The Tyranny of Words in the Economy of Abundance: Modernism, Language, and Politics in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Abstract

To some observers in the late 1930s, the problems faced by the sharecroppers of the South were as much symptoms of a general linguistic failure and breakdown as they were illustrative of political and social inertia. Indeed, the two were closely connected. In 1929 the modernist Eugene Jolas noted the connection between social collapse and linguistic inertia when he stated, “[t]he Art of expression is suffering from a paralysis that is one of the symptoms of a civilization in collapse.”1 As this chapter shows, James Agee’s fraught attempts to dissect, understand, and revive the power of language in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men paralleled a popular exploration of linguistic structures and the political role of language in the New Deal era. With the rise of fascism in Europe, language and the control over meaning and language became a matter of heightened interest to writers and politicians and led to an accumulating interest in the relationship between semantics and politics over the period in which Agee penned his book. Even writers who had no interest in the creation of literary masterpieces, or the apparent abstractions of artistic modernism, held in common with Agee the desire to explore the political failure of language and communication. In 1938 the New Deal economic observer Stuart Chase argued for a language revolution, stating in The Tyranny of Words that it was linguistic and semantic failure that had lead to “slums, Tobacco Roads, and undernourished, ragged schoolchildren in a land of potential economic plenty.”2 Just as the New Deal in government had demanded a “recovery” through experimentation with political structures, the exploration of linguistic structures and functions now promised to alter the way meaning was produced on the page (and by logical extension, to alter certain social and political realities).