the Virtue of Knowing” (chapter 4), “Jayber’s Soul: The Psychology of Magnanimous Despair” (5), and “Hannah’s Body: Grief and the Space of Hopeless Patience” (6). In conclusion Wiebe writes: “Jack’s mind shows how wisdom and regret shape the intellect of affectionate perception. Jayber’s soul shows how magnanimity and despair shape the psychology of affectionate perception; Hannah’s body shows how patience and grief shape the spatial reality of affectionate perception” (151).

Given the sense of holism throughout the book—the sense that imagination, reason, affection, body, place, and ecosystems are intimately bound up with one another—I wonder why Wiebe decides to parse the moral psychology of each of these characters and their respective virtues in precisely this way. Ancient debates about the interrelations among mind, body, and soul, as well as the names, number, and connection of the virtues that perfect different parts of each are alive and well among virtue epistemologists and ethicists today. Wiebe does not directly engage those debates, ancient or modern, except to insist on Berry’s holism—his non-dualistic understanding of the role that body and spirit play in the spiritual journey. Still, the questions remain: why Jack’s mind, Jayber’s soul, and Hannah’s body? And why this traditionally gendered assigning of mind and soul to male characters and body to the female character? These characters cultivate the virtues of wisdom, magnanimity, and patience, in the face of regret, despair, and grief, through an elaborate dance of body, mind, and soul. I wonder whether Berry’s narrative resists such clear parsing? Is the mind, body, soul distinction as clear in Berry’s fiction as it appears in Wiebe’s analysis? Berry’s warning, as Wiebe knows, is severe: “Persons attempting to find a ‘text’ in this book will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a ‘subtext’ in it will be banished; persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise ‘understand’ it will be exiled to a desert island in the company of only other explainers” (by order of Author, JC). But Wiebe hazards the risk. What is gained or lost in this investigation? At least this: we gain Wiebe’s insights about moral formation, while those less familiar with Berry’s work might lose some of his holism. What follows is a fuller response to this question.

The chapter titles reveal one insight that is woven through the chapters in part 2: that virtue is always cultivated in the face of dangers, toils, and snares and enables its possessor to respond well to such difficulties. The virtues shape our affective response to people and events such that we experience regret, grief, anger, sadness, and joy that is fitting to the situation. But they also cultivate our response to these emotions, what we do with our regret, grief, anger, etc. So too, Wiebe like Berry rightly resists the false binary between personal virtue and structural change (36). Virtue is not just a matter of personal righteousness as though such a thing could be set apart from just relations with neighbor, community, and land in the midst of systemic injustices. The virtuous recognize institutional and systemic sociopolitical ills—domination, exploitation, discrimination—and find creative ways to reimagine and reform these institutions and systems for the better. Wiebe’s is an important contribution to conversations that seek to move beyond false binaries of individual virtues and participation in sociopolitical structures.

As for the particular virtues Wiebe names, I could not shake a couple of questions about hope and despair. The first question is interpretive; the second is normative. Hopefully it goes without saying that readers should err on the side of trusting Wiebe’s interpretations of Berry over my own. That said, I wonder whether Jayber and Hannah are quite so hopeless, quite so despairing as Wiebe portrays: this is the first question. If so, my second question is whether I want to follow Wiebe in endorsing “magnanimous despair” and “hopeless patience” as virtues.

As for the first, Wiebe argues that “the primary virtue of Jayber Crow is not his hope but his despair” and admits that “it remains to be seen how these virtues might fit within the Christian tradition” in which faith, hope, and love have been central theological virtues (217n12). It’s true, as he notes, that Berry uses a line from Andrew Marvell’s poem as the epigraph for the book: “Magnanimous despair alone could show me so divine a thing.” Wiebe argues that Berry uses this poetic notion of magnanimous despair to demonstrate God’s love for the world through Jayber’s imagined marriage to Mattie, the woman he loves (108). Jayber’s despair is magnanimous, he claims, only to the extent that it is a condition of having his soul oriented properly in love. The “divine thing” about a soul able to love in this way is its openness to suffering and “partiality in the form of the crucifixion . . . it’s the work of love to become like Christ in love” (111).

To be sure, Jayber has moments of hopelessness and despair: “But there were times too when I lived in a desert . . . then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope” (Jayber Crow, 247). Indeed, he describes “Hell itself . . . [as] unrelieved by any light or hope” (248). But in the next breath adds, “But love sooner or later, forces us out of time. It does not accept that limit” (JC, 248). Love inspires hope and resists despair. Again “Hell is described as a place with no hope. . . . But the earth speaks to us of Heaven” (JC, 354). In the final chapter of the book, Berry has Jayber share a final self-reflection: “I am a man who has hoped, in time, that his life, when poured out at the end, would say, ‘Good-good-good-good-good!’ like a gallon jug of the prime local spirit. I am a man of losses, regrets, and griefs. I am an old man full of love. I am a man of faith” (JC, 356). As a man of faith, he goes on to describe a friend “(imagined, but also real) I call the Man in the Well” (JC, 356). The central question for the “Man in the Well” is whether he will despair or hope. “Does he despair, give up, and drown?” (JC, 357). Jayber’s conclusion seems clear: “Listen. There is a light than includes our darkness, a day that shines down even in the clouds. A man of faith believes that the Man in the Well is not lost. He does not believe this easily or without pain but be believes it” (JC, 357). If the first chapter of the Gospel of John is not already ringing in your ears, Berry goes on to proclaim that none are lost from the “lame man at Bethesda Pool, or Lazarus in the grave, [to] those who pray ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani’” (JC, 357). The latter is Jesus’ final cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46; Ps 22:1). Wiebe thinks that we have two options: “Accept that the only thing that gives his story hope is an infantile conception of God or else pity Jayber’s waste of love” (127). But if we might understand Jayber as the man in the well a third option appears: hope born of love—perhaps child-like, but not childish or “infantile.”

The second question follows closely on the first. Even if we grant that Wiebe is right, that Jayber and Hannah are despairing and hopeless, should we endorse “magnanimous despair” and “hopeless patience” as virtues? Despair and hopelessness: there’s the rub. For Aquinas, the virtue of hope resists the vices of presumption on the one hand and of despair on the other. Presumption is one danger: overconfidence in our abilities to make our own way, or unwillingness to see the grim and menacing realities of the situation. Despair and hopelessness present other troubles: failures of imagination and of will to hope beyond hope, to trust God, our communities, or ourselves to (as womanist scholars say) “make a way out of no way.” Hope is closely bound to faith and love, not only in these classical and womanist thinkers, but also in Berry’s work. Jack is a character whose magnanimity has been shaped by loss, pain, regret, and even at times, despair. But in the end, faith, hope, and love remain. So too with Hannah. Perhaps my question is, why insist on despair as part and parcel of virtue rather than as a temptation the virtuous surely must face but resist? My hunch is that Wiebe wants to accentuate the fact that virtues are only ever formed in the midst of broken communities and lives. This, of course, is true. But the virtues have always been formed under these constraints and are necessary precisely to overcome the temptations of presumption and despair in the midst of such difficulties.

