1. A major exception to this is William StoWs reading of Praise in Documentary Expression and Thirties America . He sees the text as both an aesthetic and a documentary work that explodes the latter genre. In addition to Stott's perceptive reading of Praise , to which I am indebted throughout this chapter despite certain disagreements, the following works inform my analysis: Peter Ohlin, Agee; Kenneth Seib, James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment; Alfred Barson, A Way of Seeing; David Madden, ed., Remembering James Agee; Victor Kramer, James Agee; Genevieve Moreau, The Restless Journey of James Agee; Laurence Ber- soft

green, James Agee: A Life; Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact: Literary Non-fiction in American Writing; Ross Spears and Jude Cassidy, eds., Agee: His Life Remembered; and John Hersey, "Introduction: Agee."

2. For a discussion of some of the issues raised here, see Jonathan Arac's introduction to Postmodernism and Politics , and James Clifford's introduction to Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography .

3. I think the closest parallel to what Agee was trying to achieve lies not among any American contemporaries but rather in that of a German contemporary whom I do not think he could have known, Walter Benjamin. Agee's peculiar blend of theological and political concerns, as well as his interest in rhetorical violence, in photography and film, and his appreciation/use of the Dada/surrealist moment, among other things, suggests an affinity with Benjamin. Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer" also contains a critique of documentary realism (in prose and photography) akin to that of Agee and Evans.

4. On the question of the common aesthetic-political roots and development of the word "representation," see Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation .

5. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , l-li. All subsequent citations to this work will be given in parentheses within my text.

6. James Agee, Collected Short Prose of James Agee , 134.

7. James Agee, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye , 102.

8. See Stott, Documentary Expression , for an excellent account of the centrality and meaning of various documentary projects during the Depression decade and Praise 's relation to those projects. One book, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces , a photo-prose best-seller about sharecroppers, may in particular have served as a negative example for Evans and Agee. See their scathing send-up of Bourke-White in the appendix to Praise .

9. For an attack on "well-thought-out" radical efforts that parallels this attack on liberal Fortune readers, see, for example, Praise , 215.

10. See Stott, Documentary Expression , chap. 15.

11. One could fault Agee here for thereby condescending to his audience, and his text is not without its own sentimentalizing of the tenants, though this is clearly counterbalanced by a profound respect largely lacking in other accounts. In hurling these insults at his readers he sought to separate the serious from the casual reader, or better, to turn casual readers into serious ones. And I suspect he intended to give his privileged readers a small taste of the daily indignities suffered by the families of which he is writing. But I am not at all sure this justifies the tactic, and Evans, by contrast, was able to maintain a consistent respect for his audience, not hectoring or shouting at them but continually inviting them to change their way of seeing.

12. Agee's care in trying even on the level of detail to give a sense of his text as but part of ongoing existence is suggested by the phrase "daily living" in place of the more common "daily life." This is one of many places in the text that, borrowing perhaps from Gertrude Stein, use gerunds to give a more dynamic sense of movement and process. He does not wish to capture some reified "life" but to give a sense of ongoing "living."

13. See Stott, Documentary Expression , 264, 301. break

14. The most astute work on this boundary question remains that of Mikhail Bakhtin. See especially the essay collection The Dialogic Imagination and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language . Barbara Herrnstein Smith also takes up these issues in her work On the Margins of Discourse .

15. For a general discussion of these issues, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature , 145-50. On the early use of the term "novel" in English, see Lennard Davis, "A Social History of Fact and Fiction: Authorial Disavowal in the Early English Novel."

16. This is, of course, not an absolute position. Certainly many people have had their perceptions of their everyday lives profoundly changed by works labeled "fiction." Nevertheless, Agee's main point is well taken—the tendency to seal off art from life is deep, and diminishes both art and life.

17. On the notion of "framing" as the prime means for separating what she calls "natural" from "fictive" discourse, see Smith, On the Margins .

