Cruel writings

James Agee wrote his epic novel, Let us now praise famous me in a style completely different then that of a piece of fiction, poetry, journalism, and even photography. With a mixture of all three styles, Agee is able to discuss and show matters that normally would be almost unapproachable to normal writers. Even with the help of Walker Evans, Agee is using photography to add depth and visual detail to a life style that many have never lived. Agee’s style of writing is what pushes his readers into a convoluted prose and unrelenting details over the most basic and normal pieces of information, such as the description of every room in a house. Even the very clothing that these people wear are spared no detail. Agee almost seems harsh and cruel in his description of the clothes the tenant families wear, as some have been made out of pillow slips or have become so old and dirty, that the clothing is almost nothing but rags.
While many have been pushed away by Agee’s writing style, Agee could not have written this piece in any other way. Agee has lived with these people, he has experienced the very life they live every day, so it comes as no surprise that Agee would write without compassion for his reader. Agee knows that it would be cruel to the tenant family if the reader of his writings would simply look down on the people. Through his harsh writing style the reader begins to understand how serious these families lives are. That these people who live in poverty, who have to struggle to eat every day, that they deserve respect. These families have shown us that even under the most dire of situations one can still stand up with respect for themselves.

The Paradoxical Meaning of Art in Let us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has been described as a ground-breaking piece of literature, changing the norms of traditional journalism and presenting the real lives of tenant farms in a way which had never been done before. In the book, Agee tells the reader not to regard the book as art, or a novel, but as a representation of real life. He attempts to use words in the novel to convey true meaning, rather than something abstract and unrealistic. However, he often interjects passages of real-life occurrences with pages upon pages of poetic anecdotes. The result is a novel that is truly a work of art, but is only so beautiful because of its attempt not to be so.

When Agee begins to describe the location of the homes in relation to one another, he gives the reader a detailed account of exactly how to get to each home. Even when he describes the households of each family, he does not spare any details. The one thing Agee is truly vague about is the people with which he is living and the happenings of their everyday lives. In his attempt to realistically represent the families, he leaves the reader with passages open to interpretation. For example, when Agee begins to describe George Gudger, he begins a description and then changes his mind, finally stating that he is just a man. Throughout the novel Agee openly admits his inability to do their lives justice, and in the end the reader is left with a book full of poetic passages and imagery rather than anything that can be deemed “real.”

The book is not a documentary that relays the real lives of three tenant families, but a story that can be seen only through the eyes of an artist.

New York Times article: "Picturing the Depression

In a New York Times' Sunday Book Review, David Oshinky reviews Linda Gordon’s book Dorthea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits – a biography about the photographer who took the iconic “Migrant Mother” (above) and who worked for the Farm Security Administration along with Walker Evans.  I found the article interesting, but also relevant to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It outlines Lange’s philosophy and approach to photographing her depression-era subjects saying, “[Lange was] an ambivalent radical, deeply sympathetic to the plight of the migrants yet uncomfortable with the chaos that social conflict inevitably produced,” and that made me wonder: is that the same philosophy Evans shared?  “Lange stressed the inner emotions of those facing injustice and deprivation.”  To compare, I personally don’t think Evans was concerned with expressing the inner emotions of his subjects.  His photos of people – which are outnumbered by landscapes – seem to be dominated by blank stares and emotionless faces (that is, the people are neither visibly upset or happy).  As Professor Irmscher showed us in class, Evans thoughtfully chose to publish the photo of Flora Merry Lee and Margaret Ricketts where they weren’t smiling for a photo.  Instead, Margaret is more stoic towards the camera and her emotions cannot be easily described.  In other photos, the emotions of the subjects are just as difficult to pinpoint.  The families don’t look visibly happy, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they unhappy. In contrast, “Lange provided an alternative to the photography of wretchedness, which centered on the misery of beaten-down victims, as well as to the Popular Front mythology, which showed earnest, well-muscled men and women laboring together in fields and factories to produce a Soviet-style paradise on earth. Lange saw America as a worthy work in progress, incomplete and capable of better. By portraying her subjects as nobler than their current conditions, she emphasized the strength and optimism of our national character. She became, in Gordon’s words, “America’s pre-eminent photographer of democracy.””  Perhaps Evans took the approach Lange tried to avoid.  He focuses on the subjects’ destitute existence - not masking their conditions, or trying to uplift them.  His subjects aren’t portrayed as strong “fighters” of the Depression, but instead, people living their life “in this way.”  Their wretchedness is at the center of many of his photographs and he does not emphasize strength or optimism.  However – while Evans and Lange’s approach to photography differ, his purpose was not to disenfranchise these people.  Evans was not looking to sugarcoat or glorify these families through his work, and maybe his photographs are more closely representative of the reality of the situation.  I think there is something very powerful in reporting the truth because it puts less emphasis on Evan’s point of view or inherent bias towards purpose, and more weight on the audience’s reaction to the “truth” of his photography. 

Agee, Joyce and the Epic Tradition

I briefly mentioned in class the following allusion, but I'd like to expand on it here. Agee uses the quotation "I will go unto the altar of God" as an epigraph for the section entitled "Shelter." He also repeats it, its original context prior to the "Inductions" section. The quotation is from Psalm 43:

"I will go unto the altar of God:

Even unto the God of my joy and gladness, and upon the harp will I give thanks unto thee, O God, my God."

Some more context is in order: at the time of Agee's writing, the Catholic mass was still in Latin. The Roman Order of Mass begins (after the sign of the cross) with a section called the Introit:

"Priest: Introibo ad altare Dei.

Response: Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam."

