Representations of Truth

Abstract

Katherine Anne Porter submitted a group of stories called “Legend and Memory” to The Atlantic Monthly in 1934, but instead of the reception she hoped for, The Atlantic Monthly responded with a request for significant revisions. These recommendations, as Porter adamantly explained, would change the collective meaning of the stories. And yet, Porter ultimately chose to concede, publishing the stories separately in other magazines before finally collecting them together again in The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944). Over the next twenty years, Porter would publish the stories (later called The Old Order stories) in two more collections— The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Each time she chose not to edit individual stories but rearranged the order of the stories. Individually, each story is like a sketch, or one component of the protagonist Miranda’s construct of identity from the perspective of an adult looking backward and remembering as a child. And yet collectively, these stories reveal memory’s process of reconstruction and how the perspective of time transforms event through addition, elimination, and arrangement. Using text, correspondence, manuscripts, and cognitive research to examine the progression of Porter’s work on The Old Order stories in three collections over more than thirty years, “Representations of Truth: The Significance of Order in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order Stories” traces the progressive ordering of these stories from their original submission to their final collection in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). This essay argues that Porter’s rearrangements reflect a reconstructive process of memory. Over time, the reorganization of The Old Order stories demonstrate a shift in Miranda’s memories from a chronological positioning to a representational ordering, allowing Miranda to reexamine her perspective on past experiences.