“In a time when nationalism sweeps everything else before it, as it does at present,” C. Vann Woodward wrote in the “Irony of Southern History” in 1952, “the regional historian is likely to be oppressed by a sense of his unimportance.”Footnote 1 The regional critic cannot help but feel a similar sense at the present, when globalism sweeps everything else before it, including nationalism. Now, the idea of focussing attention on regional literatures seems counterintuitive, but just as Woodward argued that the Civil War South set important precedents for the Cold War United States, the study of regional modernism can provide important insights about the relationship between material conditions and cultural production that apply to the study of global modernization as an uneven set of processes.
The irony of southern modernism may be that it exists at all. If one follows the theory that aesthetic modernism is the cultural response to the social process of modernization, then modernism in the US South seems unlikely. As the United States developed in the early twentieth century, the South stagnated. Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression, the North significantly outpaced the South in the development of cities, industries, and new technologies, and this uneven infrastructural development contributed to cultural discontinuity within the United States. American literary production during this period reflects the uneven development between the regions. The key centers of the publishing industry were in northern cities, the most prominent writers were northerners, and the most influential texts depicted life in the industrializing nation. By the beginning of the twentieth century, as the nation projected images of itself as a rising economic empire, the national media portrayed the South as a backward, underdeveloped colony of the nation. The literature of local color – the most common form of writing set in the South through the end of the nineteenth century – underscored this representation of the South as a place different from the mainstream United States. Between 1865 and the late 1910s, relatively few southern writers registered with the American publishing industry, and those who did lived in northern cities, such as Mark Twain, who wrote in Connecticut; Kate Chopin, who wrote in St. Louis; Charles Chesnutt, who wrote in Cleveland; and Thomas Dixon, who wrote in New York.
After World War I and through the 1920s and 1930s, however, southern writers contributed disproportionately to American literature, even while the region's fragile economic and social infrastructure declined. This ironic fact demonstrates the slippage between modernity and modernism and undercuts the notion that modernism necessarily constitutes a response to modernity, which raises the possibility of a form of modernist literature that deviates from the typical form of urban-centered texts usually associated with the period. Modernism, in other words, is only loosely connected to industrialization and urbanization, and the tension between modernism and modernity can often be observed at the sites where discontinuity is felt most strongly. The effects of modernity were most evident in the dramatic differences between New York and Mississippi or between Paris and Birmingham. Between the two world wars, southern writers produced texts that use techniques associated with modernism to depict non-modern material conditions. I want to make a case here for rural modernism in the US South, and I believe that my argument has numerous analogues in the literature of zones at the periphery of modernity, such as North Africa, Central America, and South Asia. As a core space develops socially and economically, its culture also develops, a process clearly demonstrated in the coeval emergence of modernity and modernism. In the South, cultural development preceded social and economic development, leading to a form of literature in which the material conditions represented are not consistent with the form of representation. In southern literature of the 1920s and 1930s, premodern social and economic conditions are depicted with modernist technique, and several southern writers experimented with technique, including John Crowe Ransom, James Weldon Johnson, Evelyn Scott, Katherine Anne Porter, and others. To illustrate this case, I will analyze two texts that exemplify southern modernism, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, because these works make the discontinuity between modernity and modernism in the South evident. In the South, where the past isn't even past, modernism isn't even modern.
THE PROBLEM OF RURAL MODERNISM
The South's maintenance of an agricultural, rural economic system well into the twentieth century contradicted the processes of industrialization and urbanization driving modernity. Critics and scholars generally use the term “modernity” to refer to a period of rapid social change, primarily involving the material conditions of daily life, that originated in central European cities in the mid- to late nineteenth century and that spread outward to large population centers worldwide. Marshall Berman, for example, lists several processes that contributed to modernity, including scientific discoveries, industrialization, population shifts, urbanization, mass communication, political bureaucracy, social movements, and the growth of capitalist markets.Footnote 2 These processes developed unevenly across Europe and North America, and they lagged at a remarkable rate in the US South. By 1920, while northern cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, and New York developed into bustling modern metropolises, the rural South fell far behind, openly resisting some developments. Cities, factories, and mechanization did develop in the South, but the scale and pace of their development did not approximate that in the North. The South remained primarily rural and agricultural, dependent on cash crops and exploited labor, and growing more distinct and separate from the modern urbanized sections of the United States. As northern cities came to dominate the nation's political, economic, and cultural affairs, the South became increasingly marginalized.
