All the King's Men

I dunno if it was prophetic or what, to have finished Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men days before the May 14 polls. Coincidence or not, it is good to be reminded about how politics work, and how it will forever remain as it is.

The Pulitzer-prize winning novel is an intimate look at politics because it does not necessarily expound on the immediate political sphere of the main character but is keen on examining the interplay of interpersonal relationships -- family, friendships, love -- and how these are transformed in within the sphere of politics. The novel has that grandeur in its ability to explore these emotions and Warren concocts his sentences as if he was enunciating a poem or explaining a novel in a literary group discussion.

The story is viewed through Jack Burden's lenses, and it is hypnotic at times because it seems as though he dissipates in the scene like smoke and arrive like a breeze. He narrates like as if he was a vase on the far side of the room. This is specially eminent when the novel tries to establish Willie Stark, the so-called king who believes that he is nowhere bound but the seat of the Governor. All the other characters revolve around his web and getting out of it is difficult and dangerous.

On the edition of the book that I read, Warren wrote a foreword explaining the book's semi-autobiographical flavor. The book is loosely based on Huey Long, the infamous Louisiana dictator back in the 50s. It was also believed that Warren was the novel's Jack Burden. The final chapter is an all-too familiar territory but yet Warren captures it with much honesty and gritty realism. One that reminds me that power is too tempting to resist but then we can still tread a life uncontrolled by it if we choose to. Here's an excerpt:

This is not remarkable, for as we know, reality is not a function of the event as event, which is not real in itself, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events. We seem here to have a paradox: that the reality of an event, which is not real in itself, arises from other events which, likewise, in themselves are not real. But this only affirms what we must affirm: that direction is all. And only as we realize this we do live, for our own identity is dependent upon this principle.