My final question, for the sake of this conversation, pertains to the necessity and centrality of Berry’s agrarianism for the rehabilitation of the moral imagination and whether or not it can be extended to non-agrarian landscapes and lifestyles. Can a person cultivate these virtues of wisdom, magnanimity, and patience among others without being rooted in an agrarian community, or reading about those so rooted? Wiebe seems to think so. As he notes, “One can reflect on and embody the poetics Berry invokes in scenarios different from those in his novels. It is how one can be agrarian in the city, in the university, and so on” (154). As if to demonstrate this point, the conclusion opens with a vignette from Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy about Avery Jenkins, a man on death row in Alabama and a prison guard who was transformed by hearing and sympathizing with his life story. Wiebe suggests that “Stevenson’s narrative about Jenkins and the officer exemplifies Wendell Berry’s moral imagination”—his sense that our perceptions and the norms of an exploitative culture and extractive economy can be transformed by encountering the stories of others (150). Like Stevenson’s nonfiction, Berry’s fiction is meant to shape our moral imagination. Yet, as Wiebe notes, for Berry, transformation comes by way of “fidelity to place . . . this rehabilitation is Berry’s agrarianism, what he calls a way of thought based on land” (151). A tension seems to arise at this point between the transformation that may come by fidelity to place—whether city, university, or prison—and the transformation that depends on a way of thought based on land.

If this way of thought “based on land” is central to Berry’s agrarianism, to the practices, habits, and virtues cultivated in intimate connection to not only any place or neighborhood but specifically to land, I wonder whether Berry’s agrarianism can be extended in the ways Wiebe hopes. Here, the contrast between Stevenson and Wiebe, on the one hand, and Berry, on the other, seems stark. Jenkins is obviously barred from agrarian rehabilitation. Perhaps that’s the point—mass incarceration is designed to obliterate such attachments in guards and prisoners alike. But the officer’s rehabilitation (and presumably that of the reader’s as well) does not come either by fidelity to place or by a way of thought based on land. It comes through identification with Jenkin’s story. The gift of this transformative encounter comes in spite of hostilities, prejudices, and racism. But for Berry, as Wiebe demonstrates, the place and the land with its trees, rivers, farms, and woods matter. How central then is Berry’s agrarianism to moral rehabilitation? Presumably “fidelity to place” can be cultivated anywhere, moral transformation can happen anywhere, but I am not convinced that the same can be said for Berry’s agrarianism. Nonetheless, I share Wiebe’s hope that a place-based identity, wherever that may be, might hold the same promises as Berry’s agrarian vision. This vision requires an attention to neighbors and land or the lack of connection to either as well as the desire to overcome the routines of an exploitative culture and extractive economies by recognizing our complicity in them.

A final word on reading as an ethical practice: by helping us to read Berry well, Wiebe helps us to become good readers—readers of fiction, history, communities, land, one another, and the world around us. In the end, Berry’s work, and his fiction specifically, does not offer a prescriptive program or principle for redressing our social ills and neither does Wiebe. Instead it provides parables and what Wiebe calls the poetics of community. There’s no cheap or quick fix. The kinds of transformation of imagination, self, and community, to which Berry and Wiebe invite readers cannot be prescribed. Indeed, transformation requires good attentive readers, readers attached to their own places and communities. In his essay “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson imagines an interlocutor asking, “Where’s the fruit? . . . Why not realize your world?” Like Emerson, Berry and Wiebe suggest that the “transformation of genius into practical power” is never quite so simple. It demands virtuous, imaginative, loving attention to place, land, animals, books, neighbors, communities, enemies, economies, and ecosystems. Making a home of the world begins . . . well, at home. As Edmund Burke suggests, “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.” Given the systemic nature of social ills and our complicity in them, personal and sociopolitical reform is an endless task. Nonetheless, we must begin somewhere. Wiebe suggests we might begin with the ethical practice of reading well.

To embrace the complex legacy of a living literary agrarian legend is no small task, as Joseph Wiebe has done with Wendell Berry. Nor is it a small undertaking to engage Berry’s fiction without also participating in—or merely ignoring—the fawning, nostalgic, and passively white supremacist sentiments that too easily cleave to agrarian ideologies. Yet The Place of Imagination is commendable because it engages Berry’s fiction with enormous literary detail while also resisting and critiquing the tendencies to reify Berry’s legacy towards exclusionary ideologies or whitewashed nostalgia about race, class, and community.

Admittedly, I have a complex relationship with Wendell Berry, though I’ve never met the man. He is a close friend of one of my mentors; he is clearly a man of letters whose breadth and depth in the humanities (in the sense of Western classics, as well as his own corpus) is beyond anything I will ever come close to approximating. Berry’s commitment to place and his decades-long grappling with the social, ecological, and economic imperatives of that commitment is something about which many of us in my geographically mobile job-following scholarly generation—myself, obviously, included—can only conjecture, though most of us cannot relate to it directly. Moreover Berry is Southern, at least in my imagination, with all the nuances of that term that my bias as a US Westerner-East Coast transplant misses entirely. And he is long married, with a confidence in that institution that I cannot share.

Plus, I have an on-again-off-again relationship with Berry’s vast corpus of writings, of which I have sat with only a small selection. His book The Unsettling of America both speaks to me as conveying truths (I quote it in my own book)—and yet puts me on edge. Perhaps it is my innate suspicion of the settled white male, but I have a similar wariness toward some of his poems, which do not directly speak to me. (In my mid-twenties, when a friend gave me a book of Berry’s collected poems for my birthday, it was hard for me to tack into and trust the insights that Berry shares.) To this day I have never read his fiction.

So I wondered first whether it was fair of me to accept the invitation to write this response to Wiebe’s book; and second, whether and how my skittish approximations of Berry’s work had changed amidst the intellectual, personal, and societal shifts that the intervening years have wrought. To the first query, what Wiebe and I share is an interest in how moral discernment and expression take root not just in standard philosophical or theological scholarly essays but in creative, narrative, literary and poetic forms—especially, but not only, as regards the complications and caliber of relationships, which I take to be a core aspect of what ethics (at its best) is about.

