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The Language of Faith and Self-Identity in
A Death in the Family
By Marshall N. Surratt From the opening pages of A Death in the Family,
readers are aware that here is a richly crafted work; and over the years, academic scholars have offered some weighty criticism about how Agee developed his lush, dense style. Sill some of the most-perceptive comments have come not from professional critics but from someone who worked with Agee. Walker Evans had collaborated with Agee on
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, contributing photographs to the book about tenant farm families.
Evans wrote later that Agee, though he masked it, was "a poet, an intellectual, an artist, and a Christian." Evans described Agee's faith, left from the Anglican training of his childhood, as "a punctured and residual remnant, but it was still a naked, root emotion."
How does this relate to Agee's style and his approach to writing? One result of this "residual remnant" from Agee's childhood faith, wrote Evans, was that for Agee "human beings were at least possibly immortal and
literally sacred souls." That placed a heavy responsibility on him both as an observer and as a writer. As an observer of those around him, Agee was in awe of the subtlety of their lives, and he found special meaning in
such seemingly ordinary events as a family lying on a lawn at night or a father and son taking in a movie at the nickelodeon. As a writer, he felt a special responsibility to those whose lives he tried to depict, and he
wondered how words could ever reproduce the intrinsic meaning of their lives. The answer for Agee was to strive for an approach in his writing that was essentially religious and poetic. This attitude is
present throughout Agee's writings. It not only shows up in his feelings for those he writes about; it is also evident in his stylistic influences. There are other influences, of course, but to a large extent Agee's
writing style was, indeed, informed by the language of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. (After the death of his father, he would become increasingly immersed in his mother's
Anglo-Catholic faith, which he would wrestle with over his lifetime.) Another influence on Agee was psychoanalysis. The year before staying with the Alabama tenant families in 1936, Agee had read Freud's
The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as Frances Wicke's Jungian analysis The Inner World of Childhood.
Later he would keep notes of his dreams for a while, and he would try some psychoanalysis as preparation for writing The Morning Watch and A Death in the Family,
each which used Agee's memories of his childhood or adolescence (Bergreen). Agee also admired Marcel Proust's and James Joyce's use of the subconscious in their writings. In A Death in the Family,
he would try to achieve a subconscious dreamscape similar to what Proust or Joyce had done. Agee had already experimented with all these elements in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Just as in
A Death in the Family,
the book also opens with extended, dreamlike descriptionhere of the members of a tenant family asleep in their house at night. For that opening passage, Agee borrows an analogy from the Eucharist. There the worshiper drinks from the chalice "the blood of Christ, the cup of salvation" and in the wafer partakes of "the body of Christ, the Bread of Heaven" (the words said by the priest). In the Eucharist, the worshiper is asked to share Christ's suffering and feel his presence. In
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
Agee writes about the hardships the tenant families face. Agee wants the reader to compare the suffering of the families, forsaken by the powers that be, to Christ's suffering. So Agee writes that here in the house "the bone pine hung on its nails like an abandoned Christ." As if reciting a liturgy, Agee goes on to describe how in the house the family lay asleep "bone and bone, blood and blood, life and life disjointed and abandoned."
Throughout Agee's writings there would continue to resonate the language of the spiritual texts of his youth. The King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer
had both coincided with the development of Early Modern English. It was a language in transition, but Early Modern English can roughly be said to commence about 1500. In syntax and vocabulary, Early Modern English is thought to be most fully realized in the language of the
King James Bible
(1611) and the Elizabethan English of William Shakespeare. Briefly put, it was an attempt to modernize the English language while retaining certain Latinized structures, including parallelism and subordination. (The
King James Bible
also retained Hebraisms that emphasize parallel structures, such as are found in the Psalms and book of Proverbs.) There was a certain freedom, too, with sentence order. Just as in poetry, sentence order might sometimes follow the writer's, or character's, train of thought, rather than a standard noun-verb-object form. Such is the case, for instance, when Shakespeare has Macbeth say (in Act 5, Scene 5 of
Macbeth): "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time." Among Agee's writings, this style is perhaps strongest in
A Death in the Family. Just one instance is the haunting opening paragraph in Chapter 2, which continues from the first chapter a sense of sleep interrupted and the growing consciousness of a something other
breaking through the family's tranquility. Agee writes how: Deep in the night they experienced the sensation, in their sleep, of being prodded at, as if by some persistent insect. Their souls turned and
flicked out impatient hands, but the tormentor would not be driven off. They both awoke at the same instant. In the dark and empty hall, by itself, the telephone was shrilling fiercely, forlorn as an abandoned baby and
even more peremptory to be quieted. In the passage above, the parallelism and subordination recall the cadence of an earlier time. Evans would later write of Agee's prose: "It was hardly a twentieth century
style; it had Elizabethan colors. Yet it had extraordinarily knowledgeable contemporary content." What Agee has done in A Death in the Family
is to build on a style associated with the scripture and prayers of the church. (Agee was brought up high Anglican; the mother in A Death in the Family
is Catholic.) He has added to the physical details of his story another layer of spiritual concerns. The reader is also helped to see this other layer by Agee's choice of words. In the passage above, for instance, Agee writes of "souls" and "the tormentor." The reader understands that it is not just a technological contrivance, the telephone, interrupting the family's sleep. As elsewhere in this most autobiographical of Agee's writings, there is a spiritual dimension, too, in the events that will befall the family.
