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The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," Traumatic Memory, and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918
Abstract
As Katherine Anne Porter's short novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" opens, Miranda fitfully endures a vivid nightmare. She sees herself on horseback desperately racing from Death, the pale rider, who has already taken her grandfather, an aunt, a cousin, her "decrepit hound, and [her] silver kitten," and when he reaches her, she realizes that "he is no stranger to [her]" (270). Her nightmare tangles images of life and death with images of remembering and forgetting, and the relationship between survival and memory is a recurring motif in the story. Porter's allusion to the apocalyptic horseman described in Revelation proves to be appropriate because the story takes places during the influenza pandemic of 1918, the greatest public health catastrophe in modern history. The interplay between death and memory in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" gives an aesthetic dimension to the pandemic's horrifying consequences and raises questions about literature as a form of traumatic memory.
In the spring of 2009 fear of a swine flu pandemic and ongoing fear of a potential avian flu pandemic awakened dormant memories of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Global health officials mounted a campaign of contagion preparedness, and many officials still see another human pandemic as inevitable, if not imminent. To mitigate this potential disaster, scientists, epidemiologists, and government officials worldwide are looking to the 1918 pandemic as a worst-case scenario as they develop contingency response plans. Before the emergence of the current virus, however, the 1918 influenza pandemic had largely disappeared from cultural memory. Few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture, or even in history books, which makes Porter's story an important record of the outbreak.
In the story, Miranda, a reporter for a Denver newspaper, enjoys a whirlwind romance with Adam Barclay, a young Army officer, until she collapses from the virus. Adam nurses her as she comes near to death, and while she recovers, he returns to his unit where he dies from the virus. Porter based "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" on her personal experience as an influenza survivor, and it is the most significant American literary work set during the pandemic. The novella illustrates the varieties of traumatic experience—personal trauma, cultural trauma, historical trauma, and aesthetic trauma. The story takes place in a unique and profound historical context, both because of Porter's personal traumatic experience and because memories of the pandemic have faded.
In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a "wound of the mind—the breach in the mind's experience of time, self, and the world—[that] is not, like a wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor" (4). Most trauma theorists locate trauma's impact in the individual memory, where the unsettling experience disrupts the victim's identity, but when a disruptive event affects a large population simultaneously, a collective trauma occurs. The influenza pandemic of 1918 complicates the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma. One might stipulate that collective trauma merely consists of numerous individual traumas, but collective trauma amplifies the individual's experience by taxing the network of social resources that ordinarily stabilize the individual victim. Massive events such as wars, natural disasters, and pandemics have different dynamics than personal events such as crime, accidents, and illness. In both individual and collective forms of trauma, the event's impact lies not in the immediate experience but in the survivors' memory of the event. Exploring the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma leads to an explanation for how and why the pandemic has virtually disappeared from collective memory.
Katherine Anne Porter survived the influenza pandemic of 1918. She worked for The Rocky Mountain News during the outbreak, and she contracted influenza as the epidemic reached its peak in Denver. By that time, all of the hospitals in the city were filled beyond capacity. Her landlady, fearing infection, threatened to have her evicted from...
... Previous studies focus on Porter's writing style appreciation, literary influence, her characterization and themes. Researches on Pale Horse, Pale Rider mainly include trauma of war and plague [3,11], the relationship between plague and society and illness narrative [7,[9][10], and the theme of death [4]. ...
American author Katherine Anne Porters novelette Pale Horse, Pale Rider takes the First World War and the Great Pandemic of 1918 as the background. Through some modernist techniques such as stream of consciousness and non-linear narrative, the story focuses on the chaotic and broken feelings of the heroine Miranda during her illness. The illness experience offers an opportunity for Miranda to think about life. In this case, Mirandas existential crisis, haunting and difficult to solve, is revealed through the psychological description during her illness and the implication of the modernist narrative techniques. In addition, descriptions of peoples lives during the war exposes great oppression of the war on people, suggesting social cause of Mirandas existential crisis. Through analysis of the plague writing and the social situation in the text, this essay will conclude that modernist plague writing is a manifestation of the existential crisis, and the plague has symbolic meaning in the text, implying the existential crisis of Americans under the influence of the First World War.
... Replication of heroic narratives such as that of Rev. Gordon's efforts in Cartwright were given priority over the demoralizing death found elsewhere in the account, and this was the case in both popular histories and academic studies. 46 When NL appeared in Canadian works about the Spanish Flu pandemic, it had a minimal presence. Eileen Pettigrew's The Silent Enemy: Canada and the Deadly Flu of 1918 provides a short but detailed account of the Spanish Flu across Canada, from NL to British Columbia. ...
