Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Cultural History ADM
Brown 8 December 1993
Transcript of Reality:
Reality and Narative in
Kirkland’s A New Home — Who’ll Follow
and Agee’s Let us Now Praise Famous Men
To the modern editor William Osborne, Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home — Who’ll Follow is an
epochal document in American sociology. It marks a departure from the romantic travelogues
of years past in which reality was touched up with flowery language and a great deal of au
thorial invention. Kirkland, argues Osborne, tenuously enters into the realm of realism.
Kirkland commits herself to providing a detailed and accurate picture of the Michigan frontier.
But she discovers that the groundbreaking of realism is not quite so simple as she imagined.
When an author dedicates herself to scrupulous detail, she risks not only boring the reader, but
also leaving out seemingly insignificant, but nonetheless significant and real, particulars. It is
difficult to observe every occurrence, every character, every object, and impossible to record
each of these. This is the barrier she would run into were she to keep to a straight path through
extreme realism. Instead, she compensates for her inability to observe and remember everything
by imagining things. But rather than invent exciting episodes of snake bites and cougar sitings,
Kirkland dresses up the commonplace with invention. Perhaps unfortunately for the reader, she
neglects to mention exactly what is real, and what artifice, so her audience probably is left
believing more, rather than less, of what she writes. It is a peculiar, if prototypical, mode of
realism that develops over the years into an almost radical realism of the early twentieth century
that seeks to document each and every detail of a given experience, and somehow reify it
through the pages of the book. A chief exponent of this method, James Agee, attempts to
chronicle his time with poor tenant farmers in Alabama.
In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee dispenses with Kirkland’s method of ethnog
raphy in favor of a new, experimental one. His narrative is a fusion of sociology, philosophy,
philology, and autobiography, that means to capture the universe of details surrounding the
three tenant families. Where other sociologists might leave the families lifeless, or write them off
as inferior, Agee explores the bleak lives of the farmers and uses his words and extreme
attention to minutia to “make an opening in the darkness...as nothing else can” (A, 232). He
makes an effort to record their lives with such precision, the farmers will assume an almost
sublime status. He is, however, aware of his limitations as a single pair of eyes, as a single voice,
but aims to compensate for this with careful consideration of each person or object he en
counters. It is as though Agee hopes that by being nearly exhaustive in his descriptions, he will
translate seamlessly the lives of his farmers into the pages of his book. If he is successful, Agee
would create a perfect copy of the tenant farmers who, without his narrative, would never have
existed for anyone but themselves. As soon as something happens to the farmers, it is gone,
surviving only in Agee’s mind. We would never know the Gudgers, the Ricketts, and the Woods
without Agee’s text. They are the trees in the forest, falling.
Both works investigate a certain population Americans at large widely considered in
ferior and “backwoods,” and both authors are supported by relative wealth and education.
Their narratives mark a departure from precedent, and their initial goals begin similarly. Agee
and Kirkland hope to capture in words (and more important, convey to their readers) what it is
like to be either a frontiersman or a tenant farmer. For Kirkland, she hopes her book will be “an
unimpeachable transcript of reality” (Kirkland, 11), while Agee hopes that his “analysis be
exhaustive” (Agee, xlvi). To succeed in this project both must confront the troubling issue of
reality. How much reality is too much? Too little? What role does the author play in adding
events to complete the picture of reality? In short, what is reality? These questions haunt both
authors (especially Agee) through both their narratives, and help to illustrate some fascinating
problems in the enterprise of realism and historical documentation. Agee is considerably more
selfaware, and therefore more plagued by his role as author. He spends page after page
fighting with himself over his role in the reality of his tenant farmers. Kirkland, on the other
hand, is more ready to posit “some general idea” (K, 220) to her audience back east. But both
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must engage in a creation and illustration of reality that will build communicable images of
southern tenantry or the Western frontier. The construction of these images is an exercise in
history in which both texts serve, in the end, as subjective attempts at one form of the truth.