Activity Suggestions 1. Against the tableau of scripture and prayer book, Agee has set forth other classic motifs, such as a child orphaned from his rootsbut roots still nostalgically,
painfully felt, as is the lingering sensation of a lost limb, though long since amputated. Alan Spiegel suggests that in the prologue to A Death in the Family "Knoxville: Summer, 1915"and in the opening
chapter, Agee, reaches back to recover images seen and felt by the young boy Rufus (Agee's middle name), so to develop word-pictures of an ideal childhood: nestled between an earthy but emotionally warm father and a
spiritually concerned though less demonstrative mother. Their differences complement each other, but this balance will be upset by the father's untimely death. What other classic motifs do you see Agee setting up in the
prologue and early chapters of A Death in the Family? How are these motifs developed over the course of the book? 2. A Death in the Family
is a rich repository for studying how a writer uses a narrator's limited understanding not only to gradually unfold information but also to show different perspectives and emotions. After the opening chapters of
A Death in the Family,
Agee alternates between scenes with a dreamlike feeling and scenes that are painted as stark and matter of fact. See, for instance, the scene in Chapter 14 where the mother tries to explain the father's death to Rufus and his younger sister, Catherinealong with the following scene where Rufus helps Catherine get dressed. What do you think Agee is trying to convey in alternating scenes like these? Is it, for example, a growing sense for Rufus and his younger sister, Catherine, that they will lose some of the innocence and security of childhood? Or is there something more?
3. Mark A. Doty and a few other critics have theorized that Agee struggled all his life to reconcile the physical and religious worldshis loud, gregarious, hard-living, hard-drinking father, whom he
greatly admiredwith his religious, artistically turned mother, who would have such an influence over the remainder of his childhood. As mentioned above, Alan Spiegel suggests that in A Death in the Family
Agee has depicted a worldly father and spiritual mother complementing each other, but in a balance that will be upset by the father's untimely death. Do you agree with these assessments? What examples can you find in the book for your conclusions? Examine the choices offered the young Rufus after his father's death: exemplified in the faith of the efficient, sometimes taciturn Father Jackson set against the unbelief of the bitter, perhaps hateful Uncle Andrew. What is Rufus' ultimate choice, and how might things have been different had his father survived?
4. The prologue to A Death in the Family,
and the long, extended passage in the opening chapter, can be used to examine how Agee uses cadence and selected details to attempt not just the sense of an interrupted dreamscape, but also an interrupted childhood and development of self-identity. Agee writes how each member of the family has a sense of the others' well being that can be expressed even without words. As he finishes the prologue, though, young Rufus recalls: "After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but I will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." And at the end of the first chapter, the young boy falls asleep before the evening is over and by next morning "he had so forgotten the words and the noises that years later, when he remembered them, he could never be sure that he was not making them up." Agee was fond of parallel structure, subordinated clauses in complex or even compound-complex sentences, and long lists to create images. Look for examples of these. How does Agee use syntax, word choice, and accumulated details to achieve a sense of memory and dreamscape and, in general, verisimilitude? If you wish, for comparison find examples in Shakespeare or the
King James Bible. How are these constructions used there, compared with how Agee uses similar sentence structures? 5. Throughout the book, there are many references and allusions to scripture and the
prayers of the Christian church, up through the last paragraphs of the book. As early as the prologue, Rufus asks: "May god bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother; my good father, oh, remember them kindly in
their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away." The phrase "time of trouble" is found in six psalms collected in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. "The hour of their taking away" might echo "the
hour of our death," found in the Good Friday litany and the service for burial in the Episcopal prayer book, as well as in the Catholic rosary. The events of the book are situated in 1915, when the Episcopal Church, in
which Agee was brought up, used the 1892 Book of Common Prayer. Agee wrote "Knoxville: Summer, 1915" in 1935-36 and the most of the remainder of A Death in the Family
in the late-forties. During that time, the church used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. On the other hand, the mother in the story is depicted as Catholic and perhaps would have remembered the Catholic missal and
prayers. Some ambitious students might wish to hunt down the sources for the prayers and other Biblical allusions in A Death in the Family. Are any significant to a particular passage, as where Rufus cites
phrases that possibly foretell a service for burial? How is prayer, or remembered snatches of prayer, used differently throughout the book? Works cited Agee, James.
A Death in the Family. New York: Mcdowell, Obolensky, 1957. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Agee, James. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Reprint, Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Paperback, 1980. Agee, James. The Morning Watch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Bergreen, Lawrence. James Agee: A Life. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1984.
Doty, Mark A. Tell Me Who I Am: James Agee's Search for Selfhood. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Evans, Walker. "James Agee in 1936." Evans' essay, written, in
1960, is included as a foreword in the reprint of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Spiegel, Alan. James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A Critical Study. Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1998. Works consulted Kramer, Victor A. James Agee. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Suggested sources Agee, James.
The Letters of James Agee to Father Flye. Ed. James Harold Flye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. The 1892 U. S. Book of Common Prayer http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/BCP_1892.htm
The 1928 U. S. Book of Common Prayerhttp://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/BCP_1928.htm
Several searchable texts of the King James Bible are available on the Internet, including:
Humanities Text Initiative at the University of Michigan: King James Bible
http://hti.umich.edu/k/kjv The Unbound Bible
http://unbound.biola.edu Marshall Surratt currently teaches literature and writing at Prestonwood Christian Academy in Plano, Texas. |
