[In the following essay, Perry appraises Porter's story “Hacienda” as a combination of her major thematic concerns, concluding that change is the most important theme in the piece.]

Katherine Anne Porter's “Hacienda” is one of those stories whose meaning is blurred by topicality. This story, as many of its readers know, had its genesis in a series of impressions Miss Porter gathered during an extended visit to the Tetlapayac Hacienda, one of the settings for Que Viva Mexico. This ill-fated masterpiece, directed by the famous Sergei Eisenstein, aroused great controversy in the States when Upton Sinclair, the film's financial backer, suddenly curtailed production of the film and refused Eisenstein the right to edit it. What followed was an extended legal struggle over the rights to the film in which Sinclair was ultimately the victor. The film was thereupon sold to Sol Lesser and released in 1933 under the title of Thunder Over Mexico. Readers wishing to learn more about the story of Que Viva Mexico and the people involved in it may consult Marie Seton's excellent biography of Eisenstein published by Grove Press in 1960.

This immense topical interest in the story makes one guess that the failure of critics to discover its unifying theme stems from their unwillingness to read the story as “art,” and from their eagerness to read it as a factual, reportorial account of Miss Porter's experiences. Glenway Wescott, for instance, recently wrote in The Atlantic (April, 1962) that the story was “mainly a portrait of the great Russian film maker, Eisenstein,” although anyone even tolerably familiar with the story knows this simply is not true. And knowing what we do of Miss Porter's profound respect for the craft of fiction, we should find it odd that she would submit for publication a story that was little more than mere journalism.

Since J. W. Johnson writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn, 1960) has suggested that “Hacienda” is an “amalgam” of Porter's major themes, perhaps we should appraise the story in these terms. Johnson sees five specific themes operating in Porter's works, each represented by a novella prototype and a flock of short stories. The first is “the individual within his heritage” (Old Mortality), the second is “cultural displacement” (“The Leaning Tower”), the third is “unhappy marriage” (“The Cracked Looking-Glass”), the fourth is “the death of love” (Pale Horse, Pale Rider), and the fifth is “man's slavery to his own nature and subjugation to a human fate which dooms him to suffering and disappointment” (Noon Wine). We can easily find all of these themes operating in “Hacienda.” Don Genaro, for instance, clearly represents the theme of “the individual within his heritage,” just as Uspensky, Stepanov, Kennerly, and especially Andreyev represent the theme of “cultural displacement.” Moreover, we have an “unhappy marriage” between don Genaro and doña Julia, and both the “death of love” theme and the “fate” theme are present in the tragedy of Rosalita, Justino, and Vicente. It seems futile, however, to examine the story in these terms, for to do so would mean focusing on its several parts rather than attempting to see it as a coherent whole. Instead of discovering a series of themes, we must discover a single, all-embracing theme.

At least one of Mr. Johnson's five major themes, the theme of “man's slavery to his own nature and subjugation to a human fate,” is worth discussing at length, since it does in fact come near to being the story's controlling idea. This theme appears principally through a series of chase-images which serve to remind us that each character is, to one degree or another, hounded by a personal fate that is inescapable. Such is the case with the unfortunate Justino, who, after murdering his unfaithful sister, “struck through the maguey fields towards the mountains” chased by his friend Vicente, who rode horseback “waving a gun and yelling: ‘stop or I'll shoot!’” (Modern Library edition of Flowering Judas, New York, 1935, 247.) At times the chase-motif becomes a parody of fate, as when one of don Genaro's “polite, expensive dogs” chases “a little fat-bottomed soldier” back to his barracks (271), or when, to the great delight of Carlos, “three dogs chase a long-legged pig from wallow to barn” (274). The most compelling statement of the drama of fate occurs during the journey by mule-cart to the hacienda, when the narrator sees a valiant rabbit running full speed chased by “lean hungry dogs”:

It was cracking the strings of its heart in flight; its eyes started from its head like crystal bubbles. “Run, rabbit run!” I cried. “Run, dogs!” shouted the big Indian with the red cords on his hat, his love of a contest instantly aroused. He turned to me with his eyes blazing: “What will you bet, senorita?”

