Reading Illness from “The Dead Cold Light of Tomorrow”: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Times of COVID-19

Abstract

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.

Full text

171
REBECA GUALBERTO VALVERDE
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
rgualberto@filol.ucm.es
miscelánea 66 (2022): pp. 171-190 ISSN: 1137-6368 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20227360
READING ILLNESS FROM THE
“THE DEAD COLD LIGHT OF TOMORROW”:
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER’S PALE HORSE,
PALE RIDER IN THE TIMES OF COVID-19
LEYENDO LA ENFERMEDAD DESDE
“LA LUZ MUERTA Y FRÍA DEL MAÑANA”:
PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER DE KATHERINE ANNE
PORTER EN LOS TIEMPOS DE LA COVID-19
Abstract
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.
Keywords: Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, COVID-19, 1918
influenza, medical humanities.

Rebeca Gualberto Valverde
miscelánea 66 (2022): pp. 171-190 ISSN: 1137-6368 DOI: https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20227360
172
Resumen
Este trabajo sugiere una revisión de Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), el texto
semiautobiográfico de Katherine Anne Porter en el que la autora relata su
experiencia próxima a la muerte cuando fue víctima de la pandemia de gripe de
1918. La obra está considerada como la más relevante entre las que se ocupan de
dicha pandemia en la tradición estadounidense, y este trabajo se sirve de esa historia
crítica del texto, centrada en gran parte en explorar las intersecciones entre ficción
y memoria, para trasladar no obstante el foco crítico hacia la experiencia de lectura
en el momento presente, con el objetivo de ofrecer una nueva perspectiva que
aclare algunos de los misterios del texto original. En un contexto en el que nuestra
propia experiencia traumática durante la pandemia de la COVID-19 ha
desenterrado la memoria cultural de la gripe de 1918, este estudio examina las
incertidumbres y ambigüedades de la narración de Porter, investigando la hipótesis
de que la lectura contemporánea de Pale Horse, Pale Rider sirve para decodificar
parte de la indeterminación modernista de la obra, ofreciendo así la posibilidad de
trascender las limitaciones en torno al uso del lenguaje y del mito en el texto para
construir nuevos significados a partir de la memoria compartida.
Palabras clave: Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, COVID-19, gripe
de 1918, humanidades médicas.
1. Introduction
In the year 2020, as our world trembled under the devastating effects of the
COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and media outlets turned their gaze back to the
deadliest pandemic of the 20th century, the 1918 influenza pandemic, in search of
answers and elusive certainties. As scientists quickly noted, these two cases of viral
infection followed a different pattern of disease (Javelle and Raoult 2020), but they
seemed to share certain epidemiological characteristics in terms of how the viruses
were believed to be transmitted and how fast they spread (He et al. 2020: 67).
Perhaps more interestingly for this study, however, it was found that accounts of
influenza patients from a hundred years ago seemed to echo in the stories of
respiratory failure of COVID-19 sufferers today (Weber and Culler Freeman 2020).
These coincidences led to the assumption that there might be some lessons to be
learned from past epidemics, specifically those related to the application of common
policies of public closure and social distancing, measures followed in a desperate
attempt to contain the spread of the virus. Of course, to determine whether this
looking at the past for guidance in a time of fear and loss is a wise decision when
making scientific or political decisions is far beyond the scope of this article. The

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aim of this study is to explore how the contemporary revisiting of an illness narrative
of the flu pandemic of 1918 contributes to shaping the meaning of such a tale,
while simultaneously helping to soothe our own pandemic anxiety. For, as will be
argued, such a revisitation renders the experiences of reading and remembering
inextricable, which in turn allows the contemporary reader to envision and
understand the experience of a collective trauma that was mostly forgotten, in fact
almost unknown, but which has so recently become uncannily familiar.
This paper suggests a new assessment of Katherine Anne Porter’s semi-
autobiographical account of her near-death experience with the 1918 flu, Pale
Horse, Pale Rider, published in 1939. Considered to be “the most significant
American literary work set during the pandemic” (Davis 2011: 56), Porter’s short
novel fictionalizes the author’s personal trauma as an influenza survivor. It is a
“work of memory” (59), but it manages to bridge the personal and the collective
to create “a memory that connects her personal experience to the experience of
millions of other victims, that connects the survivors to the dead, and that connects
the past to the present” (59). The aim of this article is precisely to critically probe
those connections and to relate Porter’s fictionalized, aestheticized trauma to our
contemporary reading experience in a context in which dormant memories of the
1918 influenza pandemic were awakened by our own fear of getting sick and our
hopes of finding in the past the answers to the questions of our own traumatic
survival. As this study will attempt to demonstrate, our contemporary response to
Porter’s novella intersects with the modernist uncertainties of the text, raising the
possibility of finding meaning and recovery in a personal reconstruction of an
almost lost cultural memory.
2. Unearthing Memories of a Pandemic
As the First World War was coming to an end in 1918, Katherine Anne Porter was
working in Denver as a reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. At this time, she
came very close to dying of influenza (Platizky 2014: 1), to the point that, as she
herself wrote, “they gave me up. The paper had my obit set in type. I’ve seen the
correspondence between my father and sister on plans for my funeral” (in Hendrick
1965: 76). Her novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, published over twenty years later,
tells the story of Miranda, a reviewer for a Denver newspaper who, like Porter, falls
terribly sick with the virus. Miranda narrowly escapes death at the end of the story,
but the man she loves —Adam, a young soldier waiting to be deployed once the
sanitary emergency allows it— tragically dies after nursing her, having most
probably been infected while taking care of her. The narrative, as criticism has long
established, dexterously combines memory and fiction as it mixes separate events

