Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle: Review, part 1

After a slow and interrupted start, I gobbled up Wendell Berry’s Life is a Miracle and found in it much of relevance to those who have chosen a life within (or at least within earshot) of the university. I originally picked the book up out of interest in how Berry—an acclaimed poet who is also an essayist, a fifth-generation farmer, a conservationist, and a Christian (I believe)—would approached the issue of ‘scientism’ in contemporary culture. I did not expect to be so directly addressed as a prospective member of the profession of English within university culture.

As a poet-farmer with an MA in English, Berry has participated at times in university culture but for the large part remains outside of it, ‘in but not of’ its world. It is precisely the framework of that world and its capitulation to the ideals of science-technology-industry that draws a lot of fire from Berry, often causing me to wince and mutter an appreciative and somewhat chastened ‘ouch!’ at thundering denunciations such as this:

“The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic ‘profession’ of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly ‘revolutionizing’ itself in pathetic imitation of the ‘revolutionary’ sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, ‘publishable’ but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity” (69).

Lest you be tempted to dismiss Berry as an injured poet uninitiated in higher criticism, it is well worth noting that renowned literary critic and theorist, Peter Brooks, has also recently militated against the dominance of ‘ideological criticism’ and argued for the profession to return to poetics (although emphatically not to the liberal humanist assumptions that once drove the study of poetics).

To my mind, Berry’s most crucial insights are the way he links respect for mystery to the quest for knowledge and his insistence on the distinction between creatures and machines which in turn impacts not only economics, but ideas of community, ecosystems, and what and how it is that humans study in the university. I will treat these two in two separate posts.

Ignorance and Mystery
Berry in many ways regards ignorance as a fundamental part of the human condition, and not necessarily a negative part. Ignorance is not the mere absence of knowledge for Berry, but can also signal the human encounter with mystery. Some mysteries—and certainly the most important ones—cannot simply be reduced into problems to be solved as scientism demands. In contrast to scientism’s faith in the future solution of all problems and the limitlessness of human knowledge, Berry postulates that “The mystery surrounding our life probably is not significantly reducible” (11). As a result, the question of most importance is not a technological or educational question that pushes forward into new frontiers of knowledge, but “the question of how to act in ignorance” (11).

As someone writing up a PhD and worried about what I’ve left out, “how to act in ignorance” describes a daily dilemma. When faced with what I do not know, do I run to the library and spend days and days to try to gain exhaustive knowledge that, while very informative, probably will be left on the cutting room floor at the end of the writing process? How much time should I spend increasing my knowledge of _insert ancient or modern foreign language here_? How can I possibly publish my own opinions or claim a place in intellectual culture when what my PhD reveals to me is how little I know? Berry’s comments on knowledge and ignorance are worth repeating to myself on a daily basis:

“If there is an economy of the life of the mind—as I assume there has to be, for the life of the mind involves the distribution of limited amounts of time, energy, and attention—then that economy, like any other, subsists upon the making of critical choices. You can’t think, read, research, study, learn or teach everything. To choose one thing is to choose against many things. To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance” (59-60).

This statement may at first appear dismaying, but should not be. Ignorance is natural to us, and it signals not just our limitations, but also our interdependence and the grace of our encounter with mysteries both human and divine. To regard a limit to our natures solely as something bad is to not only to envy what we have not been given but also to desire to grasp at the place of a god, unlimited in knowledge and agency. To regard an encounter with mystery as a disappointment instead of a grace also shows the temptation of Adam and Eve to see ‘as God’ to be quite familiar to their sons and daughters. The question of writing up my PhD and preparing to be in some ways ‘an intellectual’ is not a question of knowing everything or even of knowing the ‘right’ things in order to pass muster, but is fundamentally a question of how to live in the state of ignorance, a question of ethics: “How does one act well—sensitively, compassionately, without irreparable damage—on the basis of partial knowledge” (149). And the crucial insight of Berry is that the answers we find to such questions are not limited to the concerns of the minutiae of our studies, but must address a context, a community, and a common purpose outside of those concerns. For me, then, how to write my PhD on the basis of partial knowledge is a question that includes but also goes beyond the details of late-medieval England, beyond the professionalism required of bona fide medievalists to include concerns larger than obscure understandings of literate history or my career.