As Osborne points out, Kirkland book is “significant to the development of American
Realism” (K, 15), but as a prototype, her work pursues realism in fits and starts. In the preface to
Forest Life, Kirkland identifies her journalistic philosophy. When placed against Agee’s, it
appears subjective and, one might object, unreliable, especially for a book cloaked in the rubric
of American realism. It as though Kirkland enters her project with an impatience, a reluctance to
offer praise or dedication to the frontiersmen. Where Agee ignores his readers’ attention span
(“If I bore you, then that is that”), Kirkland seems more concerned with pleasing her readers
than with painting an accurate, thorough picture of her subjects. “I will throw myself on the
indulgence of the reader, hoping he will allow me to say my say in my own fashion, and be
content to gather what is worth having...” (K, 11). A mature realist probably would not offer the
reader such an escape from the commonplace. In his mind, every detail is “worth having” and
necessary to “imparting a correct general idea” (K, 11). By distinguishing between worth having
and not, Kirkland hints that she will glean the good from the bad before writing home. In A
New Home, she further delineates her strategy. “[W]hatever is quite unnatural, or absolutely
incredible...is to be received as literally true. It is only in the most common place parts...that I
have any leasingmaking to do” (K, Pref.). In other words, whatever happens that interests her
makes the cut, whatever doesn’t, she deletes and imagines a suitable replacement. Although her
realism is innovative, it is far from pure.
Despite his unceasing valorization of reality and “what is,” Agee is reluctant to conclude
that what he writes is the one and only truth. But Agee believe himself closer to the truth than
he does his predecessors, as he continually questions the efficacy of any book in capturing the
totality of an experience. What he seems to desire is a new narrative, a new method of seeking
the truth, but he is uncertain of the exact nature of this innovation. He tells of his confusion, of
his uncertainty, in writing. Struggling to change his pen into a camera, Agee yearns to create a
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holistic, unblinking copy of the tenant farmers’ existence. Eventually, he realizes he is doomed
to failure, but this does not prevent him from pushing forward, in search of an original narrative
process. In the end, Agee’s selfconscious, imagebased and multifaceted text in large part
abandons Kirkland’s modern ethnographic technique and acts as a tenuous, but distinct,
prototype of postmodern ethnography.1
Interestingly, Kirkland wavers between embracing and eschewing her own
predecessors. This quandary suggests the difficulty of any groundbreaking enterprise, in which
one must acknowledge how far the predecessors have carried her, but realizing it is time to
originate an undertaking of one’s own. Agee, for his own part, would not be possible without
Kirkland, but his narrative retains only her theoretical devotion to realism. Kirkland seems to
play what modern pundits call “the expectations game.” She is reminiscent of a presidential
candidate downplaying his ability to debate as she defers to the past: “I can only wish, like
other modest chroniclers, that so fertile a theme had fallen into worthier hands” (K, 34). She
realizes much later, however, that she has “departed from all rule and precedent in these
wandering sketches” (K, 220). Her departure is evident in her traditionbreaking “genius for
digression” (K, 220) and her professed attempts to provide “a veracious history of actual
occurrences, and unvarnished transcript of real characters, and an impartial record of everyday
forms of speech” (K, 33).
Agee’s use of nontraditional narrative and Walker Evans’ photography is an attempt to
reify the notion of “tenant farmer” for his audience. Underlying the whole of Agee’s text seems
to be the a fear that the general bourgeois readership does not care about, or at least does not
understand, the plight of the southern American tenant farmer. (Oddly, Kirkland often appears
to take this disinterest in her frontier neighbors.) By dedicating an entire volume (and proposing
two others) to these people, Agee puts them squarely in the spotlight, where his readership
1I believe that Kirkland’s is a prototypical “modern” ethnographic technique, while Agee’s is
prototypically “postmodern,” and that the way in which each handles reality is closely related to these
designations. Because the discussion is so detailed, this paper aims merely at discussing the innovative
narrative and the issue of reality as employed in Kirkland and Agee, rather than detail the nature of their
respective modernity and postmodernity.
