Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Analysis

It could be argued that in a written documentary, the images and information that the author chooses to include are purposeful. Unlike with a camera, the only aspects of the people and the surroundings that are being portrayed are what the author meant to portray. Events that occur during the documentarian’s process with a camera, can be edited, but one never knows what images slip past this editing process and make it into the documentary. This is not the case with written works, which can be seen in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee wants the reader to know that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a “book only by necessity. More seriously, it is an effort in human actuality” (xi). Throughout the novel, Agee writes …show more content…
. curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying . . . to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings” (5). This anxiety hits a new notes when discusses his encounters with black Americans in the novel. Agee pointedly notes at the beginning of the book that black people had “no use to [him]” (24). While Agee makes this claim, he dedicates two “chapters” to describing his encounters with black people. I would argue that this happens for two reasons: first, Agee seems to understand that there would be no way that they could document the lives of blacks and capture the reality of their situation because of the race boundaries, and second, Agee is conscious of the possibility of inadvertently exploiting his subjects, and wants to veer away from it as much as possible. However, Agee also appears to understand that in order to give a thorough image of the south, he has to include black subjects, so he does it covertly, in a way that minimizes his interactions, but ensures that they are, in some way, …show more content…
After describing a short and ribald conversation between the landowner and a few of the black tenants, Agee gives a detailed about how some of the black tenants “had been summoned to sing for Walker and [him], to show [them] what nigger music was like,” even though Agee felt that he and Evan done everything possible to “spare them … this summons” (27). The singing is described as “jagged, tortured, stony, accented as if by hammers and cold-chisels, full of a nearly paralyzing vitality and iteration of rhythm, the harmonies constantly splitting the nerves” (26). When they finished the first selection, Agee notes how “they were abruptly silent; totally wooden; while the landowner smiled coldly. There was nothing to say” (27). As a result, Agee tries to show the tenants the utmost appreciation for their singing requesting another song. When they comply, he notes that it seems as though the next selection “was their favorite and their particular pride” (27). W.E.B. Du Bois calls selections such as the one that the black farmers sand “sorrow songs.” Du Bois states that black people had “walked in darkness [and] sang songs in the olden days – Sorrow Songs – for they were weary at heart” (231). He states that these songs “came out of the South,” which is where Agee encounters them in the book (231). Du Bois goes on to say