[In the following essay, Gwin praises the sensory details of Porter's short fiction, in particular her depiction of eating and drinking in the stories comprising Flowering Judas.]

Many efforts have been made to penetrate what Eudora Welty has called, with deliberate contradiction, “the eye” of Katherine Anne Porter's fictional art.¹ Welty finds this “eye”—the penetrating vision of Porter's stories—to be interior, subjective, and nonsensory. Yet, even though Porter often eschews visual images, choosing to “see” within rather than without, her fiction, in Welty's judgment, intensifies rather than diminishes life.² We may gain a deeper understanding of this apparent paradox by observing Porter's sensitivity to the rich textures of life and her startlingly complex renderings of those textures as both interior and exterior manifestations of the same reality. Consistently Porter's oeuvre has the quality of realistic specificity infused with a compelling sense of mystery. As a whole her work may be seen as play between these two elements, the exterior and the interior, the realistic and the mysterious.

Particularly in Porter's first collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories,³ we find the peculiar ambiance of realism couched in mystery, or perhaps mystery developed through realism—we are not sure which. What we do know is that in most of these stories the parts somehow add up to more than their sum. Detail is piled upon detail. Each smell, each piece of clothing, each incident—however seemingly insignificant—contributes not merely to the realistic surface of the stories, “the rich surface detail” which so impressed Robert Penn Warren,⁴ but also to the inwardness of vision which Welty remarked upon, the powerful sense of richness and indefinability of human experience. Yet in this, Porter's earliest collection, it is particularly difficult to tie the wealth of realistic detail to the tantalizing unreality and mystery which is created, almost imperceptively, out of that wealth. The very specificity of the stories belies the elusiveness of their impact. To a degree, surely this incongruity, this play between external and internal realities, is the essence of all literary art; yet in the Flowering Judas collection it becomes a peculiarly compelling force which narrows the emotional distance between reader and fiction, which draws us inexorably into what Welty calls “the eye of the story,”⁵ a whirling vortex of intense inward vision.

Many of the stories, with their primitive Mexican atmosphere, seem, for example, to present life with a rich realism. Yet the haunting impact of such a story as “María Concepción” transcends its textures, smells, colors, and shapes; and it does so almost by stealth. In this story it is the mystery of love and its terrible power which compel and awe us. The sense of human capacity rendered here is deeply powerful in a way which is not easily definable, either morally or esthetically. Yet this sense of mystery is filtered through an alembic of specificity—the dirtied and thorn-pricked feet, the wrung fowl, the darkly bloodied knife, the cooking of food. Joan Givner has pointed out that “exact detail is a feature of [Porter's] mythmaking imagination.”⁶ In this story and in the others of this collection, it is perhaps the organic nature of the relationship between that exactness of detail and the elusiveness of its impact which lies at the heart of Porter's art. Likewise, patterns of richly realistic detail may be found to convey an overwhelming sense of the mysterious rhythms of life. This sense of a natural mystery to human life is often developed in details associated with food and drink, the act of ingestion and its consequences and ramifications. There is a mysteriousness in the paradoxical nature of the act itself. Ingestion is an animalistic act, an instinctive means to survival. Yet, the human body, like the human heart, remains something of a mystery; and all the eating and drinking that goes on in the stories of this collection—a considerable amount—seems to become the physical, external manifestation of human complexity and indefinability.

