The variable presence of place: narrative construction in the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter

Abstract

Viewed from a socio-spatial perspective, Katherine Anne Porter's fiction illustrates a complex set of interactions between sense of place and narrative construction, and the consequential relationship between place and identity. In those works classified as long short stories or novellas, place functions as a mechanism for imposing order on chaos and conceptualizing self-identity, both for the artist and her various protagonists. Acting either as analog (by the actions performed within it), as image (by the visual form it presents), or as symbol (by partaking of the reality it represents), place provides the spatio-temporal matrix within which the individual operates and in which contextual relationships occur. This study demonstrates how perceptions of and attitudes toward surrounding structures and/or environments engender specific literary responses within Porter's narratives by drawing upon the theories of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, sociologist Nancy Chodorow, and architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. It illustrates sense of place to be a variable presence, one which anchors both narrative structure and self-identity in multiple terms. The first presence names that of the dwelling place-the existential space afforded within architectural abodes; the second, that of the physical and/or cultural landscape-the present/absent frontier and plantation myth; the third, that of self-referential and/or inscribed spatial metaphors; and the fourth, that of space defamiliarized through repetition and memory. In each, the protagonist ultimately acquires or rejects personal and/or social selfhood in accordance to perceptions of place; in each, the narrative action is paradoxically centered and decentered in respect to the same place.