“The question for art, then, is exactly the same as the question for science: Can it properly subordinate itself to concerns that are larger than its own?....It is bad for artists and scholars in the humanities to be working without a sense of obligation to the world beyond the artifacts of culture....to be operating strictly according to ‘professional standards’, without local affection or community responsibility, much less any vision of an eternal order to which we are all subordinate and under obligation” (88, 93).

Ignorance and the University
You may have already noticed the connection here between ignorance and the university. The partial nature of human knowledge is in many ways the founding condition for the university as a sort of ‘convocation’ in Berry’s terms, a coming together of those called to different specialties. A specialist chooses myopia, chooses to be ignorant of many things in order to see distinctly a few things up close. A convocation of the near-sighted needs to have a conversation which takes on the far-sightedness gained by questions from outsiders as well as by a sense of being subordinate to something larger than one’s own narrow concerns. To do so is not to eliminate ignorance; we don’t have a conversation to become specialists in more things. To do so is an appropriate act in response to the isolation and hubris that partial knowledge outside of community can occasion. To do so is to recognize our higher obligations outside of the concerns of our specialties, even beyond the range of our knowledge, and to work together to meet those obligations as best we can. As Berry puts it:

“[To become a conversation] the convocation would have to have a common purpose, a common standard, and a common language. It would have to understand itself as a part, for better or worse, of the surrounding community. For reasons both selfish and altruistic, it would have to make the good health of its community the primary purpose of all its work” (60).

Cross-/interdisciplinarity is clearly not enough, because its goals tend to be too narrowly focused on the narrow agenda of enhancing or spicing up one’s own work. Interdisciplinarity may stitch together various bits of knowledge into new forms and uses, but such translocations are not the main point of conversation within a university and tend to be done rather poorly. What is needed to inspire this conversation and determine part of its agenda is a larger vision of what academic work is for, and thinking hard about that larger vision in the context of a local community. The work of the academy has its own places after all, and there are not the virtual places in the pages of refereed journals or briefly popping into existence for a day conference, but real, solid, embodied places, each of which has a unique nature and provides a home to living creatures of all sorts. These are places and creatures to which we owe our stewardship as well as our loyalty as we make our home with them; in other words, we owe our love to them.

New Criticism, 3

5. “Our reading of a work should be ‘disinterested’….In other words, our reading should be neutral, impartial, not distorted by prior ideological assumptions” or preconceived ideas. This idea is traced to English empiricism and the notion that “We should experience the text directly rather than applying ideas to it.”

Again, we have here in New Critical ideals the presumably detached, neutral observer of the ideals of modern science. There remains something to recommend in this position, insofar as it also grows out of a firm commitment to trying to listen to the text as much as possible on its own terms instead of only appropriating it to one's own interests. The difference now is our sense of how much this is possible, our awareness of the limitations and challenges faced when trying to engage with the otherness of the text (please excuse the trendy invocation of the word 'other' but I couldn't think of a better word -- suggestions welcome!). All reading is now commonly regarded as interested, filtered, and--at its most pessimistic--partial and distorting.

The pendulum has swung from the objectivist ideal of the New Critic to the subjectivist distopia, from the denial of the self to the rejection of the another self. Note also that a corollary of the objective observer is the possibility of neutral, objective evaluation potentially capable of dispassionate, universal acceptance; likewise, the dominance of hyper-subjectivity renders evaluation of worth an impossibility, even should such worth be granted to exist.

