"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