In what follows, I describe what I found in closely reading and conversing with Wiebe’s book: its major strengths, a few key critiques, and how my own personal and scholarly proclivities inflect those two categories. (After all, as Berry would point out, it is only in our particularity that we come to know things well, and to learn from and with what we encounter.) I also offer a few reflections on where I’d love to see Wiebe’s work unfurl in its next phases.

*

This is not a book review, so I’ll spare you the formulaic chapter-by-chapter summary with its positive exhortations and one reliably negative critique. What I’ll say instead is that The Place of Imagination challenged me on multiple levels. The first, as noted above, is linked to my own hermeneutic of suspicion of literary investigations that mask a theological triumphalism and can too easily reify a beloved author’s work into a kind of ideology. Wiebe explicitly, and frequently, calls out this tendency and refutes it—as, for example, when he describes how in multiple interviews Berry

is hesitant to allow his work to become subsumed under a general protest or agrarian movement that transforms a searching and agonistic argument into an ideology . . . shallow slogans and self-righteousness tend to seep into ideological movements and blind members to the difficulties of the problem at hand, not least of which is the fact that everyone is implicated in the economy that cultivates a corporate mastery over creation. (159)

The suppleness with which Wiebe draws on Berry’s longstanding critiques of consumerism, industrial-extractive capitalism, and racialized dynamics is admirable and refreshing. That Berry has, especially in his nonfiction, continued to point out the racist, extractive, and genocidal roots of US identity is laudable; that Wiebe centralizes them (especially in early chapters and the Conclusion) is important.

As a complete ingénue when it comes to Berry’s fiction, I can’t say whether the interpretations of individual books or characters that Wiebe offers are fair or somehow objectionable—that is honestly a task best left to scholars whose literary expertise with Berry are better formed—but I can say that the general frame of historical and structural complicity and complication of agency and community is vital, especially in the present day. In fact, Wiebe’s depth of knowledge of Berry’s corpus—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—and his consistent interpolation of nonfiction and poetic insights into the analysis of fiction are both encouraging and, for surprising reasons, perhaps even frustrating.

I admire, enormously, Wiebe’s clear expertise on Berry’s writings across genres and his ability to link an insight suggested by a moment in a novel with a maxim generated in an interview decades later. (Even though Wiebe and I have never met, I can imagine that a beer, bourbon, or a cup of tea and a long discussion about these things would be utterly fascinating and memorable.) But at times I was also frustrated as I engaged Wiebe’s close reading of Berry’s novels, for the simple reason that I wanted to hear more about Wiebe’s methodology. I wanted more detail—not just in endnotes—about what theories and methods of interpretation and interpolation he was using, explicitly and implicitly, in linking certain texts. I wanted to hear Wiebe talk not only about what Berry himself says about his fiction; not only about what dissertation-like arguments Wiebe can propose about the role of narrative and moral imagination; but about the actual, day-to-day decisional criteria that Wiebe uses when he juxtaposes certain texts. This, it seems to me, is where a lot of the moral discernment comes in for those of us who are readers and interpreters of texts: how do we know when and how to connect, describe, and riff on fragments of text separated by (in some cases) decades that nonetheless speak of a theme worthy of attention? To cite just one example: in his discussion of “Jack’s Mind” (chapter 4), in the space of five pages Wiebe begins with an epigraph on the Trinity from Rowan Williams; refers to previous analysis of Homer’s Odyssey; invokes one of Berry’s references to Yeats; and excerpts a tercet from Berry’s poem “An Anniversary,” this last of which functions as an illustration of the symbolism of light and darkness (invoking Blake), the way of moderation, and a possible reference to fertility. My interest piqued, my brain also nearly exploded with possibilities—and then the next paragraph turned, instead, to memory.

The constructive critique here is that there is so much to be explored on a conceptual and topical level in these pairings, juxtapositions, and invocations—perhaps more, admittedly, than a scholarly book on a production and tenure timeline can reasonably accommodate. What theories—implicit, generated by his own experience and learning; or explicit, that is, uttered authoritatively by others—have informed how he proceeds in this book, and what sources are named in his pages?

To this end, so much of my in-depth conversation with this book was conducted with the smaller-font endnote excurses that constitute the back pages of The Place of Imagination. I truly wish that the vast majority of these footnotes could have been written into the body of the book, because there reside many of the background framing and evaluative decisions that were obfuscated in the sudden juxtapositions described above. How does Berry’s nonfiction shape Wiebe’s interpretation of the novels discussed in this book? What other interpretive approaches have shaped (positively or negatively) Wiebe’s understanding of how Berry’s novels function? In particular I wish that Wiebe had spent more time in the introductory chapters explaining the ways that Annie Dillard’s notion of “parable” has shaped his interpretation of Berry’s fiction. Wiebe relies heavily upon the idea of Berry’s novels as “parables,” such that he concludes: “Understood as a series of parables, Berry’s fiction is an instantiation of a cultural logic different from the logics that produce a vitiated social imagination marked by segregation, isolation, waste, racial prejudice, and exploited labor” (153–54; see also p. 6). This seems to me utterly vital and yet significantly under-recognized (with regard to Dillard explicitly in the body of the text) and under-theorized outside of the endnotes.

*

Despite my unfamiliarity with the fictional works analyzed in The Place of Imagination (and my inability to read them in preparation for this commentary, given the embodied realities of parenting and professoring), I appreciated many ways that Wiebe’s book prompted me to rethink my own inherent biases about Berry himself; how that relates to my own proclivities towards intersectional analysis; and whether my longstandingly-standoffish relationship with Berry’s corpus is worth reconsidering. I found the follow summations by Wiebe very productive to think with:

• “All of Berry’s essays, fiction, and poetry are about rehabilitating place as the facilitator of reality for people. . . . This rehabilitation is Berry’s agrarianism, which he calls a way of thought based on land” (151);
• “Berry investigates what a good community is, what it consists in, by way of images in narratives. These images are tentative; rather than working toward constructing an ideal, they move toward an end without imposing an abstract pattern to arrange current states of affair” (152);
• “Narrative should reflect the provisional nature of historical life in the world” (68).

Even though Berry explicitly eschews universalizing statements, the above claims are some that I imagine Berry could support; I found, after reading Wiebe’s book, that I could too.

In future work, I would love to see Wiebe blast open the cross-genre knowledge and thematic strands that he gestures towards in this book. His analysis of Berry on trees, for example—in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—has so much possibility in light of contemporary engagements with trees (The Secret Life of Trees; or The Overstory) as well as classic articles in environmental philosophy (such as Stone, 1973, “Should Trees Have Standing?”). Similarly, the theme of wilderness (see p. 49 and the beginning of ch. 5) is massively contested in literary analysis, ecocriticism, and ethics; Berry’s positions on it are so seemingly multiple and nuanced that Wiebe could be well poised to engage this literary and often moral concept.

