SOURCE: “‘Endless Remembering’: The Artistic Vision of Katherine Anne Porter,” in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 1, Winter, 1986–1987, pp. 5–19.

[In the following essay, Brinkmeyer considers the role of memory in Porter's work, concluding that her “exploration of memory places her in the company of a number of other modern Southern writers who made similar if less extreme quests.”]

In the mid-to-late 1920s Katherine Anne Porter began showing a strong interest in the South and her Southern upbringing. Before this time, she could have been called a “rebel” only in the sense of being a woman scornful of tradition and authority. Early in her life she had acted out her rebelliousness by marrying, at age sixteen, Alfred Koontz, a clerk for the Southern Pacific Railway, and by converting shortly thereafter to the religion of his family, Roman Catholicism. Later, during the late teens and early 1920s, after having left Koontz, Porter continued to run roughshod over her traditional upbringing, living a free-wheeling (if not completely happy) life that boldly stamped her independence as a woman, a social activist, and a writer. By the 1920s Porter had centered her life in two places that aptly embodied her own disregard of restraint: Greenwich Village, America's hotbed of artistic and political dissent; and Mexico, a land at that time troubled by the throes of violent social revolution. Porter felt inspired and energized by both places—at least initially.

But, as Porter later realized, the turmoil of the 1920s soon began to take its toll on her own development, as well as on that of a number of other writers. In the introduction to the reissued edition of Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1940), she wrote that “none of us flourished in those times, artists or not, for art, like the human life of which it is the truest voice, thrives best by daylight in a green and growing world. For myself, and I was not alone, all the conscious and recollected years of my life have been lived to this day under the heavy threat of world catastrophe, and most of the energies of my mind and spirit have been spent in the effort to grasp the meaning of those threats, to trace them to their sources and to understand the logic of this majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world.”¹ Elsewhere (“Reflections on Willa Cather”) she observed that in looking back on the twenties she felt it had been fortunate that she was already thirty years old when the decade began; with her youth behind her, she said, she had been in a better position than some of the younger writers to make her way through the tumultuous years. “I had had time to grow up,” she wrote, “to consider, to look again, to begin finding my way a little through the inordinate clutter and noise of my immediate day, in which very literally everything in the world was being pulled apart, torn up, turned wrong side out and upside down; almost no frontiers left unattacked, governments and currencies falling; even the very sexes seemed to be changing back and forth and multiplying weird, unclassifiable genders. And every day, in the arts, as in schemes of government and organized crime, there was, there had to be, something New” (CEP, pp. 33–34).

Because of the instability of the times and despite her growing success as a writer, Porter found it difficult (even if she said otherwise at times) to give herself entirely to the pure pursuit of art, as many writers of the time were willingly doing. Like a number of other Southern writers who left their homeland in the 1920s and 1930s to pursue their careers in the cosmopolitan cities of America and Europe, Porter eventually discovered that strict allegiance to the literary priesthood was not entirely fulfilling. In his perceptive discussion of Porter in The Literature of Memory: Writers of the Modern South, Richard Gray cites a passage from one of Robert Frost's discussions of poetic order to describe what he sees in Porter's fiction—it is, says Gray, using Frost's words, “a momentary stay against confusion.”² Gray's observation here, used in an overall discussion of Porter's ideal of an open and perceptive consciousness, also suggests the limits Porter saw in the artistic quest: art yielded only momentary—not permanent—stays against confusion. For Porter, who grew up in communities where the modern world had not yet toppled the old ways of life based on myth and tradition, such limited and fragmentary victories over chaos proved fulfilling only for a while. She eventually discovered that the single-minded pursuit of art seemed to limit the richness and potentiality of life by denying any possibility for order and transcendence other than through the creation of the artifact. Her central dilemma became how to reinvigorate her life with the order and knowledge she experienced during her upbringing while still maintaining her artistic standards and ideals.

