Biblical Incantations: Agee and Evans

By Matt Pearce

I’m still working on this week’s passage, but I already had a few thoughts — the first being that to read James Agee and enjoy the experience is to have overcome a summit of tics.

Agee's prose is, to paraphrase Robert Lowell, a "monotony of the sublime." The natural proportion of things seems to have been thrown out of whack; details of the smallest sort are blown up to near-hysterical significance. Each little thing seems electrified with mortal urgency and has become shocking to the touch.

Then there’s Agee's paralyzing self-consciousness, on display from the beginning in a throat-clearing that spans dozens of pages. Agee seems paranoid about not fully representing his subjects, whom he holds in an incantatory awe of Biblical inflection:

“A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children: First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children: Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents: This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars: It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end...”

And they begat, and begat, and begat.

As we go on, his frenzied deference is reminiscent of the Book of Numbers, where Moses’ men survey the foreign tribes of Canaan and return humbled:

“...The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

Walker Evans’ photos seem to take on a similarly intense focus. The close crop and the harsh conditions combine for a kind of claustrophobia. The subjects are rarely given a backdrop that suggests any kind of space. We can extract any number of interpretations for this, but one metaphor is easy to reach: these people are trapped in their lives.