America's uneven economic development also affected publishing and readership, the nation's primary outlets of cultural production. By the beginning of the twentieth century, New York dominated the publishing industry and was home to the most influential publishers, editors, and critics. A disproportionate percentage of Americans, moreover, lived in the urban Northeast, and an even more disproportionate percentage of American readers lived in the urban Northeast. In What America Read, Gordon Hutner explains that “mainstream fiction [published between 1920 and 1960] represents the middle class vision of American life,” which tended to focus on domestic family relations, struggles for personal attainment or fulfillment, and historical conflicts and conquests.Footnote 3 Works of regionalism, such as books about southern poverty, deviated from the mainstream, challenging the tastes and values of the majority of American readers and antagonizing the processes of daily life in modern America, which makes the emergence of southern modernism counterintuitive. However, two works of southern regionalism dominated American book sales in the 1930s, Tobacco Road and Gone with the Wind. A series of critics have argued recently that the South has served as a site of projection within America's nationalist psyche, as America's racist, backward other, and the phenomenal success of these two books clearly illustrates the South as an imagined region, a place alternately inhabited by inbred hicks and hoop-skirted southern belles. Jennifer Greeson traces this narrative from colonial America to the turn of the twentieth century in Our South, Leigh Anne Duck examines the South as a space of national alterity in the first half of the twentieth century in The Nation's Region, and Scott Romine exposes the cotemporary South's façade of authenticity in The Real South.Footnote 4 Collectively, these books suggest that the South is a cultural construction invented both by Americans who desire to imagine the region as different from America and by southerners who want to imagine themselves as different from Americans. Deviation from the mainstream, in other words, may be been intentional.
The exact relationship between modernity as a set of social processes and modernism as an artistic and intellectual movement is the subject of much debate. In The Concept of Modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson considers dozens of theories of modernism, many of which question the direct or causal correlation between modernism and modernity.Footnote 5 His study suggests that modernism is a constructed category, an abstraction used as a descriptor rather than as an actual movement. When scholars use the term “modernism,” however, they typically refer to artistic products that reflect a set of values related in some way to the social processes of modernity, thus situating the works in time and space. The pivotal connection between modernity and modernism is urbanization, the social process that most drastically changed the conditions of daily life. David Harvey claims that “modernism, after 1848, was very much an urban phenomenon,” both because the social processes of modernity took place primarily in cities and because artists and writers tended both to congregate in cities and to depict the processes taking place in cities.Footnote 6 Considering the critical roles that Berlin, Chicago, Dublin, London, New York, Madrid, Paris, Rome, and Vienna played in modernist cultural production, this claim seems completely plausible.Footnote 7
Indeed, of all the theories about modernism, the idea that it developed in global metropolises seems to be the most durable. In the landmark collection Modernism 1890–1930, Malcolm Bradbury states that “when we think of Modernism, we cannot avoid thinking of these urban climates, and the ideas and campaigns, the new philosophies and politics, that ran through them.”Footnote 8 Most studies of modernist writers and artists focus on cities, either directly or indirectly.Footnote 9 To the extent that modernism is a cohesive and coherent movement, it appears to be a primarily urban movement. But this conclusion presents a problem in that it characterizes modernism as an exclusive term, one that rules out writers or artists who do not adhere to its implicitly urban conditions. Recently, critics such as Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in Bad Modernisms, have interrogated modernism in ways that appear to make the term more expansive or inclusive, allowing for the construction of numerous modernisms rather than a monolithic, reified Modernism. This approach opens the discourse on modernism by allowing space to discuss previously marginalized artists and art forms, but it makes defining modernism even more difficult. Even so, this is generally a productive development because it includes a broader and more nuanced range of creative production. I am uncomfortable, however, with merely offering southern rural modernism as an adjunct form because it occupies roughly the same time and space when it appears to lie clearly outside even loose definitions of modernism.
