Beyond Alterity: Narrative Ethics in Faulkner and Agee
by
Benjamin Joshua Doty
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Auburn University
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
Auburn, Alabama
May 14, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Benjamin Joshua Doty
Approved by
Sunny Stalter, Chair, Assistant Professor of English
Erich Nunn, Assistant Professor of English
Donald Wehrs, Professor of English

Abstract
This thesis uses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to examine the narrative structures
of two literary works: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men. Both texts feature dense interaction with the notion of the “poor Southern white”;
this is of particular interest to me because of the American literary canon's habitual ontological
categorization of this figure as lazy and shiftless; even the term “poor white” linguistically traps
these people as 1. poor and 2. white. My aim is to explore the ways in which these texts'
narrative ethics free the characters ethically damaged by the “poor white” cognitive category and
allow them to transcend caricature into humanity.
ii

Acknowledgments
I am, as always, grateful to my parents, who introduced me to learning, and the
professors who have been formative in the way I think about literature, particularly Noel Polk,
who taught me William Faulkner. Thanks especially to Tom Nunnally for his sharp editorial eye
and knowledge of Biblical literature, Erich Nunn for his depth of knowledge of Southern
literature and sound advice, Don Wehrs for introducing me to Emmanuel Levinas and guiding
my reading in ethical criticism, and Sunny Stalter for all the questions, answers, edits, advice,
and encouragement that guided this project into realization.
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Table of Contents
Abstract.........................................................................................................................................ii
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................iii
List of Figures...............................................................................................................................v
List of Abbreviations...................................................................................................................vi
The “Poor White” Problematic ....................................................................................................1
Emmanuel Levinas and Literary Criticism .......................................................................7
The “Poor White” in Context .........................................................................................10
As I Lay Dying and the Ethical Call ..........................................................................................17
Denuding Dewey Dell into Humanity ............................................................................19
Ethical Sensibility and Cognition ...................................................................................26
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Multimodality, and the Impotent Reader ............................31
James Agee and Unimagined Existence .........................................................................35
Agee's Documentarian Poetics .......................................................................................38
The “Poor White” and Anti-Essentialism .......................................................................46
Works Cited ................................................................................................................................47
iv

List of Figures
Figure 1, the cover of the first edition of Tobacco Road ............................................................50
Figure 2, an Alabama man photographed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .........................51
Figure 3, an Alabama man photographed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men .........................52
v

List of Abbreviations
LUNPFM Agee, James, and Walker Evans. 1939. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cambridge:
The Riverside Press, 1960. Print.
AILD Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. New York: Vintage International, 1990.
Print.
OB Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being; or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981.
TI Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso
Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
vi

Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.
 Cora Tull
The “Poor White” Problematic
In Genesis 22, God asks Abraham “Where are you?” In response, Abraham says
“Hineni,” or “here I am.” To say “here I am” goes beyond the meaning of its words: by saying
hineni, Abraham makes himself available to God, displaying an openness in response to a call.
Abraham does not tell God “here I am” to signify his placement in time and space; rather, hineni
is a way to witness and respond to the infinite Other. Hineni is a response to the act of being
commanded. Abraham's only experience of the commander is the act of being commanded, and
that command is such that its audience must answer its call. In Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, the
human face-to-face encounter is analogous to the encounter between God and Abraham; the
Other's presence commands me to respect the infinite alterity within him or her, as Abraham
respects God's infinite alterity. For Levinas, to be a human is to say hineni in response to the
Other's presence and accept the infinite responsibility for the Other that implies: the human is
being-for-the-other (l'être-pour-l'autre). Levinas's thought is radical in that it is this relation, the
infinite obligation and responsibility in which the Other's presence puts me, that lies at the heart
of philosophy. Pre-rational ethics, rather than ontology, is the first philosophy, reversing two
thousand years of logocentric discourse.
Levinasian ethics is a burgeoning subfield in literature studies.1 The great strength of
1Some examples of Levinasian readings of literature include Clark Davis, Hawthorne's Shyness: Ethics, Politics,
and the Question of Engagement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), Levinas and Nineteenth Century Literature,
eds. Don Wehrs and David Haney (Newark, U of Delaware P, 2009) and Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and
1

using Levinasian ethics to read literature is the abandonment of the conventionality that a person
can be completely known or mapped. Much contemporary literary theory accepts that texts and
the humans they represent exist within contexts that are discourse-based and culturally
constructed; we are all familiar with the difference-based tropes of race, class, and gender that
drive much contemporary literary criticism. Levinasian ethics, in contrast, while it is situated in
the post-structuralist intellectual context, looks beyond discourse and power to the irreducible
ethical relationship between humans.
To my knowledge, no work has been done in Levinasian readings of Southern literature.
This comes as a great surprise to me because Southern literature, by its very name, engages in
communication and conflict with the rest of America and the world: it is Southern literature,
intrinsically Othered, as opposed to American literature. My thesis will explore the ways that
Southern Modernism, particularly William Faulkner and James Agee, engages with one of the
South's most enduring tropes: the shiftless, lazy “poor white.”2 This figure is of particular interest
to me because of its status as a cognitive category into which not only socioeconomically
disadvantaged whites are corralled, but also, in modern American culture, most white
Southerners. Some questions I would like to answer in my thesis include: where are the Southern
Modernists situated in the Southern representational spectrum? In what ways do Faulkner's and
Agee's texts use epistemological problematics to evince an aesthetics of non-ontological
representation? Finally, what responsibilities are placed on the world by these texts and on these
texts by the world?
While asking these questions is not a new idea, the manner in which I will explore them
Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999).
2 By “poor white,” I am referring to the Southern “poor white”; all instances of the term throughout the paper are
meant with this regional distinction in mind.
2

will be original; while critics have analyzed the origins of the represented South, they do so
through the philosophical-metaphysical lens of ontology as first philosophy, arguing in terms of
discourse, sign, and capital.3 The originality of my examination of the Southern aesthetic lies in
my reading's reliance on the idea that ethical obligation exists before rationality and that a text
enacts an ethical encounter with its reader in much the same way that the Other enacts an ethical
encounter in her observer: to quote Adam Zachary Newton, “[c]utting athwart the mediatory role
of reason, narrative situations create an immediacy and force, framing relations of provocation,
call, and response that bind narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text” (13).
My thesis, then, contributes to the Southern literary field by examining literature in a manner that
traffics in interactive rather than legislative orders; rather than presuming to know what the
South “is” or “is not,” I am interested in examining the ways that Faulkner and Agee textually
represent the Southern “poor white” to be encountered by the reader. By “ways that Faulkner and
Agee textually represent,” I mean the ways that their narrative structures, particularly their
epistemologically problematic breaks and cracks in narrative and representation, function as sites
of ethical encounter and response.
I would like to to briefly address the reasons why I think this project is necessary. My
greatest interest in my work lies in finding the ways in which characters and cultures overlooked
by literary criticism might be usefully habituated within academic discourse. In the time I've
spent studying Southern literature, I haven't found very much commentary on “poor whites” that
diverges from romanticized primitivism or diagnostic paternalism. Though critical discourse has
rightly rehabilitated its previously white, Western attitude towards minority writers and female
3 I am thinking especially of the work of Michael Kreyling, Scott Romine, Leigh Anne Duck, and Houston Baker,
particularly, for Baker, Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2001).
3

