"The human filth, the human hope": Subjectivity and the Abject in Robert Penn Warren's Audubon

Much of the critical work on Robert Penn Warren's 1969 poem Audubon: A Vision emphasizes difficulty in reconciling oppositional binaries that serve as barriers to self-realization, either on the part of the poet or the protagonist. Whether that binary is between man and nature, the artist and the world being represented, or, more broadly, the individual and society, both Warren and Audubon experience a divide between their current selves and their ideal selves, which seem to be forever just out of reach. For these reasons, the selves of the poem exist in a constant state of disequilibrium that drives the artists perpetually to search out stability and completeness. While the poem's many disconnections have their idiosyncrasies that make them unique, they all can be integrated into a unifying concept using a theoretical framework derived from the work of psychoanalyst and literary theorist Julia Kristeva. While Kristevan concepts have been applied effectively to Warren's poetry in regard to his representation of maternal figures (Rivas 11), such an approach has yet to be applied to the ways in which Warren the poet explores identity and its creation. As Warren, in the guise of Audubon, continues to further separate and define his being, a lack emerges that can be described in terms of the loss of the original union with the mother when a child enters into the mirror stage and then proceeds into the symbolic order. While this hard psychoanalytic view can be read into the poem, it also has bearing beyond the literal mother-child relationship. Beyond this initial trauma, Audubon also struggles with his own abjectness and that of those around him, a perpetual discomfort that springs from his fractured selfhood. These issues are most clearly manifested in his encounter with the murderous frontier woman and her sons, during which he experiences a simultaneous revulsion from and attraction to the woman, eventually leading to his entering into "the manly state" upon her death (Warren, Audubon 135). When viewed alongside the clear divide—what is referred to as a thin membrane—that exists between Audubon and the world, and by extension Warren and the world, these ideas form the basis of an aesthetically stunning exploration of the perpetual desire to clearly define oneself despite being by our very nature incomplete beings.

A concept that permeates the poem and links Audubon with Warren is home and the subject's relationship to it. Audubon's home and origin are points of contention that shift with his ever-changing portrayal of his past. The poem makes this point abundantly clear within the first section, "Was Not the Lost Dauphin," which builds upon the lore that Audubon descended from French nobility:

Was not the lost dauphin, though handsome was onlyBase-born and not even ableTo make a decent living, was onlyHimself, Jean Jacques, and his passion—whatIs man but his passion?

(130)

So it is established early on in the poem that the actual identity of Audubon does not bear the same importance as his self-made image, both through the tales of his exploits in the West and his work as an artist. This thread of true identity is present in other works of Warren's, notably "The Ballad of Billie Potts" (1943), in which a case of mistaken identity leads two loving parents to murder their long exiled son. Randy Hendricks notes that such a tale is prominent in Warren's early poetry: "In many of his best-known early poems Warren uses an Americanized prodigal to tell a traditional story of flight and return. Sometimes addressed explicitly as 'wanderer,' he appears in several pre-1943 poems as a transient consciousness if not a full-blown character" (40). The "Americanized prodigal" concept that Hendricks posits certainly applies to Audubon who, although originally from France, became a foundational figure in American naturalism. However, there are aspects of Audubon's character that separate him from characters such as Billie Potts, who was able to forge a singular identity despite his exile...