Porter's declaration that in the 1920s she sought “to consider, to look again, to begin finding my way” embodies her turn during this time from a faith in the literary religion to belief in the redeeming powers of one's memories. She now began to search deep within the realm of memory, an activity that would become central to her life and art for the rest of her days. Her new interest in her consciousness of her past initiated within her a profound interest in and reappraisal of her Southern heritage. By the mid-1920s she was for the first time writing stories set in her Southern homeland and drawn from the people and experiences of her childhood. These stories stood in marked contrast to her earlier works: of the four stories she wrote before 1925 (“María Concepción,” “Virgin Violeta,” “The Martyr,” and “Magic”), three are set in Mexico and one in New Orleans, and, as Joan Givner points out, all but “The Martyr” have identifiable sources (traditional tales or contemporary stories that Porter had heard) that lay outside of Porter's own immediate experience.³

Publication of “He” (1927) and “Rope” (1928), stories set in Southwestern range country (presumably Texas), signaled the new direction of Porter's art and vision, looking to memory for inspiration and meaning. Soon to follow were a number of Porter's best works, which, unlike “He” and “Rope,” not only were drawn from the world of Porter's memories of the South but were themselves explorations of the integral relationship between memory and growth. These works include “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Old Mortality, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Noon Wine, and her story sequence, The Old Order. In the early 1930s, moreover, Porter began work on a novel that was to follow the exploits of her family from the time of its original landing in America. The first section of this work—it remained unfinished—was entitled, significantly enough, “Legend and Memory.” Most of her best work from the 1930s until her death—including, most importantly, “Flowering Judas,” “Hacienda,” “The Leaning Tower,” and Ship of Fools—explores her memories of later periods of her life and depicts characters grappling with the past in order to derive understandings of the present.

Porter's exploration of memory places her in the company of a number of other modern Southern writers who made similar if less extreme quests. As Lewis P. Simpson observes, much of modern Southern literature bristles with the tension between memory and modernism. To resist the modern forces of history that were transforming Southern society—reducing it from a community of myth and tradition to one of history and science—many Southern writers developed what Simpson calls an “aesthetic of memory.”⁴ Almost by necessity did Southern writers turn to memory to maintain a sense of the transcendent and the mysterious; modernism's onslaught was that overwhelming. Simpson describes the radical interpretation of history that underlay the modern impulse by saying it “is the looking upon everything—man, nature, place, time, and God—as subject to the dominion of history. Not history as story; on the contrary, of history as an ineluctable process or series of processes, which may be regarded either as teleological or blankly purposeless.” “In this situation,” Simpson adds, “memory became, not a spiritual heritage, but a ‘life's work.’”⁵

For Porter, both as person and artist, memory was indeed a life's work, and she discusses its crucial role frequently in her nonfiction. One of Porter's most telling discussions of memory and the human experience comes in a journal entry written in Paris in 1936. The key passage begins: “Perhaps in time I shall learn to live more deeply and consistently in that undistracted center of being where the will does not intrude, and the sense of time passing is lost, or has no power over the imagination” (CEP, p. 449). Though these lines do not say so, Porter soon makes it clear that this “undistracted center of being” is the seat of great mystery and meaning, and that it is found within one's memories. She goes on:

Of the three dimensions of time, only the past is “real” in the absolute sense that it has occurred, the future is only a concept, and the present is that fateful split second in which all action takes place. One of the most disturbing habits of the human mind is its willful and destructive forgetting of whatever in its past does not flatter or confirm its present point of view. I must very often refer far back in time to seek the meaning or explanation of today's smallest event, and I have long since lost the power to be astonished at what I find there. This constant exercise of memory seems to be the chief occupation of my mind, and all my experience seems to be simply memory, with continuity, marginal notes, constant revision and comparison of one thing with another.

(CEP, p. 449)

As this passage makes clear, Porter sees engaging one's memory as essential for discovering meaning and initiating growth. Meaning arises only when events are seen in a context derived from the active workings of memory—and thus Porter's comment, “all my experience seems to be simply memory.”

To engage one's memory was for Porter not an act of passive recall or a submersion into nostalgia; it was, rather, an engagement with a mysterious realm of experiences and meanings we all carry within us, in a real sense an encounter with another and secret self. Walter J. Ong's observation, in an essay on voice and belief in literature, that a person's “own ‘I’ is haunted by the shadow of a ‘thou’ which itself casts and which it can never exorcise”⁶ seems particularly relevant to Porter: for her this shadowy “thou” is a person's memory and only by entering into an open and free dialogue with it does a person mature and achieve understanding, both of the self and of the world. To ignore or to repress memory is to limit growth and potential, for in doing so a person closes himself or herself off from the multiplicity of life in order to consolidate his or her own already established and self-assured understanding of it, an understanding rooted in a belief that a person's consciousness stands alone, without a secret thou, unified and self-sufficient. Porter, on the other hand, seeks what Mikhail Bakhtin calls a dialogic (as opposed to a monologic) relationship with self—a relationship that acknowledges the existence of another self within and actively engages this self in a dialogue where voices freely interact and provoke, not impose, new meanings. Such a relationship, writes Bakhtin in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, leads to “the discovery of the inner man—‘one's own self,’ accessible not to passive self-observation but only through an active dialogic approach to one's self, destroying that naive wholeness of one's notions about the self that lies at the heart of the lyric, epic, and tragic image of man. A dialogic approach to oneself breaks down the shell of one's image, that shell which exists for other people, determining the external assessment of a person (in the eyes of others) and dimming the purity of the self-consciousness.”⁷

