Katherine Anne Porter's "The Old Order": Writing in the Borderlands

Nervy, glowering, your daughter wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

--Adrienne Rich, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law"

... I can eat as I go

--Denise Levertov, "Stepping Westward"

Katherine Anne Porter is most often--and rightly--thought of as an essentially modernist writer, as one of the hallmark figures of modernism. When she is read as a regionalist, it is generally as a Southerner, and it is her affinities with a group of Southern modernists--Allen Tare, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks--that are considered. Postmodern theory would seem, then, to have little insight to offer into Porter's practice of the art of fiction or her conception of the artist's role. An exception, however, is the "borderlands" theory that has proven so fruitful an approach to Southwestern (and other) literature. Porter's work, much of it set in the Texas soil from which she sprang, lends itself with particular readiness to this most stimulating and culturally grounded theoretical approach. I want to claim her here as, in multiple senses, a "borderlands" writer. Further, I want to argue that when she is viewed in this way she becomes centrally important in Southwestern literature and especially in defining the place of Texas letters in relation to that larger category

Gloria Anzaldua's 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, an impassioned cultural and literary critique that has generated a conspicuously lively and provocative critical discourse, develops what is essentially a version of Bakhtinian heteroglossia in its argument that "borderlands" writing is a writing of multiple and disjunct voicing. Her theory differs from Bakhtinian theory, however, in its geographical grounding. Anzaldua speaks primarily, as she states in her preface, of an "actual physical borderland," the "Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border." But from this literal grounding in a space that she calls an "[un]comfortable territory," a "place of contradictions," Anzaldua extends the idea of the borderlands to include such symbolic spaces as "psychological," "sexual," and "spiritual borderlands." These are "not particular to the Southwest" but exist in any space where "two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldua v).(1) Such borderlands include any "space" of contact with otherness, where the result is ambiguity and tension. Moving between literal and figurative meanings, Anzaldua finds that writers who speak from racially dual identities or who inhabit that uneasy borderland between old ways of gendering and new ones share a particular kind of voicing with writers who occupy the literal strip of ground where the United States and Mexico meet and, in a sense, interpenetrate. All such writers will speak out of a divided, dual, or multiple consciousness. They will feel themselves as belonging to two distinct identities at once, or perhaps--caught, in effect, between two worlds--to neither. They will possess, she says with notable understatement, a "tolerance for ambiguity" (30). They will have an "`alien' element" in their consciousness, so that they are "never comfortable" with a single, clamorous authority. They will straddle dividing lines. They will see double.

Following Anzaldua's own compelling argumentation, we might most readily draw on her theoretical conception in readings of Southwestern writers of ethnic doubleness or the fractured cultural identity born of conquest and national redefinition.(2) Katherine Anne Porter belongs to neither of these categories. But her imagination was one of doubleness and crossing in a great many respects--in politics, in her sense of gender, in her sense of the enterprise of literature and her own role in that enterprise, and in religion.(3) She occupied a particularly conflicted borderland zone with respect to her sense of temporality, by virtue of the duality and ambivalence of her appreciation of the past and traditional graciousness, as opposed to her zest for modernity and change. Envisioning herself as a child of the old order, a belle, a Southern grande dame, she nevertheless also envisioned herself as an advanced woman, a challenger of the past--in Sandra Cisneros's terms, a "bad girl." Any searching consideration of Porter's mind will find itself crisscrossing borders of all of these kinds.

Porter's consciousness was also, however, a "bordered" one in a more literal, geographic sense, and thus a sense much closer to Anzaldua's own primary meaning. It is when we consider Porter in this way that she ceases to be peripheral to a Southwestern literary canon, as has often been asserted, and becomes instead a defining figure of such a canon.

It has been well recognized that Porter's attitude toward Texas and her Texas origins was one of ambivalence.(4) She was as deeply divided as to how she felt toward her place of origin as she was toward her family of origin. The two, place and family, were indeed, in her mind, essentially one. Her family, she believed, squelched her emergent creativity in childhood and failed to provide the unquestioning, undemanding love she wanted as an adult. Texas culture did not nurture the arts; the Texas Institute of Letters gave its prize to J. Frank Dobie's Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver instead of to her Pale Horse, Pale Rider in 1939; and the University of Texas failed to name its humanities research library after her as (so she believed) it had promised. However much Porter might resist and revile her origins, however, it is generally agreed that she was profoundly influenced by her relationship to Texas. More specifically, she was profoundly influenced by the presence in Texas of not one but two geographic borders, the legal and cultural border between Texas and Mexico that Anzaldua writes about and that unofficial but nevertheless significant border running through the state north to south, the border between the South and the Southwest. Although it is on the second of these two borders that I will primarily focus here, it should be pointed out that the Texas-Mexico border is of great and multiple significance to Porter, and she can well be considered a writer of the borderlands with respect to her crossing, both real and imaginative, of both.