Other, more measured ways of voicing an ideal similar to the New Critic's disinterestedness but without modernist baggage would include the concept of reading with 'good faith' or reading charitably, a notion whose various forms dot Christian history all the way back to Augustine at least (as with so many other things, good ol' Augustine). Both the idea of 'good faith' and 'reading charitably' attend to reading as an interpersonal encounter which can indeed produce knowledge--both interpersonal knowledge and otherwise--even though the mystery of that encounter precludes anything like Cartesian certainty. For myself, I can neither read as an everyman nor an island; neither depersonalized nor radically isolated; the former is at best a god-like illusion, the latter a vice masqueraded as necessity.

Current thinking on 'preconceived ideas' stresses without them, one cannot read at all. Not my bag to prove that here (haha!), but just a brief comment: the problem with preconceived ideas seems to me to be not that we have them, but that we bring to bear on the text ones that don't belong. And, despite appearances to the contrary, doing so outside certain set limitations and fashions is still called bad, far-fetched, or just plain silly in degree programs. What I aim for, at least, is to fill out my intertextual knowledge of the text's historical moment so that I have more and more at my fingertips the preconceptions and even some of the sensibilities that are more likely to belong that those natural to my own cultural and personal moment. I am under no delusion that I can be a 15th century reader, but neither do I despair of sharing some of that reader's means of approaching the text. In fact, such a practice as I have outlined is not merely an exercise of historical imagination or literary appreciation; it is also potentially an act of charity. I think I have Augustine and many others in the Church with me in preferring to try and love. So with this assumption of New Criticism, I would partly accept the goal of taking the text somehow as much as possible on its own terms, but change the language of objective detachment to a language of charitable interpersonal encounter.

New Criticism, 2

3. “Human nature is itself unchanging, and it is because of this that certain works have a timeless and universal appeal, since they issue from and appeal to this unchanging human nature. We each have our own unique individuality or unique ‘essence’, yet there is also a common store of ‘humanity’ which we all share.”

This tenet attempts to negotiate between a sense of common humanity and a sense of the individual…and thus the age-old question of the One and the Many enters into literary study. With some of the insights offered by reader-response, one could also add that a reader brings both her humanity and her individuality to a text, rather than just her humanity alone, and the two interact together in the reading act (as, presumably, they do in all other human acts). “Unchanging” is the flashpoint here, especially if you feel you must link up a discussion of human nature to a Darwinian model of speciation. However, it should be noted that one can take human speciation on board without dumping human nature into the primordial slop; see Leon Kass’ work for an example of retaining both. Without a relatively stable human nature, though, it seems to me at first glance that only radical individuation remains, and the reading encounter becomes yet another chimera to disguise the self.

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4. “The best literature carries its meanings within itself; the ‘words on the page’ are enough for a true appreciation of a literary work. We do not need to know about an author’s life or intentions or about the historical or cultural context of a work to appreciate its literary value.”

Let’s set aside the way this statement assumes that a major reason to read is to appreciate literary value, which in turn is predicated on the idea that literary excellence exists (see previous post) and can be apprehended as such. Thus we’re back to the issue of evaluation with this one.

Of all the statements so far, this is the one I would most readily part company with. In an attempt to avoid biographical or intentional fallacies, it thoroughly isolates the text from both author and reader (whether that reader be the author’s contemporary or no). Such a strategy is perhaps partly indebted to a certain sort of modernist attempt at scientific objectivity, which separates the object of study from its environment and reduces as much as possible the variables at play in order to get at the ‘object in itself’ (e.g. the self in Descartes Mediations). What I find problematic with this approach is that understanding this ‘object in itself’ does not also give one an understanding of the objects’ being in relation. It is of course the temperment of our age to emphasize the object/text’s place in a network of relationships, contexts, etc., and this so even in theology with the advent of personalism. I personally find this to be a healthy correction of New Criticism. The opposite to the fallacy of ignoring the relational aspects of a text—its context, intertexts—is taking one of those aspects, say material circumstances or power relations, and making that the sole key to unlock the significance of the text. Both oversimplify.