writers, I agree with Michael Kreyling when he writes that critics of Southern literature “have
been more rigorously schooled than others in the orthodox faith that our subject is not invented
by our discussions of it but rather is revealed in a constant southern identity” (ix). Though I
applaud the work of modern scholars in offering new ways to shift the Southern literary
paradigm in areas such as African-American writers, cultural memory, and cultural artificiality,
little academic work has been done towards reconfiguring that paradigm's picture of the “poor
white.” This reconfiguration is what is necessary about my project. I don't think that the lack of
work on “poor whites” is due to some reluctance on academia's part to spend scholarly capital on
white people; rather, the lack is due to a dearth of critical tools for exploring phenomenological
intersubjectivity.
Having explained why my project is necessary, I will explain my choice of methodology.
The way I choose to explore intersubjectivity phenomenologically – that is, to explore questions
of empathy and the subject's realization that the object is actually another subject – is through
Levinas's ethics. Though Martin Buber and Edmund Husserl were both pioneers in
intersubjectivity and phenomenology, Levinas's insistence on ethics as first philosophy and his
firm stance against totality make him suitable to bring the often inhuman “poor white” into the
reader's range of intersubjectivity. I want to show how Faulkner and Agee subtly manipulate
their narratives to create “poor whites” whose portrayals forbid totalization. This project is,
ultimately, an offering of a the “poor white” that traffics in empathy instead of sympathy or
paternalism. As a brief example, let us consider the quote that opens this project: Cora Tull's
declaration that “Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, for He can see into the heart.” The
ability to “see into the heart,” Levinas argues, is based in the subject's realization of the object's
4

subjectivity and status as a fellow human. God does not recognize riches as a marker of worth;
rather, he looks into the heart. This operation – seeing past the culturally material into the human
– is God's way of “reading” a person. Cora, of course, does not end up looking beyond culture,
but Levinas, I argue, allows us to read characters as human without traditional literary criticism's
reliance on difference.
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men feature dense
interaction with the notion of the “poor Southern white”; this is of particular interest to me
because of the American literary canon's habitual ontological categorization of this figure as lazy
and shiftless; even the term “poor white” linguistically traps these people as 1. poor and 2. white.
My aim is to explore the ways in which these texts' narrative ethics free the characters ethically
damaged by the “poor white” cognitive category and allow them to transcend caricature into
humanity.
My first section constructs the critical apparatus for the thesis in a much more detailed
way than it has already been done so in this introduction. I rely on a constellation of
philosophical and critical texts that I see complimenting and elucidating Levinas in addition to
Levinas's writings to establish my focus. I establish ethics-as-criticism within the post-
structuralist, post-modern literary critical field before contextualizing my own critical approach,
particularly how I see its engagement with the idea of the “poor white,” within the ethical-critical
field.
To discuss the “poor white,” I will first need to give some account of her literary and
cultural origins. In this matter, my second section relies on scholarly discussions of the topic
such as Sylvia Jenkins Cook's From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in
5

Fiction to set the literary/cultural/historical stage for my discussion of Faulkner and Agee in both
their regional and literary contexts. I will weave analyses of narrative structures qua ethical
structures throughout my discussion of “poor white” fiction to offer a contrast to the narrative
structures of Faulkner and Agee. Of particular interest to me is the “poor white” in the
sentimental novel. I am interested in the ways that the sentimental novel visits ethical violence
on the “poor white” in the course of its moral mission since a common claim in American anti-
slavery sentimental fiction is that the “poor white” owes her existence to slavery.
My final sections briefly place As I Lay Dying and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the
cultural context explicated in the previous section before exploring what Newton calls the
“narrative ethics” of each work. Each text, in its aesthetics of fragmentation and problematic
epistemology, echoes what Levinas finds valuable in Proust's work: their “most profound lesson,
if poetry can contain lessons, consists in situating reality in a relation with something which for
ever remains other, with the Other as absence and mystery” (“The Other in Proust” 165). While I
will focus on both texts' narrative structures, my methods for examining them will vary slightly
to accommodate for their differences. My interests in As I Lay Dying lie in the examining the
character Dewey Dell as subject and object since the text places her in both positions. Something
I think will be a rich vein to mine is the idea of sensibility, or expression of ethical feeling
beyond rationality. For instance, though the novel's “poor white” characters typically only speak
in sparse, declarative sentences, the reader finds that their thoughts are rich and colorful in their
affectedness and complexity. My argument is that though these thoughts being represented by
text incline the reader to believe that they are rationally-based cognitive function, the syntactic
and orthographic havoc wreaked upon them by the novel's fragmentary poetics renders them
6

The key feature of Levinas's philosophy is that it argues for ethics' place as first
philosophy, in contradiction to, especially, Martin Heidegger's arguments for ontology as first
philosophy. He is especially suspicious of the resemblance of Heideggerian Being, which seeks
power as a form of mastery and freedom as the assertion of will, to Nazi philosophy: as Levinas
writes, “Being's interest takes dramatic form in egoisms struggling with one another, each against
all, in the multiplicity of allergic egoisms which are at war with one another and are thus
together. War is the deed or the drama of the essence's interest” (OB 4). Heideggerian Being, for
Levinas, pits “each against all” in a struggle of ego-against-ego that inescapably culminates in
war. Ontology as first philosophy, he writes in Totality and Infinity, is ultimately “a philosophy of
power” (46). Levinas's response to this dangerously dehumanizing and totalizing philosophy is a
metaphysics predicated on ethics as first philosophy. In Levinas's ethics, one's world and one's
complacent existence within it becomes shattered by the encounter with the Other who “cannot
be comprehended, that is, encompassed”; one encounters the Other's face, which is itself the
Other's discernible presence, but cannot grasp it, mentally or otherwise (TI 194). Because one
cannot grasp the Other's face, it is infinitely Other. One cannot in any way come to know the
Other through Western philosophy's traditional approach to subjectivity in which one see herself
in the Other and can rationally decide that she is human based on her perception of the self-in-
Other. In the face of the Other's infinite alterity, one understands that attempts to categorize her
fall radically short in their quixotic quest to define the indefinable; she “resists possession, resists
my powers” (197). The radical asymmetry between the subject and the Other means “the radical
impossibility of seeing oneself from the outside and of speaking in the same sense of oneself and
Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for
Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, and Simon Critchley’s the Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and
Levinas of great use.
8

of the others, and consequently the impossibility of totalization” (53). The implications for art
and representation are obvious, but Levinas provides a method of traversing the distance between
subject and Other: discourse.
The means by which I access the Other, in her infinity, is speech: “discourse relates with
what remains essentially transcendent” (195). For Levinas, the formal structure of language
“consists in presenting the transcendent”; language, being a relation between terms, enacts an
ethical relationship that “subtends discourse” and “is not a species of consciousness whose ray
emanates from the I; it puts the I in question. This putting in question emanates from the other”
(195).5 Language, then, makes me question myself in the face of infinity and “opens the
primordial discourse whose first word is obligation” (201). This discourse “obliges the entering
into discourse”: when the Other speaks, one necessarily responds in much the same way that
Abraham must reply hineni to God when asked, “Where are you?” (201). The responsibility to
the Other is irrecusable.
Western philosophy's treatment of freedom as the ultimate good is therefore replaced by
one's infinite and unavoidable responsibility to the Other in which the Other's discourse puts my
conception of myself into question. One of my main claims is that literature can enact an
encounter with us in much the same way that a human Other does. A story moves otherwise and
beyond rationality to provoke an asymmetrical metaphysics in relationship with its audience that
mimics the subject's asymmetry with the Other. Narrative, then, acts pre-logically in its
primordial call that inextricably binds reader and text in responsibility: narrative, for me, is
ethical performance. The ethical performances that As I Lay Dying and Let Us Now Praise
5 I should note that the translator of Totality and Infinity into English, Alphonso Lingis, writes that “With the author's
permission, we are translating 'autrui' (the personal Other, the you) by 'Other,' and 'autre' by 'other.'”
9

