The Place of Imagination: Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Community, Affection, and Identity by Joseph R. Wiebe (review)

The Place of Imagination is an artful narration of Wendell Berry's poetics focused distinctively on his works of fiction. Moralists concerned about issues of land use or racialization could commend or criticize "what" they assume Berry's stories (re)present—nostalgia or some abstract, principial program. But Joseph Wiebe ventures a thesis about "how" Berry's imaginary Port William community discloses the nature of good, real-world community. Understanding how Berry's poetics reflect his real-world moral imagination clarifies what we may learn from his fiction. So, in part 1, Wiebe traces Berry's journey of local adaptation, through which he developed a moral imagination and discovered the agonizing details of his entanglement in his place's history and his neighbors' problems.

Berry's poetics starts with imagination opening itself to the genius of a place and the other (friend and foe alike) as a living soul. Such imagination engages our sympathy to see others as complex subjects without controlling their stories, objectifying them to realize some idealist worldview. In sympathy, we perceive the other as a neighbor and develop affection for them in their difference. This affection is no mere sentiment but a Humean moral sentiment that motivates behavior and, when properly nurtured, makes moral reasoning subservient to itself. Affection "disrupts habits of pity" that reduce others to mental objects and inspires a kenotic movement toward concrete neighbors (37). Problems felt at the societal level are habituated in local communities. While idealist solutions may satisfy the white, Western mind's impulse for complete knowledge, their resources prove incompetent before these problems as such. We must affectionately open ourselves to others who disrupt our mental worlds and draw us into real-world habits that change underlying communal dynamics. Relinquishing control of our storied identities (or idealist worldviews) to the others in our place, we might truly locate ourselves in those problems—and start undoing them.

In part 2, Wiebe offers glimpses of "what" Berry's poetics teach us about a placed life together through select members of a quaint Kentucky farming community: Jack Beechum, Jayber Crow, and Hannah Coulter. His imaginative attentiveness to each character exemplifies the art of discovering the virtues of place-based identity. The way through Port William offers no shortcuts. Its imaginary community does not merely stand in for some universal idea of community. Neither potential solution nor nostalgic phantasm, Port William is the setting for parables that reveal something true about good community. "If there is something to imitate, it is the underlying processes that generate the particulars of Berry's narratives rather than the characters that furnish them" (152). In Port William, one can practice relinquishing control and patiently "imagining" the contours of a place; in the real world, one can deploy that imagination to develop fidelity to their place.

Wiebe aptly follows Berry's method, yielding control over Berry's biography and work by taking a third-person narrator's perspective. He focuses on what Berry's life and writing reveal parabolically to the patient reader. The book beckons readers to hold Berry and his stories as a mirror—to engage in introspection and self-interrogation—that we might learn something about sympathy and affection needed for engaging our places non-imperialistically. Wiebe's adept style may appear to some as a flaw; the narrator gives no academic cues (e.g., "I will argue") for rapidly consuming principial content. There are only Berry's life and work and the reader, hopefully changed. The Place of Imagination will be of greatest interest to those who already have some affection for that "artful crank from Kentucky" (10). Beyond the agrarian crowd and its auditors, this book holds appeal for a range of explorations, from the fecundity of poetics in ethics to the disruptiveness of Christian imagination vis-à-vis whiteness.