09.13.06
All the King’s Men and Their Crazy Narrative Powers
I picked up the “Restored Edition” of All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren. This edition caught my eye because the back cover introduces the novel as the story of Governor Willie Talos, blah blah blah… wait a minute, wasn’t his name Willie Stark? Turns out (according to this edition’s editor, Noel Polk) the name change was made at the request of the original editors, as they felt “Talos” was not an American-enough name. Other changes included cleaning up language that may have been vulgar at the time, changing the novel’s structure from 9 chapters to 10, and imposing a style upon the text that was considered to be more marketable.
It’s been so long since I read the book as a sophomore in high school that I probably would have missed most of the changes from one version to the next if I hadn’t started with the editor’s afterword. Even if I was reading the same edition, however, I think I would still have the sense of new discovery this time around. When I read the book in class, about a decade ago (!), I knew it was a great book; I enjoyed very much the plot, I probably recognized that the characters were interesting, and because the class focused on close examination of the text, as well as thematic analysis, I’m sure I appreciated those elements of writing as they were successfully wrought by the author.
However, I don’t recall the novel having such a powerful narrative voice, which is the overwhelming impression I’m getting now. I remember that the story had a sort of slow start, so I decided to try to track at what point the plot became interesting. (This wouldn’t have mattered when I read the book in high school, since we had to read things whether they were interesting or not — like that one about the ambulance driver in WWI. Who knows, maybe I’d see that book differently now too.) It took about one hundred pages for me to get interested in what was going on. More subtly, however, was the way Jack Burden’s narrative took hold of the text — I can’t say at what point this happened, but all of a sudden I realized that the little jarring points of language, both spoken and descriptive, which I had previously attributed to Warren’s writing style, aggregated into the narrator’s voice and personality with such subtle forcefulness that I have not seen (or at least noticed) in any piece of writing before.
(Of course, the bulk of my reading is science fiction, and this is not to say that science fiction authors are not good writers, or that their characters are not well executed, but their focus is perhaps more on the “science” and the “fiction” parts of their stories, and that is why I like to read them.)
It’s an effect that’s hard to describe. It is a bit like how poetry can take seemingly disparate quirks of word choice and pacing and create an effect that removes the reader from the page, and in his place — in the reader’s place, mind you — recreate the experience that forms the gut of the poem. At least, in the poetry I like, I have no idea what you guys are reading.
So if you haven’t done so already, or more importantly, if you haven’t done so in a while, as was the case with me, go and pick up All the King’s Men, and give it at least a hundred pages to get going. Better do it quick too, before you watch the movie, which shows promise, but can’t possibly convey narrative power of the text, and will probably have to cut corners on the plot like even the best movie adaptations do.