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MYTH AND THE POVERTY OF EXPERIENCE: Wright Morris’ The Home Place and Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Image
by
Frank Edler
Since I do not have the luxury of time, I will get straight to the point: Wright Morris and Walter Benjamin share a deep commitment both to phenomenology on the one hand and to the need for creative transformation on the other. The first – phenomenology – is dedicated to unfolding the meaning of the phenomenon or artifact as it presents itself from itself which includes the accrued meanings of its historical context. The second – creative transformation – is dedicated to the need of every people, indeed, every generation, to redefine itself in terms of its identify in time and place. The intent of this paper is to investigate this productive tension between phenomenology and creative transformation in Wright Morris’ photo-novel The Home Place, which, although categorized as a photo-text, is itself a "radical departure" from Morris’ previous photo-texts such as The Inhabitants (Time Pieces, 137). For the first time, Morris used photographs as an integral part of a novel, and, thus, created a dialectic between the verbal images of the narrative and the photographic images inserted into the text. I have brought in Walter Benjamin, not because Morris was influenced by him, but because Benjamin was dealing with the same problem, that is, the problem of the tension between phenomenology and creative transformation in terms of images. The term ‘dialectical image’ was coined by Benjamin. It does not describe a discursive logic in the Hegelian sense (Buch-Morss, 146), but rather a visual logic (Buch-Morss, 218) which has "as many levels of logic as the Hegelian concept" (Buch-Morss, 210). For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Benjamin, he was a German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School who grew up in Berlin around the turn of the century and was friends with Theodor Adorno, Gersham Scholem, and Bertolt Brecht. What Morris and Benjamin will ultimately agree upon is that phenomenology and creative transformation are both aspects of the same process. As Morris says in his Foreword to The Territory Ahead:
Reappraisal thus involves both creative transformation (reconstruction) and phenomenology (resurrection) and that is the theme of Morris’ photo-novel The Home Place. To put it another way, the theme of The Home Place is homecoming: how does one come home? For one who has left, especially for a long time, homecoming will necessarily involve an act of reappraisal. This is, of course, Morris’ own experience. In his interview with Robert Cromie for Nebraska ETV, Morris says that for 25 years he did not think once of his childhood and did so only after he returned from Europe in 1934. (Cite "Conversations with Wright Morris, Neb. ETV) The Home Place, however, is not simply a transposition of Morris’ own concerns about his childhood and his own homecoming into a novel. Rather, homecoming is also a metaphor for juxtaposing, assembling, and binding regional and even national polarities between urban and rural, past and present, near and far, etc. In 1940, Morris’ plan for the photo-text expanded from a book to an entire series:
The theme of homecoming is already implicit in The Inhabitants (1940), especially in the final text which Joseph Wydeven has highlighted in his book. The text reads as follows:
The question, nevertheless, remains: how do the people cover themselves? This is a task of a phenomenology of homecoming. The most important question, however, that permeates the theme of homecoming for Morris is the question on what it means to be human, and it reveals Morris’ philosophical interest in the nature of art and the role of the artist. Before turning to The Home Place, I want to examine some of the challenges Morris faced in taking on the theme of homecoming. These challenges are complicated by the fact that he combined photographs with the narrative, thus facing two traditions, that of the American novel and that of American photography. The very fact that he combined both would irk purists on both sides. As it turned out, the American public was not yet ready for this experimental novel about – of all things – a decrepit farm in Nebraska that had managed to survive the Great Depression and the dust bowl. Perhaps the greatest challenge Morris faced was his attempt to reverse what Roy Stryker’s crew of documentary photographers of the Farm Security Administration and what James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) had already established photographically. I am referring to the photography of social realism. In response to Paul Bunnell’s question of whether Morris belonged to this category, Morris replied that