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cannot help but notice. But in so doing, Agee risks squashing the farmers into onedimension, or
convoluting them with artificial characteristics. Agee believes religiously that the best way,
perhaps the only way to avoid this with Gudger, for example, is to copy him exactly, to be “as
faithful as possible to Gudger as [Agee] know[s] him” (A, 239).
Remaining true to his own perception is the way to reify Gudger for his readership. “It
is my business,” he writes, “to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate
him into some invented, literary imitation of a human being” [emphasis added] (A, 240). The
literary reproduction of the families and the setting, Agee hopes, is to be so exact it would to
deconstruct the ancient divides between author, narrator, subject, and audience. Through his
writing, Agee’s audience will know the tenants, they will read Famous Men just as Agee implores
his readers to listen to Beethoven: “You are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it” (A,
16).2 The readers will be inside the farmers and of them. In his book, Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson, discusses how a readership can be taken in by
such perfect likenesses, or simulacra, in “a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for
pseudoevents and ‘spectacles’.” (Jameson, 74). In postmodern parlance, a simulacrum is “an
identical copy for which no original ever existed” (Jameson, 74). Agee’s mission, then, goes
beyond simple mimetics, it is an attempt at a simulacrum.
Kirkland makes no such attempt. Her work is relatively selfsatisfied and complacent.
It has few, if any, pretenses of being anything other than a simple, barebones travelogues. It is
the modern editor, after all, and not Kirkland herself who praises the book as a watershed
document. She sees it as a failure. Kirkland tells the reader she has departed from the authors of
the past, but does not necessarily regard that as a virtue. She implies she wishes to stay closer to
tradition, to take an assignment for which she is better suited. Unwilling to join Crevecoeur,
Custine, Mitford, and other protoethnographers, she would rather turn the job over to someone
else: “History is not my forte. I give up the attempt in despair, and lower my ambition to the
2Agee, much later in the work, likens his text to music, rather than other books. “[T]he book as a whole
will have a form and set of tones rather less like those of narrative than like those of music.” (244)
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collection of scattered materials for the use of the future compiler of Montacutian annals” (K,
220). Her admission of defeat is not as resounding as Agee’s (which occurs in the middle of his
book), but it does display the anxiety which accompanies an abandonment of precedent. The
audience may measure her success by the standards she posits early in the text. Any attempt to
gauge her success by determining whether she creates a simulacra (as Agee tries) is doomed to
fail, since she did not operate on those terms. She didn’t intend to manufacture a perfect
likeness; her goal was “a general idea.” She asks the reader to “expect nothing beyond a
meandering recital of commonplace occurrences — mere gossip about everyday people, little
enhanced in value by any fancy of the author” (33). Her intention is strangely paradoxical,
considering her preface allows for “leasingmaking” when she discusses the commonplace.
But, on her own terms, she meanders and gossips rather well, though some mystery surrounds
whether she follows through on her promise not to use “the glowing pencil of fancy” (36). The
mystery stems from her refusal to note which anecdotes she fabricates, and which she merely
records. The mystery aids in suspending the reader’s disbelief, nonetheless, and whatever is
fiction falls into the category of mimetics.
Agee’s try for simulacra, a kind of hypermimetics, is much more difficult to analyze.
The issues involved are exponentially more complex, and often delve much further into the ab
stract than Kirkland could ever have anticipated. But Agee’s relentless selfinterrogation pro
vides a great quantity of material from which to draw evidence. His concern of doing justice to
his subjects — that he not be considered a “spy” or a “traitor” (A, 100101) — motivates him to
such a degree, he almost moves the reader to question the whole of Western literature. He as
sures the reader that if he could fully the capture the experience of the tenant farmers, we “could
not bear to live.” That is a powerful statement, far stronger than anything Kirkland mentions,
and it also escalates the discussion of the part of the author and the literature in the reader’s life.
How far should it go? Agee wonders. Is it in his power to make the word as effective as a piece
of the body torn out by the roots? These questions, coupled with his confrontational approach to
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the reader pushes the limit of ethnographic literature. Agee doesn’t just abandon Kirkland. He
buries her.
