A broader premise for future study...

Beyond All the King’s Men, it seems it’s inherently possible to apply the lens of this essay to other noir narratives that employ first person, masculine narrators.  True, Burden appears sharply distinct from his Californian brethren given that his fallen state comes from his inability to take responsibility—hence marry—Anne Stanton, but the male narrators of the early 40’s (the boon time of Hammett, Chandler, and Noir Cinema) have built within them a similar ineffectual masculinity given that then narrators of these Californian incarnations sit out World War II.  Perhaps we can postulate a similar sort of gender based deprivation and shame inherent to these narrators in their inability to fight—or not wanting to fight—for their country and its just cause to end Nazism and Fascism across the globe.  Accordingly, how might we reconsider Philip Marlowe’s cynical humor and womanizing with this chip on his shoulder?  Certainly, reflexive masochism, in this regard, will provide further enticements for literary study.  

Complications in terms of AKM and women as Plot Devices

I think my analysis has provided some interesting complications in terms of feminist readings of AKM, particularly in the assertion that Anne's affair with Talos is staged so that Warren can fulfill the noir formulaic.  Anyway, my discussion of this point proceeds as follows: 

In terms of possible feministic readings of AKM, reflexive masochism, as I’ve appropriated it in this work, excitingly complicates Wilson’s and Ferriss’s analysis of role of female characters, particularly Anne Stanton, in terms of plot construction. Certainly, Wilson’s work in “Medusa, the Movies, and the King’s Men,” offers astute insight into the role of Sadie Burke, but both Wilson and Ferriss seem to comprehend Anne Stanton’s agency in her affair with Talos as a fathomless lacunae with the rationale behind her choice withheld by Warren in order to configure her into the fallen symbolic order prerequisite to the restorative questing of the typical noir, male protagonist.  True, the narrator allows Anne no voiced reason as to why she went to Talos other than he wasn’t like anybody she’d ever known, but this doesn’t tell us much and disappointingly limits any further understanding of Anne’s motives to Burden’s interpretation.  However, if we consider that AKM isn’t just Talos’s story, but Burden’s story too, we must understand that the entire tragedy of this text can be attributed to Burden’s inability to have sex with Anne when she first made herself available so many years ago.  If the younger, college-boy Burden had the moral certainty and self-mastery as Adam Stanton, then he would’ve gone through with it, they would’ve been married, and Adam wouldn’t have been killed after assassinating Talos.  Though this certainly doesn’t lend anymore agency to Anne in her affair with Talos that seemingly drops out of nowhere, it doesn’t put the blame on her shoulders.  Accordingly, in the grander sense of this novel’s telling, the narrating, heterodiegetic Burden, absorbs all these injuries in the telling because it’s his ultimate inability to be a man and sexually consummate his love with Anne that subsequently sparks the tragedy of the entire novel.  Furthermore, the narrating Burden relives each injury and takes the fault on himself according to the reflexive masochistic framework previously delineated.  As Silverman suggests, Burden, in taking on more than his share of responsibility—as Cass Mastern—he multiplies and deepens his own suffering in order to “aggrandize the self” in which such “martyrdom effects a primarily personal “triumph,” and produces in the ostensible sufferer a “mood of enlargement” (Silverman 327).  Ultimately, the whole of AKM can be seen as an apotheosis of Burden’s newfound virility where he becomes master of himself in the wake of Willie’s death.  

Conclusions and beyond

Here's how I'm thinking my conclusion:

Given the many versions of Burden available in each scene, the narration of AKM demonstrates Silverman’s notion of reflexive masochism in various ways.  Principally, we have two Burdens, the first being the Burden who moves along with Willie Talos’s rise and fall, the second being the narrator/speaker.  Still, a multilayered focalization exists given that the narrating Burden deftly conjures memories, not as he currently remembers them, but as the past version of Burden remembers them as appropriate to the dramatized/recounted moment.  Accordingly, while the first, homodiegetic Burden, revisits his past to appropriate Anne’s affair with Talos by eliminating her agency and responsibility as he constructions his theory of the Great Twitch, the second, heterodiegetic Burden identifies with Cass Mastern and takes on more than his portion of the “awful responsibility” by mastering it through the art of narration.  Though more ostensibly damaged and traumatized, the homodiegetic Burden who is seen experiencing pain in the aftermath of Anne’s affair with Talos, Burden the teller (who likely feels the hurt all the more because he is married to Anne) forces himself to receive this trauma once again, though behind the curtains, as he’s both the narrator and principal narratee of this telling.  On the surface, the Long Beach Burden who agonizes more actively resembles Silverman’s read on T.E. Lawrence, but that doesn’t exclude the narration itself as a reflexive masochistic act given that the ultimate, heterodiegetic Burden reengages his trauma with such attention and authenticity throughout all the past versions of himself that he conjures.