The act of eating and drinking is an overlapping pattern throughout these stories. Several of the stories begin and end with the mention of food and drink. In “María Concepción” the first scene is of the young woman hurrying along a dusty road to bring a noon meal of fowls to her husband, Juan, and the story closes with her feeding Juan's baby warm goat's milk. In “The Martyr” overindulgence in self-pity and in food and drink is the story. In the opening passages, our attention is immediately centered on food, not only by mention of Rubén's nickname, “Churro,” meaning “sweet cake,” but also by the description of the artist himself: “When he laughed, he shook in the waistcoat, for he was getting fat.”⁷ At the close of the story, Rubén dies, quite appropriately, over a plate of tamales and pepper gravy. His epitaph is fitting: the journalist covering his death assures the cafe owner that in writing the obituary he “shall mention the tamales”—a specialty of the restaurant (p. 38). In “Rope” the opening scene is of the unnamed husband trudging back from a shopping expedition in the village with a basket of groceries, but without the coffee his wife wanted. At the end of the story when the husband finally does get her coffee, her frustration is resolved—if only momentarily—perhaps by the stimulation of the argument itself: “He was a love, she firmly believed, and if she had had her coffee in the morning, she wouldn't have behaved so funny …” (p. 48). “Flowering Judas” opens with a view of the consequences of overeating: the obese Braggioni sitting “heaped upon the edge of a straight-backed chair much too small for him” (p. 90), the gluttonous antithesis of the ideals he espouses. Significantly the story closes with the dream sequence in which the austere Laura sees herself eating the “warm, bleeding flowers” of the Judas tree and then hears Eugenio cry out “‘Cannibal! This is my body and my blood’” (p. 102). In its mysterious horror the dream is an apt ending in that Laura realizes, if only subconsciously, that she is the real glutton, having been guilty of feeding, as George Hendrick notes, upon the “lives of others.”⁸ In the opening scene of “Hacienda,” food imagery is quickly thrust upon us as Kennerly and his group enter the train, which smells like “mildewed pea soup,” and face “the teeming clutter of wet infants and draggled turkeys and indignant baby pigs and food baskets and bundles of vegetables” (p. 135). Kennerly almost immediately embarks on a discussion of food in a foreign country, emphasizing his own and the group's alienation from “teeming clutter” around them. “‘Isn't it horrible, the things they eat and drink?’” he says, taking a swig of lukewarm, but sterile, beer (p. 138). A story of stark contrasts, “Hacienda” closes with the Indian driver's wistful promise: “‘But then the green corn will be ready, and ah, there will be enough to eat again’” (p. 170)—a hope which embodies the ironic contrast between the life-and-death matter of food in primitive Mexico and the foreigners' absorption in creating a world of fantasy, a movie.

The act of eating or drinking links the mystery of natural physical rhythms to the thematic concerns of the collection. In primitive Mexico, where food is closely linked with life, María Concepción endures. She feeds warm milk to her husband's child, so that he too will survive. Like Rubén, the fat artist, María Rosa has had “too much honey”—and like Rubén, she dies from overconsumption. The women in “María Concepción” line the streets “nursing babies and eating fruit,” both giving food and ingesting it (p. 9). The story in itself, in fact, seems not so much the “strength of life over defeated death”⁹ but the power of the normal order of life, the basic rhythms of stability in marriage and family and community over the instability and disorder of Juan's liaison with María Rosa.¹⁰ In this sense the nursing women become personifications of the natural sense of things, the strong, regular rhythms of life. Likewise, in “Rope” there is an inexplicable sense of disruption of the natural order; and food and drink—or their lack—become emblematic of that disturbed order. The wife's complaints center around food. Not only is there no coffee, but the eggs are broken; she will have to fix them for supper, and she had planned on cooking steak, and the steak will not keep because there is no ice. This family quarrel is about much more than food, but it is food which starts the fight and it is food which ends it when the husband brings his wife her coffee and is greeted with the smell of broiling steak. In “Hacienda” as well, the natural order is disrupted by Kennerly and his crew, and this disruptive alienation is reflected most distinctly in Kennerly's obsession with clean food and drink in a lean country with its starving dogs that chase rabbits, and with its sad natives who speak hopefully of there being enough to eat again in ten days' time.

Food and eating are physical manifestations of the mystery of despair in the bleak story “He,” which opens with the hungry mouths of the Whipples, for whom “life was very hard.” Later in the story, we find Mrs. Whipple uttering what is perhaps the most definitive statement of her resentment toward the child: “‘He'd eat it all,’” she says bitterly (p. 52). Her complaint rings true on a deeper level. The child is a burden; not only does he eat everything he can get his hands on, but he drains the family in every other way. The manner in which the child consumes his food forces us to see his grotesqueness: “He ate squatting in the corner, smacking and mumbling. Rolls of fat covered Him like an overcoat …” (p. 50). Hendrick points out a marked similarity in this description of the child and in a later description of the suckling pig Mrs. Whipple kills for Sunday dinner: “[T]he sight of the pig scraped pink and naked made her sick. He was too fat and soft and pitiful-looking. It was simply a shame the way things had to happen” (p. 52).¹¹ In this passage, Mrs. Whipple is butchering the pig, but it is apparent that her thoughts are of her son who is more animal than human. The food-related descriptions of the child thereby play a major part in this story, not only in allowing us to see “Him” as both pitiful and grotesque but also, because they hold the story on an ambivalent level, by tempering our sympathy for the child with sympathy for Mrs. Whipple, who must live with the horror of his physical grotesqueness and the more elusive horror of her own guilt.

