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New Study of Porter’s Mexican Stories by Susana Jiménez Placer

Susana María Jiménez Placer, a professor at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain, completed her Ph. D. in July 2003. Based, in part, on her research in Porter’s papers and library conducted in April and May 1999, her dissertation, “Los relatos mexicanos en The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter: lenguaje, representación e identidad,” offers a new approach to Porter’s Mexican stories through the analysis of the linguistic attitudes of the main characters. Making use of some basic post-structuralist terms, she argues that some of the characters in Porter’s Mexican stories suffer from an “excess of representation,” an excess in the symbolic side of their discourse, while other characters suffer from a “defect of representation,” a defect in the symbolic aspect of their discourse. Partly as a consequence of this, she argues, they can only barely achieve fulfillment in their lives.

Her study offers a new approach to “María Concepción,” “Virgin Violeta,” “The Martyr,” “That Tree,” “Flowering Judas,” and “Hacienda,” based on the linguistic attitudes shown by their characters. Some of the critical terms central to the works of Derrida, Kristeva, and Bakhtin constitute the theoretical background. According to Kristeva, human language has two basic functions: a representative, articulate and symbolic function separating language from immediate reality and a semiotic function containing the inarticulate and immediate expression of the human instinctual drives.