the Territory to escape to

I wrote yesterday about Wendell Berry’s essay “Writer and Region”, and his reflections on Huck Finn and the failure of American society to reckon with the responsibilities of our demands for freedom. The whole essay is fascinating, and I want to take some time over the course of a few posts to reflect on the idea of the Territory that Berry establishes in the essay.

By “the Territory,” Berry means that place that modern society tells us all we must go to, the great westward land that the manifest destiny of modernity points towards, that place we are all called to go that leaves behind the ties that bind us to other people, to the land, and to the traditions that shaped us. In modernity, all such ties have no economic utility, and in fact hinder growth, and so must be escaped, and that escaping is prompted by the promise of something bigger, better, freer, and less full of responsibility for anything.

Berry draws the idea of the Territory from the end of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck embarks on a journey to some unnamed territory west of the Mississippi and the promise of greater adventure and riches, and freedom from the strictures of life with Miss Polly. Berry is quite critical of this ending to Twain’s novel, in short calling it a cop-out for the novelist, an abandonment of the story he had been telling up to that point. Thus, Berry makes the idea of the Territory a critical one, a concept to apply to all the ways we are all trying all the time to escape our lives and become something else, even if we don’t really know what that something is.

I want to take a few posts over the coming days just to recount the seven Territories Berry illuminates in his essay. I don’t know that I’ll necessarily have comments on each one. But I’ll at least quote a relevant passage from each. Taken together, I think they serve as a strong indictment of the modern character, and our overwhelming urge – fed by modernity’s demonic drive for more and more growth and acquisition and production and greed – to abandon ourselves and remake ourselves sui generis.