Agency, Guilt, and Philosophy of History in "All the King's Men"

Robert Penn Warren's novel "All the King's Men" deals with a number of complex philosophical issues. This essay is a distillation of some of them.

Agency, Guilt, and the Philosophy of History in All the King’s Men

            Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men has a number of philosophical preoccupations. Warren explores themes of sin, guilt, demagogy, political ethics, and perhaps most fundamentally, the significance of the past, and its repercussions in the present. It is no accident that Jack Burden, the novel’s narrator, is a failed historian �" he is as well placed as anyone to consider the philosophical and practical implications of history. The twin themes of philosophy of history and guilt are inextricable from each other in the novel, and so they will bear upon each other in my analysis of them. Ultimately, this paper will argue that Jack’s view of history transforms over the course of the novel, beginning with something of an idealistic outlook, then gradually evolving into the nihilistic “Great Twitch” theory, and finally resolving itself into the position Jack holds at the end of the novel, a theory which acknowledges that human choice has historical consequence; a view which allows Jack a satisfactory degree of resolution in his own life.

            One cannot fruitfully examine the character of Jack Burden without first exploring Willie Stark, because as Jack himself says, “the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, the same story,” (157). Willie is very much the classic man of action; he has a ferocious level of energy, illustrated by his reluctance to sleep when there is work to be done, his voracious sexual appetite, and the general tenacity with which he goes about accomplishing his ends, usually employing whatever means necessary to accomplish those ends. He is willing to use the tool of corruption to achieve what he considers positive goals; namely his reelection. This facet of his personality is revealed in the episode with Byram White; White has been siphoning money into his pocket, using his position as State Auditor. Willie is furious with him; he embarrasses him as fully as possible, saying, “…I fixed Byram. I fixed him so his unborn great-grandchildren will wet their pants on this anniversary and not know why” (136), but the second quote comes from the conversation with Hugh Miller, in which Willie defends Byram. He says, “My God, you talk like Byram was human! He’s a thing! You don’t prosecute an adding machine if a spring goes bust and makes a mistake” (135). To Willie, corruption is unconscionable and is punished if it threatens to expose him, but it is something that is dealt with “in-house.” He sees things on a larger scale than does Hugh, for example: “…don’t you see that Byram doesn’t mean a thing? Not in this situation. What they’re after is to break the administration. … What they care about is undoing what this administration has done” (137). His understanding of law is pragmatic:

“like the pants you bought last year for a growing boy, but it is always this year and the seams are popped and the shankbone’s to the breeze … The best you can do is do something and then make up some law to fit and by the time that law gets on the books you would have done something different.” (136)

Willie does have a streak of idealism left in him, shown in the way that he refuses to allow Tiny Duffy to have anything to do with the Willie Stark Hospital. He feverishly asks Jack, “Damn it, can’t you understand? … Can’t you see I’m not going to let those b******s muck with it?” (233). It is this idealistic streak that Willie picks up on in the character of Adam; Willie seems to have some sort of understanding of Adam, because Willie sees a great deal of himself in the surgeon. Jack says as Adam when he is attempting to persuade him to accept Willie’s offer as director of the hospital: “He knows what you want. He knows your weakness, pal. You want to do good, and he is going to let you do good in wholesale lots” (238).

I think that to some extent, the story of Willie Stark is also the story of Adam Stanton; Jack himself sets them in opposition to each other at the end of the book:

“Jack Burden could see that Adam Stanton, whom he came to call the man of idea, and Willie Stark, who he came to call the man of fact, were doomed to destroy each other, just as each was doomed to try to use the other and to yearn toward and try to become the other, because each was incomplete with the terrible division of their age.” (436)

Adam, then, is the idealist, the romantic, as Jack says. “He has a picture of the world in his head, and when the world doesn’t conform in any respect to the picture, he wants to throw the world away” (247). One of the more revealing sections for both Adam and Willie is their conversation together, as Willie tries to explain his motives to Adam, who is seemingly uninterested or unimpressed. Willie explains his position that there is only “badness” in the world, and that it is u to mankind to make “goodness” out of the badness, to which Adam inquires, how does one determine what is good, then, if it is made from badness? “Easy, Doc, easy,” Willie answers, “You just make it up as you go along” (257). Pragmatic as always, Willie argues that all of human history has been people making goodness out of badness, “Because what folks claim is right is always just a couple of jumps short of what they need to do business” (258). Adam seems unable to adequately respond to Willie’s argument, and instead switches topics, questioning Willie’s motive for coming to his apartment at all. The two men are separate sides of the same coin, a reality that becomes even sharper when contrasted with Jack.

            Jack Burden is very different from his two associates. Adam and Willie are both assertive, active, and feel compelled to work to benefit the public at large, though they have very different ways of going about their work. Jack, on the other hand, is the observer, passive, dispassionate, almost uncaring in his day-to-day life. He is largely alienated from the people around him, his family in particular. Narrator-Jack, distinct in some ways from the Jack of the story, describes Jack as “invulnerable. Perhaps that was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable” and “Jack Burden… was hiding from the present” (159). Referring to his old roommates, he says, “[They] were hiding from the future, from the day when they would get degrees and leave the University. The other two took refuge in the present. Jack Burden took refuge in the past” (160). In his book dealing with Robert Penn Warren’s view of history, L. Hugh Moore argues that, “The westward flight, the escape into the past, and the Great Sleep represent ways of evading responsibility of learning values from history; they are merely ways to sink in ‘the motionless ooze of history’ (70). Perfectly indicative of Jack’s general disposition is his description of himself as he watches Willie and Sadie Burke converse: “They wouldn’t care who was there. Certainly not if I was there, and there wasn’t any reason for me to avert my face out of delicacy. I had been a piece of furniture a long time…” (Warren, 32).