Famous Men, I argue, enact an ethics of indefinability and of alterity that is infinite, yet, in being
read, unavoidable. In embedding ethical content into form, both Faulkner and Agee engage in
Modernism's fascination with the relationship between meaning and word.
My analysis of literature stems from this philosophical argument in its interest in art's
mission of representation: if representation is analogous to cognitive categorization and therefore
totalization, in what ways might art allow for infinity? As Robbins writes, for Levinas, art often
effects “a passivity, a disengagement, an evasion of responsibility. Hence for Levinas the task of
criticism becomes all-important: it serves to reintegrate the inhuman work into the human world,
to detach it from its irresponsibility” (52). A text that requires the act of criticism or
interpretation, then, operates in both the art and human worlds. My answer to the question of
infinity in texts proposes viewing epistemological problematics as lacunae in which the reader
must construct the textual universe without textual aid; while narrative normally exerts iron
control over its characters and their actions, speech, and thoughts, creating a universe even as it
reports it, gaps in narrative that create a slippage between what a text says and what a reader
understands create a space in which the reader may find the sign of the unrepresentable. An
epistemologically problematic text, then, makes the idea of unknowability into an aesthetic
element. To begin my analysis, I will address the literary history of the “poor white” and her
position in the turn-of-the-century literary racial/ethnic field.
The “Poor White” in Context
The prospect of discussing “the poor white” in literature runs the same risk of
thematization that representation does: in identifying a group of people as an object of scholarly
inquiry, do I not also categorize them?6 I would like to make clear that I am studying the
6 For a discussion of the challenges involved with arguing against ontology in language that is implicitly ontological,
10

phenomenon of categorization of the “poor white” rather than participating in that categorization
itself. This distinction between presuming to study the “poor white” and studying her
representation is, I argue, an important distinction between my project and those of the authors I
discuss.
The “poor white” is a popular figure in American culture. In Sylvia Jenkins Cook's From
Tobacco Road to Route 66, she notes that “[t]he southern poor white is one of America's oldest
and most enduring folk figures. His image is an elusive one, compounded of popular prejudice . .
. but most typically it derives from the alliance of extreme material deprivation with slyness,
sloth, absurd folly, and random violence” (ix). W. J. Cash, writing in The Mind of the South,
describes what he calls the “classical” “poor white” family: “The men might plow a little, hunt a
little, fish a little, but mainly passed their time on their backsides in the shade of a tree,
communing with their hounds and a jug of what, with a fine feeling for words, had been named
'bust-head'” (25). It is this definition of the “poor white” that I will examine in this paper. In
particular, I am concerned with the image of the rural, Southern “poor white” given to folly,
violence, and laziness: in other words, given to animalistic behavior that precludes humanity. To
usefully contextualize Faulkner and Agee in “poor white” literature, I will examine the standing
of the “poor white” in the American sentimental and Naturalist traditions before moving to
Southern Modernism.
I will begin with the sentimental novel. Sentimental fiction operates on a system of moral
exemplification wherein authorial intention and characters' moral imaginations collude to enact
emotional changes in its reader; as Adam Newton explains, it “instruct[s] response by inducing
identificatory states of compassion and pity . . . ethics operates in interpolated fashion, bolstering
see Derrida's essay “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980).
11

the authoritarian character of the novel with deontic and legislative weight” (9). Don Wehrs
writes, in reference to the origins of the sentimental novel, that “the novel's generic susceptibility
to fostering the internalization of Foucauldian surveillance and to serving as a vehicle of
Gramscian hegemony reinforces and is reinforced by the sentimental tradition's naturalization of
class and gender condescension” (142). The sentimental novel, then, simultaneously instructs
and normalizes its reader's ethical systems. Its operation is fueled by an ethics of exemplarity: by
using fictive characters as vehicles of moral education, the sentimental novel often instructs its
reader's ethical sensibilities not in the context of lived life, but theoretical, textual knowledge. I
am taking care to not confuse a sentimental novel's call to ethical consideration with
deontological programming; that's too broad a claim. Rather, my observations of sentimental
fiction's treatment of the “poor white” will focus on her forced participation in moral calculations
in exemplary texts rather than on the genre as a whole.
To begin, I would like to briefly address the abolitionist sentimental novel's figuration of
the “poor white.” It is typical of these novels, however admirable their purpose, to cast the
transformation of rural whites to “poor whites” as the inevitable result of slavery. Harriet
Beecher Stowe published A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1853 as a guidebook for her novel and
an attempt to prove its veracity; concerning “poor whites” in her novel, she writes, “between the
free labour of the North and the slave labour of the South, there is nothing for a poor white to do.
Without schools or churches, these miserable families grow up heathen on a Christian soil, in
idleness, vice, dirt, and discomfort of all sorts” (Stowe 366). The ethical issue at hand is one of
disciplinary cross-pollination gone wild: though Stowe might have created her characters as
composites of real people, they are still fictive, existing at best as re-creations of her mind's
12

ideologically mediated perceptions of the “poor whites” she met, read about, or heard of. This
prosopopoeia, in Levinasian terms, is a figuring; as Jill Robbins writes, for Levinas, “[t]o take on
a character (une figure) is to risk becoming a figure, and to thereby lose what is human, to be
turned into a statue, to be turned into stone. To take up a character is said to render one incapable
of distinguishing illusion from reality, 'stage' from 'world' (50). In figuring the “poor white,” by
categorizing her, then, Stowe turns her into stone, aestheticizing her into a work of art, and
rending her humanity in the process. Uncle Tom's Cabin instructs and modulates its readers'
ethical systems to act not in response to anything resembling humanity; rather, sympathy and
ethical action are configured from a position of societal height and are directed towards
caricatures. Moreover, Uncle Tom's Cabin draws from a racist image-repertoire in its figuration
of African American figures, particularly in the cases of Sam and Mammy, and those images,
despite the intention of their use, circulate into public consciousness simply by being used. The
same process works, I argue, in the case of “poor whites”; in figuring them as the dregs of the
slavery machine, Stowe creates and reinforces images of them that are easily cognitively
categorizable and resistant to interpretations of them as human.
In William Well's Brown's 1853 novel Clotel, the “authoritarian character” vis-a-vis “poor
whites” resides in the book's moral mission to end slavery. In “Chapter VII. The Poor Whites,
South.,” Carlto, Snyder, and Huckelby, all members of the middle or upper class, discuss poor
whites in Sand Hill, Mississippi. Snyder remarks that they are “ignorant as horses,” and
Huckelby says that “we who come from more enlightened parts don't know how to put up with
'em down here. I find the people here knows mighty little indeed” (116, 118). The reason for the
abjectness of the South's poor whites is, according to Snyder, slavery (117). This judgement is
13

handed down from characters of superior ethical sensibility to instruct readers in both the
societally degressive effects of slavery and the relative depravity of the “poor white.”
Meanwhile, the attempt to transcribe Southern dialect – e.g. “'Is you gwine to stay here long'”
and “'You are the first of that sort that's bin in these diggins for many a day'” – functions, in its
semblance to scrupulous reportage, to lend authoritative weight to the novel's representations of
its “poor whites.” Here, functioning as integers in a moralistic calculus, the “poor white,”
allowed narrative expression only in the minds and mouths of other (socially superior)
characters, is confined within the text and is denied full realization. In Levinasian terms, the
sentimental novel's “poor white” lacks the ability to engage the reader in a face-to-face encounter
due to her confinement within categorization. The representative thread of categorization is
longed lived: the presentation of the “poor white” as a product of a vast societal machine extends
from Stowe and Brown's sentimental fiction all the way to Erskine Caldwell's Naturalism.
The first edition of Caldwell's Tobacco Road, published in 1932 by Scribners, features a
cover (Figure 1) that depicts a sunken-cheeked, slump-shouldered man in a battered hat gazing at
the viewer from a background consisting of a road running between sickly pine trees and a house
with a swaybacked roof; tree stumps dot the ground. This accurately foretells the novel's
Naturalist interest in rural degradation: it begins with Lov speaking to his twelve-year-old wife's
parents to see if they could convince her to finally sleep with him. His in-laws eventually divest
him of the fifty-cent sack of turnips he was carrying back to his wife. The novel is full of such
occurrences; in one of its most famous scenes, a comical fistfight between family members over
a car ends in their matriarch being run over:
Bessie retreated. Both Ada and Jeeter were fighting her, and she was unable to
14

strike back. She ran to the automobile and jumped in. Jeeter picked up a stick and
hit her with it several times before Ada took it from him and began poking Bessie
in the ribs with it . . . Mother Lester, who had watched the fight from the start, ran
across the yard to get behind another chinaberry tree where she could see from a
better location everything that was happening. She had no more than reached a
point midway between two chinaberry trees when the rear end of the automobile
struck her, knocking her down and backing over her. (165)
The narrative's scrupulous reportage presents a filmic representation of the event from the
position of “ethical insight and epistemological privilege”: we watch the characters move and act
from on high without feeling anything beyond spectatorial fascination (Wehrs 142). To do so, I
think, verges on the pornographic: unlike Mother Lester, whose proximity to the action she
observes results in danger, we observe without fear of reprisal. While sentimental fiction
attempts to induce personal identification with the characters, Naturalist fiction presents the
characters as pawns in the hands of vast natural or social forces; indeed, the novel ends with an
examination of the socioeconomic forces that drive the Lesters and those like them into moral
depravity.
While Caldwell is ostensibly well-intentioned towards poor whites in Tobacco Road, his
use of stereotypical imagery – the novel reads today like a prolonged Larry the Cable Guy joke –
leaks out of the text into “the collective hands of a culture's capacity for, and failure of,
imagination – its large-scale ethics of representation” (Newton 221). The unquestioned use of the
stereotypical poor white figure, despite good intentions, circulates back into reality such that the
movie made from the novel is a comedy. We move now from Caldwell's spectatorship to
15

