Let Us Now Praise Famous Men/James Agee Annotated Bibliography (D1)

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McLuckie

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men/James Agee Annotated Bibliography (D1)

Kara McLuckie

October 24, 2011

ENG 501

Chandler, Aaron. “‘Mutual Wounding Shall Have Been Won and Heal’:

Deleuzean Masochism and the Anxiety of Representation in James

Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Literature Interpretation Theory. 20 (2009): 196-214. EBSCOHost.

Web. 15 October 2011.

Chandler attempts to explain the perennially confounding self-reflexivity and anger of the text. Distinguishing Deleuzean masochism from psychosexual masochism by listing out five basic characteristics of the concept: fantasy, suspense of gratification, exhibition of suffering, provocation, and the contract, Chandler proposes a comprehensive reading of LUNPFM that cannot be accomplished through interpretations of voyeurism. Chandler argues that the voyeuristic interpretations of the text by the likes of Rabinowitz and MacLean allow too much credit to Agee’s personal vision rather than “political aims and aesthetic methods” (197). Instead, the masochistic view explains, for example, the berating and insulting tone in the opening of the text, as a means of bonding the reader and author to one another and raises questions about how these entities form the subject. Chandler concludes that Agee intendeds to confuse and subvert the inevitable failures of communication inherent in representational systems by provoking them through mimesis in the failures of communication he writes into the text.

Chesnick, Eugene. “The Plot Against Fiction: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” The

Southern Literary Journal. 4.1 (1971): 48-67. JSTOR. Web. 21 October 2011.

Chesnick argues that Agee attempts to devise a new literary form that can be neither wholly identified with fiction or non-fiction (51). In LUNPFM, Agee experiments with redefining the relationship between audience, author and text through the use of an antagonistic tone toward the audience and an accusatory tone toward himself, both of which serve to implicate author and audience in the recounted events. For Agee, this technique gives the text a stronger sense of objective reality than the author/audience/event relationship found in novels, where the author and audience are situated above the events in the text.

Agee’s autobiographical confessions play a dual role for Chesnick because they point to Agee’s interest in objective reality as well as a “preoccupation with his interior self,” and force the narrative to work in two directions: one toward defining his own identity and the other toward having both he and his audience identifying with the tenant families. The bi-directionality of the narrative embeds the author and the audience in the text, and effectively holds it in “stasis” between fiction and non-fiction forms without being a hybrid of the two (67).

Jackson, Bruce. “The Deceptive Anarchy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Antioch Review. 1999: 39-49. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30

September 2011.

This book review contextualizes Agee’s and Evans’s work in relationship to literary influences, such as Joyce and Faulkner, and explains the challenges to publication and sales of the first edition of the book due to changing cultural focuses: As a documentary text about tenant farmers that was reminiscent (though radically different from) of the 1930s social consciousness literature, Steinbeck had “cornered the poor farmer market” and the U.S. was on the brink of involvement in WWII (40).

Jackson argues for the intentionality behind Agee’s, at times, belligerent or deeply confessional prose and its role in making the text an effective piece whose sentences have a “sublime lucidity” (43). The confusing shifts in prose and tone call into question the division between fiction and realism, the relationship between audience and author, author and subject as well as reader and subject. Agee reorganizes or disorganizes the conventional design of the book, which has the effect of disorienting the reader’s tacit understanding of how a book is structured and should be read. As a primary example, Evans’s photographs show up at the beginning of the book, even before the title page, without any introduction, captioning or explanatory closing. Despite all of the prose and structural disruptions of the text, and Agee’s overt questioning of the line between truth and fiction, Jackson argues against labeling Agee and LUNPFM as post-modern because the author and photographer both “believed in the real and in our ability to know it and tell one another about it” (46).

Lopate, Phillip. “Agee’s Gospel.” The Nation. December 2005: 58-62. EBSCOHost.

Web. 20

September 2011.

This is a book review of the Library of America’s two volume set of Agee’s writings, which includes LUNPFM. Lopate argues that the density of the text makes it an almost unreadable piece of literary non-fiction, but points out one of its more comprehensible motifs: religion. For example, the title itself comes from Ecclesiastes. Lopate proposes that Agee one of the main challenges to reading the text, aside from shifting forms, is Agee’s attempted refusal to aestheticizing the tenant families, but ultimately turns them into character by painting them as saintly.

MacLean, Robert. “Narcissus and the Voyeur: James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise

Famous Men.” Journal of Narrative Technique. 11.1 (1981): 33-52. JSTOR.

Web. 30 September 2011.