The current COVID-19 crisis emphasizes that pandemics are both biomedical phenomena and significant multifaceted historical events. The 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic, known as the “Spanish Flu,” was estimated to have killed between fifty to one hundred million people, yet historians like Alfred Crosby labelled the Spanish Flu a “forgotten” pandemic because of its absence from contemporary and academic writing. Memory of the pandemic has recently received academic attention in Pandemic Re-Awakenings (2022) though memories of thepandemic in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) were not explored in that work. This paper examines the memory of Spanish Flu in NL using both “global” and “local” perspectives and argues for the importance of applying globally recognized academic theory, methodology, and examples to local perspectives and experiences. During an era fixated on remembrance, the pandemic dead were concealed by the Great War, except members of the community who fit into heroic narratives. Without utilitarian value, the memory of the Spanish Flu was “forgotten,”an active and passive process that downplayed its impact on human society. Memory of the Spanish Flu persisted in private form and influenced the world through public health policy changes and as a precedent-setting event to be viewed in grim anticipation of future pandemics.
... It is part of living memory. However, with time, it will become a distant memory or part of human history like other disease outbreaks [139]. Just like the 1918 Flu Pandemic, understanding of the past becomes dependent on the documentation and historical study of events [140]. ...
COVID-19 vaccinations have demonstrated effectiveness in reducing severe infections. However, vaccine hesitancy posed a major public health hurdle to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Online spread of vaccine conspiracy beliefs generated unwarranted mistrust and resistance to vaccines. While numerous studies have explored the factors influencing vaccine hesitancy, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the interplay between perceived disease vulnerability, COVID-19 fear, and vaccine hesitancy. Protection motivation theory posits citizens will evaluate perceived threats and take actions to mitigate potential harm. With a large U.S. sample, path analysis demonstrated individuals’ perceived disease vulnerability was associated with lower vaccine hesitancy. Greater perceived disease vulnerability was associated with higher COVID-19 fear. Greater COVID-19 fear was associated with lower vaccine hesitancy. Greater vaccine conspiracy beliefs associated with higher vaccine hesitancy. However, in the presence of perceived vulnerability to disease, vaccine conspiracy beliefs associated with higher fear of COVID-19 and thereby lower vaccine hesitancy. We found under circumstances of higher perceived vulnerability to disease and fear of COVID-19, vaccine conspiratorial believers were less vaccine hesitant. We discuss how public health messaging can highlight personal risks to contracting COVID-19 to appeal to those who self-identify as disease prone, but may have reservations about vaccines because of misinformation. Successfully combating diseases entails reaching and gaining cooperation from misbelievers because misinformation is expected to continue in the digital age. By understand individual differences to vaccine hesitancy, it can help increase vaccinations and prevent severe illnesses in the post COVID-19 pandemic era.
... She makes a good claim about how the text presents "a carefully fictionalized version of [the author's] experience" (366) -which this article will examine in order to explore the text as a specifically modernist response to trauma. However, it is no less true that critics such as Catherine Belling (2009), David Davis (2011) andCaroline Hovanec (2011) have advanced quite insightful studies focused on reading the story as a record of personal trauma, motivated by biographical accounts such as Givner's, which Davis summarizes as follows: ...
The aim of this study is to suggest a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), considered by many as the paradigmatic American narrative of that pandemic. Following the trend set by most critics of Porter, this article explores the intersections of memory and fiction in the novella, but shifting attention to our present-day response, assessed as a critical tool that provides renewed insight into the mysteries of Porter’s late-modernist text. Revisited in a context in which cultural memories of the 1918 influenza have been awakened by our own traumatic experience with COVID-19, this article seeks to probe the uncertainties in Porter’s aestheticized trauma narrative. The aim is to investigate the hypothesis that our contemporary reading of Pale Horse, Pale Rider illuminates the modernist obscurities in the text and, in consequence, raises the possibility of transcending the limitations of language and myth exhibited in the text, providing new meanings through connection and remembrance.
... Whereas there is a dearth of literary output on the 1918 influenza because of its coincidence with World War I and political interventions that suppressed the discourse of mass death as a result of the influenza virus (Davis 2011), Covid-19 has been highly publicised and is likely, as Fred Khumalo (2020, 78) speculated, to result in a "surfeit of books-both fiction and non-fiction." It is possible that writing directly or indirectly about Covid-19 will result not only in the popularity of a literary topos of contagion but distinctly Covid-19 metaphors and perhaps narrative conventions also. ...
