Telling the Stories Right

Wendell Berry's Imagination of Port William

Baker, Bilbro

• Publisher: Front Porch Republic Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532638114
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Wendell Berry thinks of himself as a storyteller. It's somewhat ironic then that he is better known as an essayist, a poet, and an advocate for small farmers. The essays in this collection consider the many facets of Berry's life and work, but they focus on his efforts as a novelist and story writer. Indeed, Berry had already published three novels before his seminal work of cultural criticism,The Unsettling of America, established him as an ardent defender of local communities and sustainable agriculture. And over the past fifty years, he has published eight novels and more than forty-eight short stories set in the imagined community of Port William. His exquisite rendering of this small Kentucky town challenges us to see the beauty of our own places and communities and to tend their health, threatened though it inevitably is. The twelve contributors to this collection approach Berry's fiction from a variety of perspectives--literary studies, journalism, theology, history, songwriting--to shed light on its remarkable ability to make a good life imaginable and compelling. The first collection devoted to Berry's fiction, this volume insists that any consideration of Berry's work must begin with his stories.

Part 1: Narrative Traditions

1

Remembering the Past Rightly

Elegy and Ubi Sunt Tradition in Wendell Berry’s Fiction

Jack R. Baker

“The difference, beloved, ain’t in who is and who’s not, but in who knows it and who don’t. Oh, my friends, there ain’t no nonmembers, living nor dead nor yet to come. Do you Know it? Or do you don’t?”

–Burley Coulter1

Wendell Berry’s short story, “The Wild Birds,” begins with a rather ominous opening line: “‘Where have they gone?’ Wheeler thinks. But he knows. Gone to the cities, forever or for the day. Gone to the shopping center. Gone to the golf course. Gone to the grave.”2 And it is probably lines such as these that set Berry at odds with some readers who cast a wary eye at fiction that veers too close to backward-looking polemic. In one fell swoop the narrator paints a grim picture of cities, shopping centers, and golf courses, ending with the full stop of the grave. Lines like these, the critic might say, are proof that Berry’s imagination is stuck in the past, propping up the vestiges of an agricultural way of life no longer viable in a modern world. And surely such nostalgia is unhelpful for those of us who live in the ever changing present; the world is mutable, we can’t get back to what once was, we must press on, heads high, eyes forward. Indeed, if the critic reads beyond this opening line, he will find that the following pages are filled with further moments of lamentation and nostalgia as Wheeler Catlett looks out from the window of his law office over the landscape of Hargrave and is struck by how different, how desolate, and how devoid of life the world around him has become. And so readers of Berry’s fiction must come to terms with the reality that the voice of Port William often calls upon us to cast our vision toward things that have passed away, toward people who have gone to their graves. It is thus understandable that readers may find his fiction to be too concerned with the past, to be suffering from a myopic vision—stuck, like Dante’s diviners, with our heads on our shoulders, facing in the wrong direction.

But such would be an unfair critique of Berry’s fiction. And despite the somber tone at the outset of the story, it is a tone that is not ultimately pessimistic. Like much of Berry’s fiction, “The Wild Birds” is concerned with the passing away of dear things and the thankfulness, forgiveness, and hope those in Port William (and we readers) nonetheless practice.3 To make sense of this claim, I will situate “The Wild Birds” within the long tradition of literary lamentation that reaches back to some of the earliest surviving poetry in the English language and is poignantly elaborated in the particular example of ubi sunt literature. The poetic theme of the ubi sunt, which is closely associated with wisdom literature, explores in elegiac tone the limits of our mortality, the goodness of the past we remember, and the power of such to shape us for healthy lives in the present and to inspire in us hope. Thus, it is my argument that the nostalgia in Berry’s fiction is in fact teaching us to remember rightly those who have gone before us—not so that we might turn back the clocks to live in the fabled past, but so that we might find hope for today in remembering.

