SOURCE: “Literary Criticism, Katherine Anne Porter's Consciousness, and the Silver Dove,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 109–15.

[In the following essay, Cheatham argues against an antiformalist approach to Porter's fiction.]

I recently received a rejection notice for a paper I've written on Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, arguing that religious images suggest the Christian myth of fall and redemption which the story affirms and Miranda seems to accept.¹ Along with other comments from the rejecting referee came this one: “Porter is an existentialist, an atheist one at that, not a Christian.” From the brevity of his response I don't know how the referee arrived at such an assessment, but he has raised for me some interesting questions about poststructuralist critical methodology, questions about the nature of text and textuality, about formalism and antiformalism.

My rejected paper follows generally formalist methodology. It is a close reading of a system of symbolic allusions within a single text. The referee's comment, on the other hand, seems antiformalist, as if it might have come from a follower of Georges Poulet and the so-called Geneva school. Such critics reject formalist methodology. Instead of analyzing the form and specificity of a single work of art, they search for the author's consciousness behind a total canon. Geoffrey Hartman summarizes this way:

Poulet's method is to place himself in a writer's consciousness. He can do this by ignoring all formal distinctions, as between part and whole or preface, novel, journalistic comment, obiter dicta. He may be sacrificing lesser forms to greater, but this would have to be proved, not assumed. Chronological distinctions are also ignored: the method, in truth, approaches that of the synoptic reading of the gospels. In the case of the gospels there is of course a central event, a common mythos responsible for the clustering of the original stories and which outweighs their divergencies. It is not surprising that something similar to this center is assumed by Poulet as common to the biblia of the individual writers. This center is the artist's cogito, a continuously generated relation linking thought to the world, the I think to the I am. This is the crux relation, as it were. It precedes or constitutes all other relations of time, space, imagery, action.²

If such a critical method is to work, it should do so, I suppose, with a writer whose works are so heavily autobiographical as Porter's, with a writer whose works most directly reflect the cogito informing them. Or should it? With Porter or any author the method raises at least three difficulties. Poulet's method presumes, first, an unchanging consciousness. That is, it presumes that the cogito informing a late work like Ship of Fools is exactly the same as that informing an early work like “The Shattered Star,” a story written for a children's magazine published by the Interchurch World Movement. (It explains the Northern Lights through a story about an Eskimo girl stolen by Moon People.) Second, Poulet's method presumes an undifferentiated consciousness. That is, it presumes that the same unchanging cogito not only informs both Ship of Fools and “The Shattered Star” but also informs them both in exactly the same way. Each reveals equally the consciousness behind it. The method makes no formal or qualitative distinctions between one literary work and another or, for that matter, any journal entry, any letter, any conversation, in fact, any act of consciousness. Pale Horse, Pale Rider or Old Mortality reveals the essential Katherine Anne Porter no more and no differently than does her weekly column in a 1919 Denver newspaper, “Let's Shop with Suzanne”:

Next to being a bride is being a graduate; n'est-ce pas? And this week I saw, oh! so many fluffy little creations made just for those dear little girls who have finished school. Dresses betucked and beruffled, with long sleeves and short but always full and flowing. … I am—oh! such a busy little girl. I was almost afraid that I couldn't get to you this week, but here I am. And each Sunday now I shall have such interesting things to tell you of the “pretties” that I find in the shops. … I am a splendid shopper, too. Certainement.³

Both of Poulet's presumptions make me uneasy, however, and produce the third difficulty. They seem to require a transcendence I'm unable to achieve. Poulet's method requires us to view the writer's canon only as an entrance to the writer's cogito which though evident in the works nevertheless transcends them. The works are like a ladder to get us to the roof; once we've reached the cogito, the canon can be discarded. Or we can then use the cogito to judge the canon: Since Porter is an atheist existentialist, say, she couldn't have written a Christian story. Similar to the somewhat conflicting concepts of salvation through works and salvation through faith, Poulet would have critics consider not so much what the writer has written as what the writer at some essential level is. The distinction between the writer and the work is thus obliterated.

All three of these difficulties are inherent, I think, in Hartman's adduced analogy of the synoptic gospels. The central mythos responsible for the clustering of gospel stories is, after all, the incarnation of God, an unchanging, transcendent Being revealed through a transient, inconsequential form. Poulet's method, like the gospels, requires a leap of faith by the critic, who must presume, first, the existence of the transcendent, overarching cogito into which all apparent differences or inconsistencies melt and, second, the possibility of reconstructing that cogito. And even should the first presumption obtain, I doubt the second.