Achieving a dialogic relationship with the inner self—and indeed with the world at large—was for Porter crucial not only for personal fulfillment but also for artistic creation. Porter saw literature on one level as the author's attempt to grasp and communicate meaningful ways to understand the seemingly chaotic nature of life. “Literary art, at least,” she writes in “St. Augustine and the Bullfight,” “is the business of setting human events to rights and giving them meanings that, in fact, they do not possess, or not obviously, or not the meanings the artist feels they should have—we do understand so little of what is really happening to us in any given moment” (CEP, p. 94). To overcome our limited visions and to know “what is really happening to us,” the artist must actively search out his or her memory, listening and responding to the mysteries of the secret self. Such a dialogue, Porter insists, requires the artist to examine, compare, and recreate events and feelings in ways that, while frequently departing from strict verisimilitude, will provoke larger meanings to surface: “… in this endless remembering which surely must be the main occupation of the writer,” Porter writes in “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources,” “events are changed, reshaped, interpreted again and again in different ways” (CEP, p. 468) in the pursuit of significance and understanding. The creative act, as she liked to describe it, was a magical confluence of sources, or voices, from the memory: “Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story” (CEP, p. 449). Elsewhere (“Three Statements about Writing”) she writes that in her art “memory, legend, personal experience, and acquired knowledge” come together “in a constant process of re-creation” (CEP, p. 451).

Openly exploring one's memories and feelings to reach a true understanding of their significance, Porter knew, is usually a tortuous and painful task. Much of Porter's mature fiction, from the mid-1920s on, centers on this theme, and many of these works typically depict characters who would rather forget or rationalize unflattering aspects of their selves and their histories. To do so, however, is to spurn the fullness of life in all its mystery, and Porter shows that these characters' repression of memory and their refusal to enter into a dialogue with its voices are the major cause of the emptiness and desolation of their interior lives.

One of Porter's best-known stories, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (1929), is representative of her exploration of the hazards of denying one's memory. Ellen “Granny” Weatherall's deathbed musings on the turning points in her life center most tellingly on her wedding-day jilting by her fiance, George. When George did not turn up for the ceremony, Granny's life, as she admits, fell into shambles: “The whole bottom dropped out of the world, and there she was blind and sweating with nothing under her feet and the walls falling away.”⁸ Granny eventually recovered, and went on to marry a different man and to raise a family. To marshal the strength she needed to smother her feelings and to reorder her life Granny turned to her Catholic faith. “For sixty years she had prayed against remembering [George] and against losing her soul in the deep pit of hell,” she admits to herself at one point, and at another she thanks God for His help in keeping George out of her thoughts: “God, for all my life I thank Thee. Without Thee, my God, I could never have done it. Hail, Mary, full of grace” (CSP, p. 84).

As she thinks back over the events of her life, Granny insists that the change in her wedding plans worked out for the best. “I want you to find George,” she imagines herself telling her daughter. “Find him and be sure to tell him I forgot him. I want him to know I had my husband just the same and my children and my house like any other woman. A good house too and a good husband that I loved and fine children out of him. Better than I hoped for even” (CSP, p. 86). Granny's claims here and elsewhere barely mask her belief that since her loss of George her life has been unfulfilled, and that she wages a continuous struggle not to acknowledge these true feelings of loss. Whenever the thought of George crosses her mind, her conscious self rallies to repress her memories: “Wounded vanity, Ellen, said a sharp voice in the top of her mind. Don't let your wounded vanity get the upper hand of you. Plenty of girls get jilted. You were jilted, weren't you? Then stand up to it” (CSP, p. 84).

Granny's slide toward death is anything but peaceful because ultimately she cannot blot out the sharp glare of memory that illuminates everything which she has sought to hide from for so long. Light in this story is clearly associated with memory; Porter frequently in her works characterizes memory as a bright spot of light—in “‘Noon Wine’: The Sources,” she writes that one of her childhood memories was “a spot of clear light and color and sound, of immense, mysterious illumination of feeling against a horizon of total darkness” (CEP, p. 475). From the beginning of “Granny Weatherall,” Granny is disturbed by various lights, external and internal. The glare from the bedside lamp and unshaded window, working like the clear illumination of memory, continually keeps Granny from peaceful repose, forcing her to lie awake and think back over the disturbing events from her life. Time and again she complains of the light in the room and struggles to rest in shadow. “Better turn over, hide from the light,” she tells herself at one point, “sleeping in the light gave you nightmares” (CSP, p. 85).