Faulkner's humanistic multiperspectivality.
16

exceed the thought and ink used to narrate him or her. This portrayal of the “poor white” is
observably different from earlier and contemporary portrayals of her in novels such as Clotel or
Tobacco Road, which have narrative structures that I argue are inherently juridical, entrapping
their “poor white” characters in totalizing ontological categories. I am not ascribing any sort of
intention towards social tolerance or intolerance to any author: indeed, Faulkner said in an
interview that “it does sort of amuse me when I hear 'em talking about the sociological picture
that I present in something like As I Lay Dying”; rather, I am interested in literature's ethical
performances, which is, in a Levinasian sense, concussive: they linger as “traumatisms of
astonishment” (Meriwether and Millgate 220, TI 73). These concussions swirl out of literature
into reality: the use of the “poor white” image-repertoire propels those images from art into
consciousness and from consciousness into lived life. I hold that the user of the “poor white”
image-repertoire informs the consciousness of both the user and the audience; as Bakhtin writes,
“[c]onsciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With
each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia”
(295; emphasis original). Thus, the ethical considerations implicit in representing “poor whites”
is important because of fiction's power to transpose literary representation, laden with ethical
structures, onto cognitive representation.
This paper is prefaced with a quote by Cora Tull about God's disregard for money: just as
God is class-blind and sees into the heart, I argue, As I Lay Dying demands its reader do the
same. For this project, I will focus on the “poor white” character Dewey Dell, as most critical
commentary singles her out for her promiscuity (though, for all we know, she might have only
had sex once), stupidity, and egoism,7 all of which are common traits of the “poor white.” Most
7 See especially William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, ed. Nicolas Tredell (Columbia UP,
18

peculiarly, critics who specifically concern themselves with Faulkner's female characters often
overlook Dewey Dell altogether in favor of Addie, or, when they consider her, dismiss her. I
agree with Minrose Gwin when she writes in The Feminine and Faulkner that women in
Faulkner are “that excess which generates narrative production and makes stories flood over
their own boundaries,” but she makes no mention of Dewey Dell (43). Faulkner and Gender,
edited by Donald Kartiganer and Ann Abadie, also has no discussion of Dewey Dell, despite its
wealth of thoughtful essays. Deborah Clarke, in Robbing the Mother, writes that Dewey Dell
expresses herself “not in symbolic discourse but through a prediscursive semiotic non-language,”
a stance that I also take, but makes nothing of this realization beyond remarking on Dewey Dell's
identity being connected to her body (41). Diane Roberts, in Faulkner and Southern
Womanhood, agrees; Dewey Dell “is all body as Darl is all language,” and “[h]er consciousness,
such as it is, looks inward toward the life growing in her” (202). While these readings are well-
informed, I fail to see how they differ from traditionalist views of Dewey Dell. Where I disagree
with these critics is that even when they do pay attention to her, they still discuss her as if she is
stupid: her consciousness, “such as it is,” writes Roberts, only looks into her body. These
readings, I think, ultimately stem from literary criticism's insistence that stream of consciousness
represents conscious thought instead of feeling. My goal in choosing Dewey Dell to examine is
not only to move towards amending the path of critical attention directed towards her, but also to
explore the novel's exploration of the humanity of a woman who is, throughout most of the
narrative, barefoot and pregnant, a conventional figure of the “poor white” female.
Denuding Dewey Dell into Humanity
2000); André Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels From “The Sound and the Fury” to “Light in August,”
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000); and Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County, (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1990).
19

For Levinas, the road to intersubjectivity is paved with language. He writes: “Saying
taken strictly is a 'signifyingness dealt the other,' prior to all objectification; it does not consist in
giving signs . . . Saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication,
as exposure” (OB 48). For Levinas, then, Saying stands in opposition to the Said: where the Said
traffics in the reduction of “the manifestation of truth conceived as a combination of
psychological elements,” the Saying resides as exposure, to be defined in this project as “a
denuding of denuding . . . an expression of exposure, a hyperbolic passivity that disturbs the still
waters” (49). While Clotel and Tobacco Road are ostensibly well-intentioned, their narrative
structures lend themselves to the combination of elements that enacts the totalizing Said; As I
Lay Dying, I argue, contains in its narrative interstices and cognitive upsurges spaces of Saying
where the reader is free to enact herself upon the nude, untexted story: infinity is possible here.
This infinity is possible due to the novel's epistemologically problematic narrative
structure: it is impossible to understand it as “a combination of psychological elements” because
in doing so, gaps still remain. Darl's preternatural ability to read thoughts and see the future
eschews normative modes of understanding to create meaning and models how a reader of the
novel must look beyond the hope of stable narrative structure: Dewey Dell narrates: “The land
runs out of Darl's eyes; they swim to pin points. They begin at my feet and rise along my body to
my face, and then my dress is gone: I sit naked on the seat above the unhurrying mules, above
the travail. Suppose I tell him to turn. He will do what I say. Don't you know he will do what I
say?” (121). For Levinas, the face, nudity, and clothing have a special signification wherein to
clothe the face is to shroud it in mystery: he writes, “[h]ere is a person who is what he is; but he
does not make us forget, does not absorb, cover over entirely the objects he holds and the way he
20

road now, because it can wait. New Hope. 3 mi. it will say. New Hope. 3 mi. New Hope. 3 mi.
And then the road will begin, curving away into the trees, empty with waiting, saying New Hope
three miles” (120). She demands interaction from her reader in determining what, if anything,
she is conveying; her thoughts swirl around the approaching sign and the road near it, now in the
present tense as it takes on personification and “look[s] out at the road now, because it can wait,”
and now in the future tense when it “the road will begin, curving away into the trees.” She
mourns that “[i]t is because in the wild and outraged earth too soon too soon too soon. It's not
that I wouldn't and will not it's that it is too soon too soon too soon” (120). Dewey Dell's grief-
stricken monologue engages in “creat[ing] an immediacy and force, framing relations of
provocation, call, and response that bind narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and
text” (Newton 13). Dewey Dell's emotionally affected narration, in its desperate repetitions and
syntactic dead ends, opens a zone of intersubjectivity which demands an interactive rather than a
legislative order of understanding. The narrative structure of this section, in its
nonrepresentational narrative cracks, allows the reader to move beyond the categorizations and
thematizing implicit in narrative reportage towards an understanding of Dewey Dell not as a
“poor white” and a target for ridicule or bourgeois sympathy, but towards an understanding of
her as a person capable of the ethical encounter.
This interactivity extends not only to the reader, but also to Darl. When his and Dewey
Dell's eyes meet, they engage in communication that gradually transcends the linguistic and
verges into the precognitive: “He'll do as I say. He always does. I can persuade him to anything.
You know I can. Suppose I say Turn here. That was when I died that time. Suppose I do. We'll go
to New Hope. We wont have to go to town. I rose and took the knife from the streaming fish still
23

