What is Wendell Berry for?

Wendell Berry has been getting a lot of renewed attention from writers such as Michael Pollan and blogs, including this one, because his message of local, human-scale economics, especially agriculture, is very current. And he pens a nifty aphorism. Lots of them in fact.

The Drinking and Reading Society dutifully read Jayber Crow this month and What Are People For? last month, but we are left wondering What is Wendell Berry for? Not his purpose on Earth, but what course of action does he recommend? He obviously has in mind some better model than our hyper-speed modern world that crushes whatever or whoever gets in the way of its headlong pursuit of more. But what does he suggest that we do about it? The question perplexed us again last night in our discussion of Jayber Crow.

Jayber Crow presents a world a half step removed from peasant life. No one goes very far, except to war. Most people you see every day you have known all your life. People take their allotted places in society without any apparent questioning and never leave them. The outside world is the enemy – the bringer of death, destruction and baffling change. The local may have its faults (which are generally left unexamined in the book) but it is sustainable and comforting. We didn’t believe it. Not that Berry didn’t capture the rhythms and mores of small town America. He got a lot of details right. It’s the big picture he missed.

I suppose it’s a bane of a writer to be both essayist and novelist because readers search for his philosophy in his fiction. But it seems Berry welcomes that and is using his fiction as just another tool to communicate his vision of slow, small and sustainable. But if that vision is so perfect, why have generation after generation voted with their feet to get out as fast as they can? There’s a darkness at the heart of small town life that Berry doesn’t face either in his fiction or his essays and there is likewise a noble human yearning for completion that drives people to seek a new world.

I guess we were hoping that Berry would provide some answers about how you reconcile those opposites and that’s what has left us wondering, what’s Wendell Berry for?