This article examines how the overwhelmingly dominant genre in The Lockdown Collection (2020), the personal essay, is an appropriate medium to capture the immediacy of the initial hard lockdown in South Africa because of its brevity and resonance. While the essays react to policies of virus containment, the loss and alteration of social conventions, they inevitably reveal the identity of each author and how that identity sits in the imagination of South Africanness. This appellation itself incorporates and complicates fraternities that are race and class based in a context of acute inequality and ubiquitous violence. The essays display an awareness of the strong relationship between these two aspects and writing about them appears as an antidote to fear and a desire for a better South Africa, as learnt from and suggested by the challenges of Covid-19. Opsomming Hierdie artikel bestudeer hoe die genre wat oorweldigend dominant is in The Lockdown Collection (2020), naamlik die persoonlike essay, ʼn geskikte medium is om die onmiddellikheid van die aanvanklike streng inperking in Suid-Afrika vas te vang-vanweë die beknoptheid en weerklank daarvan. Terwyl die essays ʼn reaksie op beleide van virusbekamping, die verlies en wysiging van sosiale konvensies is, word die identiteit van elke outeur uiteraard onthul. Dit wys ook hoe daardie identiteit in die verbeelding van Suid-Afrikaansheid daar uitsien. Hierdie benaming opsigself beliggaam en kompliseer gemeenskappe wat op ras en klas gebaseer is in ʼn konteks van akute ongelykheid en alomteenwoordige geweld. Die essays toon ʼn bewustheid van die sterk verbintenis tussen hierdie twee aspekte-en om daaroor te skryf blyk ʼn teenmiddel vir vrees en ʼn Ndlovu 2 hunkering na ʼn beter Suid-Afrika te wees, soos die uitdagings wat Covid-19 meegebring het suggereer en ons inderdaad geleer het.
... The 1918 influenza pandemic ("Spanish flu") is the most extensively researched historical influenza outbreak and caused an estimated 20 million to 100 million deaths worldwide (9,10). Interest in the pandemic resurged in the 1980s (11)(12)(13), and many studies were published around the centennial of the outbreak. They covered a range of topics, including general significance (5,14), lessons learned (15)(16)(17), and unanswered questions (18). ...
Public health interventions implemented during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are based on experience gained from past pandemics. The 1918 influenza pandemic is the most extensively researched historical influenza outbreak. All 9335 reports available in the State Archives on 121 152 cases of influenza-like illness from the canton of Bern from 473 of 497 municipalities (95.2%) were collected; the cases were registered between 30 June 1918 and 30 June 1919. The overall incidence rates of newly registered cases per week for the 9 greater regions of Bern for both the first and second waves of the pandemic were calculated. Relative incidence rate ratios (RIRRs) were calculated to estimate the change in the slope of incidence curves associated with public health interventions. During the first wave, school closures (RIRR, 0.16 [95% CI, 0.15 to 0.17]) and restrictions of mass gatherings (RIRR, 0.57 [CI, 0.54 to 0.61]) were associated with a deceleration of epidemic growth. During the second wave, in autumn 1918, cantonal authorities initially reacted hesitantly and delegated the responsibility to enact interventions to municipal authorities, which was associated with a lack of containment of the second wave. A premature relaxation of restrictions on mass gatherings was associated with a resurgence of the epidemic (RIRR, 1.18 [CI, 1.12 to 1.25]). Strikingly similar patterns were found in the management of the COVID-19 outbreak in Switzerland, with a considerably higher amplitude and prolonged duration of the second wave and much higher associated rates of hospitalization and mortality.
... 127). In addition, Rebecca Totaro and Ernest Gilman (2010) Davis (2011) present an informative account of this epidemic affirming that the novel "illustrates the varieties of traumatic experience-personal trauma, cultural trauma, historical trauma, and aesthetic trauma" (Davis,p. 56), and "offers sustained examination of the pandemic, through a semi-autobiographical account of Porter's own neardeath encounter with the disease" (Bollinger,p. ...
Corpus of literature is replete with works that feature pandemics as central themes. As a response to diseases outbreaks, fiction writers portray the human condition and the shifts in human behaviour at these crucial junctures of human history. Plot structure and characterization accounts for the void –both within and without—: prevailing chaos, crumbling social structures, undermining of religious values, and Government’s apathy. Based on such themes, this paper examines, from Deterministic and Existentialistic perspectives, three representative fictions written in the 21st century: Reina James’s This Time of Dying (2006) on the deadly influenza of 1918, Amir Taj Elsir’s Ebola ’76 (2012) on the outbreak of Ebola in 1976, and Karen Maitland’s The Plague Charmer (2016) on the plague of 1361. The findings include: (a) the novels predict the contemporary society with their resonance of apocalyptic images and preventive measures, (b) they manifest ontological shifts as the orthodox worldviews are jolted, and (c) fictional and personal narratives are not less important than historical records on health in quest for existence.
