The concept of gesture in the novels of Robert Penn Warren

Abstract

In World Enough and Time. Robert Penn Warren's narrator sets the scene in which his protagonist acts out his drama: "It was a violent and lonely land ... Jeremiah Beaumont's land was the Kentucky of 1825, and his drama more than adequately embodies both the violence and the loneliness. What is important, however, is that World Enough and Time is a particular twentieth-century image of the Kentucky of the 1820's, which is another way of saying that it reveals more about the artist's vision and technique than it does about geography and history. It postulates a fictional world, but that very world is an image of its creator's world view, where violence and loneliness become significant elements in his vision of external reality in any time and place. These elements are among the things with which Jack Burden of All the King's Men must come to terms in his "State" of the 1930's and this vision of violence and loneliness is shared by any number of the characters of The Cave in Johntown, Tennessee, in the 1950's.