"The Case of the Upright Judge": The Nature of Truth in All The King's Men

"THE CASE OF THE UPRIGHT JUDGE": THE NATURE OF TRUTH IN ALL THE KING'S MEN Richard G. Law* Though controversies concerning Robert Penn Warren's most successful novel still occasionally emerge, it is generally agreed that All the King's Men is an elaborate "parable of fact and truth."1 The moral or ethical terms in which this parable is worked out have been fully and intelligently described by critics; Jack Burden's struggle for selfdefinition , the large, underlying mythical movement of flight from reality (or "separateness") and eventual and painful return to acceptance , responsibility, and a sense of community are as well defined as most things in literary criticism can be. Behind these ethical terms, however, lies another dimension, another elaborate parable which has to do, simply, with the way the mind orients itself in the incomprehensible flux of the world and creates in it some sustaining order and meaning. In addition, this parable of the nature of human knowledge and perception is bound up with the aesthetic assumptions which Warren has explored throughout his career in every genre he has touched. Both the epistemological and aesthetic ideas are, like the ethical issues, embodied in the structure of the novel; they are implicit in the very manner of its unfolding. "Duplicity" and "doubleness" are key words in Warren's description of experience and nowhere in his work does the structure of a novel better imitate the doubleness of experience, the dual structure or "dialectical configurations" of "truth" itself, than in All the King's Men.2 On the most basic level, the novel has, rather than a single center of interest, two counter-pointed plot lines: Willie Stark's political career and Jack Burden's struggle for understanding. With the intrusion of Burden's consciousness into the action of the Stark story, Warren turns the decline and fall of a great man and public figure into a Bildungsroman, a story of the education of a young man and his initiation into the world.3 The Jack Burden who attempts to tell the story of Willie Stark and who tells his own in the process belongs to a long tradition of observer-narrators whose function is to demonstrate the 'Richard G. Law is an Associate Professor of English at Washington State University and book-review editor for ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. 2 Richard G. Law deceptiveness and subjectivity of experience: Lambert Strether, Miles Coverdale, Nick Carraway, and Conrad's Marlow are Burden's cousins and antecedents. These two plot lines are, moreover, different in emphasis as well as in content and create a curious double perspective , a stereopticon effect (to borrow one of Warren's favorite images). Readers primarily interested in the Stark plot have often praised the sense of history in the novel, the careful documentation, the "facts" so laboriously and objectively set forth, as if Warren, in spite of his disclaimers, had attempted a biography of Huey Long. But one need only remember the mode of narration and the unreliability of Burden as narrator to recall how purely subjective the apparently "historical" account is. What Burden sees is always a function of what an event means to him at a given time, and his hard "facts" have a way of altering in the course of the book as Jack himself changes. This structuring device is one reflection of the often-mentioned dichotomy of "facts" and "value," or "facts" and "truth," which pervades the novel. The terms imply, among other things, two modes of perception: one rational , objective, and quantitative (the mode characteristic of a "scientific society"), and the other intuitive, subjective, and qualitative. In other words, even at this level, the structure of the novel embodies and dramatizes its themes. Warren's use of the terms also places him in a specific artistic and philosophical tradition of Humanist protest against the doctrine of scientific materialism, the belief that only what can be measured is real. While hostility toward such a view ("scientism" as the Nashville Agrarians called it) has been widespread among artists from the nineteenth century on, Warren has been unusually, almost obsessively, preoccupied with the issue. Both in his concern and in...