“I Must Write from Memory”: Reading Katherine Anne Porter’s The Old Order as a Reconstructive Process of Memory

Katherine Anne Porter wrote The Old Order stories in the early 1930s; and while there is no evidence that she ever revised them on a story level, she revised the order of the stories over more than thirty years in three collections: The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944), The Old Order: Stories of the South from The Leaning Tower, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, and Flowering Judas (1955), and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Individually, each story is its own episodic memory based on Miranda’s adult recollections of childhood experiences. Collectively, Porter’s rearrangement of these stories over time both deconstructs and reconstructs Miranda’s narrative from a chronological to a representational recollection. Therefore, while the individual stories reveal memory’s imprint on identity, the progressive reordering of The Old Order stories reveals a reconstructive process of memory which repositions itself over time