hissing and I killed Darl” (121). Dewey Dell obviously does not kill Darl, nor can most fish hiss;
rather, I argue, we see at the end of this selection a communication that relies on emotional rather
than rational symbology. She interacts with a recurring symbol of Addie's death – the knifed fish
– to direct violence at Darl. Though this interactivity ends in violence, the narration's allowing
the violence to occur demonstrates its scope beyond the rational into what precedes the rational –
the emotional, the ethical, aesthesis.
Mosley's section begins with his looking at Dewey Dell's face and seeing her “not
looking at anything in particular; just standing there with her head turned this way and her eyes
full on me and kind of blank too like she was waiting for a sign” (198). Already, we may
determine that his is a section of narration, of storytelling, rather than the desperate monologue
of Dewey Dell's section: stylistically, his first-person narrative points out at the world rather than
in, setting the stage for encountering and totalizing the Other. Here, the possession of a face
attached to a recognizably poor person “already provides the culture of definition with a pretext
– humanity reduced to physicality – for defacing or misrecognizing it; being culturally 'marked,'
in other words, legitimates a more violent marking of the face” (Newton 183). Mosley, in
defining Dewey Dell as poor, as “culturally 'marked,'” enables him to transfer his cultural
attitudes towards the poor onto her. The blankness Mosley sees in Dewey Dell's eyes exists in a
background of indeterminacy; her face, rather than offering revelation, instead merely mystifies
when confronted with a legislative order of comprehension.
While Dewey Dell's section traffics in emotional call and response, Mosley's operates
within “the culture of definition”; the face is an object of socioeconomic and racial
categorization instead of the key with which one may interact with a human. At one point,
24

Mosley thinks that he perceives some signification in her eyes: “She stopped and looked at me. It
was like she had taken some kind of a lid off her face, her eyes. It was her eyes: kind of dumb
and hopeful and sullenly willing to be disappointed all at the same time” (200). Mosley looks at
her eyes rather than beyond: his perception of her is already mediated through his racially tinged
socioeconomic assumptions and so seeks to define rather than interact. Even though he thinks
that her eyes are suddenly unlidded, he does not look beyond the phenomenological
manifestation of her humanity to its ethical manifestation. Here, I think, Mosley is a stand-in for
the reader, herself fooled by the culture of categorization into not recognizing the humanity of
the “poor white” Other. Just as Mosley mistakes Dewey Dell for a readable text, so do we as
readers mistake “poor white” characters for their stock characterizations.
Levinas notes that when we are not participants in an ethical encounter, we exist in a state
of enjoyment (jouissance), which manifests itself as independence. He writes that enjoyment “is
an independent sui generis, the independence of happiness”; enjoyment is a feeling of self-
sufficiency (TI 87). Wehrs writes that enjoyment is the release from need, “the position that
allows the sentimental hero to indulge in condescending empathy, a materially generated sense of
independence that, by placing us into an aesthetic relation to exteriority, allows us to enjoy the
illusion that we are God” (144). Mosley takes the ethically superior position of the sentimental
hero; from his relatively privileged place as a town shop clerk, he can narrate Dewey Dell's
actions while providing socially instructive commentary: in addition to the dialogue he narrates
concerning his refusal to supply Dewey Dell with medicine to induce an abortion, itself didactic
by its very presence in the narration, he says to the reader, “But it's a hard life they have;
sometimes a man. . . . . . .if there can ever be any excuse for sin, which it cant be. And then, life
25

wasn't made to be easy on folks: they wouldn't ever have any reason to be good and die” (202-
203). He verges on an empathy rooted in his knowledge of women but goes on to rely instead on
his idea of Christian doctrine as his ethical guide, substituting the ideological for the experiential.
Mosley, encountering Dewey Dell, must reckon with the break of enjoyment that she represents,
and he responds by thematizing her into ethnicity and womanhood to avoid that very break;
rather than considering her humanity, he exteriorizes her into inescapable, socially affected
cognitive categories. So, I think, do we as readers.
Ethical Sensibility and Cognition
How, then, can we break away from reading like Moseley? When Newton claims that
“narrative situations create an immediacy and force,” he refers to what Levinas calls
“sensibility,” which “does not belong to the order of thought but to that of sentiment, that is, the
affectivity wherein the egoism of the I pulsates. One does not know, one lives sensible qualities”
(TI 135). Sensibility traffics in affect and the experiential; it, then, exists within the same sphere
as Saying: both operate pre-logically, sensibility as affectivity and Saying as the “condition for
all communication, as exposure” (OB 48). I would like to make a brief distinction between
Levinasian sensibility and literary sensibility, perhaps better termed “sentimentality”: the former
finds its roots in lived experience while the latter often functions deontologically. This is not to
say that the latter cannot evince the former, but a distinction between the two is necessary for my
discussion.
Because Levinasian sensibility is pre-rational, its manifestation is typically emotional or
somatic;8 to give an example, sensibility becomes apparent when we blush even when we don't
8 I would be remiss not to note the work being done in neuroscience that resonates powerfully with the connections
between the pre-rational, the emotional, and the body found in Levinas's work; in particular, I have found Patrick
Colm Hogan, Cognitive Science, Literature, and the Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Marc Hauser, Moral Minds:
How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Ecco, 2006); and Antonio Damasio, Looking for
26

mean to. That is, a blush communicates feeling that exists before and beyond rationality and
thematization; it is affectivity, “an exposure to the other without this exposure being assumed, an
exposure without holding back, exposure of exposedness, expression, saying” (OB 15). We can
make useful commentary on As I Lay Dying's presentation of “poor whites” by examining their
“expression, saying” anterior to rationality; viz., their thoughts.
To make my point about the anteriority of thought to reason in As I Lay Dying, I need to
address the obvious: isn't thought rational? While I defer to the work of neuroscientists in
determining the wider answer to that question, I argue that thought, at least in As I Lay Dying, is
demonstrably before logos, existing as a precondition for rationality rather than an
accompaniment of it. As Cook writes, in As I Lay Dying, characters “whose oral language is
restricted to terse, formulaic, ungrammatical, and almost wholly practical utterances are
permitted in their mental language a range of philosophical speculation and colorful and complex
imagery not to be expected from their actions and conversation alone” (44). My explanation for
this disparity is the pre-linguistic character of their thoughts; in keeping my focus on Dewey
Dell, when she is milking a cow and thinks to herself that the animal's breath is “warm, sweet,
stertorous, moaning,” I argue that when she does not actually think to herself that the breath is
“stertorous” (63). Rather, her incongruous use of a polysyllabic, Latinate word is such a radical
break from her previously demonstrated vocabulary that it signals cognitive activity otherwise
and beyond, to use Levinas's phrase, words. As I Lay Dying, in this and other sections of
cognitive representation that seems to run ahead of the words used to express it, weaves Saying
with Said, sensibility with rationality, to create characters capable of ethical encounters with their
Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in
the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999) of great interest.
27

observers.
Let us examine sensibility more closely. Levinas writes that “[s]ensibility is exposedness
to the other. It is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of
offering oneself, which would be an act, and already presupposes the unlimited undergoing of
the sensibility” (75). The most important concepts about sensibility for my discussion are its
status as “exposedness to the other” and this exposure's being a total offering: one-for-the-other,
devoid of the egotistical. Earlier in this paper, I examined Dewey Dell's narration of her thoughts
as Saying, or “hyperbolic passivity that disturbs the still waters” (OB 49). While Saying and
sensibility both reside as exposure, they have different uses for my discussion: in examining
Saying, I seek to distinguish it from Said, to distinguish interactive from juridical narrative forms
and to point out the novel's potential for representing infinity. In examining sensibility, I wish to
focus my analysis and explore Dewey Dell's cognition not in terms of its potential for infinity but
in terms of its immediacy and antecedence to rationality and thus its potential for
intersubjectivity.
Dewey Dell, describing her quasi-telepathic connection with Darl, narrates Darl
informing her that he had seen her and a local boy, Lafe, having sex: “He said he knew without
the words like he told me that ma is going to die without words, and I knew he knew because if
he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been there and saw
us” (27). The siblings, then, are able to communicate with each other “without words,” yet Darl
“said he knew,” so there is some giving of signs. Darl and Dewey Dell's meta-lingual
communication partakes of “making oneself a sign” because it dispenses with language as
mediator, leaving only “sincerity.” Dewey Dell herself recognizes this sincerity: “I knew he
28