The attempt begs at least two questions. First, on what level has the original of the
farmers never existed? And second, has Agee escaped mere imitation of his farms and farmers?
The first question operates on the assumption that Agee is striving for simulacra, rather than the
base imitation of mimetics. (His astonishing depth of presumably nonfictive detail and
repeated admonitions to the reader about the nature of his work are evidence of his attempt.) By
definition (above), simulacra can have no originals. The quick objection is, these farmers lived,
these houses stood, these events happened, and all served as Agee’s originals. But closer
consideration of the issue reveals several problems with that objection. If we embrace un
abashed skepticism, a fairly common philosophical approach in Agee’s shaken times, we might
argue that those farmers, houses, and events, existed only for the farmers and their observers,
Agee and Evans. As Agee rightly points out, his words are “simply an effort to...tell of a thing
which happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing” (A, 246). That is to
say, Agee “perceives” (to use his oftrepeated word) that these things happened, but is fully
aware that they never happen to his audience until they read his printed recollections. His
audience constitutes the new reality into which Agee throws the farmers. That reality is far from
the tenants’. Agee himself employs a skepticism typical of his lonely modernism, as he wonders
dejectedly, “Do we really exist at all?” (A, 53). With Agee evincing such skepticism, it is
certainly possible to argue that beyond the small circle in Alabama, the original of his
simulacrum did not really exist at all.
That conclusion helps to establish the answer to the second question of whether Agee
succeeds in more than simple imitation of his subject. Does he achieve a perfect simulacrum?
The answer seems to be no, but he comes remarkably close. To begin with, Agee must go
beyond the romantic / modernist approach to suspend disbelief. He must remove any disbelief
whatsoever. The reader must by wholesale into Agee’s account, she must believe the spectacles
and the events, and accept Agee’s recollections as reality. In furtherance of his creating a new
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reality for his readers, he continually equates his text with reality, but is careful to almost always
include talk of his “perception.”
This softening of tone is crucial to the work’s status as prototypical postmodern ethnog
raphy. At the same time as convincing his audience of his words’ reality, he must not speak as
though he has the only truth to tell. Where Kirkland and the moderns would write univocally as
though the truth were monolithic, Agee quickly and often reminds the reader of his limitations,
his inability to play an omniscient God. He is unwilling to describe people different from
himself as “savages,” that telltale buzzword of older ethnography (K, 62), or to condescend by
“making a sort of apology for the foibles of [his] rustic friends” as Kirkland does (K, 230). He is
at once selfobsessed and humble: “I might say for the sake of clear definition, and indication of
limits, that I am only human” (A, 11). Agee as much says, he is only a human, a single human,
since he “can tell you...only what [he] saw” (A, 12). He most succinctly addresses the book’s
point of view when he writes, “I would tell you, at all leisure, and in all detail, whatever there is
to tell: of where I am; of what I perceive” (A, 52).
