James Agee and the Furious Angel

Abstract

The modern American novelist is usually filled with democratic sympathy for ordinary humanity. At the same time he is caught in a fundamental conflict with it. This conflict often takes the form of a kind of philosophical allegory. Over and over in American fiction the artist is a symbol of the mind or imagination striving for spiritual being, while the ordinary man appears as the embodiment of chaos, entropy, death—all those destructive aspects of reality that the artist must fight against or rise above if he is to achieve his special fate. This tendency of American novelists to draw a sharp opposition between the artist as romantic idealist and the ordinary man as the incarnation of chaos has, of course, deep moral consequences. For one thing it involves a perversion of the traditional idea of the soul. The spirit is debased and becomes "identity." It is no longer the given or inherent meaning which all men possess, but must be achieved as the object of a quest which only the artist or visionary can hope to complete. As the personification of chaos, the ordinary man of modern American fiction is a dead soul. He cannot order his life through dreams or ideals; he does not even have a being separate from his environment with which to resist or despise it. Paradoxically, while he is a product of his world, he has no real connection with it but simply floats around in the arbitrary soup of finite things. With the best of intentions, the American novelists of our century have set out to know the ordinary man, stripped of any idealization or mystification. The results have not been altogether in the service of truth. The ordinary man is still "unknown," but his mystery has been killed. What remains is chaos, the corpse of mystery.