Not-Knowing

In 1937 James Agee submitted an application for a Guggenheim Fellowship that listed 47 different plans for work. At the top was “Alabama Record,” which became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his collaboration with Walker Evans, commissioned and then turned down by Fortune and eventually published as a book in 1942 (and remaindered for many years thereafter). And “A new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem” points to In the Street, the 1948 film he made with Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb. It’s unclear how much work he ever did on the other plans, which are all over the map: “A cabaret,” “News items,” “New forms of ‘poetry,’” “A new type of sex book,” “A story about homosexuality and football,” “Pieces of writing whose rough parallel is the prophetic books of the Bible,”“Stories whose whole intention is the direct communication of the intensity of common experience.” (“Plans for Work, October 1937”)

The item that has intrigued me since I first saw the list as a teenager (a high-school teacher pushed Agee on me; thank you Jack McSherry S.J.) is “A ‘new’ style of use of the imagination.”

In the Alabama record the effort is to suspect the mind of invention and to invent nothing. But another form of relative truth is any person’s imagination of what he knows little or nothing of and has never seen. In these terms, Buenos Aires itself is neither more nor less actual than my, or your, careful imagination of it told as pure imaginative fact. The same of the States of Washington and West Virginia, and of histories of The Civil War, the United States, and Hot Jazz. Such are projects I want to undertake in this way.

I’ve been rolling this around in my head for decades. What would such a thing look like? The Civil War reference made me think of Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, published thirty years after the end of the war, which occurred six years before Crane was born, but which persuaded many veterans that the author was one of them. There’s also 1066 and All That, the satirical history of England by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman; the premise is that it represents the hazy recollections of a bored secondary-school pupil. And during the German occupation of France in World War II, when American culture of any sort was banned, pulp writers issued dozens of ostensibly American thrillers by authors (sample bylines: Rupert Staircase, Duchess Holiday, Diego Michigan) who had never set foot in the Western hemisphere. And of course there’s Kafka’s wonderful Amerika, also by an author who never left Europe, which I immediately on first reading saw as set in the America of silent films. (The only film I ever wanted to make was an adaptation of Amerika. My version would be somewhat different from Straub and Huillet’s.)

Not-knowing has episodically been a thing, in many different flavors, never formally constituted as an idea. The procedure does have its limitations in today’s world. It was a lot easier to evade facts in 1937. Fact-checking was not generally practiced by publishers until quite recently; places were much farther away from one another; you didn’t have the internet’s army of civilian detectives, each specializing in one thing. Not-knowing may also be subject to accusations of forced entry into protected realms. Because not-knowing really means assumption-of-knowing, doesn’t it? And that is something you practice routinely. Whether you are writing about the fall of the Hapsburg dynasty or about an alien race on a conjectural planet millennia in the future, you are calling upon your imagination to supply the material qualities of existence in a realm you have not experienced yourself.

But the facts don’t intrude. Far from it—facts enhance the imagination, because really there are so few of them. The official facts are easy enough to corral: weather, topography, prominent citizens, liquor licenses. But those are just pins on a map, conveying little of lived and subjective experience. So you look for records by witnesses, and if you’re lucky you’ll find a scant spoonful of honest and usable accounts—usable, often, by virtue of having been written or dictated by someone good at words, not to mention memory. And even those will leave out a lot, will take much for granted. Visual materials are crucial, especially photographs of little-photographed times and places, taken by policemen or journalists with a cold eye. You build your world with available materials—“world-building” in the science-fiction sense, using paper trash—but the more subjective your focus, the more likely you will run out before you’ve assembled more than the broad outline. And you still haven’t conveyed the most basic things: how it felt to walk down the street on a winter night that year. Whether you are writing fact or fiction you will have to supply that from the reserves of your not-knowing. The operations are identical in that sense, take place in the same region of the brain, which is to say that all narrative writing is to some degree work of the imagination.

For day-to-day kitchen use, not-knowing is best diluted with knowing. The two must be kept in careful balance. If you know too little, what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact. Knowing needs not-knowing like the farmer needs the rain. Not-knowing is that vast space between certainties, populated by drifting asteroids: facts, scrambled facts, factoids, quotations, rumors, jokes, songs, memories, impressions, mental associations that go back decades while the link between them was lost long ago. Beneath it all thrums the unconscious, which knows many things you don’t think you know. Not-knowing can be powerful if correctly accessed, but it is hard to approach directly, and that’s why constraints were invented. With the right rhythm and a productive constraint, you can walk confidently in a world built from your own mental foliage and detritus, confident that you are forcing a wormhole to the universe of your subject.