(250–251)

What are the odds, we might ask, that don Genaro will some day escape the fact that he hates his wife? What are the odds that Kennerly will finally escape the anxieties that hound his perilous career? Although Miss Porter's sympathies, like the narrator's, are with the rabbit, she knows full well he is doomed.

Another theme that is woven into the story's texture is the theme of death, one which serves as a constant reminder of what awaits the quarry at the end of the chase. The ominousness of death is present everywhere in the story, in the “looming mountains” in the distance, the “deepening sky” overhead, and the angular patterns of the spiked maguey plants in the fields (249–250). It is also present in the eyes of the peons, which glitter with “rich enjoyable feelings” when they discuss the funeral preparations made for Rosalita. But most of all the reader feels it in the atmosphere of the hacienda itself, which is scented with the odor of fermenting pulque-juice, “sour, stale, like rotting milk and blood” (269). Pulque is an admirable symbol for death, because it is a sleep-inducing liquor, a Lethe-like beverage that supplies the bondaged peons with their only means besides Christian communion of escaping the wretchedness of their daily existence. Thus the drinking of pulque becomes for the Indian an expression of a profound death-wish. But by drinking pulque, the Indian satisfies not only his own wish but the government's wish that he remain wrapped in his ancient slumber, unheedful of the Agrarian call to revolt. As long as the peons have their pulque, they will never change.

This last brings us to a consideration of the central unifying theme of the story. The most important word in “Hacienda” is change. Throughout the story it is applied manifoldly to the setting, the events, and the characters. The peons on don Genaro's estate are said to live in an “unchanged world.” The hacienda “hasn't changed at all” in fifty years, according to an old Spanish gentleman (236), nor has the process of making pulque changed since its discovery. Of Betancourt, art adviser to Uspensky, it is said that “he resisted the idea of change in himself,” although he thinks that Carlos, the ballad-writer, is “much changed” (261) after ten years. And on the first page of the story we are told: “Now that the true revolution of blessed memory has come and gone in Mexico, the names of many things are changed, nearly always with a view to an appearance of heightened well-being for all creatures” (223). The irony here, of course, is that although the names are changed, the conditions are not; and, as we learn elsewhere, although the wealth of the country is no longer visibly controlled by the nobility, it is nonetheless in the hands of a “successful revolutionist” (259) named Verlarde who strongly allies himself with the landed gentry. The same irony exists in the fact that the Russians are making a film which will show how the revolution has “swept away” (241) the feudal class structure of old Mexico, and yet they are filming it out of real life on don Genaro's estate. Such ironies occur throughout the story and illustrate its most basic theme, which might be called the illusion of change. It is helpful to think of “Hacienda” as a dramatic rebuttal of Marx's theory of history and indeed of all theories which predicate revolutions and radical social change.

But thus far we have spoken only of historical change. As Miss Porter uses it, the word also applies to individuals, and here also the possibility for change is illusory. For she believes that people are what they are and cannot become something different, at least not overnight. Man is enslaved by his own nature, which is, in turn, the inevitable product of his heritage, and although he may try, he cannot escape its influence. When the young actor-pugilist strides down the aisle of the coach to tell Kennerly's party of the shooting, he possesses “a brilliant air of self-confidence.” But when he begins to speak, “the pose would not hold” (244) and his face breaks out into a naive country grin. An Indian cannot become a boxer or a movie actor overnight, for his provincial background has conditioned him otherwise. The extent to which the average Indian is trapped by his heritage is almost unbelievable. When the narrator wakes up in the morning after her arrival and looks out her window at the Indians in the field below, she sees an amazing sight: “A three-year-old man-child ran beside his father; he drove a weanling donkey carrying two miniature casks on its furry back. The two small creatures imitated each in his own kind perfectly the gestures of their elder” (271–272). These are, as Miss Porter says, “figures under a doom imposed by the landscape” (236). Their only knowledge is suffering; their only wisdom is death. Only a cataclysm could shock them out of their pulque-stupor.