18. Erskine Caldwell, quoted in Stott, Documentary Expression , 219.

19. The text's characterization of the relation of photos and words shows interesting similarities to claims made by Roland Barthes in his text "on" Japan. Compare Agee's remark that "the photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative," with Barthes's claim: "The text does not 'gloss' the images, which do not 'illustrate' the text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning zen calls a satori ," in Empire of Signs , xi. The comparison between the two texts goes deeper than this, though I have no space to pursue it here, except to remark that each could be characterized as a kind of "defamiliarizing" ethnography, with Agee and Evans making their subject fully as "exotic" as Barthes's Orient.

20. These passages have been objected to by some critics as inconsistent with the general tenor of the text. I think there is some justice in this claim, but it should be noted that these "representative" bits of landlord speech (and similar bits from the families) float free in the text as if attaching them to individuals would violate some compositional-ethical principle.

21. Indeed, much of the text can be seen as a kind of phenomenological treatment of its subject, closer to the existential, perceptual phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty than to the line of eidetic phenomenology descending through Edmund Husserl to Alfred Schutz, but with a touch of each. For a phenomenologist's appreciation of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as phenomenology, see Maurice Natanson, "Rhetoric and Counter-Espionage."

22. I suspect Agee modeled this scene, not wholly successfully, on the liturgical shaving scene in James Joyce's Ulysses . Indeed, the influence of Joyce is apparent throughout the text, from the use of such words as "deeplighted" to the aesthetic passion for documentation itself, which, as G. B. Shaw once remarked, is brought to a new level of intensity in Ulysses .

23. Agee sees himself as raging against "every deadly habit in the use of the senses and of language" including "every 'artistic' habit of distortion in the evaluation of experience" (241).

24. Agee directly comments that his text should most resemble a "set of tones rather less like those of narrative than of music," and in a note adds that its forms continue

may also resemble those of film (244). But these suggestions must be played against the numerous implicit references to drama—a list of dramatis personae at the beginning, sections entitled "Curtain Speech" and "Intermission," and so on—that occur throughout. Similarly, the section given subtitles from parts of the Catholic Mass, "Recessional," "Introit," etc., are Agee's way of again crossing discursive boundaries, trying both to suffuse the religious into the profane and to show the aesthetic dimension of spiritual experience.

25. Agee uses dialogue in the text, but rather sparingly. His explanation for this is typical of the politics of the text—he fears that the use of dialect will serve only to amuse his privileged readers and detract from the dignity of the speakers (328). This resistance to dialogue and scene construction is discussed perceptively by Ronald Weber, The Literature of Fact , 63.

26. Agee was very fond of the word "silence"; it occurs frequently in the text and is used in a variety of ways (sometimes, for example, it is an index to the unspeakable, at other times it is part of an effort to induce a contemplative mood, to so slow down the process of perception that it becomes palpable, more fully conscious). Open spaces in many of Evans's photos seem to function analogously as a kind of silence. For an interesting essay on the subject, though one I disagree with in many respects, see James A. Ward, "James Agee's Aesthetics of Silence."

27. Agee actually wrote a longer version of the "Work" chapter, one that more fully and with intentional monotony enacts the daily labors of the tenants. But this portion was edited out, apparently by the publisher for reasons of cost. See Victor Kramer, "The Complete 'Work' Chapter for James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ." The article includes the omitted portion.

28. As should be clear by now, I do not see Evans as the naive realist representer of the underprivileged that he is sometimes portrayed to be. A similarly narrow reading of him as modernist technician seems closer to the truth but, in the context of Praise at least, is not wholly apt. Thus when Sherry Levine brilliantly appropriates Evans's photographs as "her own" by simply rephotographing them in her series of photos entitled After Walker Evans , I read this gesture less as an attack on Evans than as an attack on what the critical establishment has made of his work, as well as part of a more general critique of patriarchal dominance in photography and criticism. My own appropriation here is perhaps less blatant, but no more innocent.