In many of these stories, eating together means closeness and love. It is significant, then, that the child of “He” does not eat with the family at the Sunday meal (p. 53). The mystical nature of eating together is also apparent in “María Concepción,” when María and her husband eat from the same dish at the close of the story (p. 16). At this point their reunion seems complete, if not altogether happy. Granny Weatherall's jilting is symbolized in the wasted wedding cake she had expected to share with George. “What does a woman do,” she asks, “when she has put on the white veil and set out the white cake for a man and he doesn't come?” (p. 84). The idea of waste has obsessed her throughout her life. “Don't let good things rot for want of using,” she says. “You waste life when you waste good food” (p. 84).

The preparation of food also adds a symbolic dimension to several stories. We are told that Miriam, the prim wife in “That Tree,” “went on holding her nose when she went to the markets, trying to cook wholesome civilized American food over a charcoal brasier”; but, we are told by the narrator-husband, it was not “jolly and natural” (pp. 74–75). “‘[C]ook food for me,’” Juan commands María Concepción in an effort to steady her, to ease her back into reality after she has murdered his lover (p. 15). In “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” Rosaleen bakes a cake for Dennis for them to eat in celebration of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary; and as she looks at the clock and remembers that “tonight the very hour they had sat down to their first married dinner together” (p. 110), she seems to be trying to bring back a younger Dennis and a happier time.

What a character ingests may become an objective correlative for powerful human feelings. The “she” of the story “Theft” is left with her purse and a cup of chilled coffee as she reaches the bleak realization that her own cold nature has robbed her of emotional nourishment—that she is the real thief. In “Virgin Violeta,” when Violeta remembers that Carlos “used to bring her sugared limes” (p. 25), she is saying more than she realizes about the bittersweet nature of male-female relationships which she cannot yet understand or accept. In “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” Rosaleen, who yearns for the sweetness of young love, eats chocolate bars in the movie theater as she watches The Prince of Love (p. 124); and then, after the movie, she tops sweet with sweet by eating ice cream with strawberry preserves as she awaits another movie, The Lover King (p. 120). In contrast, the boy whom she picks up and whose aggressive realism later affronts her, eats a no-nonsense meal of “roast beef and potatoes and spaghetti and custard pie and coffee” (p. 127). As Ray West has pointed out, it is significant in the dream of “Flowering Judas” that Laura eats the tree itself, its “warm bleeding flowers,” rather than the saving body and blood of Christ the tiger of Eliot's poem; hers is “a cannibalistic, not a saving gesture.”¹²

Food-related imagery gives us subtle hints about characters and their motivations. In “That Tree,” the “fat scarlet young man in the tight purplish suit, at the next table … [looks] like a parboiled sausage ready to burst from its skin” (p. 68). In “María Concepción” Juan feels the burden of his marriage as a “sinking inside, as if something were lying heavy on [his] stomach” (p. 11). The fat Braggioni in “Flowering Judas” swells with “ominous ripeness” (p. 92). In “The Cracked Looking-Glass” a “starveling dog” stares sorrowfully into the kitchen of Rosaleen, who is also starved for physical affection (p. 130). In “María Concepción” Juan's situation is described as “ineffably perfect, and he swallowed it whole” (p. 12), and the husband of “Rope” “swallow[s]” the woman's angry words “red hot” (p. 44).