... For this reason, few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture, or even in history books. [3] Therefore, in the still uncertain grip of a new global COVID19 pandemic, it matters now more than ever that we hold on to the stories we narrate. ...
... The virus also stripped human societies of elaborate layers of protection against various existential threats: death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness (Yalom, 1980). In deconstructing the surprisingly few literary texts about the 1918 pandemic, Davis (2011) surmised that the pain inflicted by nature makes people feel insignificant, thus leading to collective forgetting. The COVID-19 pandemic presents a once-in-a-century opportunity for restoring a sense of awe and humility in relation to nature, as well as a collective reflection on how our social fabrics may have blinded us to addressing our existential needs. ...
Storytelling meets a fundamental human need, as narratives bring continuity, identity, and agency to an otherwise meaningless human experience. The retelling of stories not only facilitates connections but also allows new perspectives to emerge. Through a constructivist lens, we illustrate that The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story known in human history, has a great deal of relevance to present times, where the COVID-19 pandemic presents itself as a once-in-a century challenge to human societies across the globe. Using a narrative framework, we accentuate the necessary elements that facilitate the narrative reconstructions in face of grief and loss stemming from the pandemic, as informed by the heroic story. We discuss the implications pertinent to mental health practitioners as well as at the broader societal level.
The novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, authored by Katherine Anne Porter and published in 1939, is set against the backdrop of the 1918–1919 Spanish flu pandemic towards the end of World War I. It narrates the dual story of individual and societal trauma and survival amidst the pandemic, contributing to the cultural memory of that era in American history. The narrative draws heavily on autobiographical elements, with the protagonist Miranda’s experiences closely reflecting Porter’s own. As Miranda battles a life-threatening flu, her delirious mind traverses past, present, and future, blurring the boundaries between them. This paper examines Porter’s employment of modernist techniques such as dreams, visions, archetypes, biblical allusions, and stream of consciousness to articulate Miranda’s harrowing yet transformative passage through a liminal space between life and death. Porter’s novelistic approach is distinctly modern in its exploration of mortality and the portrayal of Miranda’s near-death experience, aligning her with modernist contemporaries like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, who also eschewed traditional literary forms to depict the profound dislocations of their time. The enduring appeal of Pale Horse, Pale Rider lies in its rich symbolism and psychological depth in addressing themes of death and illness.
The article explores Katherine Anne Porter’s existential concerns reflected in her fiction. Applying the tools of biographical and historical criticism as well as textual analysis, the study delves into the disintegrating apocalyptic fictional world of the American South in the tumult of the Great War and the Spanish influenza that constitutes a mirror of the author’s own personal tribulations in the context of social and personal upheavals. Strands of Existentialism represented by both Christian and atheist thinkers have been adopted as a background against which Modernist anxieties could be best understood and analyzed. The recurrent motif of time with its elusiveness and relativity tends to combine the seemingly dissimilar voices of selected Existentialists, fictional characters and the author herself in their search for truth, identity and meaning, emphasizing subjectivity as the essential element of cognition. As human anxieties are impossible to be encompassed and cast in the clearly defined borders, spiritual concerns outlined in the article tend to remain a riddle open to a multitude of explanations. However, indirect and implied inclinations towards Christian theology alluded to both in the writer’s works and life suggest the adoption of a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ by the existential sceptic into an orderly essentialism of the Catholic religion as a solution to all anxieties and uncertainties of life.
