| — | Me |
Do you think the authors intentions in writing a text ever line up with the true purpose that the work is going to have throughout time? Does purpose change over time through critical reception, trends, etc. depending on how that generation is reading? Nothing in the art world is finite… Is purpose different for fiction and non-fiction? I see fiction texts as having a more artistic purpose, but what about those non-fiction texts that are both artistic and having initial intentions of invoking change? What if that change never happens…
| — | Remind me never to write anything while under the influence. Literally translating crazy banter into complete sentences that half make sense. |
| — | And Their Children After Them, Maharidge and Williamson. Questioning things today… |
| — | “James Agee by Himself,” 1942. |
…The quell night blues above. The quell night blues:
Branchwaters, the black woods, begin to talk.
The blue night blacks above: Lamps:
Bloom in their glasses and the stars:
Splinter and glister glass. Warmth:
Slopes from the pigsty. In the barn pale hay,
Tusseled in teeth, darkness, a blunt hoof….
| — | A bit from In Memory of My Father, Winter 1937. Still exploring the otherness of Agee and how his father’s death affected LUNPFM. Where/why/how was the written and what does it mean? Who knows. No one has written on it, but it’s beautiful. |
| — | Wow, you just made my heart stop, Rufus. |
…
The problem was that Agee drank, chain smoked and wrote throughout the nights in Alabama. Evans said he thought he never slept. Agee came back with over 500 pages of material, hoped to turn it into 3 volumes, and Fortune magazine wouldn’t publish any of it. Houghton-Mifflin finally agreed only after Agee compromised, and still the book only sold 600 copies before being remaindered. The printing plates were even used as scrap metal during the Korean War.
Over the last few years, there has been an increase in Agee scholarship and the use of LUNPFM in the classroom. I started thinking about how Agee will most likely become a integral part of the American canon, and then we read Said, as well as “What Is a Minor Literature?” This is where the brainstorming for my new essay began.
Even though Said focuses on the East/West dichotomy, I think I can equip his argument to the divide that exists WITHIN America, or specifically the NORTH/SOUTH, first by arguing that in the Depression and still today, there is a problem with the Western style of domination, or hegemony against our OWN people, both culturally and economically, in turn creating an OTHER that exists within America. I also think that even though Agee doesn’t have minority status and grew up relatively wealthy, he is a part of this OTHER. It is apparent through the language he uses and the connections he makes to the sharecropper families. It can even be argued that Agee identifies Fred Ricketts of the Ricketts family as his father. Agee broke the mold in 1941 when the book was published, and to this day it is still uncategorizable. In these ways, I will also argue in my essay that Agee is a minor writer, writing AS the OTHER for the OTHER.
Then, I started thinking about how Said suggests that there is a whole separate layer to texts that can be disregarded for however long until that layer can be put into context by its readers. In this argument I find that the publishing dilemma of LUNPFM was that when it was published, we simply didn’t know how to read it until we could look back on the Depression Era and relate it to our current situation. What’s funny about this is that Agee wanted the book to be released in newsprint, and if it would have been, it would have disintegrated completely by 1992.
So in the end, the focus of this assignment is to define LUNPFM as a text by a minor writer that has room in the 21st-century to not only become an important part of the American canon, but also to be an important text in the field of cultural studies that will continue to open up new discourses in America. Throughout my reading I have failed to come across anything that puts Agee in this light, which makes me excited to do this, although I have found a few texts to set myself in dialogue with. One is Davis Hugh’s The Making of James Agee that was just released in 2008, as well as Victor Kramer’s A Consciousness of Technique in LUNPFM, released in 2001. These texts help me with bringing the history of the text into the present. Also, the text Letters of James Agee to Father Flye is very useful in that Agee can be intimately seen dealing with issues of identity within his personal letters. These will help me in identifying Agee as the OTHER…
LUNPFM=The Moby-Dick of nonfiction?
“The extrovert Melville of Moby-Dick and the introvert Thoreau of Walden are combined in the Agee of LUNPFM.” David Madden
2 books. Metafiction? 3 books? A book about sharecroppers, a book about Agee, a book about writing a book…
Why is Agee the other? He lost his father/who he would identify with before he found his identity. In Fred Ricketts he finds his father.
Facts express very little.
Agee=LUNPFM=Evans=photographs for “The Bridge”=Hart Crane=Cleveland… there are roots everywhere. Agee foreshadowing those roots (letter to Father Flye at age twenty-one).
Anti-graphic photography, the strangeness of the everyday, anti-textual literature?
Artifacts are what attracts us to the South (lengthy discussion of objects on the mantle). Books are artifacts. Paper disintegrates. Agee wishes for newsprint. LUNPFM would have disintegrated by 1992. A Kindle will never disintegrate… garbage/artifact?
In the 1930s, tenant farmers are the epitome of the American other, yet Agee seems to identify with them more than he does anyone at Time, Fortune or anywhere else really, save for Evans and Father Flye. But this is where the tension begins. This is why Fortune wouldn’t publish the mess and Houghton-Mifflin only would after Agee compromised. It was too real because Agee was one of them, not just some wealthy white person sent to Africa to save the elephants. He was the other. And so in the end, LUNPFM is as much of a meditation on Agee himself as it is on the farmers, because in finding them, he found himself, simply stuck in a society in which he doesn’t belong. He writes that the “language of tenants, among all other nonliterary and scarcely literate people, is full of surrealism,” as is his own, even through the lengthy dream sequences in A Death in the Family. Davis writes, “As primitives, the sharecroppers invigorate Agee’s consciousness, and his consciousness gives them aesthetic form. But this cross-fertilization works in only one direction, and as the book unfolds, Agee comes to realize that identifying the sharecroppers with the unconscious dehumanizes them,” although Agee is merely realizing that he, too can just so easily be dehumanized and so he struggles to find what, really, is reality, if anything… and how could you ever recreate that reality in a text? He offers suggestions: “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 excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.” Whatever Agee may have expected when he took this job, he quickly found that the sharecroppers were the first people he had experienced that were truly real, so the thought of them encompassing the surreal was just wrong. So what to do when literature itself is the surreal?