Which is exactly the translation of the first two lines of Psalm 43 quoted by Agee.

This fact is significant unto itself: Agee's invocation of the Introit colors what he has to say next with a sacred connotation. Whether he is mocking himself here (seeing as he often depicts himself as a profane, even sexual tinted, intruder in the houses) is a different question. Either way, he has cast a religious overtone to the entire section.

I find it equally significant, however, that Joyce chose the same allusion to begin Ulysses:

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirro and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--Introibo ad altare Dei."

In Joyce's case, there is no doubt about the irony of this invocation: Buck Mulligan is mocking his "jesuit" roommate Stephan Daedalus. The bowl of lather, for example, is meant as a false chalice. (Aside: Buck's real name is Malachi, a book of the bible which Agee quotes in the section about the Gudger's bible)

An allusion to Joyce is significant for Agee. As Richard Ellmann said, "[Joyce] sensed that the methods available to him in previous literature were insufficient, and he determined to outreach them." This is exactly the feeling Agee expressed in the letter we read at the Lilly about Jazz. He wants to be free of the constraints of writing for Fortune and Time. And Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was his attempt to do that, to subvert the forms of writing he had to write to make money. The bizarre "Intermission" in which Agee responds to the questionnaire of the Partisan Review is an explicit rebellion against the conventional. Agee sees a precedent in Ulysses of throwing the writer's manual out the second story window, and he uses it. Also note the difference between Joyce/Agee and Steinbeck, who for the most part (at least in the narrative chapters) stays with a conventional arc form and third-person omnicient narrator.

Examining the function of the Introit in Ulysses sheds some light on its possible function in Agee. Joyce clearly senses the epic tradition: the structure of his book is based on the Odyssey, and his title explicitly reflects that. One interpretation of the Introit is a (perhaps ironic) parallel to the invocation of the muse at the beginning of epic poetry. We've discussed how Agee's long descriptive style is akin to an epic. Here we see the connection of Agee to the epic tradition manifested in his use of the Introit at the beginning of a section of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Agee's title also evokes the kind of epic sense of singing for "Famous Men," which in the epic tradition are the great warriors remembered. Recall that "glory" in the epic tradition was exactly being remembered. This is a major concern for Achilles in the Iliad, when he is deciding whether or not to return to battle. The worse fate for someone like Achilles is not to die, but to be forgotten. The bard is the keeper of his memory. Likewise, we see throughout Let Us Now Praise Famous Men the burden Agee feels to be authentic to the "Life" of the tenant families, to keep their memory in his book.

Comparison of styles

During class, we often joke about the majority of us not enjoying Agee’s book, and to be honest, I feel that I am one of the majority. That being said, I have found myself questioning many things in the book—not the least of which is Agee’s sanity. What has puzzled me most about the book is the conflict of styles between Walker Evans and James Agee. Before beginning the work, I imagined the two would be working towards a common goal with roughly congruous methods to their craft, but that does not seem to be the case.

As Professor Irmscher’s handout of Evans’s untouched photographs, the family did not appear to be as pitifully unhappy as the ones contained within the work would lead a person to believe. Evans seems content to go against Agee’s words, “’Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as Art” (12). By taking the time to stage people and places for his photos, Evans is not trying to be real; he is attempting to create the mood that will satisfy his financial backers. Even within his photos, Evans takes the time to crop them into his vision.

Unlike Evans, Agee tells and experiences everything. As an example of his extreme eye for detail and completeness, reexamine the piece discussed on the blog last week or just randomly select a spot in the text relating to the families and read that. Agee’s method for telling the story of the Dustbowl families seems to center around realism, but at times, this becomes counterproductive. The immense depth of details related by Agee makes finding the important and touching bits nigh impossible. Returning to the scene of the fireplace, I find the detail given by Agee saying that “are in part by memory, in part composited out of other memory, in part improvised, but do not exceed what was there in abundance, variety, or kind” important (176). Agee’s focus on reality seems jaded when these comments are made. On one hand, his credibility becomes flawed because a reader is unclear on what is real, and on the other, a reader trusts him more for acknowledging his flaws.

I don’t really have a preference towards one method when comparing Agee and Evans, but I believe the differences are worth noting when trying to understand the work.

Blog 5

I have been thinking about the visit to the Lilly and the recent discussions about books that have changed history. My perception though is somewhat different in that many things that have changed the world only apply to a later or future world rather than the one where the book was first released in. Agee is a good example because Let us now Praise famous Men only sold around six hundred copies (guessing from presentation on it) when it was first put out. It is the desire of new gen rations to understand their past which may seem to cloud their desire to form a proper present or future. This can be seen in many pre-modern and modern societies but I'm getting away from the point. While the book was uniquely original and completely honest in its telling, its fame comes from a somewhat superior sense of thought processes added to an old tradition to holding up the over-looked and forgotten (Van Gogh, Poe, Plath, Duffy, etc.). Along with this, Agee also adds to this a history of the times which people will always want as another piece to help them better view the past. It does not matter whether it is a broad or narrow story because either will create discussion and analysis and most likely a special place within the subject matter. And the book did just that as it is considered one of the greatest books of the period, subject matter, and of all time. But by doing this, Agee and the book become a mythical construct and thus can never be looked at from its real point of origin but simply admired from a farther off generation of time. But with book like Agee's, something else has to take place because of it got no attention when it was put out and possibly too much after it was recovered long after, the best thing to do might be to take it just like Agee explains: read it and leave it be. Any thoughts about are fine but be careful and guard against over thinking.

Agee, or The Ultimate Misunderstood Artist.

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.