If urbanity is a necessary condition of modernism, then the US South would seem to be antimodern. As America's northern urban population grew in the first half of the twentieth century, its southern rural population shrank, a shift propelled by the out-migration of nearly three million black southerners and more than five million white southerners between 1920 and 1950.Footnote 10 Where skyscrapers, tenement houses, and highways came to symbolize the urban American landscape, decaying mansions, sharecroppers’ cabins, and eroding fields came to symbolize the southern landscape. Discussions of modernity often focus on urban growth and the social and economic problems of population density, but the decline and decay of rural areas is part of the same process, so southern ruralism is a direct effect of modernity.Footnote 11 This position suggests that, rather than being outside the process of modernization, the South participated in it fully but with economically deleterious effects that retarded social development in the region, making it effectively more rural and more impoverished.Footnote 12 Immanuel Wallerstein argues in “What Can One Mean by Southern Culture?” that the discussions about the South's cultural uniqueness are identical to any number of particularized conversations taking place within the capitalist world economy.Footnote 13 He observes that while the South has a coherent economic history, its history is part of broader, more fluid global systemic flows, so regressive developments in the South correspond to holistic changes in a broader context. Thus the South is not distinctive in the sense of being separate; rather it is a peripheral section of the nation that supplies the industrializing core with labor and resources. The South, thus, is not an imaginary region. It is a materially underdeveloped section of a nation with a rapidly developing core.
The South's economy may appear to be backward and insular, but it was actually embedded in global flows of capital and labor. The southern system of agriculture through the early twentieth century produced a limited number of cash crops that required substantial space and extended time for cultivation, so rural spaces were essential to economic production. Because tractors and other mechanical devices remained cost-prohibitive until after World War II, southern agriculture depended upon an oversupply of inexpensive, exploited labor. Although some southerners desperately courted capital investment and encouraged industrialization, these initiatives were not sufficiently successful to change the overall composition of the southern economy. Meanwhile, as many scholars have explained, from 1920 to 1940 the southern economy consistently declined, ravaged domestically by boll weevils and globally by the expansion of foreign cotton markets.Footnote 14 Since the stagnant southern economy depended upon agriculture and manual labor, the region did not appear to participate in the social processes of modernity propelled by industrialization and urbanization, but the South's participation in modernity, in fact, took on the form of rural poverty. The southern economy followed virtually the same pattern in 1930 that it did in 1830, which suggests that it did not progress, but was actually the pivot point in a vast global enterprise of cotton production, one that wove together southern sharecroppers, international industrialists, and the global commodities market in the economic processes of modernization.
The fact remains, however, that living conditions in the South were materially different from living conditions in the North. Southerners were alienated from the results of their labor, and they experienced modernity differently than their northern counterparts, often participating in modern commercialism vicariously through mail-order catalogs, Hollywood films, and broadcast radio.Footnote 15 Although the South was involved in modernity, the rural South's economy and culture felt significantly different from those of northern cities.Footnote 16 Although James Agee and William Faulkner, my example cases, set their works in arguably the poorest, most isolated, least modern locations in the United States, their works show obvious signs of modernist aesthetics, highlighting the effects of regional discontinuity. Faulkner and Agee both recognized the effects of uneven development because they lived both in the South and in the North. Faulkner lived near New York City, worked in a factory, and traveled through Europe before writing his major works, and he worked in Hollywood while continuing to write novels.Footnote 17 Agee grew up in Tennessee, but he went to college in Boston, traveled extensively, and lived for several years in New York. Both Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and As I Lay Dying have obvious characteristics of modernism in their experimental narrative form, but their subjects – the poorest rural southerners – seem inconsistent with modernity. This discontinuity between modernist technique and rural content is the definitive characteristic of southern modernism. In the literature of the US South, ruralism is modernism.Footnote 18
THE RURAL SUBJECT IN THE URBAN FRAME
In 1938, as the United States slowly began to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt announced that the South was America's “number one economic problem.”Footnote 19 Although intended to encourage economic development in the region through public support for New Deal programs, Roosevelt's comment magnified the South's discontinuity by focussing the nation's attention on its poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness. James Agee's Fortune magazine assignment to write an article about the living conditions of southern sharecroppers that led to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was part of the regionalized narrative of abjection. As both a native southerner with Marxist tendencies and a sophisticated, urbane New Yorker, Agee was keenly aware of his dual positionality among the sharecroppers. For the work that eventually became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee and the photographer Walker Evans spent several weeks in rural northern Alabama with poor white sharecroppers, closely observing their living and working conditions. At the outset, he writes,
it seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism” (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias which, when skillfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money.Footnote 20
He portrays himself as feeling conflicted about his role in exploiting and commodifying the experience of destitution, and he refers to himself and Evans as spies. He feels self-conscious about his role as narrator, about his responsibility to the sharecropping families, and about the reader's attitude toward the text. He articulates the regional discontinuity by asking, “Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it?” (9). His self-referential comment indicates his realization that the primary audience for this text is urban readers who cannot personally identify with the rural sharecroppers’ living conditions.
