Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools and the Ephemeral Promise of Transnational Community

Abstract

In the 1920s and 1930s, transatlantic steam travel was at its fastest and most accessible. During voyages lasting mere days or weeks, shipping lines used onboard aesthetics and ephemera to construct community, attempting to replace national belonging with transnational solidarity. But could this attempt to transcend passengers’ national loyalties counter the rising international tensions of the period? Katherine Anne Porter’s novel Ship of Fools—published in 1962 but written largely after a 1931 trip—suggests it could not. This article considers how Porter’s inclusion of the ephemera of Interwar steamship travel—menus, seating cards, cabin cards, tickets, etc.—allows her to represent transnational solidarity as, at best, temporary and, at worst, illusory. It argues that Porter uses the intrinsically flimsy foundations of transnational solidarity aboard the ocean liner to indicate that international cooperation in the era will not succeed. Alongside this, this paper asserts that Porter’s treatment of shipboard community runs counter to existing narratives about the exceptionalism of Interwar shipboard experience, and that the novel reveals something new about the ways fiction can preserve the temporality of ephemera differently than the archive can.