James Agee Short Fiction Analysis
Despite his prolonged absence from the South after 1925, James Agee had internalized the details of the area and its people well enough to write about them with exceptional conviction and authenticity. In some of his earliest short prose pieces, such as “Minerva Farmer” (1925), he uses Knoxville, in this case the University of Tennessee, as a backdrop. “A Sentimental Journey” (1928) recounts details about the life of a young widow not unlike his mother, whose marriage had been frowned on by her socially prominent family. “Bound for the Promised Land” (1928) recounts an African American funeral in Tennessee.
In his later work, Agee sometimes writes outside his southern milieu, but he is most convincing in the loosely autobiographical mode that often characterizes his work. His best writing is based on facts that he modifies and embellishes to suit his artistic objectives. The resulting stories, such as the posthumously published “Dream Sequence” (1968), focus on characters who have figured in Agee’s life, but he imbues them with a universality, creating archetypes that represent concepts stretching far beyond the narrow geographical range in which his stories take place.
In his novella The Morning Watch, Richard, the protagonist, at times is reminiscent of one of James Joyce’s protagonists. Agee reveals Richard’s subconscious in such a way as to make the reader question whether the twelve-year-old’s peak of religious fervor and spiritual insight will last. A master of subtle suggestion, Agee hints that it will not.
Agee brought to his prose poetic qualities that elevated it above the ordinary events about which he wrote. Almost magically, he transformed the commonplace into the extraordinary. His comments about modern society and the inroads it makes on individuality, reflected especially in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and The Morning Watch, combine with his preoccupation with innocence and death, as seen so clearly in “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” to produce a body of work unique in modern American literature.
The Collected Short Prose of James Agee
This collection, edited by Robert Fitzgerald, who starts the volume with an extensive memoir, presents four finished pieces of short fiction in the sections “Early Stories” and “Satiric Pieces,” along with four fragments and other miscellaneous items. Among the last group, “A Mother’s Tale” (1952), a fable, is most interesting. “Death in the Desert” (1930) is reprinted from The Harvard Advocate, in which it first appeared during Agee’s junior year at Harvard. In the following year, The Harvard Advocate published “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap” (1931). The satiric pieces include “Formletter 7G3” (1934), previously unpublished, and “Dedication Day” (1946). The fragments, undated but likely written in the early 1930’s, include “Run Over,” “Give Him Air,” “Now as Awareness ,” and “A Birthday.” Each of these pieces is incomplete and brief, seldom occupying more than two pages.
The stories as a whole reveal an author bent on creating believable characters that suggest archetypes. This is particularly true in the allegorical “A Mother’s Tale.” Agee is very much concerned with the functioning of the subconscious mind, as demonstrated notably in “Death in the Desert.” The seeds of his novel A Death in the Family and his novella The Night Watch are also found in these early stories.
“Knoxville”
This story, found in the opening pages of A Death in the Family , as a prelude to the novel, overflows with innocence and nostalgia. Its protagonist reflects on the last summer of his father’s life, soon cut short by an automobile accident. The boy Rufus, through whose eyes the story is told, looks back to a time when...
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his life was secure and comfortable, a time when his father, as is shown in the beginning ofA Death in the Family, would take his family to an evening’s picture show. The tone reminds one of the poet Robert Browning’s lines, “God’s in his heaven—/ All’s right with the world.”
Such complacency, however, is not to last. Although this story in itself does not allude to the impending accident that will kill Rufus’s father, readers are soon aware that the equilibrium marking the lives of Rufus and his family is about to be disturbed. Included in the original version of the story, which was written in 1936, long before Agee began work on A Death in the Family, is a segment that was eventually removed and became a separate entity entitled “Dream Sequence,” first published in 1968, thirteen years after Agee’s death.
“Dream Sequence”
“Dream Sequence” begins with a nightmare about a writer who is compelled to write an autobiographical novel in order to sort out his feelings and end the torment of the nightmare, which is based upon a horrible, terrifying event. Whereas in “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” the author returns to his childhood memories and gains a degree of peace by that return, the protagonist in ”Dream Sequence” has yet to come to grips with what troubles him and preoccupies his subconscious mind.
When Rufus and his father are brought together in Rufus’s dream, the atmosphere of the story changes drastically, and peace descends on the troubled boy. Agee is writing about the inevitability of death while celebrating, simultaneously, the joys of living. He finally brings the two opposites, life and death, into harmony, suggesting that one is the natural outcome of the other.
This story seems in some ways a more valid introduction to A Death in the Family than was “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Rufus’s isolation and loneliness pervade much of “Dream Sequence,” although the story is resolved quietly and peacefully when the nightmare is finally exorcized.
“Death in the Desert”
Written while he was a student at Harvard and first published in The Harvard Advocate in 1930, this story might have come directly from the experience of Agee or someone like him: a young man who hits the road for the summer, hitchhiking across a daunting expanse of desert. The young man, on his way to Maine, is picked up by an Oklahoma couple in a five-or six-year-old Buick. He gets into the back seat beside their sleeping son.
As the trip progresses and the characters begin to exhaust their store of things to talk about, the protagonist lapses into a stream-of-consciousness mode. He mentally undresses his hosts, imagining them as skeletons propelling the Buick across the lonely desert. Midway into their journey, they see a desperate African American man stranded in the middle of the desert, facing possible death if he does not get a ride. They pass him by, all of them in their own ways justifying the decision not to pick him up. The social complexities of this situation intrigue Agee and provide his story with the kind of dilemma that forces his readers to wrestle with the ideas he puts before them.
