Romantic Reverence and Modernist Representation: Vision, Power, and the Shattered Form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Abstract

When John Grierson coined term documentary, he identified things to be corrected as its staple subject: nascent genre was to be defined in part by its dealing conditions that can be changed by human initiative (qtd. in Stott 9). (1) Effaced in that passive formulation is power structure that made documentary practice both necessary and ethically troublesome. For kinds of conditions that attracted documentarians could rarely be changed by people who inhabited them--who were sometimes themselves identified as things to be corrected. Documentarians are usually outsiders, and though seldom possessed of direct political power, they wield at least intermediary power to represent those who cannot represent themselves. (2) But observation and documentation of otherness from a position of relative power, as Paula Rabinowitz suggests, always entails a degree of voyeurism and manipulation that, at best, may be reciprocal: the documentarian is also subject to mockery as an outsider.... The joke is on everyone.... We are complicit in theft of truth, truth gained as [documentarian] deceives his lying informant (7). While economy floundered in 1930s, slipping millions of Americans down into a new powerlessness, documentary flourished. Partly but not entirely under aegis of New Deal programs, photographers and writers produced a plethora of works documenting ravages of Depression across country. The economic crisis was obviously of political and historical importance, but mood of reading public made poverty a marketable subject as well. Thus in 1936 business monthly Fortune sent James Agee and Walker Evans to produce an illustrated feature on tenant farmers in Alabama. The initial product of that assignment was declared unfit for pages of magazine; ultimate product, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, finally published in 1941, is strangest documentary work of that era. Agee threw himself into project with an intensity his editor could hardly have anticipated. He composed an unflinching record not just of his desperately impoverished subjects but of problems with any such record--particularly exercise of power it entails and limits of representational fidelity. Agee interrogates every premise and presumption of documentary practice and condemns his own complicity; he charges himself with violation, betrayal, and abysmal failure, and his readers with sentimentality, fatuity, and bad faith. The 400-odd pages of Famous Men can be seen as a case study in how modernist self-consciousness hopelessly dissolves political clarity, but Agee's tortured scruples have elicited more respect than dismissal. Academic critics largely accept both his anatomy of ethical problems of documentary representation and his apparent conclusion about them: that inevitably fragmentary and distorted representation of lives of oppressed for commercial publication impudent, seems traitorous in deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible (88)--and yet not to investigate and represent at all is to betray ... still worse (89). In short, damned if you do, but damneder if you don't. Assuming, then, that Agee accepts that violations of social documentary are justified by its potential to prompt remedial action, commentary on Famous Men has been largely devoted to identifying textual and photographic strategies Agee and Evans use to mitigate imbalance of power between themselves and their subjects. This focus, however, leads us to overlook one of most pervasive concerns of text. If Agee is working on premise that documentary representation, though necessarily distorted, may lead to remedial action, why does he spend so much time straining toward representational fidelity, as though perfect mimesis of tenant farmers and their conditions of life would in itself achieve something significant? …