By the end of the story the external lights merge into the internal light of Granny's hidden self, her memory. As she nears death, “the blue light from Cornelia's lightshade drew into a tiny point in the center of her brain, it flickered and winked like an eye, quietly it fluttered and dwindled. Granny lay curled down within herself, amazed and watchful, staring at the point of light that was herself; her body was now only a deeper mass of shadow in an endless darkness and this darkness would curl around the light and swallow it up” (CSP, p. 89). Granny's memory here surfaces unmistakably as her secret and true self: her memories, free from all distortion from her conscious mind, are all that she has left. Sliding toward death, she asks God for a sign that she will have more time to tidy up her life, but she receives none. Granny's last defense against recognizing her true feelings, her Catholic faith, then collapses and she is left with only the stark clarity of her memory. Its penetrating light, illuminating the deep-seated sorrows and frustrations of her life, is too much for her to bear, and Granny's last act is to extinguish it and herself: “She stretched herself with a deep breath and blew out the light” (CSP, p. 89).

By repressing her inner self of memory, Granny Weatherall has, until the very end, “weathered all,” but such stability comes at a dear price. As Granny herself understands at the moment of her death, her earlier turning to Catholicism embodied a rejection of her inner self and a closing off from its deep emotional life.⁹ She sees that the richness of the voices and feelings of her memory is her true self—is indeed Granny Weatherall—and that only by embracing this self within can she be enriched by the mysteries of the individual self and the larger world.¹⁰ Inverting the pattern of a religious parable of a deathbed Catholic conversion, Porter demonstrates her belief that fulfillment lies not with religious faith but with an honest recognition of and interaction with the inner self.

Porter knew that Granny Weatherall's efforts to deny the voices of her memory, particularly those arising from a crisis in her life, were a typical human response and an act of weakness to which she herself was prone. Though she rarely admitted it publicly, Porter understood that she had a disturbing tendency to repress unpleasant emotions and memories, and that her closing herself off from her inner self severely impeded her development as a person and an artist. In a 1951 letter to William Goyen, with whom she was then in love, she wrote about the troubles she was having with a story (“A Vision of Heaven,” never finished) whose origins lay with one of her most painful memories—the death of her niece Mary Alice. At one point in the letter she writes that her refusal to accept the full implications of her niece's death has brought her growth to a standstill; the shock of the event was so consuming that it dominated her memory, smothering its other voices and thereby isolating her from its otherwise enriching realm:

But I saw—it was like a revelation—that the reason I am so long in finding the meaning and seeing the end of something I know I must tell, is that I have stubbornly refused to accept the shock and the suffering, I will not reconcile myself; the memory, instead of staying fluid and going on and changing and living, sets itself and fixes upon a point in time where the shock occurred and cannot be persuaded away from it, and slowly turns to stone. Only a greater shock either of joy or of another suffering, can make it loose its hold. You know what my life has been for the past five years, my whole being resolutely refusing to move from that place where some incurable wrong had been done to that mysterious center in which all my experience seems to take, finally. But the shock has occurred that broke up the strong core, and I must re-live with all the courage I have those experiences that I have tried to enclose and hold and yet refuse really to remember to accept. So, my dear love, when I said that being melted is painful, you will see—I feel you have already seen—that your love and my love for you has uprooted me, wrenched me away from that deadened center with such violence.

(CEP, p. 409)

As she makes clear in this passage, Porter sees embracing the full range of one's memories as demanding courage and whole-hearted commitment. The memory is a realm where one's life—and the art that springs from it—is in a constant process of de- and re-creation, and this process is characterized by a violence that can at its intensest overwhelm and uproot.

Porter's interest in memory, as suggested earlier, in the 1920s uprooted her allegiance, and initiated what was for her a profound reappraisal, in her fiction and nonfiction, of her Southern heritage and upbringing. Though there is nothing particularly remarkable in Porter's descriptions of the Southern society of her childhood—her sympathetic portrayals of the Southern community as the home of traditional values and order are the stuff of Southern legend—and though she clearly distorted a number of important facts, nonetheless her efforts to draw and create from her memories of the South signal an emergence of the mature artist. More than that, Porter's celebration of her elders, and particularly her paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter (whose name Porter, born Callie Russell, took as a young adult), points toward the consciousness for which Porter as an artist was now striving. Two of Porter's works stand out in this regard: her essay, “Portrait: Old South,” and her story sequence, The Old Order.

