Complicity and Hope in Wendell Berry’s Membership

Guest: Andrew Peterson

February 21-22, 2025
Grove City College

Grove City, PA

This conference marks the 50th anniversary of one of the more significant events in the life of Wendell Berry’s fictional Port William community: the loss of Andy Catlett’s right hand to a mechanized corn picker. This may seem an odd episode to inspire a conference, but as the autobiographical character in Berry’s fiction, Andy Catlett’s life story and tragic accident offer a way to consider the central drama of Berry’s imaginative work. Unlike Andy, Berry himself has the full use of both his hands, which invites readers to consider why he would narrate Andy’s life history in this way. As Andy reflects in “Dismemberment” on the meaning of this loss, he comes to the conclusion that the machine took his hand “as the price of admission into the rapidly mechanizing world that as a child he had not foreseen and as a man did not like, but which he would have to live in, understanding it and resisting it the best he could, for the rest of his life.” This sense of inescapable complicity haunts Andy:

And so the absence of his right hand has remained with him as a reminder. His most real hand, in a way, is the missing one, signifying to him not only his continuing need for ways and devices to splice out his right arm, but also his and his country’s dependence upon the structure of industrial commodities and technologies that imposed itself upon, and contradicted in every way, the sustaining structures of the natural world and its human memberships. And so he is continually reminded of his incompleteness within himself, within the terms and demands of his time and its history, but also within the constraints and limits of his kind, his native imperfection as a human being, his failure to be as attentive, responsible, grateful, loving, and happy as he ought to be. He has spent most of his life in opposing violence, waste, and destruction—or trying to, his opposition always fragmented and made painful by his complicity in what he opposes.

Andy’s missing hand becomes a perpetual reminder of central questions that we all must live with: How do we imagine our complicity in and responsibility for systemic evils? How do we respond to our failure to live up to our ideals? How do we make do as maimed members of wounded communities? Christians have long wrestled with what it means to dwell on earth as exiles, and Berry’s writings offer us ways of living with this longing for a home and a wholeness that we know can never be realized on this side of the new creation.

In keeping with the tenor of Berry’s writings, we welcome papers from disciplines beyond English (e.g. history, theology, philosophy, political science, ecology, music, visual arts, etc.), and we prefer papers that avoid what Hannah Coulter calls the “Unknown Tongue” of stilted academic writing. Papers might address:

• Any topic related to the writings of Wendell Berry

• Writers from the many communities that Berry has belonged to: Kentucky writers, writers who studied with Wallace Stegner at Stanford, members of the Temenos circle, etc.

• Literary responses to these questions from across history, particularly from those whom Berry has turned to for guidance: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, Thoreau, and others

• Authors from other places or times who consider related questions of complicity, despair, and hope

• Issues related to the genre of fictionalized autobiography

• Agrarian, regional, or local literature

• Representations of nostalgia and exile

• Considerations of the interactions between local and global

• Ways of imagining the relationship between our present condition and the eschaton

The conference will take place on February 21-22, 2025 at Grove City College. Andrew Peterson will give a keynote address and an evening concert.