MacLean analyzes LUNPFM for moments where Agee acts as a voyeur and where he adopts a narcissistic view. MacLean claims that Agee is predominantly voyeuristic and this position is the source of his guilt in the book, and MacLean suggests that Agee’s voyeuristic behavior entails the victimization of the tenant families he studies because there is an impenetrable divide between him and them. No authentic relationship can be built between Agee and the farmers due to inequalities in socio-economic and socio-political power. The text culminates with Agee seeking an identity beyond that of the voyeur, and this is the point where, MacLean says, he becomes narcissistic. MacLean suggests that Agee’s self-contemplation and self-examination does not release him from the voyeuristic posture, although he assesses his relationship to the famers, “motivation and intention” do not mitigate voyeurism as Stott might suggest. However, narcissism does not accomplish this either, and although Agee tries to make meaning from the “irregular data of sense and memory” he cannot accomplish an authentic relationship with the farmers, which situates the text in its widely acknowledged “unique”

How does the voyeurism evident in LUNPFM necessitate the extended self-contemplations, and reflexive references to the reader that comprise the narrative of the text? MacLean argues that the meticulous description of the tenant farmers’ lives is driven by Agee’s bent toward voyeurism. He also says that Agee takes a break from the voyeuristic posture and lapses into narcissism, though briefly, and concludes that Agee’s way of seeing the world is fully encompassed by these two psychologies. *

Madden, David. “On the Mountain with Agee.” Remembering James Agee. Ed. David

Madden. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State, 1974. 1-13. Print.

This essay recounts the dedication of the James Agee Library at the St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Tennessee. Madden uses his experience at the dedication as a vehicle to convey some biographical information about Agee and to critique pieces of Agee’s work that have influenced Madden’s writing. Madden argues that his “rediscovery” of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (LUNPFM) can show the text as something other than“pernicious, mannered, pompous” (2). Madden’s initial impression of the text stems from two narrative techniques that Agee employs to express his concern with the limited capacity of the written word to adequately describe the humanity of his subjects.

As the first technique, Madden identifies Agee’s call to substitute “talismanic objects inhabited by the spirits of those who had used them” instead of writing anything at all (2). Agee’s list of items that could adequately substitute for description is a direct statement of his belief in the limited capacity of the written word. A second, and indirect technique is Agee’s “compulsion to transcend mere description moved him to devote four pages to overalls” (4). In this technique, overstating or obsessing about detail may be meant to construct an image and meaning in the readers mind and therefore the closest thing to a mutual experience between author and reader.

Madden’s critical transition comes afterhe investigates these narrative techniques not just intellectually, but by aligning them with some of his own experiences as a participant in the week long celebration of the library dedication. Over the course of the essay, Madden makes a closer connection as a reader with Agee as a writer, and then reflexively connects to himself more deeply as a writer, and although Agee may have recognized the limitations of the written word in vitally describing his subjects, there is still a transcendence made between reader and writer of a different sort. This essay raises questions about authorial intent, narrative technique and audience agency.

Ophir, Ella, Zohar. “Romantic Reverence and Modernist Representation:

Vision, Power, and the Shattered Form of Let Us Now Praise Famous

Men.” Twentieth Century Literature. 53.2 (Summer 2007): 125-152.

EBSCOHost. Web. 29 September 2011.

Ophir argues that Agee is modernist in his resistance to the conventions of documentarianism, but is often overlooked as a modernist because of his tendency toward romanticism. Proposing a counter argument to T.V Reed’s assessment of Agee’s postmodernistic realism, Ophir says that Agee is a modernist because of the combination of his critical stance against totalizing systems of representations of reality and his reverence for the integrity of beauty, consciousness, the natural world, and humanity. Although the text is self-reflexive and formally disrupted like postmodern texts, it is grounded in the recognition of unity, which is lacking in postmodernism.

Quinn, Follensbee, Jeanne. “The Work of Art: Irony and Identification in Let

Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Novel. Summer 2001: 338-363.

EBSCOHost. Web. 1 October 2011.

Quinn argues that Agee resists the sentimentalism found in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s early 1930 documentary about sharecropping with irony. Ironically, Agee uses irony as both an aesthetic and political tool to try to create a sense of identity for the tenant farmers. Agee’s ironic references to the extra-textual: Caldwell and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, and the middle-class appeal of Fortune magazine, is a unique use of irony according to Quinn. Typically, Quinn says, irony is an intra-textual break between what is being said and what is meant by what is being said, or in other words the text seems to refer to itself in its break between saying and meaning. Both of these uses of irony allow Agee to show similarities between the farmers and middle-class Americans and to show the radical difference between the farmers and the middle-class readers, giving the farmers a distinct political identity. Quinn outlines a relationship between the potential for political recognition and subjectivity in aesthetic representation. *

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Voyeurism and Class Consciousness: James Agee and

Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Cultural Critique. 21

(1992): 143-170. JSTOR. Web. 21 October 2011.