Does this book have anything to do with theology or religious ethics? My answer is: perhaps. If one is looking for tidy moral scenarios, then Wiebe (like Berry) refuses to grant such closure in The Place of Imagination. But if religious sensibilities are first and foremost about commitment—devotion—amidst the complexities of living, and not always in tandem with formal religious institutions—then yes, Berry’s novels certainly seem to have quite a bit to say. Morality, religion, and devotion to place are not necessarily equivalent, and they are certainly not to be deduced from first principles. Rather, it is place and the ecological community in which one finds oneself that grounds human being and becoming.

Berry believes that “a work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said.”1 Fiction and poetry create meaning through not only what they say, but also how they say what they say. In light of Berry’s understanding that the form of a work is intrinsic to its meaning, I find it fascinating that Berry writes poetry and fiction in addition to his nonfiction essays. It suggests that it is not enough for Berry to write nonfiction essays only. It is not enough for Berry to write just poetry. It is not enough for him to write only novels and stories. The very fact that Berry is compelled to write fiction in addition to essays and poetry, even if the themes overlap with his other works, means he believes that there is something to be revealed that can be revealed or experienced only through that particular form of writing.

Though Berry often remarks that he doesn’t have a comprehensive program for agrarian, economic, or ecological reform, his use of multiple forms of writing highlight the “wrap around” nature of imaginative formation. In his book The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity, Joseph Wiebe has offered readers insight into the place and function of narrative in Berry’s overarching goal of local adaption. In my brief engagement with this book, I would like to focus on Wiebe’s astute argument that Berry’s novels and short stories should be read as parables to be imaginatively experienced, not templates to be followed. Then I will consider the relationship between Berry’s poetry and his fiction, concluding with how understanding Berry’s fiction as parables may also help us read his poetry.

As Wiebe writes, for Berry “imagination is not just a shift in perspective but also a change in character,” which is to say that imagining is a “relational activity” (13; 22). This change in character comes through the ability to imagine a place in all its integrity—the complicated wholeness of its interdependencies, memberships, and patterns. Respecting a place’s integrity requires that a person begin to aim for local adaptation. Local adaptation involves an ongoing process of learning affection for one’s place, perceiving its holiness, and continually interrogating how one fits within the existing membership. It is the imagination that makes the life and irreducible details of a place present to the perceiver.

Imagination is thus a faculty of perception. Berry writes, “To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with ‘the mind’s eye.’ It is to see actively, with the force of vision and even with visionary force.”2 The imagination is cultivated through embodied, tangible connections with persons, places, and communities. As a faculty of perception, imagination can enable persons to “see” a place more clearly. This expansive vision is important for Berry because as limited beings, knowledge is fragmentary and experience incomplete. To tell the whole story and understand a place “as it is” or as it could be, one must become able to imagine beyond what one knows or even what one is able to know. A defining characteristic of a placed or locally adapted imagination is that it has been submitted to and investigates a real place with real needs, problems, and limits, and that it recognizes the irreducible richness of these details. The quality of one’s local adaptation is judged by the fidelity to, sympathy for, and harmony with the membership among which one is living.

William Carlos Williams is Berry’s paradigmatic poet of local adaptation. Williams, by submitting his poetic imagery and poetic language so neatly to the details of his place, offered Berry an approach and method that was able to help frame Berry’s relationship with his own place. Wiebe notes that Berry’s fiction, as well as his poetry, is part of Berry’s attempt to participate in the life of his place. And, as Wiebe argues, it is Williams’s understanding of how the imagination can support practices of local adaptation that provides a foundation for understanding Berry’s stories of Port William as parables, an example of his imaginative engagement with his world (15). His fiction and his poetry are ways in which Berry incarnates his love for his place and shares in God’s love and delight by echoing the rhythms of his creation.

Wiebe laments how many readers miss this imaginative submission and instead assume that Berry’s stories are either somehow outside of history or intended to preserve memories of the past and therefore do not contribute to present experience. He writes, “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” (4). Instead Wiebe is insistent that neither kind of reader is actually doing justice to Berry’s stories as stories; to read Berry’s stories of Port William as an illustration of Berry’s ideals of community is to approach them not as narratives but as tracts, as “political and religious ideas easy to read, easy to spread” and “templates meant for imitation” (5). Though Berry’s characters may be aware of their membership in the community and the significance of their relations, particularly their friendships, they are not stand-ins for logical precepts or saints with lives to be copied.

To read Berry’s stories as parables is to recognize Berry’s commitment and fidelity to his place. His fiction is an attempt “to pierce the shallow culture and exploitative economy that cloak his native land so that its genius can be revealed and clarified” (29). If “Berry’s imagined characters are useful,” it is “not as ideals for how to be in the world but as clarifying the constitutive experiences and qualities of an imagination in place” (7). The central characters in Berry’s novels are characters of resistance and affection, those who participate in practices that are intended to be faithful to the Port William membership. The truth that fiction offers its readers is found “in the integrity of its characters,” not in some truth beyond the text (30). In Berry’s case, his characters explore and clarify what it means to have (or not have) a place-based identity, an imagination that is fully adapted.

Interestingly, Wiebe writes that “though Berry focuses on Williams’ poetry, much of his indebtedness can be seen in Berry’s fiction. The Port William stories manifest a poetic, embodied imagination” (32). With the latter comment I don’t disagree—Wiebe has shown this masterfully in his analyses of The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter later in his book. What I find strange is how this claim seems to—though perhaps Wiebe did not intend to—disregard Berry’s indebtedness to Williams’s poetry in Berry’s poetry or the relationship between Berry’s poetry and his fiction.

To take Berry’s understanding of how art works seriously is to recognize that “a work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said.”3 A work of the arts means what it says through how it says what it says; its witness to the truth of reality can be revealed in no other form. Wiebe notes, “Berry’s narrative technique is a meandering, wandering method without end or terminus. . . . 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” (8). Similarly, his Sabbath poetry aims to reveal and reflect on the mysterious holiness of all things, to draw our attention to the wholeness of God’s creation. The fact that he writes poetry—and has for most of his life—tells us that this form of writing, too, is critical to his imaginative practice of becoming locally adapted. Both Berry’s fiction and his poetry are indebted to Williams, though they embody it in different ways—Wiebe focuses on Berry’s fiction and I think his arguments can be extended to included his poetry as well.