In pandemics, past and present, there is no textbook definition of when a pandemic is over, and how and when exactly a respiratory virus transitions from pandemic to endemic spread. In this paper we have compared the 1918/19 influenza pandemic and the subsequent spread of seasonal flu until 1924. We analysed 14,125 reports of newly stated 32,198 influenza-like illnesses from the Swiss canton of Bern. We analysed the temporal and spatial spread at the level of 497 municipalities, 9 regions, and the entire canton. We calculated incidence rates per 1000 inhabitants of newly registered cases per calendar week. Further, we illustrated the incidences of each municipality for each wave (first wave in summer 1918, second wave in fall/winter 1918/19, the strong later wave in early 1920, as well as the two seasonal waves in 1922 and 1924) on a choropleth map. We performed a spatial hotspot analysis to identify spatial clusters in each wave, using the Gi* statistic. Furthermore, we applied a robust negative binomial regression to estimate the association between selected explanatory variables and incidence on the ecological level. We show that the pandemic transitioned to endemic spread in several waves (including another strong wave in February 1920) with lower incidence and rather local spread until 1924 at least. At the municipality and regional levels, there were different patterns of spread both between pandemic and seasonal waves. In the first pandemic wave in summer 1918 the probability of higher incidence was increased in municipalities with a higher proportion of factories (OR 2.60, 95%CI 1.42-4.96), as well as in municipalities that had access to a railway station (OR 1.50, 95%CI 1.16-1.96). In contrast, the strong fall/winter wave 1918 was very widespread throughout the canton. In general, municipalities at higher altitude showed lower incidence. Our study adds to the sparse literature on incidence in the 1918/19 pandemic and subsequent years. Before Covid-19, the last pandemic that occurred in several waves and then became endemic was the 1918-19 pandemic. Such scenarios from the past can inform pandemic planning and preparedness in future outbreaks.
Thucydides’ detailed description of the Athenian plague, which is estimated to have killed from a quarter to a third of Athens’ population has been approached from a variety of scholarly perspectives, yet its memorializing function is still under-explored. This article contends that Thucydides’ plague episode serves an inherent commemorative function and memorializes the plague through narrative emphasis, pathos, ἐνάργεια, and his focus on abortive burial rites.
Loneliness and isolation were two factors introduced as “effective measures” during the COVID-19 crisis. The lockdown exacerbated loneliness among those already suffering from acute illnesses. In this context, a rereading of the film Lars and the Real Girl by Craig Gillespie is particularly relevant as it offers novel perspectives on loneliness. The interplay between Lars’s desire to be in a compassionate relationship and the fear of meeting and socializing is comparable to what was witnessed across the coronavirus-afflicted world. This paper explores the potential for understanding delusion caused by traumatic experiences as a form of communication rather than a mental disorder. The film explains how a silicone sex doll functions as a medium between the lonesome Lars and society in resolving the trauma. The paper focuses on the infantile nature of humans and uses infantilism in a conducive manner to understand anthropomorphism for bridging the gap between a lonely/delusional person and society while drawing examples from the film. The introduction of a nonhuman actor—an anatomically correct doll—becomes an opportunity for a traumatized person such as Lars to know himself well and gradually open up to socializing. As he moves from external to threshold en-rolling, followed by internal en-rolling, it indicates his opening up to communication as he moves from language to lalangue and creates his world with the doll. This film presents a therapeutic approach to treating schizoid personality disorder with the assistance of a nonhuman actor.
This article focuses on Katherine Anne Porter’s semiautobiographical modernist novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a rare example of literature with a direct reference to the Spanish flu pandemic during the World War I. The article first provides a brief overview of critical approaches to the novella, situating it in the literary plague canon, then focuses on the war and the pandemic as the external factors that are not shown only to change the face of the society, but also to deeply affect people’s minds. As the main protagonist Miranda falls ill with the influenza and enters a strenuous combat with the disease, the reader gains access to her subconscious through a series of dreams and deliriums that Miranda experiences during her illness. These will be analysed using Bion’s theory of dreams to show that they present Miranda’s affective response to the external reality as well as her capacity to digest the previously indigested emotions.
Laura Spinney, British science journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World observes that, “The Spanish Flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discreet, private tragedies.” The pandemic of 1918 was not memorialized like World War I which supervened at the same time as the Spanish Flu. It was soon relegated in public memory as the world emerged from the throes of the nightmarish war. Almost a century later, the world finds itself in the grip of yet another pandemic, the COVID-19. Similar situations of patients with multiple complex symptoms, heaving hospitals, shortage of doctors and nurses, scenes of patients left unattended, dealing with the guilt of infecting their family and friends and struggling to survive paints an apocalyptic scenario. This paper tries to explore a parallel among the two pandemics as it witnesses the tragic tale of a survivor of the Spanish Influenza in Katherine Anne Porter’s autobiographical short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” The private tragedies of physical deterioration, psychological delusions and social stigmatization also suffered by the COVID-19 survivors have been documented and blazoned all over news and social media. The design behind broadcasting these factual accounts are recognition of the reality of the virus (suspected and labelled fake on many occasions), awareness of the symptoms and understanding of the disease. These hopeful and optimistic narratives of the COVID survivors are a faint ray of hope in these bleak times.