When describing their experiences, Agee frequently makes comparisons to living conditions in metropolitan America. He notes, for example, that the comparatively wealthy landowner for whom the families work drives “a several-years-old tan sedan, much the sort of car a factory worker in a northern city drives” (26). Later, he explains that southern homes are not as well maintained as they are “in Ohio or New England,” and “that everyone lives in homes equivalent to the homes of those a full category worse off in the economic–social scale than in the north” (207). These comparisons reinforce the North/South economic dichotomy of “urban/rural, high-wage/low-wage, consumption/subsistence, credit/debt, and free labor/coerced labor” that Richard Godden and Martin Crawford construct in the introduction to Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars.Footnote 21 This dichotomy appears to privilege the culture of the developed North over the impoverished South.
In the early twentieth century, the South's small middle class congregated in southern cities, amplifying the spatial division between urban and rural. While southern cities were much more provincial than northern metropolises, Agee describes their living conditions as substantially different from those of rural southerners. At night, when “all over Alabama the lights are out” and “the fields lie there, with nothing at work in them, neither man nor beast,” “New Orleans,” the largest city in the South at the time, “is stirring, rattling, and sliding faintly in its fragrance and in the enormous richness of its lust” (45). An agricultural economy functions on a daylight schedule, but the market economy of the city allows for an extensive system of night-shift work and night-club culture.Footnote 22 The population density, constant activity, and dynamic exchange in the cities created a more elaborate class structure than in rural areas, where racial and social castes remained rigid. Even within the South, a dual social structure created divisions between urban and rural. After spending several days with the sharecroppers, Agee and Evans venture to Birmingham, to find “the infinite relief of talking more nearly in our own language to others,” seeking the reassuring comforts of modernity (375). They clarify, however, that the urban experience in the South is different from, and significantly less developed than, the urban experience in the North. While he finds the stimulation of Birmingham invigorating, he unfavorably compares the “cruel great spread out country town” to New York (375). Even the most modern elements of the South lagged behind the modern North.
Agee spends the majority of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men describing the living conditions of southern poor whites in tedious, exacting detail. He examines three sharecropping families and takes an exhaustive inventory of their meager possessions: homes, furniture, clothes, food, tools, and mules. He follows them into the fields to describe their working conditions, he follows them into schools to describe their educational system, and he goes into their homes to describe their family structure. Mostly, he observes and catalogs from a detached perspective rather than interacting with the sharecroppers, which gives the text a perspective that Hugh Davis describes as “surrealist ethnography.”Footnote 23 But after establishing the conditions of the families' destitution, he imagines their feelings and perceptions, especially their apprehension of their own social class, pushing the text far beyond the conventions of ethnography. Recalling their first meeting with the families when Evans took photographs, he focusses on Mrs. Ricketts's reaction:
You realized what the poor foolishness of your husband had let you all in for, shouting to you all to come out, children sent skinning barefooted and slaver-mouthed down the road and the path to corral the others, the Woods and the Gudgers, all to stand there on the porch as you were in the average sorrow of your working dirt and get your picture made; and to you it was as if you and your children and your husband and these others were stood there naked in front of the cold absorption of the camera in all your shame and pitiableness to be pried into and laughed at; and your eyes were wild with fury and shame and fear. (363)
Agee's shift into second person projects onto Mrs. Ricketts all the effects of southern rural subjectivity within a modern frame: the poverty, the abjection, and the self-consciousness. She understands her position, or, rather, Agee and the reader understand it for her. The South's abjection is a product of regional discontinuity, but it does not originate in the South; rather the urban reader projects it onto the region, so the regionalized dichotomy of economic development that privileges the North is a chauvinistic cultural construction.