“Portrait: Old South” sings the praises of Porter's elders, with a focus on her grandmother. After first establishing her own Southern credentials—“I am the grandchild of a lost War,” the essay begins, “and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country on the bare bones of privation” (CEP, p. 160)—Porter goes on to speak of the strength and fortitude that her elders exhibited during the hard times of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She tells several yarns drawn from family lore and then further connects herself to her elders by saying that they “all remained nobly unreconstructed to their last moments, and my feet rest firmly on this rock of their strength to this day” (CEP, p. 161). Her mind, she says, brims with stories of her elders, and the few of these stories that she has told in the essay are “the merest surface ripples over limitless deeps of bitter memory” (CEP, p. 161).

The heart of the essay, the celebration of Porter's grandmother, then follows. Porter depicts her grandmother as a strong-willed woman who knew what she believed in and who, despite misfortune and hardship that shook the foundations of the life about her, never altered that belief. Hers was the life, according to Porter, of the aristocracy: a formal life based on a rigid code of conduct and order; everything had its place and everyone had his or her duties to perform and standards to live up to. In its strictness and completeness, Porter suggests, the grandmother's code was a ring of fire not easily transgressed. Her grandmother's response to her grandchildren's quarrelings was this: “It was ‘vulgar,’ she said, and for her, that word connoted a peculiarly detestable form of immorality, that is to say, bad manners. Inappropriate conduct was bad manners, bad manners were bad morals, and bad morals led to bad manners, and there you were, ringed with fire, and no way out” (CEP, p. 164). When the family fortunes ebbed and life became difficult, her grandmother refused to buckle under; she held fast to her principles, an act which “tapped the bottomless reserves of her character” and which led Porter to conclude that “her life was truly heroic” (CEP, p. 162). For Porter, her grandmother's courage, determination, and rage for order set her apart both from the rest of the family and from the general run of humanity as well. Hers was the life of legend and mystery. Porter ends the essay: “She left the lingering perfume and the airy shimmer of grace about her memory” (CEP, p. 165).

The parallels between Porter's depiction of her grandmother and her views of the artist are striking. In a real sense, Porter's grandmother was an artist in her own right: according to Porter's interpretation, she saw her role as head of the family as a vocation and felt it her duty to forge a dignified family life that sparkled with the beauty of decorum and order. The chaotic nature of life, with all its trials and tribulations, was her chief antagonist, as it was for the artist. She was worthy of the task: “Her bountiful hospitality represented only one of her victories of intelligence and feeling over the stubborn difficulties of life” (CEP, p. 163). Like an artist, she based her efforts on diligence, discipline, and high standards. “She had no patience with the kind of slackness that tried to say second-best was best, or half good enough,” writes Porter (CEP, p. 162). Finally, it was the grandmother's consciousness, itself wrought of order and meaning, that she sought to pass on to her family. Though she did not actively probe her memory to achieve an understanding of life and its mysteries (as Porter felt the modern artist must do), this was because she still lived as most moderns do not, in direct contact with her past and its traditions. Lewis P. Simpson observes that “in the traditionalist society, memory is yet in the flesh and in the blood”; it is not, as for many modern writers, a means to resist the dehumanization of contemporary life. Porter's grandmother, in other words, was already in direct contact with her secret self of memory without having to make a conscious effort.

And yet, particularly as seen in The Old Order, Porter saw potential dangers in her grandmother's approach to life. The grandmother in this story sequence, Sophie Jane, is clearly based on Porter's perceptions of her grandmother, and her portrayals of her are quite revealing in terms of Porter's ideas about memory and art. Like Porter's grandmother as described in “Portrait: Old South,” Sophie Jane possesses strength and fortitude and is driven by a rage for order. Her code of life, based on the traditions of the past, is strict and unbending. And she too, like Porter's grandmother, is in intimate contact with the realm of memory.

