Katherine Anne Porter and the Luminosity of the Short Story

There are some writers who, although they construct novels, are just best at honing short stories.  Katherine Anne Porter is one of those writers.  Unfortunately, the mode of criticism most popular in the past decade—cultural/social/ideological—suitable for analyzing novels, has, with the exception of some studies of Ship of Fools, pretty much ignored Porter’s fiction. 

Consequently, to seek the assistance of good analysis of her work, we must go back to that much maligned mode of criticism that peaked in graduate programs in the mid-sixties—Formalism, sometimes called the New Criticism.  I was fortunate to have received my undergraduate and graduate education in literature between 1960 and 1966 and thus had the benefit of being influenced by such critics as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others.  Unfortunately this mode of criticism, which focused on explicating individual poems, stories, and novels, began to fade with the advent of so-called “theory.”

Eudora Welty, in her usual perceptive acuity reminds us why Porter is best at writing short stories, noting that Porter’s stories all take place in the interior of our lives.  “Her use of the physical world is enough to meet her needs and no more; she is not wasteful with anything.”  Welty also notes that, like her own tales, Porter’s stories are about the mystery of love: “Her ardent conviction that we need to give and receive in loving kindness all the human warmth we can make—here is where her stories come from”

Robert Penn Warren also centers his comments on Porter’s special talent for the short story form, noting that the characteristic of her fiction is a “rich surface detail scattered with apparently casual profuseness and the close structure which makes such detail meaningful; the great compression and economy which one discovers upon analysis; the precision of psychology and the observation, the texture of the style.”  Warren concludes that Porter’s fiction is “a literally metaphysical poetry…The luminosity is from within.”

Although Porter’s “Flowering Judas has been singled out for discussion over the years, most of that discussion recently has been on feminist and social issues. In my own opinion, “Flowering Judas” has a more universal (hateful word for the current cultural critics) significance suggested by Porter’s careful use of metaphoric language--the tension between flesh and spirit.  Braggioni sits “heaped” and sings in a “furry” mournful voice,” ‘snarling a tune.” He “scratches” the guitar familiarly as though it were a pet animal, taking the high notes in a prolonged painful squeal. “The gluttonous bulk of him has become a symbol” of Laura’s many disillusions.

Laura withholds herself from others, her round white collar is “nunlike,” and she has renounced vanities.  Braggioni bulges marvelously in his clothes, swells over his ammunition belt, swells with ominous ripeness.  But nobody touches Laura.  All praise her gray eyes and the soft round underlip which promises gayety yet is always grave. She draws her strength from one talismanic word, “no.” “Denying everything she may walk anywhere in safety, covering her great round breasts with thick dark cloth and who hides long invaluably beautiful legs under a heavy skirt.”

This tension between body and denial of body culminates with the death of Eugenio.

My two favorite Porter stories, which I included in my textbook Fiction’s Many Worlds, are two of her shortest ones:  “The Grave” and “Theft.”

In 1964, Sister M. Joselyn, began her essay on Katherine Anne Porter’s story “The Grave” as a lyrical short story this way:

“To those who enjoy the short story and are inclined to take it seriously as an art form, it is a constant source of surprise to find that although the genre has been with us for several centuries, there is still a marked dearth of systematic criticism concerning it.” 

Sister Joselyn argued that the “time is ripe for a serious, empirical study of the forms of the short story” and that we might begin by recognizing two basic recurrent kinds of stories which she called the ‘mimetic’ and the ‘lyric.’”  A few years later, using her secular name, Eileen Baldeshwiler, she published an article entitled “The Lyric Short Story:  The Sketch of a History,” in which she identified the two strains of short fiction as “epical” and “lyrical.”  I included this essay in my collection Short Story Theories, 1977.

I, of course, agreed with Sister Joselyn that it was time for some systematic criticism of the short story, by which both she and I meant that the short story had both a history and an aesthetic that readers would do well to know and understand.  Sister Joselyn’s description of the “lyrical” short story included the following characteristics: “(1) marked deviation from chronological sequence, (2) exploitation of purely verbal resources such as tone and imagery, (3) a concentration upon increased awareness rather than upon a completed action, and (4) a high degree of suggestiveness, emotional intensity, achieved with a minimum of means.”

