Conductivity in Fiction
Wallace Stegner
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Night Rider. By Robert Penn Warren. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. $2.50. Pale Horse, Pale Rider. By Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2.00. Sirocco. By Ralph Bates. New York: Random House. $2.50. The Wild Palms. By William Faulkner. New York: Random House. $2.50.
About all these four books have in common is the fact that they are all fiction. Under the circumstances, the one workable expedient seems to be the setting up of an arbitrary function or quality of fiction, and the measuring of all the books against it. Call our arbitrary principle "conductivity," the capacity to transmit the living sense of participation that is half the justification of fiction. It is more than mere understanding or intellectual appreciation or the perception of an artistic idea. The scholars take that approach too frequently, and render themselves emotionally impotent before the literature they study. Conductivity is simply that emotional rapport between character and reader which for the moment makes the fiction more convincing and moving than reality; it functions through the ductless glands rather than through the mind.
Measured by that standard, Robert Penn Warren's "Night Rider" is an in-and-out novel. Mr. Warren has focused the crisis of the "tobacco war" of 1905 in the person of Percy Munn, a Kentucky lawyer caught in the old dilemma of the liberal: do nothing, or do things for which no justification except the compulsions of the cause can be found. Under those compulsions Munn throws in his lot with the growers' association that is bucking the buyers; finger by finger he loses his hold on his old life; he is forced deeper into violence, from raids on plant beds to the murder of a blackmailing cropper and the burning of the company warehouses with its accompanying killings. In the end he has come the full distance to murder in personal rather than group causes, and almost immediately after that revelation of the bottomless depths in himself he meets his own appropriate end by violence.
