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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Rachel Carson & Silent Spring
By Matt Pearce
Our perception of man and nature colliding is mostly iconographic and kind of hegemonistic. Something is always being dominated by a greater apocalyptic force. Houses are always getting flattened by mudslides, mountains of salmon are seen swung around in a giant net.
These things are sensational and make for great images. They inspire people to action.
So how, then, do you write about a disaster whose root causes are molecular? And in a time when prevailing scientific wisdom was seemingly sacrosanct?
Carson’s use of lyricism — metaphor, essentially — is the natural tool for jumping from place to place, from zoom to zoom; a wide-angle telescope with a perfectly-adjustible aperture capable of capturing her argument for nature’s — and man’s — interconnectivity.
I think it’s important to point out the successes of the written word when we encounter them. Nature is a beautiful thing, but as much as we’d love to luxuriate in its visual largesse, a physical camera can’t tell all its stories.
DDT: what is it, exactly? What does it do when it enters an organism? How does it affect an insect, a waterway, a township? These are the questions a crusading writer has to answer, and answer in ways that can engage the people who most need to be engaged.
On a related note, you have to be curious about who will be Carson’s heir for our generation, and what values they’ll challenge. We look back with pride on our successful muckraker journalists who, stripped of the context of history, seem to don great cloaks of justice.
But how were they treated in their day? As activists. Rabble-rousers, challenging the system.
This seems to conflict, slightly, with some of our inculcated values as journalists: impartiality, fairness, not becoming the story. I wonder how much the achievement of success affects questions of these journalists’ “impartiality,” and how much that empowers us as journalists to pursue causes we know are just.
Because what if we’re found in the wrong? We would have violated some of our most hallowed professional values.
I suppose muckraking journalism is kind in that its successes are much better remembered than its failures. It makes me also wonder whether our attempts at impartiality aren’t also hedges against the changing mores of history.
Nonetheless, Rachel Carson was right, and so we salute her. She had the facts on her side, and she delivered them with the grace of a litterateur. Given her success, and the success of the authors we’ve read before, it’s hard to argue against journalists taking a few more chances and making a few more stands.
Our perception of man and nature colliding is mostly iconographic and kind of hegemonistic. Something is always being dominated by a greater apocalyptic force. Houses are always getting flattened by mudslides, mountains of salmon are seen swung around in a giant net.
These things are sensational and make for great images. They inspire people to action.
So how, then, do you write about a disaster whose root causes are molecular? And in a time when prevailing scientific wisdom was seemingly sacrosanct?
Carson’s use of lyricism — metaphor, essentially — is the natural tool for jumping from place to place, from zoom to zoom; a wide-angle telescope with a perfectly-adjustible aperture capable of capturing her argument for nature’s — and man’s — interconnectivity.
I think it’s important to point out the successes of the written word when we encounter them. Nature is a beautiful thing, but as much as we’d love to luxuriate in its visual largesse, a physical camera can’t tell all its stories.
DDT: what is it, exactly? What does it do when it enters an organism? How does it affect an insect, a waterway, a township? These are the questions a crusading writer has to answer, and answer in ways that can engage the people who most need to be engaged.
On a related note, you have to be curious about who will be Carson’s heir for our generation, and what values they’ll challenge. We look back with pride on our successful muckraker journalists who, stripped of the context of history, seem to don great cloaks of justice.
But how were they treated in their day? As activists. Rabble-rousers, challenging the system.
This seems to conflict, slightly, with some of our inculcated values as journalists: impartiality, fairness, not becoming the story. I wonder how much the achievement of success affects questions of these journalists’ “impartiality,” and how much that empowers us as journalists to pursue causes we know are just.
Because what if we’re found in the wrong? We would have violated some of our most hallowed professional values.
I suppose muckraking journalism is kind in that its successes are much better remembered than its failures. It makes me also wonder whether our attempts at impartiality aren’t also hedges against the changing mores of history.
Nonetheless, Rachel Carson was right, and so we salute her. She had the facts on her side, and she delivered them with the grace of a litterateur. Given her success, and the success of the authors we’ve read before, it’s hard to argue against journalists taking a few more chances and making a few more stands.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
