James Agee, Let Us Now Praise. . . : Stranging the Familiar
James Agee was writing during the 1930s, a terrible time for many Americans who depended on the earth for a living. Farmers were ruined, and families in the south turned to sharecropping in order to survive. It was a hard life—-harder than most of us could imagine. In fact, many northerners and wealthier Americans could not imagine it.
AGEE
Or, more precisely, they thought that they could imagine what utter poverty, ruin, and sadness was like for these people. However, Agee wanted to shake up this assumption. He wrote his documentary as a way of saying something, showing something, about poor southerners. On one hand, he is making a strange situation (poverty, ruin, the back-breaking labor of sharecropping) more familiar to readers. But on the other hand, he is actually disabusing people of the notion that they “really understand” or “really know” what this life is like (especially if they assume that they do understand/know). Agee is de-familiarizing readers to the lives of sharecroppers.
Why would Agee wish to de-familiarize readers to a subject, when we normally think of writing as doing the opposite?
How does Agee “strange” his subject?
- Agee works through a kind of “doubled telling.”(Like Benjamin’s “dialectical image”?)
- The nominal and the actual subject (x).
- He is writing a book, but he recognizes the limits of books. (11) It’s “art,” but he does not want anyone to think of it as art. (12)
- The farmers he writes about are constantly painted as divine. (88-89, 92) Why set up the expectation of a very difficult, complex, hard to understand topic–especially when he’s only talking about sharecroppers?
- His narrative voice in the preamble is sometimes adversarial, sometimes very apologetic, and sometimes very personal. How might this help him to actually accomplish his goals?
- See pages 5-6, for example. Why set this up as an obscene and terrifying piece of work? Why does Agee seem to begin with utter contempt for the project he is about to show us? (See page 9)
- He wants this work to hurt you, like listening to a stereo way too loud for your ears (12).
- How does Agee use collage/montage? What are the effects?
- See the quotes from a children’s textbook, for example, and the playbill of his “characters.” What are the effects of this collage in a non-fiction books about a serious issue?
- “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. . .” (10). Why?
- Montage of style and substance: pages 72-73
- Agee places himself in the story, the research, about these southern tenant farmers. The distance and emotion of the situation is read through him.
- “Late Sunday Morning.” (25, 28)
- “Near a Church.”
- How does Agee organize the book? Though he does not use traditional chapters, he does have specific divisions. What are the rhetorical effects of his strategy? What of the intermission, for example? (310-)
A doubled-telling can help to give some kind of depth in your exploration. You might be telling a “straight-forward” story of a place, event, happening, but you are also making a comment or observation about much larger issues or subjects. For example, I might use a narrative about my explorations of Columbia as a way of talking about the larger issue of home–what it is, how you make one, etc.
Other methods Agee uses:
- He “walks” you into the scene he is describing. (page 67, 143-155, 174-176)
- He writes his dialgogue into the description itself. Words of others free-float in the narrative. (page 25, 70, 71)
Note his take on “usability” where writing is concerned: page 313.
This week’s challenge: We are sometimes surface readers: we don’t think about the connections or bigger implications of what we’re reading. Is there a way for you to communicate the idea that your subject is bigger, more complex, stranger than what your readers might otherwise assume? As a writer, your job is to help readers see beyond the obvious–beyond what they assume or already think they know. Can you use any of Agee’s methods for doing such a thing?
