Focus:

Wendell Berry and the Work of Local Culture

Rufus Ernest Cook[i]

Dept. of FLL, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

     When Salman Rushdie in his book Imaginary Homelands refers to the migrant as “the central or defining figure of the twentieth century” (277), he has in mind the fact that in the modern world practically all human beings are uprooted and displaced, identifying with no particular local cultural community.  Instead of being educated to stay at home to serve the needs of local communities, human beings are now educated to leave home in pursuit of a career that, in Wendell Berry’s words, turns them into “modern urban nomads” (Harmony 163), moving from one standardized suburban home to another in quest of professional advancement and recognition.  Like everyone else in the alienated modern (or postmodern) world, the most widely recognized and admired writers  and intellectuals are also now usually nomads and expatriates, individuals who fled the rural towns and villages where they were born in order to seek fame and recognition in metropolitan cultural centers like New York, Paris, or London.  That was the “career trajectory” of modernist writers like Pound, Hemingway, Eliot, Wolfe, and Joyce, and it continues to be the pattern for postmodernists like Rushdie, Kingston, Naipaul, and Coetzee.  Not only do such writers feel that they “belong to the planet” instead of one particular local cultural community (Kingston 107), but they see little that is negative in their lack of specific local roots.  Indeed, local writers like Willa Cather or Wallace Stegner are generally dismissed simply as “regional writers” or “local colorists” in contemporary intellectual circles (McDowell 377, Love 230) while “nomadism,” “decentering,” and “transnationalism” are touted as unqualified values by many of our most prominent intellectuals.  “We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time” (Rushdie, Shame 91), and despite the deepening environmental crisis in which we now find ourselves, few literary scholars seem to see a problem in that fact......<More>