I've known a few other folks who've read this book, and have seen some real differences in opinion. Some thought it was just beautiful, some really loved it's content, some thought it was pretentious, others thought it was just a dressed-up screed. So, then, a few questions to get us conversing. Answer which ones you will, as you will:
1--What's your gut reaction here? I mean that in senses both broad and narrow.
2--Agee and Evans originally had an assignment from a magazine--Fortune, to be exact--to investigate sharecroppers and write a magazine-length story. It obviously turned into something much bigger and grander, and was never published in Fortune.. Nevertheless, the journalistic impulse is still there, in a mutated way. What do you make of the shifts in genres here? Sometimes it reads like a play, sometimes like a piece of journalism, sometimes like a novel, sometimes like a poem. Why does the book need to be written from so many different aspects, in so many different forms, to accomplish Agee's purpose?
3--Building off that last question, what does Agee seem to think the truth of the book is, the truth of these people's lives is? It's hard to tell when he's being journalistic and when he's being a novelist (which was his other trade). Which reveals the reality of the situation of the sharecropper better, fiction or ostensibly truthful journalism? What does this tell us about how we understand our own contemporary problems?
4--What do we call this book? How do we label it?
5--Do the photographs work with Agee's text or not? Is there tension between what they present? If, indeed, this is so, then why do Agee and Evans agree to pair them?
6--To my reading, this is a book with a very big dose of that great bugbear, liberal white guilt. Does this negatively affect the book? Or is it absolutely necessary?
Looking forward to a nice discussion, and hope my selection wasn't too out of left field for everyone!