Poetry and fiction, then, are interdependent literary pursuits that work in tandem to form Berry’s imagination and help him belong to his place. Truth in Berry’s fiction is found by living with and through the complicated lives, emotions, and actions of his characters, while truth in his poetry is found in its attention to particulars, its memorable, metaphor-rich images, its rhythm, and its suggestion of the poetic quality of human life. For Berry, like Williams, a poem’s “meaning is incarnate.”4 Poetry is a way of committing to and confronting the limits and particulars of place, and of finding a place for himself and his farm within the complex pattern of creation.

Berry is clear in his essays that he is both a farmer and a writer, a farmer-poet or a poet-farmer. Not one and then the other, but both together. The two vocations cannot be separated and remain “resistant to any kind of simplification. It is an experience of what I will go ahead and call complexification.”5 As a farmer-poet he has accepted the limit and particularity of his land as an influence for his farming practices and his writing practices. Each form of creative engagement attends to the world in a different way and all four—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and farming—are necessary for Berry to fully imagine and become locally adapted to his place. This is because adaptation requires the practice of imagination in relation to the irreducible details of a place. Poetry is a form particularly sensitive to such irreducibility, and is a crucial means by which Berry explores and imagines his place.

In Sabbath poem VII, 1994, Berry reflects as a whole on his vocation as a writer. The first half of the poem reads as follows:

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or an essayist except that I

have been bewildered and afraid,

or a storyteller had I not heard

stories passing to me through the air,

or a writer at all except

I have been wakeful at night

And words have come to me

Out of their deep caves,

Needing to be remembered.6

As a writer, Berry writes of things he feels need to be and are worthy of being remembered. He is a poet out of love, an essayist out of confusion, and a novelist out of gift. This poem ends with the affirmation that these three roles—poet, essayist, novelist—have been his way of serving his marriage, his work on his farm, and his local woods—which is his way of serving all of God’s creation through serving his local place. All three engage and serve creation in their own distinct ways, yet all are part of the same imaginative formation.

Additionally, Berry’s novels and poems are not completely distinct because he has written poems from the perspective of his Port William characters. Four of these poems appear in the Sabbath collection—as Andy Catlett in VI, 1989, Burley Coulter in VI, 2000, and as “old man” Jayber Crow in IV, 2004 and II, 2006—and at least one appears in his non-Sabbath poems, “Burley Coulter’s Song for Kate Helen Branch” from his 2005 Given collection. What Wiebe identifies as Jayber’s “magnanimity” and affection—for the entire Port William membership and not only Mattie—is on display in Sabbath poem IV, 2004:

To think of gathering all

the sorrows of Port William

into myself, and so

sparing others:

What freedom! What joy!

This meditation by Jayber supports Wiebe’s observation that Jayber’s transformation is “from despairing at the world as it is as all there is, to imagining the world as it is as more than what can be seen or shown in time” (111). Similarly, “Old Man” Jayber Crow in Sabbath poem II, 2006, also reflects Wiebe’s statement that Jayber’s story is about “a broken heart that allows Jayber to see the love of Christ” in the broken and lowly (111).

Many I loved as man and boy

Are gone beyond all that I know,

Fallen leaves under falling rain,

Except Christ raise them up again.

I know my blessings by their cost,

Thus it is the pride of man made low.

To ease the sorry of my thoughts,

Though I’m too weary now and slow,

I’d need to dance all night for joy.

It is interesting that Jayber Crow does not exhaust what Jayber Crow has to say, even though he is rarely mentioned in later novels. Berry takes this character beyond the pages of his novel and places him in the pages of his own spiritual practice of writing Sabbath poetry.

Though these brief poems may not change what we “know” about Jayber’s story, this example shows how intimately Berry’s novels and poetry exist in his imagination. These two poems say something through Jayber’s voice that could only be said in poetic form, not the prose form of a novel or even in Berry’s own poetic voice. Most importantly, these two poems in Jayber’s voice are located within Berry’s forty-plus-year practice of taking a Sunday walk in the woods and cultivating affection for and attention to his place. Berry understands his Sabbath poems to participate in the peace of the Sabbath and represent a practice of contemplation that enables Berry to imagine how practically to orient his whole life and work toward the goal of Sabbath rest.

Wiebe’s insight that Berry’s novels must be read as parables and not paradigms also gives us insight into how his poetry should be read. In the same way that Berry did not imitate William Carlos Williams’s style of poetry but his imaginative process of local adaptation, so too Berry’s fiction and poetry offer us an imaginative orientation to imitate. In Berry’s poetry you will find that he addresses nearly every topic that he addresses in his nonfiction essays—everything from damnations of the consumer-industrial economy to praises of fidelity in marriage. Berry’s poetry, stories, and essays all assist his personal process of local adaption in their own unique way and all three are necessarily interconnected. In particular, Berry’s poetic practice of attention assists the imaginative formation necessary to create a world of integrity in his fiction.

As a Catholic theologian working at the intersection of religion and ecology, I’ve long been inspired by Wendell Berry’s writings. In fact, Berry’s influence on me has been so great that I’ve often quipped that I’m “more Wendell Berry than Thomas Berry” to position myself within the scholarly conversation.

Yet like many readers, I’ve worked primarily with Berry’s essays and poems; my exposure to his fiction is limited to Hannah Coulter and a few stories. So, I begin my response to The Place of Imagination with gratitude for Joseph Wiebe’s close, careful study of how Berry’s place-based imagination operates in his fiction. At the same time, I’m aware that my ability to comprehend the depth of Wiebe’s analysis is limited by my lack of exposure to Berry’s fictional works. With that in mind, this essay discusses three insights and poses a few critical questions that arose as I read this book. These insights and questions aim, respectively, to lift up theological insights that emerged from Wiebe’s analysis and to promote productive conversation on the valuable work he has done.

First, Wiebe demonstrates beautifully how Berry’s place-based imagination operates both as an intellectual faculty and as an apparatus for holistic decision-making that takes seriously the full range of factors at play in a creature’s socioecological context. Imagination and affection are not unbounded; they are “finite” and “particular,” situated within networks that “are bound to the community’s exercise and arrangement of power and social structures” (2). Wiebe likewise illuminates Berry’s profound ecological vision, which places humanity within a great oikos—a socioecological household—within which creatures of all types and stripes strive to flourish amid the exploitative pressures of what Laudato Si’ names the “technocratic paradigm.”1 In so doing, Wiebe offers theology an invaluable resource for seeing how an imagination rooted in place understands the social, ecological, and structural as inextricably entwined; to consider one in isolation from another is to miss a fundamental truth about how reality is constituted. Chapter 2’s analysis of race and land in The Hidden Wound makes this point very clear. In this way, too, Wiebe demonstrates the practical power of Berry’s fiction; imagination challenges creatures to become mindful of the ways they are situated within and constituted by the concrete networks of relations they inhabit. Just as Berry’s characters interact with a given “now,” so Berry challenges readers to become mindful of their respective “nows.” Such a vision seems vital if theology is to foster a new consciousness oriented away from exploitation and toward the “finite particularity of love” (2).