My primary passage and some initial notes

I thought it would be nice to share the primary passage I will study for my project and include some of my initial discussion which I will use in my paper.  This is Burden remembering his first night alone with in his convertible back when she was seventeen and he failed to reach across those “thousand miles” of leather cushion to make the first move:

I didn’t know why I didn’t reach over.  I kept assuring myself that I wasn’t timid, wasn’t afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore.  Hell, I told myself, she wouldn’t get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn’t sit alone in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano.  Then I assured myself that it wasn’t Adam that I was afraid of.  To hell with Adam, I told myself, did he think he could put lead seals on his sister’s drawers.  Hell, somebody had probably hosed her already. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry.  I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. (AKM 383-84)

The reflexive masochism, the multilayered focalization, Burden’s faltering attempt to act sexually as a man: everything about this passage preeminently integrates into my project.  Still, before we jump into interpretation, we must disentangle the layers of focalization intrinsically inherent to this passage.  First—as I’ve already indicated—we must establish the point of narrating in that the apparent heterodiegetic Burden recreating/remembering this scene isn’t the ultimate heterodiegetic Burden that looks back from the novel’s conclusion.  This Burden is being revisited as he revisits his first romantic encounters with Anne.  Accordingly, the Burden who’s lost in the memory of this parked car liaison lounges on a motel bed in Long Beach.  The ultimate-narrator Burden conjures this past version of himself, who then conjures his college self.  This is a categorically important distinction given that each of these versions of Burden contain various disparate facts and worldviews.  To be clear: the homodiegetic Burden in this scene is a college boy pretending “he’s such a God-damned big man” (AKM 383). The second, remembering Burden, is the recently wounded Burden who’s just discovered that Anne has been sleeping with the Boss.  Interestingly enough, the reader infers that the sensibility, mood, and voice of this passage are imbued by the wounded Burden, not the “redeemed” Burden we meet at the novel’s end, precisely by the fact we haven’t met him yet.

Upon looking back on the online digital editions, I was surprised to see that so few were as well constructed as the Blake archive that me and my partner presented on.  Of course, Blake's work, with his blending of art and literature with his Illuminate Press, presents perhaps the ideal candidate for such scholarly work, it seems odd that so few authors receive similar attention, particularly in the case of Dickinson, who's publishers so decisively changed her poems from how they originally appeared by her own hand.  Still, the lack of such editions might bring us back to previous conversations where talked about the legitimacy of online publications, and how the status of what's online still seems to fall short of the esteem most feel for books. This is changing, and, given the Blake archive, should change, particularly in his case, considering how unique each of his printed books were.

As for other turns, it seems I've now discerned the key passages in AKM in which I'll apply my "reflexive masochist" lens.  It seems the moment when Burden discovers Anne has been sleeping with Talos and his eventual "Drowning by West" will be incredibly useful considering the many homodiegetic Is the author Burden conjures in recounting his relationship to Anne.

Some Recommended Books

Though I might provide some of my Annotation Highlights for the class:

Gender Trouble

This essential text in gender theory scrutinizes the “naturalness” of gender under various philosophical, anthropological, psychoanalytical, and political frameworks.  Butler reveals that gender cannot be separated from identity and that persons only become intelligible to themselves and others by becoming gendered.  Though throughout much of the novel Burden fails to live up to the standards of Southern masculinity in which he’s immersed, we can understand—through Butler’s work—the reflexive masochism latent Jack Burden’s narration in that he must continually present himself in some masculine fashion in order to effectively conjure a past self to make his agency intelligible to the reader (and, subsequently, to himself).   

Living to Tell...

Phelan’s work singlehandedly pioneered the notion of an implied author whose agency steers and generates any given text.  The implied author isn’t the real author, but a subset of the real author who imbues their text with their values and aesthetic standards.  This notion of an author outside the text requiring a constructed agent in the textual field to perform the text, can be applied to Burden the author—though in a decidedly artificial and microcosmic manner—as he looks back and conjures (and separates) the various versions of himself in the book.  Also, Living to Tell has a wonderfully useful glossary of narrative theory terminology.

Southern Masculinity since Reconstruction:

In contemporizing male tropes in terms of the time period of AKM (1930s), Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction shows how notions of “Muscular Christianity,” evolutionary theory, and Nietzsche’s overman, pushed the “new” Southern masculinity into a category of behavior defined more by will, sexuality, and physical force.  This fits Talos perfectly in both his philandering and his drive to give Louisiana a more modern/dynamic economy.  Similarly, since manhood in the South has been typically classified as governed by the passions rather than intellect (a quality Burden readily applies to himself), Burden can’t be a leader and must subjugate his intellectual agency to another, more muscular, patriarch.

Last Class, Some New Reworkings

It was nice getting to meet some of the new faculty last week.  I particularly enjoyed meeting Matt Hooley, whose academic interested mirror many of my own: Modernism, Ecocriticism, the relationship between art and literature.  Besides supplying me with a nice reading list to beef up on ecocriticism, he also gave me some advice on how I might be able to blend Modernism with Ecocriticism by examining works of art from the Modernist period. For those interested in ecocriticism, you might want to look up Lawrence Buell and Tim Morton. 

As for other updates, it seems I needed to reframe the narrative theory component of my research project accordingly: 

Where Willie is a vacuum of volition, Burden suffers an identity crisis that precludes him from entering Anne Stanton’s life as legitimate suitor because he has no presiding worldview where he can be seen as master of himself or subsequently—in terms of Southern culture—a viable husband and patriarch to Anne Stanton.  All this only highlights the performative aspect of Burden’s own narration and how the noir cynicism and self-loathing latent to his homodiegetic voice and characterizations are a manifestation of his youthful inability to become a true gentleman like Adam, Anne Stanton’s brother, who exhibits morality, confidence, and strength.  More of an thinker than a doer, the homodiegetic Burden has been thrown into a perpetual state of affected impassivity whereby his cynicism and self-loathing can still be seen as inherently masculine, though largely ineffectual in a paternalistic sense, if we employ the lens of what Kaja Silverman calls “Reflexive Masochism” to certain segments of Burden’s recreated/homodiegetic narration.