Agee’s flexible perception allows him a flexible narration that gives suitable attention to
many, if not all, of the elements of tenantry. There is little use of “the glowing pencil of fancy”
or emending of the commonplace. He lends voice to the voiceless, the poor wives and women
who participate in the drudgery of everyday life. Where Kirkland is careful always to separate
her voice from the frontier vernacular (“Don’t your old man smoke?” “No, indeed. I should
hope he never would” 91), Agee conflates his voice with that of his surroundings, he is
becoming the farm. Without being overbearing, he uses a variation of freeanddirect discourse
to emulate the child thinking, “These are women, I am a woman, I am not a child any more, I am
undressing with women, and this is how women are, and how they talk” (A, 72). In the same
way, the discourse, unbroken, follows the evening valedictions as the family goes off to sleep:
“Good night Louise; good night George; night, Immer; night Annie Mae...night; good night,
good night:” (A, 73). Later, the narration shifts to one of the farm women commenting at length
on various other tenants. The firstperson narrator commingles with Agee, and it is unclear in
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the text precisely who is saying what.3 At the same time he obscures the identity of the narrator,
Agee clouds the secondperson as well, perhaps meaning to again cloud the divide between
reader and subject: “I made her such a pretty dress and she wore it once, and she never wore it
away from home again: Oh, thank God not one of you knows how everyone snickers at your
father” (A, 79).4
Agee similarly brings the reader into the text when he leads the reader from the
Gudgers’ house to the Ricketts’. His secondperson imperative grabs the reader by the hand and
carries her “very quietly down the open hall that divides the house, past the bedroom door, and
the dog that sleeps outside it....” (A, 75). This detailed verbal mapping helps the reader
construct an image of the farmers’ surroundings and, perhaps to Agee’s mind, prompts the
reader to unite with him and the farmers. This technique appears in another protopostmodern
text that appeared twenty years earlier. James Joyce’s Ulysses guides the reader through Dublin
with a similar accuracy, care for particularity, and hodgepodge narrative voice as Agee’s work.
Joyce’s influence appears elsewhere in Famous Men when Agee opens his chapter “Shelter” with
the epigram, “I will go unto the altar of God.” The phrase derives from Psalms and the Catholic
Mass, but also appears in the first few sentences of Ulysses and is repeated occasionally
throughout the novel, as it does in Agee. Agee acknowledges Joyce once more when he laments
the difficulty of exhausting the details: “It took a great artist seven years to record nineteen
hours and to wring them anywhere near dry. Figure it out for yourself; this lasted several
weeks, not nineteen hours. I take what I am trying to do here seriously , but there are other
pieces of work I want still more to do” (A, 242). The sentiment echoes Kirkland’s worry that “if
[she] should attempt to set down half [her] recollections...[she] should never get on with [her]
life” (57). She eventually ends the project and later moves back to New York and works on other
projects, but Agee’s efforts just to publish his book take several more years.
3This raises some postmodern concerns with the Self and the Other, or Identity and Alterity, of
which Agee may have had some conception, but which will not be examined at length here.
4I can’t help but think that if Kirkland were present, she would snicker at the father.
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His method of narration is part of a larger scheme of supplying as much detail as possi
ble about the families. Agee seems to feel that the more “real” details he provides, the more
believable, the more perfect his story will be. By extension, he would seem to maintain that in
finite detail brings infinite believability. Trying for the perfect simulacrum, Agee begins his
work with a zeal almost as large as the scope of his project. With language fit to inaugurate an
original undertaking, a mission, he writes in his Preface, “it is intended that this record and
analysis be exhaustive with no detail, however trivial it may seem, left untouched, no relevancy
avoided, which lies within the power of remembrance to maintain, of the intelligence to
perceive, and of the spirit to persist in” (emphasis added, xlvi). This contrasts with Kirkland’s
refusal to become too caught up in the frontier, to deal only with “what is worth having” (K, 5).
Agee’s hope to exhaust the particulars of the families is evidenced in his painstaking description
of seemingly every item in every room of every house. His outline of the chapter “Shelter”
illustrates his devotion to systematic exploration and textual explosion of the Gudger house. He
goes on to describe the altar, the tabernacle, the fireplace, the mantel, the closet, the beds, the
table, the lamp, and general information about each room (A, 123). Boring the reader is little
concern of his — “If I bore you, that is that” (A, 10) — so he undertakes the task of exhausting
the details with energy and resolve. Somewhere along the way, however, Agee seems to have
realized the impossibility of encompassing the totality of his experience, and he recants his
prefatory commitment repeatedly, in effect admitting defeat. “I am under no illusion that I am
wringing this experience dry,” (A, 242) he writes. But he remains convinced of the nobility of his
purpose, and seems uncertain how to proceed. In a streamofconsciousness rant, perhaps
unprecedented in ethnography, Agee argues
that each of you is that which he is; that particularities, and matters ordinary
and obvious, are exactly themselves beyond designation of words, are the mem
bers of your sum total...: nevertheless to name these things and fail to yield their
stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems im
pudent, seems traitorous in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible:
yet in withholdings of specification I could betray you still worse (A, 100101).