I can't prove it, as Hartman suggests it must be proved, but my intuition is that an attempt to reconstruct Porter's or any author's cogito does sacrifice lesser forms to greater. Like any theory—including formalism, marxism, or structuralism—antiformalism seeks to demystify the literary text, specifically to explain the text for the uninitiated by means of the cogito, to eliminate interpretation of the text by providing analysis. Unfortunately, unless one accepts it as somehow absolutely given, the cogito itself must then be interpreted. That interpretation must in turn be interpreted, and so on ad infinitum. Theory doesn't eliminate interpretation; rather, it displaces interpretation from the literary work to the theory itself and probably multiplies interpretation as well. Katherine Anne Porter's cogito seems every bit as mystifying to me as does one of her short stories.

The sacrifice antiformalism requires, moreover, isn't worth making. I instinctively resist the flattening, the homogenization, such a reconstruction requires, denying as it does any quantitative difference between works written at ages 15, 30, 50, or 80 and any qualitative differences between a story like Old Mortality and one like “The Shattered Star” or an unpublished poem on the death of her niece or a book review or a marginal notation. Not only are lesser literary forms sacrificed to the overarching cogito, but the work as a work is lost; even the idea of literature itself is lost. Poulet would both demystify and deprivilege the literary text. The creation of a work of literature becomes for Poulet merely another undifferentiated act of consciousness, in theory neither quantitatively nor qualitatively different from a casual conversation. All sense of development, differentiation, degree, form—all melt before Poulet's fierce Cartesianism.

There is, of course, an author, a consciousness, behind each text. Each text exists in a context, in a web of textuality—a potentially infinite and indefinite, all-inclusive series of networks of interrelation with connections and boundaries that are not securable.⁴ That is, each work is written by a particular author, in a particular language, at a particular place in the canon, in a particular tradition, at a particular time, at a particular location, in a particular culture. In Hillis Miller's words, a work's “relations to its surroundings radiate outward like concentric circles from a stone dropped in water.”⁵ But where does the context stop? With the canon? The author's life? The literary tradition? The historical epoch? Indeed, where does the context start? With a phoneme? A morpheme? A sentence? A metaphor? (Notice here how the term I used earlier, antiformalism, belies itself. The search for the author's cogito is still a type of formalism. The search is simply for increasingly more comprehensive forms—for the ever-widening concentric circles of Miller's simile.)

Miller continues, seeming to admit the impossibility, perhaps even the undesirability, of full comprehensiveness:

These [concentric] circles multiply indefinitely until the scholar must give up in despair the attempt to make a complete inventory of them. … [A]s he proceeds in his endless quest, the [work] … gradually fades into the multitude of its associations. … Instead of being a self-sufficient entity, it is only a symptom of ideas or images current in the culture which generated it.

(pp. 560–61)

The work disappears also, I might add, if we move too far into the text—into a full analysis, say, of a work's phonemic structure.

So how do we go about establishing boundaries that are not securable? How do we know how far to go inside or outside a text? Can we meaningfully isolate for analysis a chapter, a verse, a metaphor, a word? Can we meaningfully adduce biographical or historical antecedents? A literary, cultural, or religious tradition? Can we assert that Porter, an atheist existentialist, would not write a Christian story? Can we formulate any rules at all? What do we do with a story like Porter's “The Grave,” for instance? Clearly the story was written by Katherine Anne Porter, as were Ship of Fools and “The Shattered Star.” Must “The Grave” then conform to what we know of the other two? And how are we to know just what about the others it must conform to? Must the story conform to the author's life? How then are we to know the life? We can multiply such questions indefinitely. For no matter how wide or narrow these concentric circles, we are ourselves always inside them. We always lack an absolute, external ground from which to “explain” a work and thus cannot avoid interpretation, hermeneusis.

Suppose for illustration we look at a single symbol, much discussed, from “The Grave”—the silver dove, a screw-head for a coffin, which Miranda and Paul find in an open, empty grave. The dove unquestionably symbolizes the resurrection of man's immortal soul through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is, after all, why people put such screws in coffins. But that's not the point. The point, rather, is whether that cultural symbolism functions in any way in the story. We have several possibilities.

First, the inclusion of the symbol could be coincidental. As I said, such screw-heads were used on coffins, and Christian imagery in general is so much a part of our cultural baggage that accidental allusions and unintended, possible interpretations are probably unavoidable. Second, the symbol might be a pretentious device to add a superficial sense of weight or depth to the story without any particular religious significance. Third, the dove might suggest a Christian meaning which the story as a whole denies. In what could be considered a parody of the resurrection, Miranda's grandfather has left his grave—but only to be reburied in a new cemetery in town. The old cemetery has been emptied, in fact, only because his children have greedily sold off the land, including the family burial plot, as soon as the parents died.