Second, Wiebe clearly demonstrates how, like all good parables, Berry’s Port William stories disrupt entrenched systems of power, privilege, and domination, not to prescribe a particular outcome (at least not one beyond the finite particularity of love) but to promote deep reflection. On this point, Wiebe offers theologians much to consider. For, it seems to me that one of the greatest weaknesses of Christianity’s interpretation of biblical texts lies in the impulse to read the Bible as people have read Berry’s stories: as a guidebook or moral manual that contains self-evident truths about reality and right belief, offering “a program by which his argument can be institutionalized or legitimated per se” (157). Yet, Wiebe shows, Berry’s fiction resists such systematization. In doing so, it offers a hermeneutical resource that counters any impulse to reduce the destabilizing and disruptive power of Jesus’ parables to pithy claims on how to “be good.” In other words, parables turn the status quo of the imagined world order upside down, not by offering an alternative social program but by provoking thought. As such, Wiebe explains, Berry envisions “the moral of the story” not as lesson but as “formation,” which strips away preconceived notions, challenges systems of oppression and injustice, and fosters “sympathy, affection, interrogation, [and] self-awareness” (151). In this sense, Berry’s fiction and gospel parables are more like Zen kōans, which trouble the clear-cut resolution our consciousness seeks in the interest of deepening mindful reflection on the interrelatedness of all things. Wiebe makes the point well: “Becoming aware of the farmer’s dignity does not elicit the question, how shall I farm? but rather, what does the worth of that dignity reveal to me?” (25)

This second point raises an issue that I’ve thought a great deal about. Though theologians have begun to reflect conceptually on ecology and the present crisis facing our planet, I wonder whether we have made a full perceptual turn that imagines humans within rather than alongside or above socioecosystems. Wiebe’s discussion of Jack and Ruth in chapter 4 is instructive here. Both characters are cut from the cloth of their mothers and fathers and formed to imagine their “place” in a particular way, bound as they are by ambitions and desires that operate silently within their comings and goings, such that “neither can see the actual person present” (88). As Wiebe makes clear, there is an implicit diagnosis of the present situation in Berry’s stories—a diagnosis that touches every aspect of life. In light of this reality, Berry’s “meandering, wandering” technique reflects the meanderings of everyday life and so challenges people and communities to reimagine creaturely life and—like Jack—to “stand where we stand” (103). In Wiebe’s words, to do so is to see “the earth and its human and natural history reverently” (159), suffused with the life-giving love of the living God.

Third, I (my inner theology geek) was delighted to discover through Wiebe’s analysis how Berry’s fiction seems to embody major themes of the Christian theological tradition—from Thomas Aquinas to James Cone—in powerful ways. In discussing these links, I do not intend to remake Berry in the image of Christian theology (that would surely be blasphemous!). I intend these connections only as conversation-starters, whatever their worth might be.

I found Wiebe’s interpretation of the imago Dei as joyous participation in the Creator’s creativity wonderfully consonant with Aquinas’s idea of creaturely flourishing according to each creature’s own “kind.”2 If, for humans, to be is to be creative, then Berry’s imagination raises the question of how human creativity is to be expressed. If God is in all things, as Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, and Berry would have it, what does this mean for discernment and ethical action? (Lonergan’s movement from reflection to judgment, decision, and action operates in Port William, as well.) Here, the premium Wiebe places on communal and individual discernment is crucial, as it honors the particularity and diversity of creaturely experience within concrete social and ecological contexts, countering top-down assertions of truth and meaning that all too often lead to domination with an openness to discernment and self-discovery.

Chapter 2’s treatment of white supremacy, the myth of upward mobility, and white pity—which demonstrates how “race and environment are coextensive constructions of the interconnections between identity, imagination, and place” (35)—is instructive on this point, particularly as it echoes James Cone’s observation that

the logic that led to slavery and segregation in the Americas, colonization and Apartheid in Africa, and the rule of white supremacy throughout the world is the same one that leads to the exploitation of animals and the ravaging of nature. It is a mechanistic and instrumental logic that defines everything and everybody in terms of their contribution to the development and defense of white world supremacy.3

In contrast to this logic of domination, Wiebe writes, “Imagination . . . perceives a dimension of the world that all things share” (21) and “blurs conventional boundaries of perception and divisions of mind and objects” (27) toward the realization of a communion of flourishing creatures.

Likewise, Wiebe’s vision of place-based imagination as a mediator of memory offers an excellent conversation partner for the theologies of Karl Rahner and Johann Baptist Metz. In some sense, Berry’s fiction illustrates Rahner’s account of how transcendence is mediated in “categorical” (worldly) realities. As Berry explains, “It is not just from the canonical Scriptures that the news of eternity comes. It can come from anywhere, anytime. . . . It’s important to me to understand that there are heavenly things that are present here, in time, in flesh, wood, rock, water and all the rest of it” (160). Yet this vision of God’s presence in the world is not unfiltered or ideal. Quite the contrary, Berry’s fiction shows that even divine presence is subject to the finitude and strife of the world. “Being at home in the world happens in the struggle, not as a result or in spite of it” (34). The connection with Metz’s categories of memory, narrative, and solidarity emerges here. For it is precisely in narratives of suffering and struggle—in “the memory of African American lives” (56) or the life of Hannah Coulter—that imagination runs up against limits. The memory of enslaved and exploited black bodies surely serves as an example of Metz’s “dangerous memory,” which like the memory of Christ on the cross destabilizes structures of oppression and promotes action in solidarity with the oppressed.4 In this way, too, Berry’s fiction challenges creatures to stand where they stand alongside those like Nathan Coulter, whose transformed perception leads him to “see the country for what it is . . .” (63) and to reimagine what it is and what it may become.

These are some of the connections I discovered in Wiebe’s insightful treatment of Berry’s fiction. I would love to hear more about how Wiebe sees any or all of these points, especially as they might inform theological discourse.