There are, in fact, such an enormous number of food images and so many references to the taking of food and drink, that even the absence of such references may be construed as having meaning. In “Theft,” for example, there is much drinking, but no eating. This absence seems significant in two ways: first, most of the characters are wondering where their next meal is coming from. They are in need of money and absorbed in trying to earn it or borrow it or have it returned to them, as in the scene in which the “she” of the story asks the character Bill to pay her back the fifty dollars he owes her (p. 62). Second, as mentioned previously, by her own coldness the woman has also denied herself the emotional nourishment of warm relationships. “Magic” is the only story in the collection in which there is no mention of food or drink; and this is perhaps a significant omission, considering the bleakness of the story. The prostitutes are diseased and brutalized. Like the woman in “Theft,” they are denied emotional nourishment. It is noteworthy, however, that it is the cook who casts the spell and stirs up the repulsive mixture in a grim parody of cooking food; and, on the surface of things, it is the spell invoked by this mixture that brings the prostitute back.

Like Eudora Welty, V. S. Pritchett reminds us that the power of Porter's fictional art lies in its ability to suggest the whole rather than the surface of life.¹³ Yet in this collection it is through the surface textures themselves that the mysterious sense of the whole of life may be most keenly realized. In Flowering Judas particularly, the realistic aspects of eating and drinking suggest the totality of experience—what it means to be human, to be both of the flesh and beyond it.

Porter has spoken often about the relationship of life to art. In her essay “Portrait: Old South” she reveals that food and drink were deeply embedded in her own experience; she makes a point simply of listing and describing such old-time delicacies as “biscuits, the big, crusty tender kind made with buttermilk and soda,” “Kentucky ham, roast turkey, partridges in wine jelly, fried chicken, dove pie, … peach pickle, … chilled custard in tall glasses with whipped cream capped by a brandied cherry.”¹⁴ In the same essay, she relates several anecdotes about the shortage of food and drink during times of rationing: how her grandmother made a coffee-like mixture out of sweet potatoes and dried corn and called it “That Brew”; how her grandfather once found a piece of raw bacon rind lying in the road, dusted it off, ate it, and pronounced it “‘the best piece of bacon rind I ever ate in my life.’”¹⁵ To the granddaughter of the woman who made “That Brew” and the man who ate the dusty bacon rind, food and drink were elemental parts of the texture of life. And yet, in reconstructing that texture in the stories of this collection, Porter clearly does much more than “mention the tamales”; she makes the very physical acts of an imperfect humankind—eating and drinking—suggestive of a mysterious life rhythm which is, at once, both physical and beyond the physical. It is this synthesis of realism and mystery, “infinite space … bounded in a nutshell” as Hamlet would have it, which is at the core of the peculiarly elusive quality of the Flowering Judas collection and of much of Porter's other fiction. One could do worse than to approach Katherine Anne Porter's art by way of her tamales.

Notes

1. Most recently, feminist readings have contributed to our understanding of Porter's fiction. See Jane Krause DeMouy, Katherine Anne Porter's Women: The Eye of her Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Judith Fetterley, “The Struggle for Authenticity: Growing Up Female in The Old Order,” Kate Chopin Newsletter, no. 2 (1976), 11–19; and Jane Flanders, “Katherine Anne Porter and the Ordeal of Southern Womanhood,” Southern Literary Journal, 9 (1976), 47–60.

2. Eudora Welty, “The Eye of the Story,” in Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979), pp. 72–80.

3. I refer to the 1935 enlarged collection which includes “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” “Hacienda,” “Theft,” and “That Tree.”

4. Robert Penn Warren, “Irony with a Center,” in Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 94–95.

5. Welty, p. 72.

6. Joan Givner, “Porter's Subsidiary Art,” Southwest Review, 59 (1974), 265.

7. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 33. Because Flowering Judas and Other Stories is out of print, all citations are to this collection.

8. George Hendrick, Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 41.

9. Hendrick, p. 30.

10. The theme of order and disorder in Porter's work is explored by Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Negatives of Hope: A Reading of Katherine Anne Porter,” Renascence, 25 (1973), 85–94.

11. Hendrick, p. 84.

12. Ray West, Katherine Anne Porter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 11.

13. V. S. Pritchett, “The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter,” in Katherine Anne Porter: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 111.

14. Katherine Anne Porter, “Portrait: Old South,” in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Delacorte, 1970), pp. 160, 161–162.

15. Porter, “Portrait: Old South,” pp. 160–161.