            Jack’s conception of himself as a piece of furniture is not far from his conception of humanity on a larger scale; his initial view of history is idealistic, but of a very nihilistic mold: “I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway” (30). Much later on in the novel, Jack develops his theory of the Great Twitch, remarking that, “The words Anne Stanton were simply a name for a peculiarly complicated piece of mechanism which should mean nothing whatsoever to Jack Burden, who himself was simply another rather complicated piece of mechanism” (311). This might be Jack’s lowest point, the point where he has backed the furthest away from any concept of historical responsibility and causation. The transformation of his outlook is a response to the emotional pain that he feels, having found out about the affair between Willie and Anne. Tellingly, his first reaction is flight, and he drives out West. Again, he his not the confrontational man of action like Adam or Willie, and his philosophy of history reflects that. The Great Twitch theory, developed as Jack lays naked on a hotel bed in California, is the ultimate escape from significance, and therefore is an escape from the present. R. Gray describes Jack’s evolution from Idealist to nihilist:

“…the best the idealist can do is stand on the side-lines, mocking the world and its squalor. When this in turn becomes intolerable, and the mask of cynicism begins to slip, there is still ‘the Great Sleep’, that retreat into vacuous non-being which is always available to the man of ideas when the world is too much with him.” (Gray, 305)

From the beginning, Jack has an innate tendency to avoid any kind of pain. He says to Adam, “Pain is evil,” to which Adam responds that, “Pain is an evil, but … it is not evil in itself” (Warren, 238). Jack responds to Adam’s counterargument by changing the subject with the excuse that he doesn’t like to debate those sorts of meaningful questions when he has a toothache.

            Two events coupled together eventually challenge Jack’s nihilism, and change it. The first is Judge Irwin’s suicide. It worthwhile to quote Jack’s initial reflection on the incident at length:

“I turned that thought over and reflected on my responsibility. It would be quite possible to say that I had none, no more than Mortimer had. Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin created me, and looking at matters in that light one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instruments of Judge Irwin’s protracted and ineluctable destruction. For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal’s own hand and every man is a suicide.” (353)

Jack’s powers of rationalization are shocking, illustrating just how far he has sunk into the depths of nihilism, which in turn illustrates just how painful the incident truly is for him.

            The second incident that plays into transforming Jack’s consciousness is Adam’s murder of Willie. Gradually, Jack works out the string of events leading up to Willie’s murder: Sadie persuades Tiny Duffy to tell Adam about the affair between Willie and Anne, which prompts Adam to murder Willie. All of them are implicated in the murder to one extent or another, but it is his vehemence toward Duffy that prompts Jack to confront him and, for the first time, assert himself, “You don’t know how much I know or what. I was thick with the Boss and I know a lot. I’m the joker in the deck. My name is Jack and I’m the wild jack and I’m not one-eyed. You want to deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it’s no sale, Tiny, it’s no sale” (414). Though not prepared just yet to abandon the Great Twitch, Jack comes to a realization of his own culpability in the situation:

“I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so sure I would work for him. And suddenly I saw the eyes of the little squirt-face newspaperman at the cemetery gate on me … and suddenly I knew that I had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself off from Duffy, and my million-dollar meal of heroism backfired that yellow taste into my gullet … I hated everything and everybody and myself and Tiny Duffy and Willie Stark and Adam Stanton. To hell with them all, I said impartially under the stars. They all looked alike to me then.” (417)

The last step for Jack’s transformation is an acceptance of the past (and thus an acceptance of pain), which comes when he returns to Burden’s Landing to visit his mother. Jack says that the reconciliation with her is what finally prompts him to “accept the past now because I could accept her and be at peace with her and with myself” (432). Once he is reunited with Anne, “he woke up one morning to discover that he did not believe in the Great Twitch any more. He did not believe in it because he had seen too many people live and die” (436). Life must be more than electrical currents and mechanistic relationships, and the forcefulness of people’s choices and the consequences of those choices forces Jack to confront a view of history that rejects nihilism and also accounts for free will. Too many people in Jack’s life have died as a consequence of events in which he has played some role for life to merely be chance.

            Jack recounts a conversation with Hugh Miller, in which Miller says, “History is blind, but man is not” (436). It is an aphorism that succinctly sums up the idea that there are some human and non-human forces that determine circumstances, from which people must choose one action or another. It rejects nihilism and Jack’s earlier Idealism, as it seems to suggest some level of moral responsibility. It is perhaps more in line with Willie’s pragmatist view of history, but it is tempered with moral judgment. Thus, in this system, the ends do not necessarily justify the means. It is with this balanced viewpoint that Jack is able to come to terms with his guilt in the deaths of Judge Irwin, Willie, and Adam, a viewpoint that allows him to return to his study of Cass Mastern, and to finally understand him, because it is Mastern’s profound sense of guilt which troubled Jack in the first place. No longer paralyzed by fear of consequence, Jack is able to “go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time” (438).

Works Cited

 

Gray, R. “The American Novelist and American History: A Revaluation of ‘All the King’s Men’” Journal of American Studies 6:3 (1972): 297-307.

 

Moore, L. Hugh Jr. Robert Penn Warren and History. The Hague: Mouton & Co. 1970.

 

Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996.