The Word and the Flesh in A Place to Come To: The Postmodern Exile and Alienation from Community

The last of Robert Penn Warren's published novels, Place to Come To (1977), is also most contemporary, sharing features with novels of a younger generation of writers that includes Walker Percy, William Styron, John Updike, and early John Barth. Place to Come To is informed by Warren's earlier statements about postmodern alienation his 1966 lecture A Plea Mitigation: Modern and End of Era, which anticipates some of Warren's conclusions Democracy and Poetry. Society, with rise of industrialism, financed capitalism, and power state, seemed to be losing its old sanctions; sense of community and of human ties was being replaced by anonymous forces; communion seemed to be lost noise of communication by mass media; historical sense disappeared into a cynical, or supine, acceptance of incoherent present. Man, fact, seemed to be living a No-Society--in even an Anti-Society--an agglomeration of No-Persons whose relations, satisfying certain appetites, fundamentally denied certain human needs. The greatest need it denied was sense of identity--only to be had by a sense of meaningful relation to other man and to nature. (5) Place to Come To, Warren uses contemporary sensibility, one sensitive to pressures of deracination our postmodern experience and a climate more tolerant of explicit sexual expression, to investigate potential of narrative voice, construction, and structure. Warren uses Jed Tewksbury's narrative this novel to provide a textual diagnostic of extent to which deracination affects modern as well as to show, therapeutically, possibility of textual reparations. Furthermore, juxtaposition of Jed's oscillating attachment to words and flesh depicts more graphically than Warren's earlier novels a necessary element of Warren's aesthetic: tension between abstract or ideal and physical or real experience. The opposing forces of word--written and oral--and flesh, as text and sexual experience, are two of primary means Jed uses to unite with a community and to further alienate himself from that community. Warren's 1974 Jefferson Lecture Humanities, published 1975 as Democracy and is a record of Warren's thoughts on relationship between and community and connection has to that relationship; it is foundational to understanding Warren's aesthetic practice Place to Come To. Democracy and is critical tradition of Plato's Republic, Sidney's An Apology for Poetry, and Shelley's In Defense of Poetry, all of which position poet an influential relationship to society; potentially, poet is morally dangerous, according to Plato, or morally and/or linguistically regenerative, according to Sidney and Shelley. Warren suggests that, an age when art becomes increasingly commodified by public and politicized by theorists, there is such a thing as great art, and that artistic work, if reader and writer allow it, has regenerative power for (both writer's and reader's) and community. Warren's stated purpose two essays that make up Democracy and America and Diminished Self and Poetry and Selfhood, is to discuss the interrelation of three things: democracy, poetry (really general), and selfhood (xi). Warren defines self as a being who is in individuation, felt principle of significant unity (xii). By felt, Warren means a more or less aware individual may experience as his own selfhood, and what he assumes about other individuals. By significant, Warren means continuity--the as a development time ... and responsibility--the as a moral identity (xiii). Warren's definition is informed by many of concerns his oeuvre. …