“The Grave”

What makes this story so irresistible is its distinctive use of several modern short-story conventions.  First of all, as Sister Joselyn points out in her article listed below, the story

is closer to a lyric poem than it is to traditional narrative; consequently, it communicates more by metaphor and symbol than by character and event.  Secondly, it is a story about a significant

moment, in this case a moment of realization or passage from one state of being to another. 

Finally, it is a paradigm of story in that it is a memory fashioned into meaning.

The story focuses on Miranda's reaction to the gold ring she found in the grave, which makes her long to put aside her childhood for the traditionally feminine world of her thinnest and most becoming dress, and the opened body of the pregnant rabbit, which introduces her to the mysterious nature of birth. When Miranda sees the unborn rabbits, it is as if she had known this all along; she now understands some of the secret formless intuitions in her mind and body which have been taking form so slowly and gradually that she had not realized she was learning what she had to know.  Both perceptions suggest a traditional initiation of the young girl into womanhood.

What is not so clear is the relationship between this memory, which has lain buried for twenty years, and the present situation of the adult Miranda, for whom the marketplace's smell of mingled sweetness and corruption is the same as the smell of the cemetery so many years ago at home.  Miranda's image of birth arrested by death evoked by her memory of the pregnant rabbit is transformed into metaphor by the memory of the discovery of treasure in the graves; what was horrifyingly real is thus displaced by the poetic image of her brother turning the silver dove over and over in his hands.  And what was a shocking encounter with the nature of birth and death has been transmuted into meaning by the creative power of memory. 

“Theft”

The basic problem in this story is how to determine the relationship between the protagonist's encounters with various young men before the theft of her purse and her encounters with the janitress after the theft.  What has to be understood is how both series of confrontations motivate or justify the extremity of her final feeling that she is the thief who will end up leaving herself nothing.  As usual in post-Chekhovian stories, there is no explicit exposition to provide the answer.  The only background exposition is indicated obliquely when she mentions she has received a letter "making up her mind" for her and when she recalls spreading the letter out to dry so she could reread it.

The contents of the letter constitute an appropriate metaphor for modern short fiction, for it is largely made up of blanks, gaps, ellipsis.  However, as usual in letters, we "read between the lines" to conclude that it signifies a broken relationship.  This is further suggested by her telling the janitress that the purse was a present from someone (someone the janitress takes to be a man; she earlier says that it is a birthday present) and that the loss of it makes her feel she has been robbed of enormous number of valuable things, all of which suggest this is not the only loss she has experienced recently.

Most of the story focuses on seemingly irrelevant encounters she recalls in the "immediate past": the polite ceremonies of Camilo trying to put on a good front and then hiding his hat under his coat to save it from the rain; her conversation with Roger in the taxi about his trying to make up his mind to do something definite about his relationship with a young woman; the dialogue with Bill who complains that his wife is ruining him with her extravagance and who cannot pay the protagonist what he owes her.  In the midst of these scenes, there are brief scenes "in passing," as it were:  the three boys who talk about getting married and the two girls, one of whom complains about the conflicts of her relationship.  What unites all these seemingly unrelated scenes is that all focus on broken, flawed, or faulty relationships in which people are posturing or putting on a false front.

Given this background, it seems inevitable that when the protagonist confronts the janitress to get her purse back, she will realize the justness of the janitress's rebuke that she has already let her chances pass her by.  The story thus very economically and indirectly conveys a life lived carelessly; as the janitress says, "you leave things around and don't seem to notice much."  As the protagonist realizes, life is a process of having things taken from you, but the worse kind of loss is that which is a result of your own neglect and failure to attend to things, for it is that kind of loss that ends by leaving one with nothing.

Messy Mountains vs. Luminous Diamonds

As much as I admire the criticism of William H. Gass, I am disappointed that he ended his essay on Porter in his newest book with a common slight to the short story as a form:

“Although O’Connor, Welty, and Porter obliged us by writing novels, it is for short stories they are generally remembered, in which more polish for small surfaces is routinely expected, whereas writers like Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Stein—well, they are moving mountains, and it doesn’t matter if they leave a small mess here and there like great chefs in the kitchen. Does it?”