In other words, Morris is truly interested in the phenomenology of things and not simply interested in choosing subjects to photograph as instances of social injustice. To put it another way, Walker Evans and other photographers emphasized the deprivation-in-the-human. The emphasis here is on the first word – deprivation. Social realism focused on the social injustice of the Great Depression: the hardships, the hunger, the savaging of human being. In The Home Place, Morris will attempt to reverse this emphasis. By engaging the theme of homecoming, Morris must get the reader to delve below the first impression of deprivation, that is, the reader must be able to break through the cliché of "hard times, of social unrest, of depression, ruin and alienation." in order to come home. Otherwise, there is nothing to come home to. In order to pull off this homecoming, Morris will emphasize the human-in-the-deprivation instead of the deprivation-in-the-human. Indeed, this discovery of the human in the midst of deprivation is the very essence of The Home Place. Without this discovery, The Home Place would collapse. Some of Morris’ photographs play a very special role in that discovery which is connected to what Benjamin means by a dialectical image. Morris’ choice of the photo-novel as an experimental form allows him to accomplish two interrelated goals: (1) the photo-novel is a form that makes homecoming possible and (2) it is a form that allows Morris to differentiate his photography from that of Walker Evans and other photographers of social injustice. In relation to the first goal, how does the grafting of one art form into another make homecoming possible? By implanting photographs into the narrative, Morris is resurrecting them, reanimating them, letting them live again in the flow of fictive times. Morris thinks of photographs as snippets of the living tissue of time, but these snippets are arrested, frozen and cut out of their world. In The Home Place, photographs are not only reanimated in fictive time, but they are also re-worlded, that is, they are re-animated in the world of the narrative. A world is reconstructed for them in which they move and speak and become human. We can see this happening in the very beginning of the photo-novel. The first photograph on the left page is one of Uncle Harry standing in the door of the barn looking down at the inner tube in his hands. He is frozen in time and worldless. We don’t know he is. The text begins with Clyde Muncy’s questions "What’s the old man doing?" (Home, 1) With that very question, Uncle Harry steps into the present of the narrative. He is no longer frozen; he is in the process of doing something. By God! Uncle Harry begins to move! He begins to walk and talk! The photograph of Uncle Harry becomes a character in the novel and becomes human in that world. This is what makes the homecoming possible. The reanimation and re-worlding of the photographs (as opposed to the photographs of Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) creates a place, a human place, where homecoming can happen. In terms of the second goal, this is also what differentiates Morris’ Photographs from those of Walker Evans. To use Morris’ own words, "First and last, the photographs of Walker Evans have helped shape our image of what is real, and as this image hardens into a cliché, it now obstructs the emergence of what is there" (Time Pieces, 62). Morris aims a harsher comment at Roy Stryker with whom Morris once had an interview for a possible job. When Stryker looked at Morris’ photographs, he asked, "‘Where are the people?’" (Time Pieces, 40) Morris continues,
The simple answer is that Morris’ photographs invite the viewer into a phenomenology of the human in and through the worn, used-up, and dilapidated artifacts he photographs. Morris’ compliant is that the highlighting of social injustice, suffering, and cruelty in Evans blocks rather than enhances a phenomenology of the human. Just as the purpose of the text is to reanimate the photographs in the narrative flow of fictive time and re-contextualize them in the world of the text, so, too, the photographs do not disappear into the narrative. They provide moments of discontinuity, that is, ruptures in the narrative flow. You have to stop reading, look at the photograph, which offers something like a piece of actuality unlike verbal images and listen to the photograph in a different way than you would verbal images. The photographs are like the "Stop, Look, Listen" of railroad warnings mentioned in the very beginning of the novel (Home, 1). But in the rupture of the narrative flow that the photograph provides, something else happens at times that shows a dimension verbal images and concepts cannot show. For Benjamin, the original sin of all human reasoning is the fact that "all thought attempts to grasp the non-conceptual through conceptual means" (Wolin, 24). As Richard Wolin says of Benjamin:
The dialectical image accomplished a temporal juxtaposition in one image, "an image in which the Then and the Now come into a constellation like a flash of lightning" (Gary Smith, Benjamin, 49) Benjamin calls this the Now of recognizability (Gary Smith, Benjamin, 50) This Now of recognizability or the climactic moment of discovery which is the culmination of Muncy’s phenomenology does not occur in words. Words, of course, lead up to the moment, but they cannot capture what the phenomenology discovers. Muncy states the recognition in the following way:
But what is it that Muncy has recognized? After he and his wife read some of the corny poems from Uncle Ed’s album of poems clipped from newspapers and feeling "like some sly peeping Tom," Muncy begins the meditation with the following question:
Muncy then pulls out the chair from the table and looks "at an old man’s shoes on the seat" (Home, 141) and stares at them. It is at this point that he makes the statement I read a moment ago that he never really knew what they had and that he knows now. His knowing is connected with his staring at the shoes on the chair. He tries to find the words for this recognition; he tries beauty, but "the word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn’t describe what there is about an old man’s shoes. The Protestant word for that is character." (Home, 141) But this word doesn’t work either: "Character is the word but it doesn’t cover the ground. It doesn’t cover what there is moving about it, that is." (Home, 141). But then he turns around and re-asserts their beauty: "I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I man. For this character is beautiful" (Home, 141) The artist in Muncy and Morris will not allow the Protestant ethic to eliminate the word beauty and Muncy re-asserts it moving beyond a Protestant ethic that will not recognize it: "but there’s something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character" (Home 141) We turn the page and there on the left is a photograph of the chair with shoes that Muncy has been staring at. Muncy in staring at the chair and shoes; we are looking at a photograph of them. The photograph shows what Muncy is trying to say in words and having a hard time of it: the character of the shoes in their wornness is beautiful. The photograph shows this beauty just as van Gough also captured the beauty of worn boots and shoes in his paintings. It is a daring photograph, and I believe Morris knew what he was doing. I cannot see this photograph without seeing it as a photographic homage to van Gogh. It is in this sense that Morris’ photograph is a kind of dialectical image the way Benjamin intends it. The photograph juxtaposes a "The" (van Gogh) with a Now (Uncle Ed’s shoes) and we immediately get it. The flash of lightning. Of course! Van Gogh who suffered greatly, who nevertheless had an incredible compassion for the life of things, was able to see their beauty and show it in his paintings of chairs, worn boots and shoes. Muncy goes on to identify this beauty or character with passion:
Passion, of course, was a hallmark of van Gogh. When Muncy closes up the house and watches his wife cross the road with both children who are wearing straw hats, Morris extends the homage to van Gogh from the photograph to a verbal image of the children: "Peg was walking the kids across the road. They looked like sunflowers in their straw . . ." (Home, 145). Who can forget van Gogh’s sunflowers? The audacity of Morris is to reconstruct van Gogh photographically combining chair and shoes. As Morris says in his Foreword to The Territory Ahead:
That is precisely what Morris does with the photograph of the chair and shoes: it is an echoing response to van Gogh. Some might say, van Gogh? In a dirt farm in Nebraska? Impossible! Not at all. Morris, I think, would say that van Gogh’s potato eaters would be quite comfortable at Aunt Clara’s and Uncle Harry’s dinner table. And "Spud Munch" would be right there with them. [thank MK] Morris, of course, was very much award of van Gogh even before he went to Europe. In his autobiography, for example, Morris recalls his train ride to Paris: "In the early dawn light I saw the fields of France, some with rows of stubble and the big two-wheeled carts I had seen in van Gogh’s paintings" (Writing My Life, 149) More importantly, Morris uses something of the same technique in his next novel The Window in the Attic, this time with Cezanne instead of van Gogh. This work was to be the second photo-novel but Scribners refused to go with it. In the novel, Muncy remembers a French funeral he saw
In The Home Place Morris calls van Gogh into the midst of the dirt farm. What difference does van Gogh make? Some commentators are disappointed with The Home Place because they read the photo-novel as nothing but an affirmation of the myth of abstinence, frugality and independence. In other words, Munch’s phenomenology simply affirms what was already there. I disagree. There is, of course, an affirmation of these holy things as worn craft sustained by abstinence, frugality and independence, but those who read it as nothing but an affirmation of this trinity fail to recognize that the photo-novel itself is a reconstruction of the home place. It is no longer the home place as it once was. The reconstruction has affirmed a dimension of the home place of which the inhabitants themselves may not be aware: their own humanity and that is the function of art to discover. What Morris wants to salvage of the home place in The Home Place is not so much abstinence, frugality, and independence for their own sake, but the passion and beauty of that humanity in those worn artifacts. Thus, van Gogh is not echoed as an example of fine art so much as an example of how art helps us to discover the beauty and humanity in our lives that we miss or do not see. The poverty of experience lies in the forgetting of our own humanity. The function of the artist is to construct and reconstruct myths in such a way that we can rediscover again in new ways our own humanity in short, to enhance life.
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