Literature has always been impacted by the abject state of thought of humans existing in a particular time and era. A sense of meaning, or forging an explanation evinced within literature during the cataclysmic contemporary crisis of the pandemic, definitely resonates within the existentialistic paradigms. Not addressing the effects this humanitarian crisis has had on humans in literature is akin to being in a bubble of time and being immune to the devastation all around. The pandemic which is arguably one of the most horrific disasters of modern times has nearly irreversibly affected the outlook, imagination and thinking of humans. It will definitely have an irrefutable impact on the literary discourse of modern times. The interactions during a crisis of such proportions, the various texts, practices, the socio-economic and political repercussions have an indelible impact on the way the literature of that time is doled out as literature effectively represents the society and its sentiments in general. The essence of the present times is survival, with death gaping at all within close quarters and this is the root of an existential way of living which reflects in literature as well. This can be ascertained by introspecting pandemic literature of the past and the purpose of this paper is to analyze the resonance of existentialism in pandemic literature.
This article reads two early twentieth-century American novels, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937) and Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), in relation to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–19 and the history of public health. Beyond serving as a literary record of “America’s forgotten pandemic,” it interprets these novels as experiments in what I term “embodied sociality”: a biocultural model of social life encompassing both the abstract, symbolic dimensions of community belonging and the concrete, biological contours of collective living made visible through the spread of infectious disease. I argue that Swallows and Pale Horse challenge the logic of “modern health citizenship,” which prioritized personal hygiene measures to prevent the spread of influenza through a community, that was promoted in turn-of-the-century public health efforts. Instead, these novels destabilize perceptions of the body as a discrete and potentially impermeable entity, revealing how to belong to a community is to be susceptible to the unseen agents of disease that move between bodies in close proximity, as well as to be, albeit unwittingly, a potential carrier of disease. Attending to embodied sociality as made visible by the flu, these novels necessitate a new way of writing pandemic—one that blends the narrative conventions of plague writing and autopathography. In so doing, I contend, Pale Horse and Swallows invite us to reimagine embodiment and community belonging by holding the local and global, personal and political, individual and collective dimensions of pandemic together.
When we recognize pandemic as simultaneously individual and communal, the boundaries that differentiate proximal bodies from one another and from a collective social body blur. And this knowledge, in turn, transforms the way we write pandemic.
Over the past three decades since the publication of Gérard Genette’s Seuils(1987), studies on paratext have spread in different disciplines and in several literary fields. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the emergence of this pioneering work, an international conference held in Bologna and host many researchers questioning the relevance of the paratext. The thematic dossier of the current issue focuses on both the implications drawn from Seuils and its reception in our current literary and media landscape. The aim is to detect some advancements, differences and connections, on the one hand, between the sub-categories indicated in the text and, on the other hand, between the research strands that researchers have developed.
The traditional dismissive view of female identity characteristic of the strongly masculinised Scot-tish culture used to trap potential women artists into passivity. Alison Louise (A. L.) Kennedy seems to be suspended between extremes in responding either by silence or maddening eloquence. Ken-nedy’s short stories are multi-faceted, unpredictable organisms which relentlessly experiment with various means of expression and continually challenge the reader’s expectations. I have chosen only one of the facets, Kennedy’s use of silence in places that seem to call for explanation, silence as a bridge that may paradoxically lead to revealing a significant meaning in the form of epiphany. I have opted for her very first collection of short stories, Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (1990), to demonstrate that this unique narrative device is present and functional even in her early fiction.
Thucydides’ detailed description of the Athenian plague, which is estimated to have killed from a quarter to a third of Athens’ population and led to the breakdown of several social norms, has been approached from a variety of scholarly perspectives, yet its potential as a trauma narrative is still underexplored.
Drawing on comparative evidence from the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s fictionalized account Pale Horse, Pale Rider, this thesis examines the emotive and commemorative functions of Thucydides’ plague episode through the lens of trauma theory. By combining elements of personal narrative, literature, and historiography, Thucydides rendered the story of the Athenian plague into an aesthetic representation and thus provides a collective memorialization of the forgotten victims. I suggest that his vivid description (ἐνάργεια) of the immense suffering enabled his readers to empathetically engage with the traumatic event and thus work through their own trauma.