Faulkner trades on the same perception of poor, rural southerners in As I Lay Dying. Published at the beginning of the Great Depression, the book invokes stereotypes of southerners as depraved, ignorant, and isolated. The family lives on a remote farm, several miles along unpaved road away from any settlement, so they have limited interaction with others. They raise cotton, but they are utterly destitute, partly because the family's patriarch, Anse, “was sick once from working in the sun when he was twenty-two years old, and tells people that if he ever sweats, he will die.”Footnote 24 Faulkner insinuates that Anse is lazy, reinforcing negative stereotypes about poor whites, but his children are relatively industrious, and everyone in the family desires material items. Cash and Jewel, whose names imply material wealth, both hire their specialized labor to purchase commodities, suggesting a transitional form of economic exchange emerging in the South. John T. Matthews argues that this economic transition “suggests that modernization is part of a dialectic internal to the workings of the novel and of the history it reflects upon.”Footnote 25 The dialectic that Matthews references involves the tension between agrarianism and the emergence of mechanical production, a sign of development in the southern economy. In spite of the family's insularity, they are aware of and involved with the processes of modernity, albeit in a peculiarly rural way.
The Bundrens have a telling fascination with town and the material products available there. The family's ludicrous, sanctimonious journey to bury Addie with her family in Jefferson becomes a perverse shopping expedition: Anse wants false teeth, Dewey Dell wants an abortifacient, Cash wants a graphophone, and Vardaman wants a train set. For townspeople, these products, with the possible exception of the aborting agent, are commonly available, which marks a material difference between rural and town in the text. There are no actual cities in As I Lay Dying, but the difference between the town of Jefferson and the Bundren's remote farm is sufficient to reflect the broader divisions between urban and rural. Their excitement mounts as they see signs advertising stores and services available in town, “the drug stores, the clothing stores, the patent medicine and the garages and cafes,” indicating their fascination with consumerism (153). But as the population becomes denser, the family's mule-drawn corpse-laden wagon becomes more conspicuous. When a man on the street comments on the smell, Jewel swears at him and almost starts a fight. Agitated, he mutters, “thinks because he's a goddamn town fellow” (155). He does not finish the sentence, but its brevity implies that Jewel feels keenly aware of his marginalized status, similar to the feeling of abjection that Agee projects onto Mrs. Ricketts, and urban reader's project onto the rural South. Many readers would have found Faulkner's representation of poor whites at best derogatory and at worst absurd, largely because of preconceived notions of southern poverty drawn from contemporary popular culture. They cannot afford items that many Americans would have found commonplace, such as medical care, transportation, embalming, and lodgings. The family thus faces an epic struggle to accomplish what would be an ordinary task to most modern Americans.
Townspeople serve an important purpose in the book because they give the presumably urban reader a point of reference that grounds the family's story in plausible reality. As Addie lies dying, Doctor Peabody comes from town to tend her, and getting the obese old man up the hill to the family's farm involves a comical episode requiring a rope. Faulkner explained that the scene
was to give for the moment what may be called a nudge of credibility to a condition which was getting close to the realm of unbelief. That is, he is brought in from the comparatively metropolitan outland for a moment which says, Well, if he comes out there and sees these people, well then maybe they do exist.Footnote 26
In addition to Peabody, a number of other townspeople intervene on the story, commenting on the absurdity of the family's situation. These people mediate for the reader, placing the rural subject in the urban frame. They, in effect, serve a purpose similar to Agee's narrative voice in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, establishing a modern, urban framework for the rural narrative.
