Katherine Anne Porter

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Abstract

Katharine Anne Porter's short stories are celebrated for their beautiful prose style. The rhythmical flow of the sentences is singularly transparent. The secret of this transparency lies in the fact that the word used is not limited to an exact sense, as, with Katherine Mansfield who infuses the words and sentences with her own personality; rather, the word is ambiguous and suggests to the reader many different possible shades of meanings. The words do not bear the colours of Katherine Anne Porter's personality. The ambiguous nature is not present only in words but also in her handling of the settings and characters. Readers are permitted to modify the image with their own imagination. In "Maria Conception" her talent is best shown in the full, ambiguous expression of the etertal femininity of a woman. The success of "Flowering Judas", however, is of a more dubious nature. I feel it is a mosaic of abstract words and phrases which at first sight appear to mean something concrete, together with imaginative description of the scenes. The central idea of the story is, according to Professor Ray B. West's article, suggested by T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion". But this analogy is only superficial. In "Flowering Judas" the idea is not crystallized as in "Gerontion"; the idea is not so much a symbol as an abstraction. The charm of the story is its mystifying quality, something like kaleidoscope. Even though abstraction, she is a talented author. Her description is picturesque, her style is rhythmic. She is intelligent in the sense that she is able to handle abstract ideas like toy blocks. She can create stories on varied subjects in varied colours and tones with a very smooth finish. However, she lacks that essential quality of a great author whose personality and view of life permeate the atmosphere like a ground colouring, even though he pretends to objectivity. Like the eyes of a simple pretty girl, her words and ideas have no strong individuality, even though they are sensually beautiful.

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