In 1918, a devastating world-wide influenza epidemic hit the United States. Killing over 600,000 Americans and causing the national death rate to jump 30% in a single year, the outbreak obstructed the country's participation in World War I and imposed terrible challenges on communities across the United States. This epidemic provides an ideal lens for understanding the history of infectious disease in the United States. The Flu Epidemic of 1918 examines the impact of the outbreak on health, medicine, government, and individual people's lives, and also explores the puzzle of Americans' decades-long silence about the experience once it was over. In a concise narrative bolstered by primary sources including newspaper articles, eye-witness accounts, and government reports, Sandra Opdycke provides undergraduates with an unforgettable introduction to the 1918 epidemic and its after-effects. Critical Moments in American History is a series of short texts designed to familiarize students with events or issues critical to the American experience. Through the use of narrative and primary documents, these books help instructors deconstruct an important moment in American history with the help of timelines, glossaries, textboxes, and a robust companion website.
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.”
“It is ironic that so much has been written about the biological mechanisms of traumatic psychological amnesia when the very existence of the phenomenon is in doubt.”
Do we forget the traumas we suffer, losing them in an amnesic haze, or do our moments of deepest pain remain available to us? This question drives Tim O’Brien’s 1994 novel, In the Lake of the Woods. In it, the Senate campaign of a Vietnam veteran named John Wade is derailed when word leaks that he was present at the My Lai massacre. Seeking escape after crushing political defeat, Wade and his wife Kathy retire to a remote lake house. Yet shortly after their arrival, Kathy vanishes, never to be found again. The novel’s drama is fueled by the fact that the nature of Wade’s involvement in each tragedy—the massacre in Vietnam and the disappearance of his wife—remains unclear. And this lack of clarity stems from the fact that he seems unable to accurately recall either event.
Psychologists call the inability to remember an intensely painful experience traumatic amnesia, and the concept was central to specialists’ understanding of trauma when Lake was published. (O’Brien directly quotes one of the great proponents of traumatic amnesia, Judith Herman, four times in the novel.) However, the suggestion that one may forget—or fail to accurately describe—trauma is also a foundational insight for the first wave of literary trauma theorists, among them Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman, and most importantly, Cathy Caruth.
It is a testament to Caruth’s over-size importance to trauma studies that Ruth Leys, in her 2001 “genealogy” of the field, devotes an entire chapter to Caruth’s work—as much as Freud. And though Caruth’s two books on the subject—Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) and Unclaimed Experience (1996)—were published almost two decades ago, her influence endures. In 2011, Cambridge University hosted a colloquium on her work, and in an essay published that same year, Jean Wyatt writes that trauma theory is still “dominated by the theoretical framework” that she introduced (31). For Caruth, trauma is an experience so intensely painful that the mind is unable to process it normally. In the immediate aftermath, the victim may totally forget the event. And if memories of the trauma return, they are often nonverbal, and the victim may be unable to describe them with words. Yet Caruth maintains that imaginative literature—or figural, rather than literal language—can “speak” trauma when normal, discursive language cannot, and fiction helps give a voice to traumatized individuals and populations. Hence, her theory of trauma is a ringing endorsement of the testimonial power of literature. Caruth builds that theory on the work of prominent contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists, most prominently Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk. In the mid-nineties, few clinicians were so influential in the field of trauma studies as this pair, and their work directly supports Caruth’s claims that trauma is amnesic and unspeakable. Because she constructed her critical edifice on a scientific foundation, her theory has long been resistant to critique, and this resistance contributes to her system’s enduring use value.
However, newer clinical studies of the psychology of trauma have challenged the theories on which Caruth relies. In 2003, Harvard’s Richard McNally released Remembering Trauma, a review of new research that has been widely viewed as a shot over the bow of the trauma studies establishment—and that is now essential reading for specialists. In it, McNally summarizes dozens of new studies—both his own and others’—that challenge some of the field’s sacred truths. Though his research is exhaustive, his central arguments are quickly summarized: traumatic amnesia is a myth, and while victims may choose not to speak of their traumas, there is little evidence that they cannot. While its importance for the field of psychology is crucial, McNally’s research also lays the groundwork for a critique of Caruth’s literary trauma theory. For McNally, unlike for Caruth, trauma is memorable and describable, and his...
Here’s what we already know—during the First World War, soldiers and civilians often had remarkably different experiences of the war corpse. Dead bodies were omnipresent on the front line and in the trenches, an inescapable constant for the living soldier. As critic Allyson Booth notes, “Trench soldiers . . . inhabited worlds constructed, literally, of corpses.” In Britain and America, however, such corpses were strangely absent; unlike in previous conflicts, bodies were not returned. This dichotomy underscores some of our central assumptions about the differences between the front line and the home front: in the trenches, dead bodies and the ever-present danger of becoming one; at home, the often haunting absence of bodies to mourn, though this mourning occurred in a place of relative safety. These assumptions miss, however, the sudden erosion of these distinctions in 1918, for in the autumn of that year, dead bodies were suddenly everywhere in Britain, in America, and across the globe; some neighborhoods had streets so full of corpses that no one was left alive to bury them. Death came swiftly and with such little warning that mass graves had to be prepared, and as one witness wrote, “Wood for the coffins ran out.” The influenza pandemic of 1918, which stretched its deathly fingers into 1919, was the most lethal plague in human history, killing somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide in an astonishingly condensed period. Yet despite inflicting five to ten times more causalities than the First World War, the flu was, for a time at least, seemingly forgotten. British and American literature rarely dwells on it, almost no memorials were built to mark its destruction, and until the last ten years, few historians had told its story; it certainly makes few appearances in modernist studies today.
