"HE" by Katherine Anne Porter

 ATONEMENT IN KATHERINE ANNE PORTER’S “HE”

Source for photograph:here

"He" is a short story by Katherine Anne Porter, originally published in New Masses in 1927 and then reprinted in Porter’s collection Flowering Judas and Other Stories in 1930. The story is about a poor American family. The mother, Mrs. Whipple, loves her second son best of all: a boy who is identified only as ‘He’.” (Source: Dr Oliver Tearle, Loughborough University)

Guilt, redemption, and the “search for meaning” as well as individuality in an intensely materialistic world, as Dr Tearle puts it, constitute the axis around which the narrative revolves. Similarly to all Porter’s stories, the selection of names is paramount: "Whipple" is an intestine disease caused by a bacteria (a very interesting connection brought forward by Begoña Rodríguez) all the more meaningful in the context of the story as the Whipples are blighted, not only due to their hypocritical maneuvering but also to the “sins of the fathers.”

The Whipples find it hard to make ends meet and “feed all the hungry mouths,” yet, Mrs. Whipple is rather more intent on preserving the “veneer of appearances” in front of the community and showing that she cares for her “simple-minded” son.  Despite her apparent love and tribulations for him, she occasionally subjects him to dangerous and uncomely trials. Thus, her attitude towards him as well as her description of the boy  are not precisely celebratory: “Rolls of fat covered Him like an overcoat, and He could carry twice as much wood and water as Adna.”

 She forces him to perform "cruel" and dangerous tasks: He takes the suckling pig from its mother so Mrs. Whipple can slit its throat. He is equally in charge of fetching the bull that may dangerously and unexpectedly attack him. Mrs Whipple does not hesitate to take a blanket off him as she considers he cannot feel cold as his other two sisters do. A lavish repast will be offered to honour her brother so the look of prosperity might be kept. Yet “He” will be hidden, he wouldn’t come into the dining room, timidity alleged. “He” isn’t to be slighted...

Mrs. Whipple’s contradictory behaviours show that she is perhaps at a paradoxical crux pinpointed by “you know yourself it’s more natural for a mother to be that way. People don’t expect so much of fathers, some way,” being the keyword “expect.” Mrs. Whipple feels guilty and obliged to be utterly devoted to her son and pine for him either by societal pressure or to find atonement for what is called the “sin of the fathers”  who might refer to some family “inbreeding” (as accurately highlighted by Paula Diz and Belén Tizón): “Blood and bad doings somewhere”. 

The story’s religious undertones are unmistakable and as Dr Tearle points: The capitalized “HE” is likely to put us in mind …“Jesus Christ, since God and Jesus are often referred to as He or Him. And Porter’s ‘He,’ like Jesus, is poorly understood by those around Him and doomed to a life of suffering (including, we surmise, an early death).“A pious attitude of devotion in the face of opposition and even ridicule from others (such as theirneighbours and even, to an extent, Mr. Whipple).” Contrariwise to this extolling: 

“the fact that the boy is referred to by His mother simply as ‘He’ denies him an identity and an individuality. Or, to be more specific, it both strips Him of individuality and makes Him stand out (in the worst possible way) as an individual because He is being treated differently. If one of Porter’s great themes is the struggle for identity in the modern world, He has a tougher struggle than most.” (Dr Olive Tearle)

We are never granted access to the boy's emotions. Unlike in Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” (enthralling comparison brought about by Mónica Rodriguez) where Faulkner gives us access to Benjamin’s convoluted thoughts through the narrative technique of stream of consciousness, in Porter’s story, we hardly have access to the boy’s thoughts and feelings. 

Yet,towards the end of the story, tears roll down his cheeks when He is to be sent to the County House as a result of a fall and constant seizures: he is sneaked in a carryall so the neighbours will not tell. Mrs Whipple intones “You don’t feel so bad, do you?” at the same time that a sense of relief overpowers her thinking that she might now have time for the girls.

Katherine Anne Porter's "Magic"

  "Yes, and then?"

