The Kiss of Judas
Early in the text, the author is railing against the transformation of those things which strike fury in the human heart eventually being subsumed into art. He is moved to write a metaphorically rich sentence: “Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.” If you find yourself confused, bewildered or befuddled by that sentence, don’t let it get you down. The initial response to the book was one in which many critics responded to Agee’s prose with a sense of sense of bafflement precisely due to this sort of mixture of highly elevated prose bursting with imagery overlaid with an emotional intensity that seems somehow incompatible.
A Young Queen of a Child’s Magic Story
The author expresses a deep emotional concern and connection with most of the people he meets on the assignment, but expresses a bond with Emma that is especially strong. This preference is made manifest through the description of his initial impression of her which is just one example of Agee’s masterful engagement of figurative language to create an impressionistic tapestry of imagery throughout much of the book. The full description reveals the magnitude of this metaphor:
“She is a big girl, almost as big as her sister is wiry, though she is not at all fat: her build is rather that of a young queen of a child’s magic story who throughout has been coarsened by peasant and earth living and work, and that of her eyes and her demeanor, too, kind, not fully formed, resolute, bewildered, and sad.”
Cotton
Cotton becomes the metaphor for the economic system which leaves these people in such a desperate and hopeless poverty. The author describes everything these tenant farmers and their work thusly: “crops and labors mean life itself.” And he immediately follows that metaphor with this: “Cotton means nothing of the sort.” Cotton is, however, the one crop that allows life itself. The paradox is an indictment of an economic alienation; it is an example of Marxist theory made concrete. These poor farmers spend more of their raising cotton than another other single crop yet they do not actually use it for anything that sustains life: it is not food, it is not clothing, it is not shelter. Cotton is not a crop for the farmers, but the labor which they sell. Thus, in a very literal sense, cotton is only a crop that is of use to the characters in a metaphorical sense.
“A good artist is a deadly enemy of society”
Part of this loosely structured book is a response from the author to a questionnaire sent to many writers by the Partisan Review. One of the questions asks “Do you think there is any place in our present economic system for literature as a profession?” Agee found the questions extremely offensive and lacking in depth and this metaphor which is a response to that particular question is representative of the whole of his response.
“the grief of incommunicability”
This metaphor is a directly an expression toward an experience related almost at the very end of the book in which he writes of the memory of sitting peacefully on the porch at night listening to the sounds being made what were probably foxes communicating with other. The larger implication of the lack of communication instilling a sense of grief becomes a more universal metaphor that speaks directly to previous events which reveal his inability to communicate successfully with people he met as well as deep-seated communication issues between those sharing the same geographic space and history.