Well, no.  Small messes do not matter when you are moving mountains.  But how many novels actually undertake and succeed in such monumental massive goals?  And what makes moving a mountain more important than crafting a diamond?  The first just takes brute force and big equipment; the second requires precision and skill. I’ll take Porter’s diamonds over Tolstoy’s mountain any day.

Focus on the Language, not the Content is Most Important for Teaching Students How to Read

Believe it or not, there was a time, some fifty years ago, when short stories were read carefully, and even respected, by teachers and students.  But because this was during that period of pedagogy known as the New Criticism or Formalism, the focus was on the explication of individual stories. Such an approach has been much reviled in recent years by critics who seem bound and determined to move farther and farther away from the story itself and more and more into studies of culture, politics, psychology, sociology, race, gender, ideology, etc.

I was reminded of this recently when one of my readers, Jim Friel, asked if I would make a few remarks on Katherine Anne Porter.  Jim said he had read William H. Gass’s review/essay on Porter in his new book (Life Sentences), which originally appeared in Harper’s January, 2009, but found it mainly a discussion of Porter’s biography.

I like it when readers ask my opinion about a certain writer; it’s the old professor in me, I reckon. It forces me to keep alert and to keep alive writers I have read in the past; it also compels me to revisit and reevaluate issues about the short story that have occupied my mind for many years. So I pulled out my copy of The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965)—a significant book in the history of the short story, for it won both the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the National Book Award that year--one of the very few short story collections to win such prestigious prizes.

I also dug out my old manila folder on Katherine Anne Porter, which contains photocopies of some of the best Porter criticism, primarily from the 1960s, as well as notes on the Porter stories I have taught, which include: “Flowering Judas,” “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” “He,” “Noon Wine,” “Theft,” and “The Grave.” Here are a few of those, inevitably formalist, critical essays on Porter that influenced my teaching of her stories back in the day:

Brooks, Cleanth.  "On `The Grave'." Katherine Anne Porter. Ed. Lodwick Hartley and George Core. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. 115-19.  Brooks says the story is about the paradoxical nature of truth, which wears a double face.  The secret of birth is revealed in the place of death, and there is both beauty and horror in the discovery.

Sister M. Joselyn. "`The Grave' as Lyrical Short Story."  Studies in Short Fiction 1 (1964):  216-21.  A discussion of the story's use of the devices of lyric poetry.

Warren, Robert, Warren. "Irony With a Center:  Katherine Anne Porter." Selected Essays.  New York: Random House, 1951: 136-56.  Warren says Porter's fiction is characterized by "rich surface detail scattered with apparently casual profuseness and the close structure which makes such detail meaningful."

Welty, Eudora, "The Eye of the Story," Yale Review. 55 (Winter 1966):  265-74.  Claims that Porter's use of the physical world is enough to meet her needs and no more.  Welty says that what Porter makes us see are those "subjective worlds of hallucination, obsession, fever, guilt."

However, a brief survey of Porter criticism in the past dozen years—of which there is precious little—reveals the influence of the social/cultural trend that has dominated literary criticism and is, in my opinion, larely responsible for driving students away from literature. For example, there is an essay on racial and cultural difference in “Noon Wine,” an essay on racial issues in the seven interrelated stories under the title “The Old Order,” a discussion of cultural and gender issues in the Miranda stories, etc. etc

Of course, the problem I have with cultural/gender/ideological critics is that they seem less interested in the work itself than they are in how the work illustrates their own particular academic niche. I realize that literature professors have to publish to get tenure and get promoted—hell, I did it in my career.  I also realize that literature profs have to follow the lead of big name critics who suddenly discover or create a new approach. The academic study of literature always changes, if for no other reason than to give new assistant professors something new to write about in order to climb up the academic ladder.  But my experience in the last few years of my teaching career suggested to me that most of my younger colleagues were not really teaching their students how to read, nor were they teaching them about the unique characteristics of literature.  It made me glad to retire.  Probably made my colleagues and students happy also.