Nostalgia as Homecoming

For some time now in the English language nostalgia has been used to describe a sentimentalizing affection for the past—a way of remembering that focuses on the good, but rarely enough on the bad. We might even feel that a person who waxes nostalgic has lost touch with reality. We can’t change the past, so dwelling on it is a fool’s errand. But at one point in the history of our language, nostalgia carried with it a rather positive meaning—“longing for one’s home.” And I think it is in this vein—when we think of nostalgia not as a quaint emotion, but as a deep desire for homecoming—that we are right to describe Berry’s fiction as nostalgic. He is in good company if this is the case; for, the theme of nostos, or ‘story of homecoming,’ was common in Greek literature. Probably the most famous example of such is the Odyssey, which is an extended nostos, culminating at the great rooted bed around which Odysseus’ entire world has been built. Perhaps the most infamous is Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, which begins with a tragic nostos that inverts the virtues of the theme—Agamemnon, returned from war, is slain by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus in his own palace. Berry himself conspicuously ventures into the theme in his short story “Making It Home,” which recounts Art Rowanberry’s much less eventful return from the war, yet culminates in a beautiful reunion in a field, reminiscent of the parable of the prodigal son. It is to these stories of homecoming, to the image of Odysseus weeping on the headlands of the island Ogygia as he pines for hearth and home, that we might trace the journey of our word nostalgia.4

If we think of nostalgia, then, as a deep longing for home, a lamentation for a familiar order that has passed away, we are able to save it from the dustbin of shallow sentiment, recovering its long history as a part of those stories in which a protagonist imagines the restoration of something dear that has been lost. Because nostalgia is concerned with imagining the goodness of things as they once were, it is at its core an exercise in the virtues of patience,5 hope, and gratitude—patience because one must suffer the possibility that all may be lost, hope that though things have changed they might yet reveal their goodness in new and unexpected ways, and gratitude for those who have gone before that we might yet go on after.6 And so, as Wheeler Catlett looks out his window and suffers the loss of those who have gone before him and the way of life that followed them to the grave, he is also marked by their goodness in the world—a goodness that lives on in him, their inheritor, as it will live on in Danny and Lyda Branch and Andy and Flora Catlett after him.7 Indeed, stories of nostalgia make us vulnerable; they inflict on us a double wound as we at once feel both the pang of loss for that which we have loved and the pang of joy for having loved it.

The Ubi Sunt Tradition

This deeply human theme of “joy and sorrow as sharp as swords”8 is an ancient one in western literature, especially in English. In medieval literature, particularly medieval poetry, joy and sorrow for things gone is given life in the so called ubi sunt formula observable in poems reflecting on the transience of life and the vagaries and finality of death. The words ‘ubi sunt’ (“where are they”) begin a common poetic formula identifiable in poems across the Middle Ages: “where are those (ubi sunt) who have gone before us?” The formula is elegiac and rhetorical, calling the reader to reflect on the passing away of what once was good and beloved, often from the perspective of one who is in a state of suffering or loss.

Though the poetic theme may, on the surface, appear to be a sentimental lamentation for the past, it is something far more nuanced, for it is concerned with patience, hope, and gratitude in the midst of real loss. The ubi sunt is typically part of a redemptive cycle in which the poet begins by declaring his grief and suffering in the loss of the life he once knew and concludes in gratitude as the rememberer embraces a consolation which leads to hope that things one day might be made right, or at least that the lost way of life was good. The 13th-century Middle English lyrical poem, “Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt” (Where are those who have gone before us?), is a prime example of this poetic theme. Composed of thirty-one stanzas, the lyric begins with the lamentation of the loss of good things, yet ends with the consolation found in placing one’s faith in the protection of Mary, Heaven’s Queen, a faith that offers the hope of reunion with Christ “In ioye wiþ-outen hende”:

Uuere beþ þey biforen vs weren, (Where be they who before us were,)

Houndes ladden and hauekes beren (Who led hounds and bore hawks)

And hadden feld and wode? (And owned field and wood?)

Þe riche leuedies in hoere bour, (The rich ladies in their bowers,)

Þat wereden gold in hoere tressour (Who wore gold in their tresses)

Wiþ hoere briȝtte rode, ...