We should not regard the text as a gnostic might, radically separating it from its embodiment in this time and place, speaking with and to this culture and textual antecedents, by this author (when known); nor should we come to it as materialists, subsuming the text (and its ideas) to its material and social con-texts. Embodied imaginations is what we have before us, not disembodied minds or infinitely permeable bodies.

New Criticism

I sat in a crowded undergraduate lecture theatre today ( I'm in England, so that's theatre) listening to a Cambridge don introduce these kids to 20th century literary theory. One of the themes of the lecture was pointing out the theory-laden training that the students have received thus far. Without their knowing, they have acquired skills in 'close reading' that carry with them a certain sort of literary theory highly indebted to the New Criticism of the early 20th century. It seemed that one of the points the lecturer wanted to impress upon the students is the key assumptions behind 'close reading' and New Critical stances towards literariness. What theory offers, she claims with Jonathan Culler, is ways of disputing what would normally be regarded as 'common sense' in reading, what we take for granted as the 'natural' way of reading.

Carefully avoiding taking a position herself, she destabilized students' notion of 'how to read' by casting suspicion on some of the assumptions of close reading. She did not take them apart completely; rather, she indicated their instability as concepts, their debt to an early 20th century moment, and their 'religious' sensibility. Interestingly enough, she spent a fair amount of time listing and then noting the instability of the liberal humanist approach to the idea of 'literature' and 'reading'. What seemed sad to me is that many of these concepts, though they may seem naive to a critically informed reader, can be powerfully defended and better nuanced with the insights offered by contemporary literary theory than the lecturer indicated. It was a bit of a debunk, it seemed to me, and the underlying message was 'while Cambridge may require you to learn to be a close reader, that choice of reading is somewhat arbitrary, culturally conditioned, and indebted to the sensibilities and values of the past.' As a student, I might have come away with a sense that I've been 'taken in' by my past teachers. Anyhow, I thought I'd list her set of assumptions of the 'liberal humanist' approach to literature and my re-articulations of some of them. See which ones you would tick off--and which ones you would seriously miss!

1. "The best literature is timeless and universal in its appeal. When we talk about a 'classic', we are referring to a work that transcends the vagaries and contingencies of history, local custom, class, gender, race, sexuality, etc."
- Note: the key words that tip this idea towards being out-dated are: 'universal' and 'transcends'. A more nuanced point would acknowledge the embeddedness of a classic within its time and the work you often need to do to understand a text culturally distant from you. Also, and this will come up again later, this statement assumes something like a shared 'human nature' that would enable universal appeal. The idea of a 'human nature' is, as you might be aware, quite suspect in academic circles these days. Even so, it is not uncritically naive to conclude that such a thing exists.

2. It is possible to construct a canon with broad consensus and only minor disagreements. "The idea of a canon, like the idea of a 'classic' work of literature, assumes that it is possible to evaluate literature."
- Note: here the key word is 'evaluate', not 'canon'. What is red-flagged here for the lecturer is the claim that this work is better, more worthy, than another; that this work is worthy of a certain kind of attention, even a certain kind of respect because of its having certain kinds of excellences that can be perceived as such. Again, while it is not straightforward to create a list of criteria of excellence, nevertheless, it is still intellectually legitimate to critisize! Not my interest to show that here, though... ;)

OK, back to the PhD - will edit this post and add more later. Just wanted to highlight first of all the trouble with the ideas of human nature and evaluation in order to suggest a possible question for later: ought a Christian literary theory recognize as one of its givens a certain sort of human nature and an ability of humans to discern literary excellences? ALSO, and this is just half-baked at the moment (like so much of our blog! lots of goo and little true crumb), would a recognition of human nature in terms of ensouled bodies make a critic better able to negotiate some of the tensions between the situated and the transcendent that plague theory? Currently the move is often to debunk the transcendent as a power ploy, but perhaps that is inhumanly materialist, just as an over-emphasis on the transcendent could be regarded as a gnostic rejection of embodiedness?