Scherezade in Porter's Magic

It never dawns in New Orleans

In medias res, and almost in an uninterrupted monologue technique, “Magic” opens up in the boudoir of Madame Blanchard with the the horror-account of Ninette’s story through the eyes of Madame Blanchard’s maid in a Scherezade-like nested story. The maid renders the narrative in a dissembling matter-of-fact way triggered by the hearsay of Madame Blanchard’s bewitched linens. The story arc of magic conjoins the frame narrative and the story told through a series of mirrored-reflective events that bring both the maid and Ninette together as well as Madame Blanchard and the Madam of the fancy house (brothel)  against a backdrop or racism, abusive authority, exploitation and violence, with money at its core. Madame vs Madam (only an "-e" separates both names).

William L. Nance in “Katherine Porter and the Art of Rejection” quoted by Michael Hollister points that “Ninette is pathetically impotent to free herself. Since the reader knows her only as a victim, however, the emphasis of the story i n not only in sympathy but the horror of the situation. Source https://www.amerlit.com/sstory/SSTORY Porter, Katherine Anne Magic.pdf

Brushing and stroking Madame Blanchard’s hair, the maid recalls her times in the brothel where she encountered Ninette. Ninette will not easily yield to “Madam's” demands of handing back the money given by the clients. While “Madam” subtracts her brass cheques (“A brass check was the token purchased by a customer in a brothel and given to the woman of his choice”), she sneaks some money under her pillow. Violence ensues, and a terrible determinism frustrates her escape only to bring her back through magic spells.

Ninette rolls in blood to fall at the feet of our narrator and the two narratives collide in a room in a brothel in New Orleans: 

“The madam began to shout, Where did you get all that, you …? and accused her robbing the men who came to visit her ...The girl, said, keep your hands off or I’ll brain you: and at that the madam took hold of her shoulders, and began to lift her knee and kick this girl most terribly in the stomack, and even in her most secret place ...and then she beat her in the face with a bottle, and the girl fell back again into her room where I was making clean” (page 40)

Madam's cook plays the cruel magic spell that brings Ninette back to an inescapable determinism: “For the cook in that place was a woman, colored like myself, like myself with much French blood just the same, like myself living always among people who worked spells” (41). The iterative use of "myself" in a threefold litany  draws Madame Blanchard's maid and Ninette's story together: magic rituals, abuse, violence and exploitation knit both. "When she comes back she will be dirt under your feet," the cook pinpoints. Madame Blanchard’s maid hears the click of her mistress’ perfume right after as well as a dull: “Yes, and then?" The tale is thus concluded: "and after that she lived there quietly."

Ninette and Madame Blanchard's servant both remain locked in their own worlds, a spiritual rather than physical entrapment as William L. Nance suggests: 

 “Ninette’s imprisonment is not mere matter of locked doors and barred windows, but an enslavement of the spirit. The spell has added symbolic resonance to the young’s prostitute degradation.”

No story will grant our Scherezade her freedom.

"María Concepción" by Katherine Anne Porter

 The Archeology of María Concepción

Source for photograph: here

María Concepción constitutes the first story that Katherine Anne Porter finished and published after 30 other stories she had previously discarded as mentioned in this interview: “Day at Night: Katherine Anne Porter, Novelist and Short Story Writer.” Katherine Anne Porter lived for a long time in Mexico, the setting to this short story.

“She walked with the free, natural, guarded ease of the primitive / woman carrying an unborn child. ….She was entirely contented. Her husband / was at work and she was on her way to market to sell her fowls”  (María Concepción page 3)

María Concepción overlooks the spines and thorns that lie ahead in the dusty road in perfunctory daily work. There is no time to rest in the shade nor to practically “draw the spines from “ her feet.  This sturdy ancestral woman advances forcefully, purposefully, regardless of the swollen limbs of dying fowls that sling back on her shoulder to be sold and gutted. There is no time for emotional haphazardness. Picture her, black eyes shaped like almonds and a clean bright blue rebozo, vanishing in an arid landscape brushed by the winds that shape the jacals ( a type of hut / shelter) which challenge the laws of gravity.