Finally, the symbol might suggest a Christian meaning which the story as a whole affirms. Miranda does recover the “treasure,” as she calls it, from the grave, and the dove is emphasized by the story's conclusion:

Miranda never told, she did not even wish to tell anybody. She thought about the whole worrisome affair with confused unhappiness for a few days. Then it sank quietly into her mind and was heaped over by accumulated thousands of impressions, for nearly twenty years. One day she was picking her path among the puddles and crushed refuse of a market street in a strange city of a strange country, when without warning, plain and clear in its true colors as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of that far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind's eye. … An Indian vendor had held up before her a tray of dyed sugar sweets, in the shapes of all kinds of small creatures: birds, baby chicks, baby rabbits, lambs, baby pigs. … It was a very hot day and the smell in the market, with its piles of raw flesh and wilting flowers, was like the mingled sweetness and corruption she had smelled that other day in the empty cemetery at home: the day she had remembered always until now vaguely as the time she and her brother had found treasure in the opened graves. Instantly upon this thought the dreadful vision faded, and she saw clearly her brother, whose childhood face she had forgotten, standing again in the blazing sunshine, again twelve years old, a pleased sober smile in his eyes, turning the silver dove over and over in his hands.⁶

I prefer the last possibility—that the dove suggests a Christian meaning which the story affirms. But can I prove the Christian element? Given the portentousness of that childhood day, the dove might easily be merely a personal icon for Miranda, inevitably associated with her brother, her youth, and the day she lost a bit of her innocence. Porter's words themselves, though, introduce the idea of resurrection. The memory “leaps from its burial place.” And the initial vision of death, the baby rabbits, fades into a vision of timeless innocence, her unchanged brother, clearly associated with the dove. But is that the resurrection of man's immortal soul through the power of the Holy Spirit?

Perhaps here we might legitimately go outside the text of “The Grave,” to a passage from another of Porter's Miranda stories. Near death in Pale Horse, Pale Rider Miranda has a vision of the afterlife:

At once [the point of light which was Miranda's consciousness] grew, flattened, thinned to a fine radiance, spread like a great fan and curved out into a rainbow through which Miranda, enchanted, altogether believing, looked upon a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of course, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it. … Moving towards her leisurely as clouds through the shimmering air came a great company of human beings, and Miranda saw in amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows.

(p. 311)

This vision of the faces in paradise, I think, recalls the vision of Paul, in the blazing sun, a sober smile in his eyes, holding the silver dove, both visions together reverberating eschatologically. This slightly larger context reveals the dove as a treasure greater than the nine-year-old Miranda had realized, suggesting, as it does, the promise of Christian salvation that will be kept. This connection between the two stories enriches each as an individual work of literature.

Again, though, how do I know there is a connection? I really don't, but I intuit there is. Or how do I know that Paul, standing in the blazing sunshine, does not recall, as one critic says he does, the apostle Paul's conversion in the blinding light on the road to Damascus? Again, I can only intuit that no such connection exists. And I can formulate no hard and fast rules of context to guide such intuitions. In fact, I don't think such rules can be formulated. I can only offer a tentative methodology which is itself certainly not original. That methodology suggested by Miller's earlier simile of the concentric circles around the stone perhaps remains the best approach. One should start with the stone, with the smallest published form, with the single work itself, with the poem, the story, and move outward or inward, cautiously, intuitively, from there, if such movement seems to enrich the work in question.

The important point is not the interpretation one reaches, itself another text, another form requiring interpretation, and certainly not the reification of one's interpretations into theory. The point rather is to keep one's interpretations fresh. The process of interpretation itself, the ontological state of engagement with a literary text is the central point, not an epistemologically grounded exegesis. Whether my discussion of the silver dove violates this principle or not, I don't know. Others must interpret that. But discovering somehow the atheistic, existentialist consciousness of Katherine Anne Porter, then using that consciousness to judge her work does violate this principle. And it limits, I think, rather than enriches our reading of her stories.

Notes

1. The paper was subsequently published: “Fall and Redemption in ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’” Renascence, 39.3 (1987), 396–405.

2. Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism; Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 51.

3. Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 130.

4. Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 189.

5. J. Hillis Miller, “The Antithesis of Criticism: Reflecting on the Yale Colloquium,” Modern Language Notes, 81 (1966), 560–61.

6. Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1965), pp. 367–68.