THE AESTHETICS OF RURAL MODERNISM
Southern writers portraying the conditions of southern rural life for a primarily urban audience took on a dualistic insider/outsider perspective, and the narrative techniques in their texts illustrate this discontinuous perspective. Their attitudes toward the subject, as in the case of Faulkner's portrayal of the Bundren family, for example, usually show signs of both detachment and investment, which creates a tone characteristic of southern modernism. Earlier writers, such as Thomas Nelson Page and Charles Chesnutt, tended to portray their subjects sympathetically; and later writers, such as Flannery O'Connor and Alice Walker, tended to portray their subjects ironically. But the writers of the modernist period, including Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, Thomas Wolfe, and Ellen Glasgow, mediated this tone, allowed them to incorporate elements of experimental narrative technique into their texts without overpowering the inherent humanity driving the plot. In “Jordan's End,” for example, Ellen Glasgow portrays a physician similar to Peabody in As I Lay Dying, attending a rural family who mistrusts modern medicine, leaving the doctor with a sense of impotent pity. The juxtaposition of innovative technique with a rural content produces a unique, and often perplexing, aesthetic experience for the reader.Footnote 27
Faulkner's work exemplifies this juxtaposition between rural content and modernist form. Many critics have offered explanations for his unique experimental technique. Philip Weinstein, in Faulkner's Subject, and Andre Bleikasten, in The Ink of Melancholy, both see Faulkner as primarily influenced by European high modernism.Footnote 28 While Faulkner did borrow liberally from his copious reading, I fear that this explanation for his technique reduces his method to a cultural epiphenomenon, implying that he imitated other writers but did not directly participate in modernity. Other critics have offered theories that address the regional aspects of Faulkner's work. In Faulkner and Modernism, Richard Moreland argues that Faulkner synthesizes southern history and modernist irony, and Daniel J. Singal traces what he describes as Faulkner's self-conscious and deliberate progression from Victorian southern values to intellectual modernism in Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist.Footnote 29 Singal goes on to explain that Faulkner developed two distinct identities: one traditional, historic, Victorian, and moral; and the other innovative, progressive, modernist, and amoral. Faulkner's modernist and historicist sensibilities are obvious, and I think they reflect his involvement in a broader set of processes based in material culture. His texts, and many of the works of southern modernism, portray the inherent discontinuities between ruralism and urbanism, and their modernist depictions of the South precede the South's modernization. This is a crucial point: the processes that influenced Faulkner did not influence him alone, rather they affected an entire generation of southern writers. These writers coming from a rural perspective could recognize the discontinuity between the conditions in the South and in the North, and their representations of region helped to produce and propel modernism.
In the case of As I Lay Dying, as in many of Faulkner's novels, the narrative fragments into multiple voices telling connected versions of a story from divergent perspectives.Footnote 30 This aesthetic technique embeds the discontinuity of rural modernism in the text's fundamental structure. With fifty-nine separate monologues, the story proceeds in a nonlinear, polyphonic form common to many modernist texts. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner's mentor Sherwood Anderson used similar techniques in their novels, and Faulkner's work reflects the same phenomenon of social fragmentation as many urban modernist novels. But that does not mean that he simply imitates their technique. Rather, he incorporates elements of oral storytelling common to rural culture into the fragmentary structures characteristic of modernism, which indicates that rural communities are not as cohesive as one might believe. This method of discontinuous perspective proves to be ideally suited to representing the fragmentation of rural modernism.
Aesthetically, the most evident discontinuity in the text is between the rural subject and the modernist representation. Many of Faulkner's descriptions draw from the imagist idiom. Consider the opening scene, for example: “The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laidby cotton, to the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision” (3). The precise, descriptive language shows signs of imagist influence, but the figurative language – “straight as a plumb-line” – and the features of the setting – “green rows of laidby cotton” – draw from the southern vernacular. Beyond the fundamental descriptive language, Faulkner occasionally uses words and images utterly inconsistent with rural living conditions. One example of this may be Addie's metaphysical discourse on “a shape to fill a lack” (117). The most obvious intentional discontinuity in this book, however, is Darl's description of Addie's coffin as a “cubistic bug” (147). His reference to cubism points out of the frame of southern rural life. One might speculate that Darl encountered cubism while in France during World War I, but even so, the reference to cubism gestures deliberately to the urbane reader who would have recognized the irony behind the reference, the modernist equivalent of a memento mori.