Most of the characters in “Hacienda” are people like the young pugilist, people who have tried to throw off their heritage and become “modern” by assuming some superficially modern pose. The one exception to this rule is the elder Genaro. Of him we read that “He had been silenced but in no wise changed in his conviction by the sudden, astonishing marriage of his grandson” (254). This man, the owner of one of the most venerable estates in Mexico, is the last of a vanishing species, the orthodox Spanish aristocrat. As such he is a man of firm, unalterable principle. Thus don Genaro's betrothal to a woman of common blood is to him more than a mere breech of propriety; it is a cataclysm signaling the imminent extinction of his way of life. For him there is only one alternative: to resist change, to stand fast like a stubborn mule while the world passes by. Like the professor in Willa Cather's The Professor's House, who in the face of a similar shock retreats to a solitary room in his attic, Grandfather Genaro moves to “the very farthest patio in the old garden,” where he lives out his days in “bleak dignity and loneliness” (255).

At first glance, don Genaro seems to be completely different from his grandfather. For the grandson is modern in that he is “always going at top speed, seventy kilometers an hour at least, and never on time anywhere.” At one point we learn that “nothing could move too fast for don Genaro,” “whether a horse, dog, a woman, or something with metal machinery in it” (257). It is important to notice that unlike Betancourt, Genaro is not punctual: for speed to him is not a means but an end in itself. He is a man virtually obsessed by speed; he is thinking of buying an airplane because he needs “something really fast” (262). But despite his craving for speed, Genaro is actually quite as reactionary as his grandfather. He is, we must remember, “acting as head of the house, accountable to no one” (254) and also is “old-fashioned” in his “taste for ladies of the theatre” (238). In the earliest published version of “Hacienda,” in The Virginia Quarterly Review of October, 1932, Miss Porter remarks of him that “If you opened his skull you would find there neatly ticketed and labeled, a set of ideas unchanged in essentials since 1650.” And despite what his grandfather thinks, he did not mean to flaunt tradition by marrying the theatrical doña Julia; in fact, he meant to fulfill it.

For there is something of don Quixote in don Genaro, some great longing to live in the style of a bygone age. He is forever sallying forth, amid a glory of chickens, accompanied by his mounted man, to joust with some small-time country judge who might as well be a windmill for all that is accomplished. Genaro is a dreamer trying to live up to some impossible romantic conception of himself, and speed is a part of that conception. More likely than not he married doña Julia because he was infatuated with her style: somehow she fit into his dream; but his great mistake was his failure to see that she was a product of a modern urban culture alien to his own. When he returns from the Capital and finds his wife strolling arm-and-arm with his mistress, he is “thunderstruck by the suddenness of this change” (239). The act is so preposterous to his mind that he is completely baffled and does not know how to react. He is not modern enough to cope with the problem; his scruples, for instance, would never permit divorce. In other words, he cannot change. And so he turns to speed as his only escape, and in the time-honored American fashion, forever races into the future in order to forget the past. But in his case the future has been stripped of all meaning except change itself, or rather, the illusion of change produced by high speeds. His is an attempt to lose himself in the exhilaration of the moment, speed being for him a drug no less effective than the pulque of his peons. But no matter how fast he travels, he will never escape the mistakes of his youth, especially the awful realization that he hates his wife.

Another character who is closely related to the theme is Betancourt, who by one way of thinking can be considered the epitome of change. Born and raised a Spanish aristocrat, Betancourt changed his politics after the revolution in order to survive (252). In this respect he is directly opposite Grandfather Genaro, who refused to change at the price of surrendering his principles. For Betancourt has no principles worthy of the name: he is, in fact, a changeling. We can easily imagine Betancourt, an aesthete, pandering for the favor of Verlarde, who is doubtless a vulgar demagogue similar to Braggioni of “Flowering Judas.” And even though he enjoys Verlarde's favor, Betancourt is forever sniffing the winds of change. He is foresighted enough, for instance, to pay homage to the Communists, who may, he feels, rise to power some day:

“I am sorry for everything,” he said, lifting a narrow, pontifical hand, waving away vulgar human pity which always threatened, buzzing like a fly at the edges of his mind. “But when you consider”—he made an almost imperceptible inclination of his entire person in the general direction of the social point of view supposed to be represented by the Russians—“what her life would have been like in this place, it is much better that she is dead.”