29. This was not an absolute aesthetic principle with Evans, nor was his avoidance of candid shots of the tenants (which in other work he often made quite spectacular use of), but rather seems to have grown out of a more or less implicit understanding he had with Agee that for this project a scrupulous attempt to avoid overt manipulation of context would be part of their self-discipline, their attempt to show the impossibility of unmediated, nonmanipulative representation. For a general discussion of Evans's work and his evolving aesthetic position in relation to other photographers, to the modernist and documentary traditions, and to the Farm Security Administration photo project, see Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs , and Maren Stange, " Symbols of Ideal Life": Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 , esp. 114-17, 129. For analyses of the politics of photographic documentation, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock , esp. part 3; Victor Bur- soft

gin, ed., Thinking Photography; and Martha Rosler, "In, around, and afterthoughts (on documentary photography)." Rosler's incisive critique also includes remarks on questionable recent journalistic attempts to "expose" Agee and Evans as victimizers that actually reinscribe the tenants as victims, esp. 68-69, 77. For an important analysis of the women photographers involved in the FSA and other New Deal projects, see Andrea Fisher, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women .

30. In a footnote (and one would need to add the self-polemical, or self-dialogical, footnote as another element of the text's polyphony), Agee adds that now (as the book is going to press a year after the initial writing) he thinks the "sin" is in ever questioning the rightness of seeing and telling of the beauty.

31. For a brilliant analysis of aesthetic privilege and underprivilege as it shapes class and other social structures, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement and Taste .

32. Throughout this section I am drawing on what one might call the "morte d'auteur" school of literary criticism, the most succinct statements of which occur in Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" and Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author."

33. This scene is also notable for the way in which Agee parodies his own style and most cherished beliefs. For example, he writes: "There is nothing that exists, or in imagination, that is not much more than beautiful, and a lot I care about that" (384).

34. I do not wish to be misunderstood here as romanticizing "face-to-faceness" per se. As symbolic interactionists like Erving Goffman have shown, such encounters are highly structured, highly mediated. If you like, think of face-to-face as a metaphor for a political relationship in which reciprocity becomes possible.

35. Two projects returning to the scene of Agee and Evans's crimes give us information about how the tenants received the text, and how their lives developed. See Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men": James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South , and "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—Revisited." Responses from the tenants and their offspring have ranged from outrage that they never got any royalties from the book (neither did Agee during his lifetime, but his executors or Evans could have remedied this after the book's late-blooming success), to sleepiness while reading, to Allie Mae Burroughs's [Annie Mae Gudger] comment: "What they wrote in the book was true." "Praise—Revisited," 14-15. See also comments from some of the tenants in Spears and Cassidy, eds., Agee .

36. The distinction I employ here between "book" and "text" is as a variation on the distinction between "work" and "text" made by Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others, a distinction between a putatively self-sufficient artifact and one caught in a web of intertextual and extratextual relations. See Barthes, "From Work to Text."

37. See Robert Coles, "James Agee's 'Famous Men' Seen Again," and Hersey, "Introduction: Agee," xxxvi-xxxviii. Agee and Evans at first wanted to live with at least one black tenant family, but they found that racism had created an unbridgeable gulf, a gulf symbolized in Praise by Agee's encounter with a young continue

African-American couple clearly frightened to be talking to a white man (this is one of several scenes in the text that contradict the claim made by some critics that Agee glosses over Southern racism in general and the racism of white tenants in particular). The lack in Praise of a full treatment of African-American tenants is more than compensated for by the superb (auto)biography of one black "'cropper," Nate Shaw [Ned Cobb], as told in Theodore Rosengarten's All God's Dangers . (Rosengarten, incidentally, went to Ned Cobb's house with a well-thumbed copy of Praise under his arm.) Cobb/Shaw's story includes other dimensions left out of Praise as well, particularly such elements of the "sonata's" second movement as the struggles of the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, formed by the Communist party but acting sometimes also in alliance with New Dealers. For a superb analysis of these efforts, see Robin D. G. Kelly, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression .

38. In typical Agee fashion it also suggests a self-ironic allusion to the drowsy state of the reader who has endured his massive, passionate extravagance for hundreds of pages. As Paula Rabinowitz has argued, there is also a cozily homoerotic element in this scene, one that I think suggests male-bonded homo- text uality that is one clear limit to the book. See Rabinowitz, "Voyeurism and Class Consciousness."