Though published nearly seventy years apart, James Agee’s novel Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Brian Reed’s podcast S-Town present and question literary documentary as a journalistic form. Both writers are white upper-class male journalists from New York, and both write about the complex issue of poverty in rural Alabama.
As outsiders to these places and people, Reed and Agee recognize their position as temporary inhabitants and writers, as well as the problem of creating work about insular communities in which they have no previous experience. Because Agee and Reed are granted access by virtue of their position, their identities and the performance of them affect the scenes they produce and induce in Greensboro and Woodstock, their respective towns of focus. To acknowledge and address the disparity between themselves, their subjects, and audience, the writers utilize experimental techniques that challenge established patterns of narrative control. Slipping between fiction and nonfiction, character and person, experience and narrative arc, Agee and Reed attempt to package rural poverty for privileged consumption without sacrificing the humanity of their subjects. Though this reevaluation of form allows for the presentation of information in new and often effective ways, the experiment these men perform obscures the responsibilities in and consequences of writing about real individual’s lives as though they are literary characters. In both S-Town and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the main character is not the southern sharecropper nor the mad scientist: the protagonist is the author, journalist, and narrator himself. The author’s influence on and presence within the narrative negates the possibility of an impartial and therefore traditionally nonfiction rendering -- the subjects are altered, consciously or not, by the writers that convert them into literary representations. Both Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and S-Town use experimental forms to satirize, critique, and ultimately dismantle established social structures. However, the narrator/journalist’s inability to remove their perspective prevents them from depicting their subjects through lenses besides their own, perpetuating the existence of the very systems they seek to subvert.