William H. Gass, whose approach to the study of literature I have always admired, spends much of his review-essay in Life Sentences on the relationship between Porter’s life and her stories, for he takes as his subject two biographies of Porter, as well as the new Library of America edition of her Collected Stories and Other Writings that came out in 2009.  Gass reminds us that F. O. Mattheissen observed back in 1945 that Porter had a “high reputation among all schools of critics” and was regarded as a “writer’s writer,” which usually suggests a “consummate craftsmanship” that other writers would be pleased to emulate. However, it is not a title that would make her appealing to the new social/cultural critics.

Gass notes that when reviewers take the time to compliment a writer on her style, they usually mean she has made it easy for them to immerse themselves into the account so that they “lose all touch with mere words” and feel as if they were present at the event described.  Gass contends that rather than praise authors for their ability to let us “see” the action, better, we should praise them for their ability to let us “read.”

I, of course, agree; I have no admiration for the hurry-scurry novelist who uses words to activate a little television screen inside our head so that we leap over the words to the so-called “content.”  I much prefer the short story writer who compels us to attend to the language of the story, which is solely responsible for “making” the reading experience.

In a bit of serendipity, when I was reading the Gass essay this week, I heard a report on National Public Radio about a recent psychological study on reading stories to children. Education researchers examined what reading behaviors helped children learn to read.  It turns out that although reading to a child helped build children’s vocabulary, it did not help them learn to read. So the researchers did some eye-tracking studies to determine what the children were looking at when someone read to them. They found that when you simply read a book to kids, they tend to ignore the print on the page. More than 90 percent of the time the children are focusing on the pictures, or they are looking up at the parent doing the reading.

Children learn to read incrementally, becoming familiar with letters, then words, reading from left to right, etc. But if a child's attention isn't drawn to the printed word, then reading to children won't necessarily make them more familiar with what it means to read. The researchers gave two groups of preschool teachers books for an entire school year — 30 weeks' worth of books. One group was told to read the books to the children normally; the other was given weekly cards with specific questions the teacher could ask — really just small phrases — that might momentarily draw a child's attention to the print on the page.

The teachers were told to read their books four times a week, and to point out the print between four and eight times, so that together the small phrases hardly added extra time to their reading sessions — maybe 90 seconds per book. They followed the kids for two years and concluded:  "Children who focused their attention on print ... had better literacy outcomes than those who did not.”  

I know the implications of this study for the teaching of reading are more complex than this brief summary might indicate, but the results of the study verify my own experience trying to teach university students how to read short stories.

One of the problems about the focus in the past few years on ideology, culture, gender, race, etc. when reading narrative is that the students do not learn how to read because they do not attend to the language of the story.

Good formalist that he is, Gass argues against the current common notion that “style” is merely a wrapping for what is really important—content.  Style, Gass protests, is the result of ‘exactness of choice” and then gives us this classic statement on the importance of style and form:

“Whether unconsciously or by intent, the writer chooses subjects, adopts a tone, considers an order for the release of meaning, arrives at the rhythm, selects a series of appropriate sounds, determines the diction and measures the pace, turns the referents of certain words into symbols, establishes connections with companionable paragraphs, sizes up each sentence’s intended significance, and , if granted good fortune, because each decision might have been otherwise, achieves not just this and that bit of luminosity or suggestiveness but her own unique lines of language, lines that produce the desired restitution of the self.”

As I have argued over and over here and any place I can find someone to listen, this kind of close attention to language is more often apt to occur in the short story than in the novel, which is one reason why readers trained to see content rather than attend to language would rather read novels than short stories and why young professors of literature nowadays are, in my opinion, failing in their primary task--teaching students how to read literature.  Gass ends his essay/review by reminding us that although writers like Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Anne Porter “obliged us by writing novels,” it is for their short stories that they are best remembered, in which more emphasis on style is expected. 

With this bit of polemic as background, I will return to Katherine Anne Porter next week and make some comments about what characterizes her as a writer of short stories and therefore—sad to say-- makes her of little interest to current academic critics/professors and their students, who while they crow that they know a helluva lot about culture, race, gender, politics, and ideology, their analyses suggest they know little about literature.