The death of heroes, the recovery of the heroic

Christian Century, Dec 22, 1993 by David Hein

IRONICALLY, HYERS'S devotion to the comic vision is itself rather absolute, and ends up forcing him to prescind too much that is really indispensable. Consider two series of scenes from the denouement of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. In the first, narrator Jack Burden confronts Tiny Duffy, who has become governor after the assassination of the Boss, Willie Stark. He rejects Tiny's offer of a job in the new administration, tells him he knows Tiny's was behind the murder of Governor Stark, and dismisses him contemptously as the Boss's less-than-human today. Walking away from that encounter, Jack "felt like a million. I had sure-God brought off that scene. I had hit him where he lived. I was full of beans. I had fire in my belly. I was a hero. I was St. George and the dragon, I was Edwin Booth beyond the gaslights, I was Jesus Christ with the horsewhip in the temple." But then he experiences an acid taste in the mouth and comes to a bitter--but comic and redeeming--awareness: "I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so sure I would work for him....And...I knew that I had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself off from Duffy....I was as though in the midst of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me with his oyster eye and I had know he knew the nightmare truth, which was that we were twins"--bound together not by blood but their common experience as minions of the corrupt Willie Stark.

In the last 20 pages of the novel, we see Jack Burden appropriating this comic awareness and becoming, not a hero, but simply a better, wiser person, one who is capable of action that is, in a small but significantly way, truly heroic. He can face the past with all its moral complexity and accept it; he can commit himself to a future full of risks. He takes up again the dissertation he had neglected because he could not face the truth it contained about the terrible responsibility of each person in the world. He marries the woman he could make no lasting promises to in the past, despite the fact that in the interim she had given up on him and pursued another path. He takes into his own house an eccentric old man, "the Scholarly Attorney," he had once rather ashamedly believed was his own father. He will support his friend Hugh Miller, an honorable man who resigned as attorney general in the Stark administration, should Miller decide to go back into politics. At the end neither a tragic nor a comic hero, Jack Burden is a man who has learned a great deal and has taken in the best of both perspectives. A similar change took place in Willie Stark just before his murder. A hero to the poor people of the state, the Boss becomes genuinely heroic only when he renounces base means and determines to change the way he does business.

We can acquiesce in the cultural process that has eventuated in the death of heroes. What we cannot accept is the loss of the heroic. The hero is an extraordinary being possessed of superior powers; the heroic is a potential attribute of ordinary men and women, as well as of children (as children learn from fairy tales). The heroic is consistent with democracy, the hero a possible threat. The hero has been honored with monuments everywhere; the shrine of the heoric is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The concept of the heroic bridges the gap between the tragic and the comic. It accepts the fragmentyary character of our knowledge, our virtue and our power (to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr), while holding fast to the old-fashioned "warrier virtues" of courage, honor and loyalty. It sees that, pace hyers, steadfastness may or may not mean a fight to the death, obedience need not be unquestioning, and the desire for kudos may be replaced by the will to act for others and for the glory of God. The traditional hero was chosen by fate or the gods to undertake a journey into the unknown; heroic thinking and doing is part of the vocation that God lays on us all as we venture unrehearsed into the terra incognita of our everyday lives.