Throughout reading and discussing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one question has kept me consistently confused: Why is Agee so down on art?
“Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art” (12). We’ve mentioned this quote many times in class, but I’m still not sure I understand his motives. If he didn’t want us to think of it as art, though, he did a good job of ignoring literary conventions, of confusing his audience, to the extent that I hardly knew how much I was supposed to read each night because the book was so poorly constructed – at least from by brainwashed, traditionalist perspective. But even this outward rebellion against art is, well, artistic.
I wonder if it’s merely a question of semantics. Despite Agee’s demands, I still consider Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to be art. Or Art, as, for some reason, Agee seems to prefer to capitalize it, which just seems to heighten its importance and thus undermine his argument, granting it the same “official acceptance” that “castrates” men such as “Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ,” and himself – making a martyr out of it, in a way.
But the disconnect starts to make a little more sense once we get his true feelings: “If I were going to use these lives of yours for ‘Art,’ if I were going to dab at them here, cut them short here, make some trifling improvement over here, in order to make you worthy of The Saturday Review of Literature…” (323). I think we can all agree that this isn’t how we think of art. But I realized I was being a little unfair to Agee, as I then started wondering what my own definition of art is. I even completely sold out and looked up the OED’s opinion, which essentially said that art is anything involving skill. I could get on board with that, but there’s something even more important.
“Art,” Agee writes, “as all of you would understand if you had had my advantages, has nothing to do with Life, or no more to do with it than is thoroughly convenient at a given time” (323-24). This I wholeheartedly disagree with. And I think I’ve come to discover that this is the exact antithesis of what art is to me – art is life, as corny as that sounds; something is made art only by its relation and importance to life. This book does nothing but try to capture life as purely as possible (though, as the above quote demonstrates, not completely without prejudice – but judgment, too, is a part of life), and therefore not only is art but is the epitome of it. You don’t have to necessarily like it or find it pretty, or want to put Evans’ photographs all over your mantlepiece, but it is art. Sorry, Agee.
I too, like Meredith here, have pondered over the question of the "artistry" of Agee's "And Now Let Us Praise Famous Men." Meredith appropriately mentions the "don't think of this as Art," quote by Agee that we have talked about in class, and, even more appropriately, the unusual structure of that book. It is true that the way in which Agee puts the book together seems unorthodox, original, and different to the point of being distracting at times. As Meredith said, it is difficult to even discuss certain passages of the book due to the fact that the structure is hard to wrap one's mind around.
ReplyDeleteI believe that Agee's comments about Art are made with the best intentions in mind. I think that he is being overly modest in his actions, but is ultimately remdining the reader for them to stop reading the workds through the filter of the author's mind. Agee does not want the average reader to read a section of the book and say, "Wow, the way that Agee put that section together is really just genius." Agee wants us to read that sections and then say, "Wow, I can't believe that is the way that it really happened." Agee's comments about Art are a constant reminder to the reader that the words are not a creation of the author's imagination, but something that is rooted in actual existence.
While I think that this is a fantastic way to look at such a serious journalistic approach to the Depression, I think that Agee's structure of the book does not in fact take away from what he was trying to accomplish. The structure does not remind us that the book's actions and its characters are rooted in existence. It distracts. It takes the focus away from the character and puts it on Agee, and why he would decide to structure the book this way. And that is, just as Meredith said, artistic.