Having offered these reflections, I’d like to raise a few concerns aimed at clarifying and advancing aspects of Wiebe’s work. My principal concern first arose when Wiebe introduced the parable of the lost sheep in chapter 3. Despite his consistent reference to the parable, I’m not sure Wiebe makes its connection to Berry’s fiction entirely clear. I don’t doubt that a connection exists, but I had trouble detecting how the parable functions in his analysis of Berry’s work. This concern came into clearest focus in his treatment of “Watch with Me,” wherein he names and describes the parabolic connection but does not, in my reading, unpack its significance. This concern grew as I read chapters 4–6. With the exception of the passages cited above and a few others, including Wiebe’s excellent treatment of the conversion that follows Andy’s acceptance of impermanence in A World Lost, I often felt a bit “lost in the weeds” of Wiebe’s analysis. To be clear, the analysis is strong, but explicit discussion of the concrete significance of Berry’s place-based imagination seemed to fade a bit in the “case studies” of the book’s later chapters. For example, in his treatment of Jayber Crow, Wiebe focuses attention on the ways in which divine love is mediated through “magnanimous despair” to transform the imagination. But in light of Jayber’s story, I found myself wondering what Wiebe thinks it might look like to enact the love of Christ in the concrete circumstances of everyday life. How might Berry’s stories answer such a question, recognizing that the answer will always be context-dependent?

More pointedly, if Berry’s fiction challenges the myth that we can “think about ourselves in abstraction from the land” (40) with the reality of our rootedness in socioecological contexts, I wonder whether Wiebe adequately engages the role that the particularity of land and ecology play in Berry’s fiction, given their centrality in his broader work. Put another way, if Berry’s place-based imagination is “a way of thought based on land” (151), how does the particularity of place shape the perceptions of Berry’s fictional characters, and how might greater emphasis on place transform the imaginations of real persons and communities today?

On some level, I suspect these concerns stem from Wiebe’s adherence to Berry’s stated claim that his writings do not provide a program to be implemented—to which I’m sympathetic. But at times the focus on imagination-as-process seemed a bit too open-ended, and I found myself wanting more of Wiebe’s voice, explaining the “so what?” significance of his analysis for life in today’s world. I likewise wondered whether bringing in Berry’s essays as a conversation partner might provide a bit more concrete material to balance the parabolic nature of Berry’s fiction—but doing so may well be contrary to Wiebe’s intention. That said, I still wish to ask, “What does a place-based imagination look like in practice? What concrete challenge does Berry’s imagination pose to structures of oppression and socioecological exploitation? What does Wiebe see as the concrete significance of such an imagination for the world today?”

More elaboration on these points would enhance my understanding of Wiebe’s text and demonstrate even more clearly the significance of Berry’s fiction for contemporary discourse. Of course, none of these concerns trumps the positive contributions Wiebe makes in The Place of Imagination. I only hope to advance the conversation about Berry by raising them, and I look forward to hearing more about this text as we imagine and reimagine our experience of this book in the conversation to come.

One of the central claims Joseph Wiebe makes in his excellent and insightful book, The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity, is that Berry’s fictional Port William must not be understood—as it often is—as the mirror of an actual location. While its genesis lay in a literal place, Port William is not the imitation of it; “Berry’s writing,” Wiebe explains, “facilitates awareness beyond convention by depicting the creativity he sees animating his place [in Kentucky]. . . . Port William ‘originates in part in actual experience of an actual place’ but is not a mirror of his home. Imagination does not imitate or plagiarize nature.”1

This evocative passage suggests what Wiebe takes his own task to be as an interpreter of Berry: to help us to see how Berry’s fiction is not driven by an agenda but by a place, imaginative fidelity to which discloses the creativity animating not only Berry’s place in the world, but ours as well. In other words, what Berry’s fiction discloses is a depth to the actual experience of actual places, the reality of which is inexhaustibly mysterious. There is no formula for this, Wiebe helpfully insists again and again, no “theory, map, blueprint, recipe, DIY manual.”2 The relationship between Port William and the place that inspired it is not one of template and imitation but parable and world. In this way, Port William is a vehicle of disclosure about Berry’s literal place, while at the same time opening up possibilities for all the literal places in which we live.

Imagination for Berry is precisely the means of this disclosure, the faculty of perception that enables the revelation of that which, in Wiebe’s words, “the routines of an exploitative culture and extractive economy hide.”3 The cultivation of this imagination is therefore indispensable, not only for the revelation and perception of the depth and mystery at the heart of being itself, but also for beginning to understand the claims our places have on us, as well as our own deep and systematic entanglement in routines of exploitation and extraction. The three central characters Wiebe treats—Jack (chapter 4), Jayber (chapter 5), and Hannah (chapter 6)—exemplify as they display Berry’s moral imagination and its placement in the world. As Wiebe contends, each of them, in different ways, help us as readers of Berry’s fiction cultivate the imaginative capacities to go and do likewise.

As Wiebe also insists throughout The Place of Imagination, there is no process of idealization at work here. In this regard, chapter 2 (“Affection: Community, Race, and Place”), which focuses on Berry’s account of the racial ordering of his place in close conversation with Willie James Jennings’s The Christian Imagination, is essential reading.4 Communities and their members, Wiebe argues, are profoundly wounded. For Berry, imagination is what enables the negotiation of this reality, and imagination does this, first and foremost, by helping us to face rather than evade the reality before us—to learn the difficult work of dealing with the wounds in the places we are and to acknowledge our own role in perpetuating them. Imagination cannot “imitate or plagiarize nature” because it would then be blind to these wounds, and therefore blind to the reality of which they are part.

***

I’ve been sketching what I take to be some of the major lines of argument in Wiebe’s The Place of Imagination. In the remainder of this essay, I want to reflect further upon the idea that imagination does not imitate or plagiarize nature. What does this mean, exactly? And what are some of the implications of this commitment?

Wiebe borrows the formulation about plagiarizing nature from Berry’s book on the poet William Carlos Williams, a major influence upon Berry. According to Wiebe, Williams inspired “Berry’s return [to Kentucky], providing the poetics that informed and made possible Berry’s revived imaginative receptivity of his place . . . [and that] structures Berry’s engagement with his home.”5 In commenting upon Williams’s poetics, Berry writes that “a work of art must not be an illusion of reality. The artist must not ‘plagiarize’ from nature. To do so—to paint as an illusion of ‘reality’ a scene or a view—is to make a thing that is by nature fragmentary; both artist and viewer must accept thereby a sort of condemnation to incompleteness.”6

The example Williams gives of plagiarizing from nature is painting that aspires towards a certain kind of realism, presenting an illusion of a scene or a view. At least on Berry’s presentation of Williams, the concerns with this approach are various, but the main one seems to be that such paintings, almost in spite of themselves, end up being only fragmentary, incomplete, and superficial. They are content simply with the surface of things. As Williams’s comment suggests, this has essentially to do with the aspiration of such art to a condition that denies or obscures its creaturely status, which leads to the evasion of, rather than the engagement with, reality in all its difficulties. Art isn’t nature. Rather, it’s contained within nature and subordinate to nature, and Williams and Berry seem to be suggesting that it’s essential to acknowledge and display that difference in the very form of the artwork itself. Plagiarizing nature—mirroring or copying or offering illusions of nature—not only denies this difference between art and nature, but it also, as Berry writes, “usurp[s] the rule of nature either in the world or in the mind.”7 Art, in other words, provides fantasy rather than insight; its disclosive powers stop at the mind of the artist rather than extending to the depths of the world.