Rabinowitz examines the relationship between looking and power as it is presented in the photographs and text. She argues that the work that Agee and Evans do is voyeuristic and has sexual and class power implications because of the social differences between them and the farmers. However, Rabinowitz also says that it is possible for Agee’s and Evans’s subjects to resist the voyeuristic looking. While doing their fieldwork Agee and Evans create social relationships with the farmers which allow the farmers to “look back” at Agee and Evans and to recover some power in their interactions. This power exchange or double subjectivity gives the text more authenticity than so-called objective reportage common in the documentaries of the 1930s. Unlike MacLean, who suggests that voyeurism is a narrative technique present in Agee’s work, Rabinowitz presents the necessity of a narrative structure that results from authorial attentiveness to class and sexual power differences. Note: This text contains a good outline of Lukacs and Freud on the issue of class consciousness and voyeurism. *

Reed, T.V.. “Unimagined Existence and the Fiction of the Real: Postmodernist

Realism in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Representations. 24

(1988): 156-176. JSTOR. Web. 10 October 2011.

Reed argues that Agee uses multiple aesthetic forms in the narrative in order to present the inadequacy of capturing the real through representational systems. This resembles the questioning of such systems in post-modern thought about art, and Agee has set out an aesthetic philosophy in the text that encourages literature to “imagine” the real rather than to deny that reality can be represented at all. Reed then proposes that Agee’s text presents a challenge to the “self-referentiality” of post-modernity because it contains a larger social focus on representing the “otherness” of the tenant families in tandem with Agee’s self-contemplation. The post-modernistic critique of realism Reed sees in the narrative and the ways in which Agee retains some of the modernist representations of reality defines what Reed coins “Postmodernist Realism.”

Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. 2nd ed. Chicago:

University of Chicago, 1973. Print.

Stott presents a literary analysis and cultural history of the documentary genre in the 1930s and pays special attention to LUNPFM because “it culminates the central rhetoric of the time, and explodes it, surpasses it, shows it up” (x). In his analysis of the text, Stott attends to the waysAgee’s belief in the impossibility of the “‘language of ‘reality’’” subverts contemporary conventions of the genre (290). Going beyond direct reportage on events and subjects, Agee takes “extraordinary participation in the narrative” (298). While other documentarians, such as Roy Stryker and Dorthea Lang, did participate in the lives they studied only Agee records assessments of his relationship to the subjects in his text, noting both distance in terms of class as well as connection throughfrank confessions of sexual attraction to a tenant-farmer woman, thus exposing an authenticity in his interactions with the subjects of the book.

Stott goes on to argue thatAgee’s decision to write about his relationships “proved” the tenant families“reality” as humans rather than representative types in Depression Era life. The reality that Agee manages to convey, despite his skepticism of the possibility to do so, distinguishes LUNPFM amongst documentaries of the 1930s.

Trilling, Lionel. “Greatness With One Flaw in It.” The Kenyon Review. 4.1 (1942): 99-

102.JSTOR. Web. 10 October 2011.

This is a book review of the 1941 edition of LUNPFM. Trilling recognizes Agee’s text as an answer to the problem of abstraction in the “‘social consciousness’” writings of the 1930s, which either played to a reader’s sense of pity or romanticized their subject. Agee’s responds to those appeals to sentiment through his candid introspections, meditations, and obsessively detailed descriptions. Trilling notes that these moments interrupt the narrative and result in an intentional “failure” that serves as a critique of the typical social consciousness narrative of the day. However, this is not what Trilling sees as the fault in Agee’s text. Instead of any serious literary short comings, Trilling suggests that Agee can only “write of his people as if there were no human unregenerateness in them, no flicker of malice or meanness, no darkness or wildness of feeling, only a sure and simple virtue…” resulting in a failure of “moral realism” on Agee’s part (102).

The lack of moral realism is driven by Agee’s sense of guilt over his own privilege in the world relative to the tenant farmers. Trilling reads Agee’s confessional passages as evidence of his guilty feelings and therefore the device he uses to ignoble suffering and poverty.

Zaller, Robert. “Let Us Now Praise James Agee.” The Southern Literary Journal. 10.2

(1978): 144-154. JSTOR. Web. 30 September 2011.

Zaller suggests that there is a deep interrelationship between the image and text in LUNPFM that is not immediately discernable given the design of the book where the text and images are presented separately. Even though Agee denies any of the superficial connections between the photographs and words a reader might look for, Zaller claims that Agee integrates the camera as a symbol of the potential for truth and actuality of exploitation in the task of documenting the sharecroppers, and because of this tension between truth and exploitation the camera also gives LUNPFM its narrative structure.

The narrative of LUNPFM is divided between Agee’s attempt to write the actuality of the sharecropper’s lives and the painful recognition of his exploitation of them. Instead of fictionalizing his accounts, which would be one way to avoid the guilt of exploiting his subjects, Agee aims to mimic the unity between truth and exploitation that the camera can afford because of its instrumentality. Zaller concludes that Agee’s narrative reflects the realism found in Evans’s images in its interweaving of description, and self-critique which creates a full image of Agee’s subjects. *