(253)

This fellow is everything that his name implies: he bets on the favorites and then courts their favor. To him political change is mere change of fashion; when governments change, one simply exchanges one set of platitudes for another. He has no qualms about dismissing the problems of the masses with one hand and praising Communist ideology with the other. His concern is to be punctual, to keep up with the times, no matter what the times might bring.

Besides politics, Betancourt is up-to-date in many other respects. He has abandoned the conservative attire of the Spanish aristocrat for the flashy dress of Hollywood, sporting riding trousers and a cork helmet (256). Like Genaro, he prides himself on his speed, which he considers “modern,” and finds “a great deal of pleasurable stimulation in the control of machinery” (257). In matters of religion, he is conversant with a wide variety of dubious creeds, extending from Yoga to Nietzsche, including “the latest American theories of personality development,” and from these has professedly fashioned a “Way of Life” which will bring him happiness and success (264). But despite his superficial modernity, Betancourt still remains the effete aristocrat he was raised to be. In essentials, he has not changed. He still maintains his elegant manners; he is still contemptuous of the lower classes; and despite his religious pretensions he is capable of stooping to the meanest kind of pettiness: he spends a good deal of his time, for instance, deriding Carlos for being a “failure” simply so he can forget that he is hugely indebted to him. For in his eagerness to keep up with worldly changes, Betancourt has neglected to superintend a more primary change: the growth of his own soul.

Kennerly is another figure who can be profitably related to the illusion-of-change theme. Of all the characters, with the possible exception of Stepanov, he is the most perfect expression of modern technological culture. At the beginning of the story we find him striding boldly down the aisle of the coach, with Andreyev and the narrator following “in the wake of his gigantic progress” (223). He expresses machine culture because he is a symbol of activity without purpose. On the train he is forever motioning wildly, arranging papers, searching his pockets, hurling bags at the racks, jerking seatbacks about rudely, and worrying, forever worrying, until finally he falls asleep in utter exhaustion. He also is immensely involved in time, and believes that “making good involves all sorts of mysterious interlocking schedules” (234). Unlike Genaro's obsession with speed, which springs from some deep psychological need, Kennerly's is almost purely pathological, like a nervous tic. At one point we learn that “the muscles of his jaw jerked in continual helpless rage” (230). Kennerly, in fact, has been conditioned by the frantic tempo of technological civilization just as surely as the drowsy peon has been conditioned by the lethargic tempo of his. In Kennerly's opinion, the peons “don't know the meaning of time” (231), but there is no mistaking that the phrase might equally as well apply to Kennerly himself.

Kennerly's mistake is that he has confused change with motion. He is caught up in a whirligig of change, but it is a false kind of change having nothing whatsoever to do with the inward kind. He thinks that by perpetually rushing about he is changing into a better person, but although he considers himself a member of “the ruling race at large” (225), a person vastly more civilized than the peons he distastefully avoids, he actually is far behind them on the road to spiritual beatitude. In his manners and habits, for instance, Kennerly is quite vulgar; he speaks in “an overwhelming unmodulated voice,” takes “ponderous, gargling swigs” from his beer bottle, and “rips open” oranges like a ravenous beast (233, 228, 229). Furthermore, he is incapable of feeling compassion, and takes sadistic glee in the prospect of refilming a murder scene in which Justino will act the part he has already performed in reality (273). But most revealing, and also most amusing, is Kennerly's provincialism. Although he is supposedly sophisticated, he is haunted by absurd small-town fears that his brother-in-law, a militant prohibitionist, will discover that he is a beer-drinker (233). Also, he is blue-nosed enough to be shocked by a hint of lesbianism between Lolita and doña Julia (248). Despite all the outward signs of his modernity, he still bears the marks of a strict Puritan upbringing.

