Katherine Anne Porter

Porter, Katherine Anne. Ship of Fools.

Porter sets Fools on a mixed passenger-cargo ship she designates as travelling between Mexico and Europe between very specific dates in 1931. The piece advertises itself as allegory, but isn't heavy-handedly so.

Writing during WWII (the novel was first published in 1945) Porter means to deal with people demographically, so various national, religious, and social groups are represented. The book saunters 500 pages through various classes of bigotry. As nearly as I can tell, Porter had considerable cultural range, both as a judge of dialect and of attitudes. Her English impressively renders various Mexican and hispanic prejudices quite distinctly. At various points one or another strangely unEnglish word choice reflects her decision to graft a very specific word from the Spanish.

On the other hand, I was disappointed in her rather harsh attitude towards her characters. I don't mind her calling us all fools: it's at least as true as it is false. I don't doubt that she's at least savvy enough to act like she considers herself another fool among us, which seems a fine and generous attitude for someone so obviously observant to take. But the people here seem inherently stupid as opposed to being victims of systemic folly and greed -- something Porter seems to have been quite aware of and may have treated elsewhere.

I think my sense of harshness has to do with the distance her narration maintains from her characters. She's following a kind of narrative that reminds me of Virginia Woolf, but she does not reveal more than flashes of intimacy with any one character. Specifically, Porter narrates in 3rd person. She jumps from focalizer to focalizer quite quickly, blending 3rd person descriptions of the focalizers with third person observations by the focalizer of various people and surroundings. Several times she took me aback with one or another bigoted statement; in each case, I eventually had to recognize that statement and attitude belonged to the focalizer, and that she had shifted from the Porter description of the focalizer to the next focalizer's view of the previous focalizer. In the midst of these shifts and the casually judgmental terms bandied about, it's difficult to get a sense of any social or psychological dynamic behind the characters' stupidities -- which left me feeling that the book was an unnecessarily skillful presentation of petty bigotries that remained inexplicable, though sharply observed -- the kind of text that makes me long for a good dostoyevskian confessions to clear the air. To be fair, presentation of this kind of material on the level of Ulysses might have taken another decade to accomplish, but I would have gladly accepted limitations of a different sort to accomplish that.

I'll be interested in seeing what the short fiction's like. Anyone have a suggestion as to which collection to start on?