knew because if he had said he knew with the words I would not have believed that he had been
there and saw us” (27). What is important to note here is that if he had used words to tell her he
saw her and Lafe having sex, she would not have believed him: she is drawing a distinction
between word and communication, displaying, like her mother, a distrust of language.9 What I
find most fascinating about Dewey Dell's distinction between word and communication is the
nature of what either would have told her about Darl: “that he had been there and saw us” (27).
Levinas, writing about sensibility, draws a similar distinction between the experiential and the
theoretical: “[t]he disclosed qua disclosed overflows itself as a symbol of this in that; it is
identified in the this as that . . . Thus knowing is always a priori”;10 further, Darl's knowing is
“[n]ot saying dissimulating itself and protecting itself in the said, just giving out words in the
face of the other, but saying uncovering itself, that is, denuding itself of its skin, sensibility on
the surface of the skin, at the edge of the nerves” (OB 62, 14). Like Levinas, Dewey Dell prefers
“saying uncovering itself” over “giving out words,” the experiential over the theoretical,
immediacy over rationality: for her, knowledge that is true and readily accepted is so not because
of familial trust but because of its medium, or, rather, non-medium: sensibility. I recognize that
this conclusion runs the risk of resembling what so many other have said about the “poor white”:
that they prefer gut feelings over education. However, I have argued for a sort of fineness of
feeling in Dewey Dell that is not present in many portrayals of the “poor white,” and it is this
feeling that gives her the ability to transcend the text and inspire something in the reader that is
otherwise than mere pity or paternalism. She inspires recognition. My purpose in arguing for
9 Addie's distrust of language, exemplified by statements such as “That was when I learned that words are no good;
that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at,” has been extensively discussed in most major critical
examinations of As I Lay Dying and is too well-trod a path to walk again, considering this project's brevity (171).
10 To compress a much larger point, Levinas is here referring to his argument for sensibility's role as the antecedent of
all knowledge; see “Sensibility and Cognition” in Otherwise than Being.
29

Dewey Dell's sensibility is not to simply provide a Levinasian “reading” of her cognition but to
make a point of her status as more than a conduit for thoughts and ideas that the narrative assigns
her: she is sensible and therefore capable of a range of emotion and cognition beyond what the
text assigns her. As Simon Critchley explains, “[f]or Levinas, the subject is subject, and the form
that this subjection assumes is that of sensibility or sentience. Sensibility is the way of my
subjection, vulnerability, or passivity towards the other” (63). Dewey Dell is demonstrably
possessed of subjectivity. This is a far cry from the promiscuous, stupid girl described by most
Faulkner criticism: Faulkner himself, I argue, creates a text in which the “poor white” obtains
subjectivity, and this text participates in a larger push towards anti-essentialism along with James
Agee's and Walker Evans' 1939 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
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Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Multimodality, and the Impotent Reader
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men concerns itself not with the “poor white” synonymous
with “white trash” but with the “poor white” tenant farmer or sharecropper. However, the book
engages in a conversation, as I have argued Faulkner's does, with scholarly and artistic works
that seek to categorize, research, analyze, narrate and otherwise represent poor Southern whites.
My interest in AILD and LUNPFM stems not merely from their similar subject matter, but the
way that each work approaches its subject; while other works touching on the Southern “poor
white” tend to approach her in a manner that essentializes and Others her into abstraction and
inhumanity, Faulkner, Agee, and Evans work towards reversing that totalizing discourse into a
new, pluralistic, anti-essentialist discourse. Despite their generic differences, both works function
in the same way: As I Lay Dying and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men both make use of narrative
structures laden with anti-essentialist ethics.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, to be literal, a book with pictures. However, the
unlabeled photographs, rather than being interspersed throughout Agee's prose as visual aids to
an otherwise complete story, are gathered at the very beginning of the book. Agee explains, “The
photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully
collaborative. By their fewness, and by the impotence of the reader's eye, this will be
misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it” (xv). Agee's valuing of
the photographs as “coequal” to the text invites a reading of them according to his view of the
difference between his work and a novel's:
31

Levinas, ethics, is encountered through the otherness of the face and its infinite demand on me”
(10). However, Levinas's writings on the visual always focus on paintings or the theatre and
never on photography. Foster constructs a methodology for Levinasian considerations of
photography, but that methodology loops through Barthes to Agamben to Benjamin to Butler
without satisfactorily articulating a usable theoretical system. For my project, I would like to
construct a brief methodology for analyzing Evans' photographs through a Levinasian lens.
Let me begin with Roland Barthes. In his book Camera Lucida, he writes that the
experience of looking at a photograph is composed of two elements: the studium, which is, to
paraphrase, a general interest in what one is looking at, and the punctum, Latin for “sting, speck,
cut, little hole” (26-7). The punctum, for Barthes, “bruises me, is poignant to me,” and, in
opposition to the codedness of the studium, is uncoded (27, 51). One example Barthes gives of a
punctum is a photograph of two mentally retarded children in a New Jersey institution. The
photograph is extraordinary: the boy is less than half the size of the girl he is standing next to, yet
they appear to be near the same age. However, what wounds and overwhelms Barthes is “the
little boy's huge Danton collar, the girl's finger bandage” (51). That which wounds and holds in a
photograph “does not find its sign, its name” (51, 53). However, why does the punctum wound
and bruise? Levinas provides an answer: for both him and Barthes, that which arrests is both
totally unknown and totally open, and it is the openness of the unknown that is so arresting. Both
philosophers traffic in the undeniable presence of the unnamed. In offering a Levinasian analysis
of Evans' photographs, I will look for the unnamed and the uncoded and explain how those
elements contribute to a larger anti-essentialist project.
Opening the book, one is immediately faced with a series of uncaptioned photographs.
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Though I will only consider two of these photographs for analysis, I hold that any photograph
can be Levinasianally considered. Because the idea of “the face” is a thread running throughout
my project, the photographs I will discuss are of people facing the camera; I am interested in
how these photographs face the observer and provoke intersubjectivity. Consider Figure 2. This
photograph comprises the first page of LUNPFM, so it can be considered to be the “face” of the
book. Agee's and Evans' intention in placing this photograph first, I think, is obvious: the
photograph faces the reader not only because of its position, but also because of its content.
Pictured is an old man in a wrinkled blazer standing against a building; his gaze steadily meets
the camera's. To make use of Barthes' methodology, to me the punctum of this photograph is the
man's tie crawling out of his blazer. It is an aching reminder that this man existed before and
after the photograph was taken: he woke up that morning and got dressed, but not perfectly. We
see that he wears a wedding ring, but why didn't his wife straighten his tie? I am pierced by this
photograph, but why? The answer, I think, is that it sets the stage for the phenomenological
realization of intersubjectivity. The punctum allows the subject of the photograph to escape
figuration and the sort of death-in-art that Barthes acknowledges in his discussion of the “Total-
Image” and that Levinas explicates in “Reality and Its Shadow.” However, let me take this
further: in the moment of my perceiving the punctum, I know that the man's humanity reaches
infinitely beyond the photograph into reality. This knowledge is beyond the Barthesian
epistemology that says the subject of the photograph “has been” as photographed. When we
consider the photograph Levinasianally, we realize that not only has the man been as
photographed, but he has been before and since the photograph. Moreover, not only has the man
been, but the vulnerability manifested in his relaxed stance and dead-on facing of the camera
34

