The Useless, The Fictional, The Beautiful

As Agee describes the Ricketts’ fireplace, he signals to the relationship between beauty, aestheticism, and utility. For Agee, the most aesthetically appealing items seem to be the ones in which any conceivable usefulness cannot be discerned. Before his long description of the fireplace he states that its rear wall is burst through and that the chimney has collapsed in upon itself (172). Still the family has taken the care to decorate it with pieces of paper. By focusing upon this fact, Agee points to the strange human desire to turn the “useless” into the aesthetic. Beauty, then, becomes not so much about how visually appealing an object is, but instead it is related to how man has worked to attribute meaning (in this case the meaning of beauty) to the otherwise meaningless. This is why, for example, the “partition wall of the Grudger’s front bedroom IS importantly…a great tragic poem” (179).
In a note after the description of this fireplace, Agee tells the reader that in fact the page of text he has provided as a description of the fireplace does not necessarily represent what was actually physically there. Instead the reader is told that this is an approximation that “does not exceed what was there in abundance, variety, or kind” (176). In describing the fireplace, Agee takes aestheticization even further by making the fireplace not only useless but the description, in a sense is essentially fictional, meant to create a feeling in the reader rather than to give a concrete account of reality. Beauty then becomes about the human desire to create something out of nothing, to fictionalize in order that an emotional affect be achieved. This is why the Ricketts’ fireplace is aesthetically pleasing, and why Agee focuses on it in his book. This act of creation parallels not only his own creation, but the creation of man at large.