But Sophie Jane's life is out of balance, primarily because rather than being in a healthy dialogue with her memories, she is ruled by them. Whereas in many of her stories, such as “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Porter depicts characters whose conscious selves tried to smother their interior realms of memory, here she describes a character whose interior self of memory tyrannizes the conscious self and the significance of present experience. With Aunt Nannie, her black maid and companion, Sophie Jane spends much of her time talking about the past, extolling the days gone by over all else. “They talked about the past, really—always about the past,” Porter writes. “Even the future seemed like something gone and done with when they spoke of it. It did not seem an extension of their past, but a repetition of it” (CSP, p. 327). Though she and Aunt Nannie are poignantly aware of the swiftly changing world, they steadfastly refuse to confront those changes and to adopt a realistic view of the situation. Rather, “by the mysterious logic of hope they insisted that each change was probably the last; or if not, a series of changes might bring them, blessedly, back full-circle to the old ways they had known” (CSP, p. 327). While remaining loyal to their tradition of life, both Sophie Jane and Aunt Nannie have questions and hesitations about it—“they wondered perpetually, with only a hint now and then to each other of the uneasiness of their hearts, how so much suffering and confusion could have been built up and maintained on such a foundation” (CSP, p. 328)—but they question “without rebellion and without expecting an answer” (CSP, p. 327). Sophie Jane represses any questions she has “as a matter of duty” (CSP, p. 328).

By allowing memory's interior self utterly to dominate her life—there is no dialogue between her memory and her present self, merely an imposition of will—Sophie Jane cuts herself off from the possibility of fulfillment and completion. Though she stands as a symbol of order and strength (to the children she raises, “she was the only reality to them in a world that seemed otherwise without fixed authority or refuge” [CSP, p. 324]), she is both tyrannized by the past and a tyrant to others as she tries to impose her will upon them, as her memories dominate her. Porter writes that Sophie Jane “developed a character truly portentous under the discipline of trying to change the characters of others” and that she possessed a fearful and “deadly willfulness,” a “certainty that her ways were not only right but beyond criticism” (CSP, p. 335).

The figure of Porter's grandmother thus emerges finally as a complex and ambiguous character. On the one hand she embodies for Porter a life of dignity and decorum, and points to the order and stability that, in a world gone awry, Porter sought to achieve with her art. On the other hand, her “deadly willfulness,” a response to her own past's tyranny over her, embodies for Porter the danger of living a monologic rather than a dialogic existence. Instead of opening herself to all experience, including all voices in her memory and not merely the voice of authoritative tradition, the grandmother entombs herself from the multiplicity of life to embrace a vision of life that never changes.

Such ambiguity and complexity also lie at the heart of Porter's perceptions of the significance of memory in the development of identity and art. In fact, so central is her grandmother to Porter's thinking—it is no coincidence that Porter entitles the opening work in The Old Order, a sketch on Sophie Jane's quest for order, “The Source,” and that she begins “Portrait: Old South” with the declaration, “I am the grandchild of a lost war …” (my emphasis)—that I believe Porter came to see her grandmother as the embodiment of the predominant voice in her own hidden self of memory. As such, the grandmother is for Porter a disturbing double whose presence demands both recognition and interaction. She represents in her complexity both the potential for meaningful creation and growth and the possibility of falling prey to a destructive tyranny of the past. To advance as a person and an artist, Porter believed she had to incorporate her grandmother and her grandmother's ways into her own life—to maintain an ongoing and open dialogue with her, her past—without becoming her grandmother and thereby closing herself off from the other presences, the other voices of the world and of her past.

Achieving such a dialogic interplay and forging a vision from it became for Porter the driving force in her quest for fulfillment in her life and art. She became, using a term with which she praised Thomas Hardy, an “Inquirer,” a person who did not blindly accept truth from one authority or the other but searched for it amidst the many voices of life and consciousness (CEP, p. 6). Her persistent life-long dialogue with the richness of her memory, embodied in the person of her grandmother, has, I believe, given us the wealth of Porter's mature fiction.

Notes

1. Katherine Anne Porter, “Introduction to Flowering Judas,” in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (New York: Delacorte Press, 1970), p. 457. All further references to Porter's nonfiction are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically (CEP) in the text.

2. Richard Gray, The Literature of Memory: Writers of the Modern South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 196.

3. Joan Givner, Katherine Anne Porter: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 161–162, 171–172, 197.

4. Lewis P. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 240.

5. Simpson, p. 241.

6. Walter J. Ong, “Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self,” in Literature and Religion, ed. Giles B. Gunn (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 71.

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 120.

8. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), p. 87. All further citations to Porter's stories are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically (CSP) in the text.

9. A converted Catholic, Porter had a complex and intriguing relationship with the Church. Her faith, or lack of it, has little relevance to this study, but is a topic that bears further study.

10. Simpson, p. 241.