The Great Disconnect: Jack Burden and History in All The King’s Men

Larry A. Gray

“Stop it,” she ordered, “stop it, and tell me. You are trying not to tell me.You are talking so you won’t tell me. Now, tell me.” (ATKM 248)

On three distinct levels, the artistic success of All The King’s Men is linked to Jack Burden’s failure as a historian. First, the novel as a whole breaks newest ground not as a political saga but as a genre- transcending work of noir fiction; furthermore, this view of the book implies for all its characters a pervasive, even tragic disconnection from the historical past. Second, Jack Burden fails specifically in communicating the recent history of the book’s objective subject, Willie Stark, although he succeeds in conveying a series of subjective vignettes. Finally, on Jack’s own terms as an aspiring historical researcher of Cass Mastern, he offers the promise but never the result of explaining the more distant past. At the end of the novel, when Jack Burden delivers the impression of an achieved redemption that is linked to understanding history, he nevertheless remains devoted to the inescapable present that has dominated all of his narrative. Whether he will eventually become a successful historian is a matter of his unrecorded future. On its broadest level as literary narrative, All The King’s Men may best be appreciated as a work that employs the conventions of noir fiction while also transcending the perceived limitations of the genre.1 Granted, the book’s richness allows it to be appreciated, discussed, and enjoyed in a number of ways: most often, as a novel about politics in general—or more specifically about 20th century Southern and 1930s politics—or as an existential, philosophical confession. Generic conventions serve mainly as a starting point for the reader—as perhaps they were a set of tools for the author—in the creative process of deriving the most literary interest from the text. For the purposes of comparison, ’s The Big Sleep (1939), especially popular in the 1940s when Warren was at work on All The King’s Men, may be considered representative of the genre at that time.2 While 21st century readers are familiar with many later innovators, imitators, and parodists of this kind of fiction, Warren was aware of it 80 Larry A. Gray as a relatively new mode of storytelling which had already influenced Faulkner as a literary predecessor in the 1930s—particularly in Sanctuary and Light in August, for example. In its narrative persona, plot, figurative language, and characterizations, All The King’s Men builds upon the basic chemical elements of a novel like The Big Sleep while aspiring to combine them into a more profound literary composite. The dominant quality of Chandler’s representative novel that sparks still greater aesthetic tension within Warren’s narrative crucible is the sense of a world entrapped in the present, and tragically disconnected from both the future and the past. Jack Burden sketches a world in which morality has become negotiable, and its features recall those depicted in ’s narration in Chandler’s novel. In both The Big Sleep and the immediate 1940 follow-up, Farewell, My Lovely, crimes against individuals can be traced to larger criminal organizations and even to established institutions. As Dennis Porter observes in The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in , “their contacts with the powerful and with the representatives of such institutions as business, politics, the law, and the police” force private investigators to uncover a “pattern of corruption and brutality”: “Under the circumstances, as Chandler makes clear, the only refuge for ‘ideality’ in his fiction is a man alone, without possessions” (178). Chandler’s detective follows an ethical code that creates conflicts with criminals and law enforcement figures alike; he wins small victories for the sake of morality, but the world of the status quo remains implacable. By comparison, Jack Burden’s experience differs primarily in the fact that he is more of an insider, during the Stark years, than Marlowe ever is in the above-mentioned titles. As a newspaper reporter, he becomes familiar with Cousin Willie the small-town politician; as Governor Stark’s employee, Jack becomes more a part of the status quo, though always retaining some Marlowe-esque distance from this role. He follows the Boss’s orders in discovering a moral lapse in Judge Irwin’s past, but he refuses to reveal this information until it suits him to do so. Tiny Duffy ultimately represents the status quo that precedes and follows Willie Stark. Toward the end of the book, Jack Burden demonizes Duffy, only to recognize himself in the post-Boss world— especially in the newspaperman with a “squirt face” (ATKM 402) who takes Anne’s photograph at Adam’s funeral. The squirt-faced reporter responds to Jack’s outrage with a reality check: “‘Jesus Christ,’ he