ABSTRACT
James Agee's aesthetic of silence might be regarded as little more than an idiosyncratic taste, a preference of the visual to the auditory. His article "Comedy's Greatest Era" seems a reactionary polemic against the talkies. Agee explicitly states his religious conviction, and though it is anything but dogmatic, he is quite literal in his intention to inquire "into certain normal predicaments of human divinity". If the silent art of photography provides an analogy to Agee's literary effort, the same is no less true of what may seem the precise opposite form of art—music. The cruelty of rural life is based on intrusion and exploitation, on a denial of personal dignity. Thus Agee is always sensitive to his own intrusive, inevitably exploitive role. In Agee's fiction the moments of static discernment are always in opposition to the lengthier periods of conversation.
