Pointing a camera at the poor, the isolated and the disenfranchised is not a journalistic practice that has gone out of favor. Reading Calvin Trillin's "A Stranger with a Camera" from 1969 reminded me of a recent 20/20 segment "Children of the Mountain" in which Diane Sawyer and her crew "investigate" the lives of the various dentally-challenged, drug-dealing, food stamp-living, unemployed people of Appalachia.
Being from Kentucky supposedly gave Sawyer an "insider's" point of view that was sympathetic and compassionate. Instead, as in so many other instances of this kind of journalism, the people of Appalachia are treated like subjects and types, not as individuals.
No wonder people in this part of the country greet strangers pointing cameras at them with shotguns.
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Excellent observations. Pay close attention, as I am sure you will, how Agee and Evans handle this issue. The movie, STRANGER WITH A CAMERA, will provide complexity to the issue of subject-observer, from the point of view of a documentation from Kentucky.
ReplyDeleteBH
I took the advice for the “serious reader,” and only went back to read the latter part of the preface after reading the first hundred pages of the book. It confirmed what I had been thinking.
ReplyDeleteTo put it one way, what I had been thinking was this: Let Us Now Praise Men was really two books. It was, we are told, the story of three families of tenant farmers in Depression-era Alabama. This story is arguably also about the journalist and photographer hired by a New York magazine to go down and write the story about them. But the book was also—and I would argue, more so—a story about broader, more theoretical and ethereal concerns. It was about journalism, and photography…and gazing, and voyeurism…and about the city and backwoods…and the educated middle-class and “po’ folk”…and about the whole enterprise of writing and reality…One could say that James Agee’s writing is a counterpart to Walker Evan’s photography. One might also say that Agee’s principle subject as a writer was photography.
Thus I was struck by the contrast between the brief narrative sections about the tenant farmers, and the longer sections of prose-poetry, in which Agee broods over the peculiar qualities of silence in an Alabama night, or about the oleaginous oil in a lamp, or of the interplay of a “blond, fat and craven rooster,” a whippoorwill, trembling leaves and other sounds of a pre-dawn hour.
There are questions that, due to the very nature of consciousness, stalk us throughout our lives. Every time a writer faces a blank page, he must grapple, on one level or another with them: What is the meaning of life, and what is the meaning of death? Where is an individual’s place in a seemingly limitless and timeless universe? What is the nature of reality? Is there a big picture, or just the refractions through a kaleidoscope, reflections on shards of broken glass? What is the nature of truth?
And beyond all the external questions, there are the internal ones: Who am I? What do I remember? What do I want? What do I feel? I am reminded of Kafka’s remark that “literature is an axe to break the frozen sea inside of us.”
I got the impression that Agee was trying to take all this on at once, and his preface more or less confirms that. He seems to be trying to whip up clumps of the ineffable with great gusts of eloquence, and by expressing this matter and anti-matter, capture the ectoplasm in his hands.
But is it at the end of his film The African Queen, when the protagonists finally have their hands on what they think is a chest full of gold, and when they open the chest, gold dust scatters everywhere in a strong wind? ...Nope, sorry, it’s Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Anyway, that was the impression that much of these sections left me with—dust in the wind. I spent a good deal of time puzzling over them, frustrated and confused.
On the other hand, I understand what he was trying to do. As he points out, “In a novel, a house or person has his meaning, his existence, entirely through the writer. Here, a house or a person has only the most limited of his meaning through me: his true meaning is much huger. It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery and dignity are in this fact.”
It follows from this argument that to adopt a more accessible, narrative style to descriptions of tenant farmers in Depression-era Alabama, for example, may render the subject more accessible, but it would also be exploitative. Indeed, Agee clearly feels that if he had approached this in the conventional way that Fortune magazine may have been hoping for, he would have been collaborating in something odious, just by accepting his role as journalist in such an endeavour.
I understand this, and there is great truth to this argument. Nevertheless, I am a strong believer in narrative. Indeed, I think Agee accomplishes a great deal more with the shorter pieces of narrative contained in this work than he does with his flights of prose poetry. In fact, I think that he could have worked his way out of the entire conundrum through a traditional narrative, had he been willing to trust it.
I like your ending comment. I will forward it to my friend and Agee scholar Jason Arthur and see what he thinks of your idea.
ReplyDeleteBH
Isn’t journalism about opening a window to people who might not have access to a story otherwise? Then what’s the whole point? I really think that Diane Sawyer did a great job after watching the documentary of the Appalachian people, I as a newcomer learned a lot from how poverty is not only an issue in developing world. I think she told stories of people took the audience to their homes and introduced us to great people who just happen to be drained by the misfortunes that poverty brings. I have to commend Julien’s analysis on Agee’s writing . It is well written and I agree with most of his points, especially about how he said sometimes Agee gets lost in finding himself and gets carried away with his “prose-poetry”. What really comes to my mind is if Agee goes on saying that he never intended to hurt or offend anyone and he was writing to tell their stories, he obviously didn’t write it in a way any of the people who were in his book could understand what he was talking about even if they would have had access to the book. I’m not saying he should go ahead and “dumb- down ” the book with “50 - cent words” but it also shows of his hunger for recognition.
ReplyDeleteFrom The Vulnerable Observer by Ruth Behar:
ReplyDelete"Nothing is stranger than this business of humans observing other humans in order to write about them. James Agee, sent by Fortune magazine on a mission to bring back an enticing story about dirt-poor farmers in the American South during the Depression, furiously wished he could tear up a clump of earth with a hoe and put that on the page and publish it.
Instead, he wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a troubled meditation about his fear of exploiting the lives of southern tenant farmers, which forms part of the very account in which he was trying, with an exaggerated sense of propriety and shame, to describe the contours of those same lives."