María Concepción resonates with a stream of religious metaphors. She proudly saved some silver coins to be "married in church" and have the bans for three days unlike the other villagers that must marry behind the church, she will kneel to the Virgin of Guadalupe and sneer at Lupe’s unorthodox healing ways that resemble those of a charmer.  María Concepción bottles up anger and retaliation as she discovers Juan Villegas (her husband) and María Rosa’s dalliance and swears to kill them. 

Givens (manager of the archeological dig) for whom Juan works wounds the earth in search for archeological remains with the precision of the scalpel. The locals wonder about this useless uprooting as it brings no monetary profit unlike their totemic souvenirs in the village. Earth and Maria Concepción are corroded, broken up, rampaged. She barrenly miscarriages, while María Rosa bears fruit. María Rosa and Juan return to the village after enlisting in the army, deserters, outcasts are forsaken by a community that retorts to them.

María Concepción mangles the body of María Rosa in an acrimonious devastation of a repeatedly thrusting knife.  María Rosa, who had enough love and enough honey lies in a coffin, pitiless. A silent acquiescence on behalf of the community endorses María Concepción. This ancestral primitive woman forcefully steps forward and appropriates María Rosa’s baby, a changeling of the fairies or a miraculous conception to whom she believes has the right to.

Agon

“Life is too short to read a bad book” 

We kick off this reading season by posing some questions that seem to be easy to answer at first sight but that often leave us brooding in a speechless limbo.

How can we tell if a book is good literature? How do we apply James Joyce’s paraphrased quote, “Life is too short to read a bad book,” and, therefore, commit ourselves only to the good ones?

An idea lingers and is branded in my mind: a book has to be at least twenty years old to be read, and a book must survive the passage of time. I tried to trace this statement back, bearing in mind that it could be attributed to a German philosopher, a rephrase of Kierkegaard, perhaps, but, faded memories turn to be cloaked landscapes of veracity. The wonders of the internet, I came across Clifton Fadiman.

Fadiman was an American intellectual, editor, and literary critic. He seems to have made this statement in his anthology The Lifetime Reading Plan, where he recommended classic books for readers who wanted to enrich their knowledge of literature. The idea behind the statement is that a book's enduring value is demonstrated if it continues to resonate with readers for at least twenty years after its publication.

Apart from the test of time, what makes a book good? Compelling characters? A good opening? A unique style? A remembrance? Visceral emotions? We have puzzled out what we consider gripping books, books we detested, and revisited.

In “The Sound Inside,” a play by Adam Rapp, Bella Baird, one of her main characters, a fictional professor of Creative Writing at Yale University, points out that good writers leave it to the reader to develop characters with very few traits explained in their imagination. Salinger did not expand much on Caufield, and just by referring to his patch of gray hair and height, the reader has “thoroughly formed him in our minds.”

We try to traverse the bridges of reality to fiction and participate in Bella Baird’s creative writing workshop by picturing ourselves as third person characters in books perhaps written by Margaret Atwood, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Margaret Lawrence, Manel Loureiro, Ian Fleming. Only a trait is allowed for the sake of imagining the innards.

Our characters have mouths like floodgates, a passion for rough and grey Galician seas, fond of spy games, eager walkers; our characters will light rooms with bright and cheery dispositions, will be endowed with deceptive smiling eyes, daring dreamers with darker sides, creative selves that keep themselves to themselves in reserved ways; characters that blush at dawn with the ease of a rose kissed by the sun in Shakespearean fashion and cling onto to the nostalgia of bygone times.

(Thanks to Rosa, Salomé, Cheli, Sonia, Antonio, Servando, Mónica, Belén, Paula, Cristina, Marcial…)

This way we kick off, thinking about what makes a good book, some visceral feeling, a unique style, compelling agonistic (from the Greek “agon”: competing) characters, the language, surviving the passage of time, the clawing of it onto the skin, the talking about it, the resonance of it in our selves, the power of language ..

Sources consulted: 

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/the-elements-of-a-good-book

How to know if a book is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i52Aqso9Tk

Letters to Sylvia Plath from "The Word Depot"

 

LETTERS TO SYLVIA FROM THE WORD DEPOT de Ana María Sánchez Mosquera