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This dedication to his subjects and to his audience is remarkable, and appears to be the product
of some deep soulsearching in which the tempestuous Agee came to terms with the essential
weaknesses of his craft and of his perception. To be sure, he has overrun the bounds of modern
mimetics, but his simulacra has failed to achieve a brilliant perfection — his perception is be
yond the designation of words. His attempt to translate the lives of the farmers into words has
left them decontextualized. This leaves open the question of whether any written work, no
matter how scrupulously documented, can substitute for “real” life. He immediately follows
this realization with a remarkably selfconscious discussion of “how [he] would wish this ac
count might be constructed” (A, 101).
Dissatisfied with words as a medium of conveying hardship and joy, “ruin or wonder”
(A, 101), Agee muses over other means of communication. Central to his dissatisfaction with
books is his strong belief in the power of the camera as imagemaker and imagepreserver. His
choice of Walker Evans, over a sentimentalist photographer, underscores Agee’s desire to por
tray the families realistically. Evans’ photographs certainly are straightforward and unemo
tional, but they do not offer the “absolute, dry truth” of the farming experience Agee believes
they do. The planning, the singleperspective, the focus, the posing of photographs is an effec
tive and perhaps more permanent method of capturing a scene and creating an image, but even
the truth of photographs is not absolute. Agee in many ways is right to say that “it is [his]
business to show how through every instant of every day of every year of [a farmer’s] existence
alive he is...bombarded, pierced, destroyed” (A, 110) by naming particularities, but he may be
overly optimistic if he believes this business — mere words and photographs — will give his
audience any real idea of how these farmers suffer. Having read the book and seen the pho
tographs, his audience carries only a likeness of the pain, and feels no extended consequence, re
gardless of how close to reality Evans and Agee come. Agee’s declaration that the book “was
written for all those who have a soft place...for the laughter and tears in poverty viewed at a
distance” (A, 14) precisely locates a fundamental fault with his project. Despite all his efforts to
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the contrary, there still remains an impassable gap between the suffering farmers and the arm
chair audience.
The failure to reach the audience is more pronounced in A New Home, in which
Kirkland’s sympathies continuously seem to lie with her Eastern friends instead of her Michigan
neighbors. The gap for Kirkland is between her and the frontiersmen, not between her and her
readers. Her book, one might argue, often appears to have been written for all those with a soft
spot in their heart for the laughter, without the tears, in poverty viewed at a distance. Worse
still, the laughter most likely will be a condescending one, whether or not Kirkland intended it.
Her portrayal of the difficulties of frontier life for the actual frontiersman pales in comparison to
her own grief: “I sat down in the corner and cried” (46); “I do not remember experiencing...a
sense of more complete uncomfortableness than was my lot” (70); And finally the almost absurd
whine, “This state of things most appalled me at first...but...I find no difficulty now in getting
such [household] aid as I desire” from maids (72).
Regardless of this distance such feelings bridge or expand, the reader plays a key part in
determining the best medium for such ideas, especially for Agee. Despite his disinterest in
whether the reader is bored, Agee must concern himself with the involvement of his audience in
the work. He begins the work by hinting at his discontent with the book as medium, but he
engages the reader and wrests much of the burden onto her. “This is a book only by necessity.
More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally in
volved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (A, xlviii). The latter statement is es
pecially strong when one realizes its context is a nonfiction, ethnographic work. Such a senti
ment in part suggests a naive faith in the strength of the word, but it does much to destroy the
barrier between narrator, subject, and audience, a key to the postmodern narrative. At the same
time, Agee seems concerned about the status of his readers, and whether they are appropriate to
his medium and message. There is no doubt he expects his work to elicit some definite reaction
from his readers, and his litany comes across almost as an attempt to give the reader a voice in
the workings of the text and the manufacture of the whole image. He is confrontational in his
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initial approach, demanding “Who are you who will read these words and study these
photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right
do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?” (A, 10).