The discontinuity between rural southern poverty and modern social development leads James Agee to reflect self-consciously on his own representation of poor whites in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He recognizes that many of his readers have preexisting associations with the vocabulary of southern poverty, so he attempts to redefine the often pejorative term “sharecropper.” To do so, he appeals to mainstream preconceptions. “In the north,” he writes, “and particularly in the seaboard north, where most of the writing and printing and reading of the United States is carried on, sharecropper has, through the agencies of print and the lectured word, become the generic term” (455). He goes on to untangle the connotations of the word, which leads him into an extended improvisational discourse on “anglosaxon monosyllables,” generating a profound list of common sacred and profane terms (456). This strange shift from journalistic description to abstract meditation is Agee's signature aesthetic technique in the book, but although he uses an experimental form, he consistently portrays the families' humanity. In one example, he recounts the Gudger family's hospitality when he has car trouble at night. He comes to their home after dark, and they welcome him, feed him, and shelter him. As he relates the anecdote about eating their coarse food, he comments on their poverty and on his awareness of his own presence – his self-conscious sense of being an outsider. Realizing that he is keeping them from their rest, he intentionally eats more than he wants because he feels
it's better to keep them awake and to eat too much than in the least to let them continue to believe I am what they assume I must be: “superior” to them or to their food, eating only so much as I need to be “polite”; and I see that they are, in fact, quietly surprised and gratified in my appetite (413).
His awareness of his own positional duality leads him to discourse at length about his aesthetic theory. He explains the difference between the aesthetic sensibilities of poor southerners, who build their homes with the “most naïve, most massive symmetry and simpleness,” and his own more complicated, asymmetrical text (143). He recognizes that his emphasis on minute description invites comparisons to realism, documentary, and photography, but he feels uneasy about this comparison because of what he sees as the inherent limitations of language. He feels suspicious of descriptive language as a means to communicate actuality. “George Gudger is a man,” he says, “but obviously, in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited” (239). So he attempts to move beyond describing Gudger to reproducing him in a technique that he compares to Picasso's cubist distortionFootnote 31 of the subject in order to recreate it: Gudger is
not some artist's or journalist's or propagandist's invention: he is a human being: and to what degree I am able it is my business to reproduce him as the human being he is; not just to amalgamate him into some invented, literary imitation of a human being. (240)Footnote 32
The key to understanding Agee's approach – and, by extension, the aesthetics of rural modernism – is recognizing the distance between the rural subject and the modern audience and the author's self-conscious role in spanning that distance.
Agee gives the reader instructions for reading his text, explaining that the book is an “experiment” and that, in spite of its unconventional technique, it intends to treat its subject, the living conditions of rural southerners, “seriously” (xlvii). He advises the reader to treat the photographs and the text equally, and he encourages reading the text aloud without interruptions as one would listen to music or watch a film. He clearly has intentions for this book that transcend the ordinary maudlin description of poverty. The book has both a social agenda, driven by Agee's southern identity and Marxist ideology, and an aesthetic agenda. He posits that the book “is an effort in human actuality, in which the reader is no less centrally involved than the authors and those of whom they tell” (xlvii). His objective is for the reader to experience the living conditions of a specific time and place. Much like a camera, his work captures a specific moment, and, while I doubt that the book actually realized Agee's ambitious objectives, it retains an aesthetic significance that endures beyond its social agenda. As Janis Bergman-Carton and Evan Carton explain, the text and pictures continue to provoke strong responses in the audience, even when completely detached from their immediate social context.Footnote 33 As the temporal and spatial distance between the audience and the material conditions of rural southern modernism grows, the texts that portray that experience continue to resonate imaginatively. While the material conditions of rural southern poverty may be essential to the social context of writing southern modernism, the aesthetic technique of discontinuous perspective is more important to reading southern modernism.
The progress of modernity in the rural South fits within a much larger context of global patterns of development. The irony of global modernism may be that the vast majority of the world's population during the early twentieth century lived in nonmodern conditions, so the actual literature of modernism – and the urbanized, industrialized perspective it represents – is counterintuitively outside the mainstream. Andreas Huyssen explains,
in those decades [of the early twentieth century] the metropolis was still an island of modernization in national cultures dominated by traditional country or small-town life. In other words, European modernism arrived at the threshold of a not yet fully modernized world in which old and new were violently knocked against each other, striking the sparks of that astounding eruption of creativity that came to be known only much later as “modernism.”Footnote 34
To the extent that modernity is a process and not an actual state of being, it takes place in those areas where modern conditions meet nonmodern conditions, where the processes of urbanization, industrialization, and consumerism are coming to be. Such was the case, I believe, in the US South somewhat later than the Northeast, but the literature of southern modernism anticipates this change. The South, ironically, was modernist before it was modern.
