KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
279
in which Mexican primitives are made to assume poses of the kind
usually referred to as "artistic": they are found frozen against passionate
backgrounds of "maguey thorns and the treacherous curved spines ,of
organ cactus." These stories have a way of resolving themselves into post–
card collections: "the blue of her rebozo became a dancing spot in the
heat waves that rose from the gray-red soil." The male characters are
very often "full-lipped," and it is customary for a young woman to have
"the silence and the watchfulness of a young wild animal." Environ–
ment, in these stories, is flattened into backdrop; as a consequence, the
characters begin to look like actors got up in a ritual melodrama designed
to reinforce the author's preconceptions.
What is most striking about all her stories is their air of indestructible
composure. Their elements seem admirably balanced and fitted, like parts
of a machine. No energy is wasted here; and it is true that when, in
stories like
Noon Wine,
the characters confront each other head-on, there
is
sudden power in the encounter. (Mr. Hatch and Mr. Thompson re–
main vivid because they are singular; the power of the representation
derives from its incisive, unrelenting specificity.) More often, however,
the author does not succeed in perceiving particulars with an intensity
which would lend them the force and weight of general statement;
instead, inventing circumstances which contain foregone conclusions, she
elaborates general statements with appropriate details.
In the process, Miss Porter assumes the role of personnel manager
with respect to her characters: they are subordinated to the immediate
needs of the organization, as though the story were a business
produ~ing
a single effect. The author will not allow tensions to develop
~een
her characters and her objectives or, for that matter, between her
characters and their milieu. Since the relations between these elements
have already been fixed, she seems reluctant to discover other, possibly
more intricate, relations. Imposing herself on them, she denies her
characters all but their predetermined literary possibilities: indispensable,
but not particularly interesting, they keep the action moving and are
used up in the process.
In "Hacienda," for example, Kennerly, with whom the narrator is
not in sympathy, seems to exist only in general: "There is always one
of him on every train ... he
is
a part of the scene of travel. ... I was
thinking that foreigners anywhere were three or four kinds of phono–
graph records, and of all of them I liked Kennerly's kind the least."
Undoubtedly, she has his number; but he has been understood too simply.
One wants
to
know what makes Kennerly different from all the others