What is the alternative view of artistic creation that Williams and Berry propose? Williams asks us to consider “The Open Window,” a painting by the Spanish artist Juan Gris: “Here is a shutter, a bunch of grapes, a sheet of music, a picture of sea and mountains . . . which the onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an ‘illusion.’” In this way, Williams continues, Gris’s painting “escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation,” coming to possess the power to “stand between man [sic] and nature as saints stood between man and the sky.”8 As Berry puts it, this approach to art “is an imitation of the processes or creativity of nature.”9

The distinction Berry is drawing is an important one: art is not an imitation of nature in the sense of its visibility, but rather an imitation of the processes and the creativity that animates what we see. This essentially relates to Wiebe’s point about the creativity Berry sees underlying his place, a depth to the reality of things that is not only ineradicably mysterious but that makes claims upon us. For what is at stake here is the disclosure of an order that is both ontological and moral.

The idea that art—understood in the broad sense of human making—imitates nature’s processes and creativity is an old one, with roots at least as far back as Aristotle,10 and it became commonplace among the medievals. For instance, in taking up this idea, Thomas Aquinas writes of the way art imitates nature almost identically to Berry: art imitates nature in its manner of operation (ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione), by which Thomas means something like art does not plagiarize nature but rather perceives, works with, and even imitates the processes already operative in the created order.11 The example Thomas uses is the medical arts. Thomas thinks there are processes already at work in the body that bring about health—what medievals referred to as natura naturans, nature doing what nature does—such that the art of the doctor is to understand how the body already strives for its own health and to assist it in its striving. The practitioner of the medical arts, then, is not the principal agent of health; the processes already at work in the body are, and the goal of the doctor’s art is to work with these processes.12

***

As I’ve been suggesting in this essay, imagination and how it places us in the world is the heart of Wiebe’s argument about Berry’s fiction, and Wiebe convincingly makes the case that it is central to Berry’s vision of artistic labor. In this final part of my essay, I am especially interested in concretizing these considerations by extending Wiebe’s argument beyond Berry’s fictional art into an art that is also important to Berry but that Wiebe does not consider in much detail, at least in The Place of Imagination: the art of agriculture. In other words, by turning to agriculture, I want to examine the book’s central insights beyond Wiebe’s explicit topic, testing the applicability and generativity of those insights beyond Berry’s fictional art to a practical art like agriculture.

In Berry’s book on Williams, Berry himself makes the connection to agriculture explicit, noting how Williams’s poetics, and the relation between art and nature it implies, conforms to the agricultural sciences as understood by Albert Howard and Wes Jackson. As Berry explains:

Farming obviously cannot copy nature because it is to a significant extent an art and is to that extent artificial. . . . But farming, according to Howard and Jackson, must nevertheless imitate the creativity of nature by incorporating the natural principles and processes of the forest or the prairie. The good farmer farms, then, not by a “realistic” copying, but by a kind of science, a kind of art, and a kind of imagination.13

Although there are clear and obvious differences between Berry’s fictional art and agriculture, Berry’s interest in this passage is the similarities between them. (And just to be clear, while Howard and Jackson’s principal interest here is agricultural science, Berry is suggesting that their work has important implications for agricultural practice.)

Consider Jackson’s work at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which is seeking to develop an agriculture that mimics the prairie by breeding herbaceous perennial seed-producing crops that can be grown in polyculture.14 What Jackson and his colleagues oppose is a dominant form of agriculture—the conventional monoculture of annuals—that treats the landscape as if it were a blank slate, without any creativity underlying or animating it. I would argue that what Jackson and his colleagues are attempting to do in developing such an agriculture—an agriculture that mimics the prairie—is imagining an agricultural art that imitates the processes or creativity at work in the wider natural world. In other words, they are not plagiarizing the prairie but imitating the prairie in its manner of operation, discerning and incorporating into agricultural practice the principles and processes of the prairie. Moreover, at least as Wes Jackson and other proponents of this so-called natural systems agriculture describe them, these ecological principles and processes even provide a kind of moral norm for agriculture—both in the sense of offering guidance for what good agriculture looks like, but also in the sense of providing a language with which to critique dominant forms of agricultural practice and how they are pillaging our world.15

What is also important to see about this agriculture that mimics the prairie is that it involves complex processes of discernment and judgment. Lee DeHaan, lead scientist on the development of the perennial grain Kernza, resists some of the more popular understandings of the work of the Land Institute, which characterize its approach as if it were a plagiarization of nature. “We don’t imitate everything about the prairie,” he said to me on a recent visit there. “We don’t copy it exactly. Rather, there’s a process of discernment regarding what to imitate that is much more complicated than it is usually represented. It’s really hard to discern what rules of nature exist, if they are something we should use in our human endeavors, and then when and how to apply them.”16 At least on Wiebe’s terms, what DeHaan seems to be arguing for here is the crucial—and oftentimes unacknowledged—role of imagination in agricultural science and practice itself.

The resonances between the Land Institute’s approach to agriculture and Wiebe’s articulation of Berry’s poetics of place are striking and worthy of further reflection. For this agriculture does not plagiarize nature but seeks to imitate it in its manner of operation. And while this agriculture might articulate certain ecological rules or principles, such rules or principles must always be locally instantiated and so must always involve actual experience with actual places. In other words, the rules or principles cannot be simplistically equated with theories, maps, blueprints, recipes, or DIY manuals, because something like imagination is indispensable both for the perception and the instantiation of them. Finally, taking such agriculture seriously entails exposure of our exploitative (agri)cultures and extractive economies, our deep and systematic entanglement in them, and the imaginative and common work of discovering alternative ways forward.

In raising the question of agriculture in this way, I am mainly interested in thinking together with Wiebe about whether the analogy Berry draws between the art of Williams’s poetics and the art of agriculture holds. If it holds—and I think it does—the analogy certainly complicates distinctions often made, for instance, between fine arts and crafts. It also perhaps offers additional grounds for responding to Berry’s critics, many of whom seem perpetually intent upon characterizing him as beholden to nostalgia, for just as Berry’s fictional art cannot be characterized as the longing for a bygone age, neither can this agriculture be characterized simply as the recovery of traditional approaches. But above all—and to paraphrase Wiebe only slightly—I am interested in thinking with Wiebe about what insight such agriculture might give into what fidelity to place means, about rehabilitating place as the facilitator of reality, and how, at least in practice, it requires something very much like imagination as affectionate perception.17