denotes the sort of sensibility I identified in my discussion of Dewey Dell. To paraphrase
Critchley, for Levinas, sensibility is tantamount to sentience (63).
The subject of Figure 3, in contrast to the subject of Figure 2, looks a good deal like how
popular conception perceives him to look. A quick glance at Figure 1, the cover of the first
edition of Tobacco Road, will show that he bears a strong resemblance to the illustration of Jeeter
Lester: they share stubble, thin cheeks, and a steady gaze at the viewer. However, apart from
medium, there is one important distinction: the man in Figure 3 is not smiling (posed, created)
like Jeeter is. He is not frowning, either; rather, he simply regards the camera, eschewing what
Barthes calls the “mortiferous layer of the Pose” for “looking me straight in the eye” (15, 111;
emphasis original). This is not to say that the subject is somehow unaware he is being
photographed; rather, I am saying that he faces the camera as he would me. To look at the
photograph of this man, I think, is to be met. The photographs possessed of the punctum cause
Barthes to feel “Pity” as he passes “beyond the unreality of the thing represented,” and this pity
makes him go mad (116-7). However, is pity not the simultaneous perception of the other's
vulnerability and the revealing of one's own? What is for Barthes madness, I argue, is for
Levinas intersubjectivity: ethical sensibility qua vulnerability.
James Agee and Unimagined Existence
My largest point in this work is that narrative structures are weighted with ethical force,
but in discussing the narrative structure of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I must address the
generic differences between it and As I Lay Dying. First and foremost, Agee's work is explicitly
and self-consciously not a work of fiction. What it is, exactly, is unclear: Agee complains that the
book “is a book only by necessity,” and he claims that he and Evans try to address Southern
35

it” (9). Mystery, responsibility, readerly action: the self-consciousness of LUNPFM places Agee
solidly in the role of narrative ethicist. If the book is self-conscious, then he, as its co-creator, is
its conscience. Considering the role of the reporter in “Colon,” he writes:
Here at a center is a creature: it would be our business to show how through every
instant of every day of every year or his existence alive he is from all sides
streamed inward upon, bombarded, pierced, destroyed by that enormous sleeting
of all objects forms and ghosts how great how small no matter, which surround
and whom his senses take: in as great and perfect and exact particularity as we
can name them: . . . but it is beyond my human power to do. . . . for I must say to
you, this is not a work of art or of entertainment, nor will I assume the obligations
of the artist or entertainer, but is a human effort which must require human co-
operation.” (110-1)
Interestingly, Agee here describes the tension and flux between literary realism and modernity; in
a realist novel such as The Red and the Black or Madame Bovary, typological generalizations
based on assumed, culturally and historically distinctive common experience attempt the
simulation of reality. This approach eventually gives way to Modernist detailed descriptions of a
few characters' particular qualities and inner workings: the all-encompassing telescope is
exchanged for the myopic microscope, and it is this microscope that Agee uses.
One example of Agee's use of the narrative microscope can be found in the text's many
lists; of plants he lists “black walnuts, swamp willow, crabapple, wild plum, holly, laurel,
chinaberry, May apple . . .,” and of animals there are “rabbits, red squirrels, gray squirrels,
opossums, raccoons, wild razorbacks, wildcats, perhaps rare foxes” (218). Agee's urge to
37

exhaustively list the contents of his surroundings is reminiscent of his early assertion that “[i]f I
could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of
cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors,
plates of food and excrement” (13). What is striking about Agee's lists are their exactness: there
are red squirrels and gray squirrels, not simply “various squirrels” or “squirrels.” The portrait he
paints of this particular part of Alabama is as close to a photograph as he can manage; he almost
frenziedly includes all aspects of his environment as if he is afraid that in neglecting one
element, the rest lose their veracity.
Tellingly, Agee requires “human co-operation” for his project (111). Levinas writes that
the work of art “is completed in spite of the social or material causes that interrupt it. It does not
give itself out as the beginning of a dialogue” (“Reality and Its Shadow” 131). However,
LUNPFM explicitly sets out not only to begin a dialogue, but to maintain it. The question is,
between whom is the dialogue held? We may find the answer in the way Agee's ethics are
embedded in his narrative structures.
Agee's Documentarian Poetics
The critical conversation about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is rich, but it has gaps in
its consideration of ethics that are necessary to explore, given the ethical mission of Agee's and
Evans' work. Kaja Silverman writes that Agee looks at Southern poverty through his own
“mortal and guilty subjectivity,” but fails to elucidate exactly what ethical connotations this
method of examination holds (202). Aaron Chandler, in a Deleuzean reading of LUNPFM,
argues for masochism being “bound up with its [the work's] political aims and aesthetic
methods,” identifying Agee's suffering as a contract that entwines him and his reader in close
38

