Wendell Berry and the Poetics of Marriage and Embodiment

Marriage and farming are not topics one readily associates with the subject of poetry in the modern world. That is, of course, unless you are Wendell Berry, who seems to think about them all the time. Marriage, farming, poetry, and the body: Just where and when did we start our collective cultural journey with these topics? If we were to ask Berry, I imagine he might say we began in Eden or just a bit of east of it, long before there were poets to write such things down, and ever since that time we have been learning and relearning the truth about them. As we look for the point in the literary record where our thinking about these subjects first came together powerfully, even primordially, Berry suggests where it might be. He locates the point in the Odyssey in a long passage about which he writes: "Nowhere else that I know are the connections between marriage and household and the earth so fully and so carefully understood" (Recollected 305). The incident Berry has in mind involves the final trial Odysseus must undergo before he returns to Ithaka, to his home, to his son, and to his wife. At this point he is a castaway on the island of the goddess Kalypso, where he is, in Berry's words, "Kalypso's lover but also virtually her prisoner" (Recollected 305). When Zeus orders the goddess to release Odysseus, she offers the wayfarer a tragic choice. He may either stay with her, become immortal and remain an eternal exile, or he may return home to Penelope and wait, like any other man, to die. "If you could see it all, before you go--" Kalypso assures Odysseus, "all the adversity you face at sea-- / you would stay here, and guard this house, and be / immortal." She then turns personal, even vain, as she challenges Odysseus to forsake his wife and home: "Can I be less desirable than she is? / Less interesting? Less beautiful? Can mortals / compare with goddesses in grace and form?" And Odysseus answers: My quiet Penelope--how well I know--would seem a shade before your majesty, death and old age being unknown to you, while she must die. Yet, it is true, each day I long for home ... (Recollected 306) "This is," writes Berry, "a wedding ritual much like our own, in which Odysseus forsakes all others ... and renews his pledge to the mortal terms of his marriage." Yet it differs from ours, because "unlike our ritual, this one involves an explicit loyalty to a home" This is not only the story of a husband returning to his wife. It is also the saga of a weary man coming home. Berry sums up the structure of the Odyssey by pairing two terms that few other contemporary critics would be likely to bring together in praise of a poem: "Odysseus' journey, from the cave of Kalypso to the bed of Penelope, has revealed a structure that is at once geographical and moral" (Recollected 306). Viewed from the perspective of a good deal of contemporary theory, such an assertion may seem hazy, even reactionary, but if we look at it in a different light, the celebration of the "geographical and moral" structure of a poem--which is part of what I would call Berry's poetics of embodiment--appears positively luminous. As Berry's essays have made clear for more than four decades, he understands far better than most of us how cliched and banal the rhetoric of expression and transgression has become in contemporary aesthetic discourse. He has long realized that in terms of the modern theoretical enterprise, if we wish to push the envelope, or stand on the cutting edge, and shatter the taboos, one of the most revolutionary things we can do is to promote a poetics of marriage and the body. A rather different tradition of the poetics of marriage, of course, has served as the dominant motif of the modern literary and theoretical enterprise. More than thirty years ago, in Natural Supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams charted the course of this tradition from romanticism to the present day. …