Agee asks these questions of his readers because he is at least somewhat afraid of com
modifying his subjects, whom he grew to love and value as living individuals. He fears that in
his effort to preserve the image of them by casting a simulacrum in the form of a book, he will
reduce them to commercial objects, thereby dehumanizing them and rendering them flat.
Jameson discusses this phenomenon in his Postmodernism, in which he describes the famous
subjects of Andy Warhol “who — like Marilyn Monroe — are themselves commodified and
transformed into their own images” (Jameson, 71). This view gives Agee’s title a dark irony that
befits an almost epic work about a handful of poor tenant farmers. Agee expresses his fear of
commodification when he realizes the lives of his farmers “are now being looked into by
[readers], who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book” (A, 13). Agee’s feel
ing seems an extension of his discomfort over being seen as “monstrously alien human beings”
“spying” on the farmers.
There seems little doubt that among Kirkland’s aims is to commodify the frontiersmen.
They are an exotic, if undereducated, species, and Kirkland capitalizes on her
“uncomfortableness” as she spends time with them. Her chapters, published in a host of maga
zines and journals, likely drew her a modest income, while protecting her from the chides of
Easterners who may have felt they had lost Caroline to the lowbrows. Predictably, many fron
tiersmen did not react favorably toward Kirkland, and even her editor Osborne admits
“Kirkland’s sketches did not make her popular with some of the neighbors” (20). This is exactly
the kind of reaction of which Agee was terrified. His fear pushed him to integrate as fully as
possible with the farmers, to adopt their vernacular and their customs. Like his book, he may
not have been a perfect likeness, but he came as near as possible.
Early in the work, Agee half injest decides on what might be the best, albeit an unac
ceptable, means of telling the farmers’ story. It would be an effort at unadulterated material
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history, that would not require the translation from reality to simulacrum, in which something,
perhaps everything, is invariably lost. Instead, it would be, to Agee at least, pure. He hopes to
escape “the breakdown of identification of word and object” (A, 237). “I’d do no writing at all
here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of
earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excre
ment....A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point” (A, 13). With the
exception of the photographs, Agee’s relics of tenantry truly might capture the suffering and de
struction of the lives, but the relationship between these objects and the thoughts which ac
company them — between the signifier and the signified — is too unpredictable. Rather than
interpret the records of speech as redolent of suffering, an audience member may understand it
as Kirkland’s might have, as a joke or an absurdity.
This leaves both authors in a difficult, if not impossible, situation. Kirkland resigns
herself to accidentally breaking tradition and ignores many of the issues contained in that de
parture. Her contribution, by her own admission, is meandering gossip about the frontier. But,
her “honest realism” (K, 5) is a major innovation in ethnography, without which Famous Men
would not have been possible. Unfortunately for Kirkland’s successor, Agee, his own
innovation collapses upon itself. He realizes he cannot verbally communicate the pain of the
farmers, but neither can he use photos or objects to elicit predictable and desirable responses.
He has abandoned many precedents of modern ethnography, but is caught struggling to scribble
down infinite details in a finite book. All the while, he is aware that he is engaged in an
“experiment” (A, xlvii), a search for “new forms” (A, 245) of art and knowledge that revolve
around images and are partly responsible for the birth of the postmodern. In the end, he cannot
perfectly pull the farmers from their context and transplant them in language. But his efforts at
giving voice to the silent, being selfconscious, offering a total depiction of an experience and a
people, and manipulating and redefining narrative — goals that Kirkland only halfpursued —
are major steps toward a postmodern ethnography. Famous Men is certainly a prototype for a
technique which, fifty years later, has yet to find a consistent and widely accepted definition.
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The next development in ethnography will no doubt leave behind Agee, just as he did Kirkland,
but it almost certainly will not escape many of the problems which have plagued the field since
Kirkland’s time and before.
5720 words
Sources
Agee, James. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Joyce, James. Ulysses.
Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home —Who’ll Follow.
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