The idealistic Andreyev is also related to the theme. He is a doctrinaire Marxist who sincerely believes that the revolution has wrought great changes in Mexico, even though the facts deny this (241). He is blind to the facts because he induces in himself a “voluntary forgetfulness of his surroundings” (267) by which he continually turns inward in homesick yearning for Russia. For all his ideals, he is essentially unchanged, essentially a young peasant boy torn from his homeland. But he is not a self-deceiver in the manner of Betancourt; his ballad-singing endears him to Miss Porter, for this shows that he is concerned with the truth of emotion and thus is not beyond redemption. His problem, like Laura's in “Flowering Judas,” is really one of immaturity. With him, as with her, there is the danger that an emotional reservoir may slowly evaporate in the desert of an alien culture. He must grow up by understanding his Russian past; like the mule that hauls visitors to the hacienda, he must get “a tolerable purchase” on the “tie” (248) before moving, for only by accepting what he is will he be able to change into what he wants to be.

This brings us to the character most closely associated with the theme, Carlos. He is a ballad-writer and a good one, because in his corridōs he sings the truths of the human heart as he finds them in his own experience. Of the Mexican street ballad, Miss Porter has written:

The corrido is … a ballad. Mexico is one of the few countries where a genuine folk poetry still exists, a word-of-mouth tradition which renews itself daily in the heroic, sensational or comic episodes of the moment, an instantaneous record of events, a moment caught in the quick of life.

—Survey, X (May, 1924)

This fits Carlos perfectly, for he composes, spur-of-the moment, his ballad to “poor Rosalita” on the same day as the murder itself. And this impromptu act is significant in another way. Betancourt believes that Carlos is a failure, simply because he has not increased his income or been recognized for his ballads. But despite the continual bustling about of “successful” people like Betancourt, Kennerly, and Genaro, Carlos is the only person in the course of the story who gets anything done: he composes a ballad, and a good one at that.

Carlos is a true artist, and like Sophocles, has the power to see life and see it whole. He sees through appearance to reality, and is able to perceive that Justino's shooting of his sister was not accidental but rather the inevitable fruit of incest. Incidentally, it is interesting to note how Miss Porter reveals the true nature of “poetic license.” When Carlos makes his ballad of the shooting, he absent-mindedly changes a small detail, making Rosalita die of two bullets in her heart instead of one. When Betancourt points this out, Carlos laughs and says, “Very well, one bullet! Such a precisionist!” (267) The upshot is, of course, that the artist can lie about the little things but must tell the truth about the big things, and that a peevish concern for the accuracy of trivia is the mark of the second-rate mind.

Carlos is the only character in the story who is aware of the true nature of change. Thus far we have spoken of change as being wholly illusory, but this of course is only one side of the paradox. Although people and cultures do not change overnight, they do change gradually, in the process of organic growth. When Betancourt shows the narrator the frescos in the pulque vat-house, he remarks that similar frescos were found by the Spaniards in pre-Conquest pulquerias:

“… Nothing ever ends,” he waved his long beautiful hand, “it goes on being and becomes little by little something else.”

“I'd call that an end, of a kind,” said Carlos.

“Oh, well, you,” said Betancourt, smiling with immense indulgence upon his old friend, who was becoming gradually something else.

(276)

For, as a style of painting gradually changes, so does one's soul, for better or worse. Carlos, an artist, is a representative of all those who are interested in soul-change. At the end of her preface to Selected Stories of Eudora Welty, Miss Porter quotes this passage from Rilke's The Journal of My Other Self:

But now that so much is being changed, is it not time that we should change? Could we not try to develop ourselves a little, slowly and gradually take upon ourselves our share in the labor of love? We have been spared all its hardship … we have been spoiled by easy enjoyment. … But what if we despised our success, what if we began from the beginning to learn the work of love which has always been done for us? What if we were to go and become neophytes, now that so much is changing?