bondage (197). While I agree with many of Chandler's assertions, particularly that to read Agee
is “a literal suffering-with,” his conclusion that Agee's work is “an effort at mastery in
submission” fails to offer insight into why Agee's masochistic aesthetics are so (203, 211). The
question of why Agee writes with such pain, considering his criticism others writing on the poor
South, particularly Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, is an important one. To what
purpose his pain? The question, because of Agee's engagement with social issues, is one of
ethical impact, and not simply aesthetics. Jeffrey Folks attempts to examine the ethical
implications of Agee's aesthetics, and asserts that his ethics follow the angelic tradition.11 Folks
continues to argue that Agee's ethics place compassion on “the other side of [Agee's] self-
contempt and self-doubt” (76). For Folks, Agee only does good as a way to absolve himself of
his middle-class status and life of relative privilege. Folks' analysis of Agee's ethical system,
with all its reliance on Enlightenment humanism and non-theistic New Testament virtues,
concludes that it is “confused and inconsistent” partly because “no purely rational argument can
establish convincingly that one should love one's enemies” (78). The implication is that an ethics
devoid of the supernatural must rely on logic to provide the force needed to enact itself. In
contrasting theistic ethics to logical ethics, Folks neglects to consider an ethics that is otherwise
than either: Levinas provides an ethical system that relies on neither divinity nor logic to provide
its impetus. Folks comments that Agee's ethics are “based on an unrelenting focus on human
suffering”: the similarities to Levinas's ethics, so concerned with wounding and trauma, are
obvious (82). In this section, I would like to take issue with Folks and argue that, rather than
being “confused and inconsistent,” Agee's ethics consciously invite readerly participation and are
11 Folks explains that “Angelism is connected with the emergence of a revolutionary sensibility focused on social
reform and the 'Rights of Man,' a central development of modern politics that Hannah Arendt analyzed in The
Origins of Totalitarianism ” (76).
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incomplete without it. Agee's text uses an aesthetics (and ethics, consequently) of suffering to
provoke readerly recognition of tenant farmers' humanity towards the anti-essentialist
reconfiguration of readers' attitude towards the South.12
The structure of Agee's ethical system, I argue, lies in Agee's attempt to experientially
convey the tenant farmer's experience in such a way as to provoke readers to compassionate
response. In attempting to address his subjects “seriously,” Agee makes a claim to reportage
untainted by occupation or circumstance. I take this to mean he aspires to a mode of reportage
superior to that of the journalist or artist. Despite the academic removedness implied by the word
“seriously,” his narrative is a deeply personal one; it is clear that his idea of serious reportage is
one that basks in its particularity to the author. Knowing that anything he reports will be
mediated by his personal ideologies and culture, Agee, rather than stifling the individuality of his
work for the sake of general understanding, embraces the Bakhtinian notion of a narrative's
ability to access “the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all
its openendedness” (Bakhtin 11). Faced with the self-imposed mission of ethical reportage, Agee
abandons the notion of the sentimental, Godlike narrator or (only ostensibly) detached scientist
and instead chooses, as the more ethical option, to narrate, as fully as possible, what he
experiences. Indeed, he writes to his subjects that he “must mediate, must attempt to record, your
warm weird human lives” (99). Significantly, he embraces the human element of his own
reportage, writing in such a way as to create a narrative that invites the reader to replace Agee's
“I” with his or her own “I.” Here, Agee's poetics work to place ethical force not within the author
or narrator, but within the modes of representation, allowing for a dialogue between the text and
12 One might argue that an “aesthetics of suffering” is the same as suffering that is aesthetized and thus totalized, but I
would like to emphasize that I mean “aesthetic” as a purposed, conscious element rather than a stylized, generic one.
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the reader that operate otherwise and beyond cultural materialism.
This emphasis on the narration of unique experience is underscored by the distinction
Agee draws between theoretical and experiential knowledge:
“. . . this is a book about 'sharecroppers,' and is written for all those who have a
soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a
distance, and especially for those who can afford the retail price; in the hope that
the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-
out liberal efforts to rectify the unpleasant situation down South” (14).
In this passage, Agee identifies a social liberalism both socioeconomically and spatially removed
from tenant farmers. This liberalism, however well-meaning, views poverty “at a distance,” and
has its locus in other-than-South: it is worried about problems down South. Also, Agee
sarcastically hopes those who can “afford the retail price” of the book might support efforts to
rectify the South's “unpleasant situation” (14). The irony is obvious: Agee throws the voice of
Northern liberalism only to mock it. Agee's imagined reader, regardless of his or her intention
towards the South, nevertheless only has a theoretical knowledge of it; the project of Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men is to give knowledge that approaches the experiential.
Levinas also makes a distinction between knowing from a distance and knowing
experientially: “In knowing, which is of itself symbolic, is realized the passing from the image, a
limitation and a particularity, to the totality. Consequently, being's essence is moved into the
whole content of abstraction” (OB 64). Knowing symbolically moves the known into abstraction
while knowing sensibly, through “exposure to wounding and to enjoyment, an exposure to
wounding in enjoyment,” signifies non-ontological meaning (64). In the passage quoted above,
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Agee takes a Levinasian stance on the totality of theoretical knowledge; he writes that LUNPFM
is “a book about 'sharecroppers'” (14). He puts “sharecroppers” in quotes to show his self-
conscious use of the term as a cognitive tag, and in doing so places that cognitive tag in the same
sphere as distance, theoretism, and abstraction. Significantly, Levinas refers to the signification
afforded by “sensibility qua vulnerability”; it is through vulnerability that Agee's ethics operate.
In contrast to theoretism, Agee's work makes a call to the reader, in all her spatial,
temporal, and circumstantial particularity, to immerse herself in the sensible particularity of Agee
and Evans' experience in the South and observe through them their subjects' pain. The
importance of the particularity of Agee's text and Evans' photographs lies in that particularity's
connection to sensibility, and it is LUNPFM's sensibility that I will examine in the following
paragraphs. Earlier, I examined Dewey Dell, Levinasianally considered, as a subject whose sum
stems from her ability to engage in the ethical encounter. Now, I will examine Agee as a narrator
who, conscious of the need to report “poor whites” ethically, sensibly records his experience an
observer of pain as the call and trigger to his readers' own encounters with the “poor white”
Other.
We know Agee attempts to create a text that requires human interaction, but how, exactly,
does he accomplish this? In short, the text works in a documentarian fashion, but the narrator's
affected presence in it makes it a sensible documentary, one that invites the reader, as much as
she can, to abandon theoretical knowledge of the “poor white” and ethically encounter Agee's
subjects. Sensibility requires passivity and trauma, and the feeling of either by a reader requires a
language and narrative structure that partakes of Saying; otherwise, “[t]he first break with the
passivity of the sensible is a saying in correlation with a said. This is why all knowing is
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symbolic, and ends up in a linguistic formula” (OB 62). Further, for sensation to signify, it must
be “a passivity more passive still than any passivity that is antithetical to an act, a nudity more
naked than all 'academic' nudity, exposed to the point of outpouring, effusion and prayer” (OB
72). It is exactly the moments of “outpouring, effusion and prayer” in which Agee's text most
powerfully provokes reader and subject to the ethical relation. Here, the openness of the text and
the openness of the experiential collude to create a narrative space that allows Agee's imagined
bourgeois reader to encounter the “poor white's” humanity.
After having constructed the circumstances that allow for the Levinasian ethical relation,
the text must go a step further in enacting it. The process by which ethical signification functions
is proximity. In proximity, there is a movement or encounter that actually brings the relation into
being. Agee's religiosity of description establishes both the infinite alterity and the irreducible
humanity that signals the Levinasian ethical relationship; he writes of a family living near
Centerville that “[t]hey were of a kind not safely to be described in an account claiming to be
unimaginative or trustworthy, for they had too much and too outlandish beauty not to be
legendary” (33). His extraordinary description of them deserves to be quoted at length:
The young man's eyes had the opal lightnings of dark oil and, though he was
watching me in a way that relaxed me to cold weakness of ignobility, they fed too
strongly inward to draw to a focus: whereas those of the young woman had each
the splendor of a monstrance, and were brass. Her body also was brass or bitter
gold, strong to stridency beneath the unbleached clayed cotton dress, and her arms
and bare legs were sharp with metal down. The blenched [bleached] hair drew her
face tight to her skull as a tied mask; her features were baltic. The young man's
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face was deeply shaded with soft short beard, and luminous with death. He had
the scornfully ornate nostrils and lips of an aegean exquisite. The fine wood body
was ill strung, and sick even as he sat there to look at, and the bone hands roped
with vein; they rose, then sank, and lay palms upward in his groins. There was in
their eyes so quiet and ultimate a quality of hatred, and contempt, and anger,
toward every creature in existence beyond themselves, and toward the damages
they sustained, as shone scarcely short of a state of beatitude; nor did this at any
time modify itself.” (33)
There are in this description two major elements that enact proximity between reader and
subject: the vocabulary Agee uses to describe the subject and the intersubjective experience
provided by Agee's sudden realization of the young man and woman's hatred.
The vocabulary Agee uses paints his subjects as Biblical figures most prominently
featured in the Book of Job: the woman as Behemoth and her husband as Leviathan. The
woman's body is “brass or bitter gold,” and Behemoth's bones “are as strong pieces of brass; his
bones are like bars of iron” (KJV, Job 40.18). Her husband's eyes “fed too strongly inward to
draw to a focus” and his face is “luminous with death.” Leviathan, in comparison to the man's
inward focus, is similarly inscrutable: “Who can open the doors of his face?” (41.14). While the
man's face is “luminous with death,” Leviathan's eyes “are like the eyelids of the morning”
(41.18). Surely, I think, these descriptions carry a religious and awestruck resonance that is
resultant of Agee's exposedness “to the point of outpouring, effusion and prayer,” and, by
extension, his readers' exposedness to infinite yet strangely recognizable alterity (OB 72). Agee's
documentarian ethics, I have argued, abandons any attempt to describe what he sees with
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The “Poor White” and Anti-Essentialism
Critics and theoreticians who work in subjectivity and alterity should be careful not to
discount the concussive effects Levinas's work has had on ethical philosophy; we see in the later
Derrida a concern with ethics and politics that reveal his close intellectual relationship with the
man he calls “a master,” and Kristeva's work warns against communitarianism, but much literary
work persists in political and racial identification (Derrida 17).13 My readers might call attention
to my analysis of an economic class an example of reductionist identification, but my goal has
been to examine the literary-philosophical incarceration of people within the group instead of the
group as such. I think that the Southern Modernists, especially Faulkner and Agee, participate in
the larger anti-essentialist project to move towards remedying the South's national and global
image. When Dewey Dell walks into Mosley's shop, he sees a country girl, summing her up in
his mind as a likely purchaser of cheap perfume. Mosley's reading of Dewey Dell bears
resemblance to the usual reading of As I Lay Dying or, really, any text: just as he looks at Dewey
Dell, criticism often looks at the text without considering what might lie beyond it. To return to
the quote that begins this paper, Cora Tull's “Riches is nothing in the face of the Lord, because
He can see into the heart,” the call to interpretation that the novel makes is a call to to the reader
to use her Godlike position of power not to infer deontological meaning with the text but to hold
discourse with it, because “discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent” (OB
195). Just as Cora's God looks beyond riches into the intimacy of the individual, so, I propose,
should we as critics and readers.
13 I am thinking of Spectres of Marx, 1994, and Politics of Friendship, 1997.
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Figure 1
Pictured is the cover of the first edition of Tobacco Road, published by Scribner's.
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Figure 3
Pictured is a photograph of an Alabama man from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
52