This neglect, however, should not be taken to mean that the pandemic didn’t matter, or didn’t matter to modernism, or even that the flu was actually forgotten. The pandemic was the second great traumatic event of the early twentieth century, and even years later, survivors vividly remembered the experience. Modernist writers and painters themselves suffered from the ravages of the flu: Guillaume Apollinaire died; D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Edvard Munch barely survived; even T. S. Eliot felt his brain was affected by his bout with the illness. Our neglect of the pandemic arises, I argue, not because it was insignificant but because it became the shadowed twin to the war, a disaster as unprecedented in its casualties and in its suffering as the war, yet at times locked into a paradoxical relation with it. Because of the pandemic’s historical position right at the armistice as well as its unusual constellation of symptoms and aftereffects, it alternatively became a suspect rival to the “real” trauma of the Great War and (paradoxically) a loss too great to assimilate. Flu deaths were in part drowned out by war deaths, but also in part subsumed into the vast work of mourning that marks the postwar period and modernism itself. The flu’s shadowed position continues to hide the profound impacts of the pandemic. As scholars of modernism and modernity, however, we should explore the subtle ways the outbreak weaves itself into the fabric of modernism and begin to analyze rather than perpetuate the pervasive postwar evasion of the flu.
My investigation of the pandemic intervenes in two ongoing discussions in modernist studies. First, important recent works on modernism and mourning by critics such as Patricia Rae, Tammy Clewell, and others have explored how modernism is often marked by a refusal of traditional modes of consolation; mourning remains unresolved, in part functioning as a political protest against various aspects of the war. Quite naturally, these analyses of mourning are usually focused on war and political turmoil, certainly central sources of grief in the early twentieth century. The pandemic, however, adds a new dimension to the history of modernist mourning. While individuals certainly grieved over those lost to the flu, there were very few public displays of mourning, and there was little in the way of a conceptual framework or shared rituals or ceremonies, such as those that marked the war...
The history of the U.S. South is one undeniably littered with traumatic acts, laws, and legitimized behaviors: racially biased laws that relegated Blacks to the status of disposable bodies denied by White culture; the regulated, segregated spaces of Jim Crow; and brutal, repetitive acts of violence that include lynching, incest, rape, and murder. This essay assesses the role that trauma studies, as an interdisciplinary area of investigation that came to prominence in the early‐to‐mid‐1990s, has played in assessing the ways that injury is troped, represented, and repeated in southern literature and its criticism. This essay first outlines the history of trauma as a theory, drawing attention to the fissures within the concept as it has developed over time, while also surveying the surge of works published under this rubric. The essay then assesses how trauma studies, with its attention to the nuances of testimony, the interlocked nature of personal and political traumas, and the importance of collective and cultural perspectives, has come to influence criticism on the literature of the U.S. South.
The pandemic influenza virus of 1918–1919 killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide. With the recent availability
of the complete 1918 influenza virus coding sequence, we used reverse genetics to generate an influenza virus bearing all
eight gene segments of the pandemic virus to study the properties associated with its extraordinary virulence. In stark contrast
to contemporary human influenza H1N1 viruses, the 1918 pandemic virus had the ability to replicate in the absence of trypsin,
caused death in mice and embryonated chicken eggs, and displayed a high-growth phenotype in human bronchial epithelial cells.
Moreover, the coordinated expression of the 1918 virus genes most certainly confers the unique high-virulence phenotype observed
with this pandemic virus.
Despite substantial work in a variety of disciplines, substantive areas, and geographical contexts, social memory studies is a nonparadigmatic, transdisciplinary, centerless enterprise. To remedy this relative disorganization, we (re-)construct out of the diversity of work addressing social memory a useful tradition, range of working definitions, and basis for future work. We trace lineages of the enterprise, review basic definitional disputes, outline a historical approach, and review sociological theories concerning the statics and dynamics of social memory.