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apparently related to Porter’s own illness. As Laurel Bollinger notes, Porter’s
biographers’ assumptions about the historicity of the text have shifted gradually
(2013: 368). 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) and Caroline 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:
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 her rooming house, so the newspaper’s city editor finagled her admission to an
overcrowded hospital. She ran a 105° fever while lying on a gurney in a hallway for
nine days. Her doctors expected her to die, the newspaper drafted her obituary, and
her family made arrangements for the burial, but an experimental injection of
strychnine helped her to recover from the virus. When she fell ill, Porter had been
seeing a young soldier, Lieutenant Alexander Barclay. While she was hospitalized, he
contracted influenza and died. (2011: 57)
Davis’s conclusion after reading Givner’s biography is that Pale Horse, Pale Rider
“testifies to Porter’s own personal trauma narrative” (2011: 57). Not published
until 1939, the text constitutes in this view an attempt at recovery after trauma,
achieved through the creation of “an identity that incorporates the pre-traumatic
identity with the traumatic experience” (58). In this process, as Davis notes,
“memory plays a critical role in the recovery process as a connection between the
original identity and the post-traumatic identity” (58). This critical view of post-
traumatic writing is certainly insightful when analyzing Porter’s novella on its own,
but it becomes indispensable when exploring our contemporary response to the
text, as Porter’s personal memory offers a vibrant, mysterious testimony of our
own lost cultural memory of the influenza pandemic at a time when we are
searching for our own path to recovery.
The biographical events traceable in Porter’s novella —epidemic outbreaks and
peaks, hospitals filled beyond capacity, fear of infection, threats of eviction, patients
lying in gurneys in a hallway, experimental treatments, etc.— may certainly be the
subject of a critical debate around the veracity of Porter’s autobiographical
narrative. Bollinger, for instance, claims that biographical approaches to the text
should not be taken at face value since the author was, in her words, “notoriously
unreliable” when discussing her life (2013: 366). However, whether or not these
plot details correspond squarely to Porter’s life events, it is undeniably true that

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they all resounded loudly in the immediate experience of readers in the year 2020,
as they struggled to overcome the fear and pain of the COVID-19 pandemic. The
interplay of fiction and memory thus shifts slightly, while the value of Porter’s tale
as a “witness narrative” becomes clear, as the novella “amplifies the testimonial
abilities of self-representation to bear witness” (Gilmore 2011: 83). Through the
prism of contemporary readers’ potential response to the text, the point is no
longer just a matter of aestheticized personal trauma as a possible path to individual
recovery; the issue broadens to encompass the reconstruction of a lost cultural
memory that offers a connection between a collective traumatic past and a shared
present trauma, offering thus the chance of communal restoration. In her seminal
work on limit-case autobiographies —that is, texts that combine, among others,
elements of autobiography, fiction, or history— Leigh Gilmore writes that
“remembering trauma entails contextualizing it within history”, because “trauma
is never exclusively personal” (2001: 31). The relevance of Pale Horse, Pale Rider
as a witness narrative is thus undeniable, as Porter’s fictional alter ego functions as
the literary witness of a historical phenomenon in a self-representational dynamic
that “conjoins the one whose experience propels the telling, the one who brings
the story out by receiving it, and the mode of carrying the narrative to other
witnesses” (Gilmore 2011: 79). Porter’s witnessing of the pandemic becomes a
shared experience in the process of reading because, as Davis argues, “in a work of
literature, unlike a history text, the reader can partially share the traumatic
experience” (2011: 62). In the context of COVID-19, then, once established that
Porter’s text functions as “a narrative that empathetically communicates the
pandemic’s trauma to the reader” (62), it seems reasonable to argue that such an
empathetic energy is only exacerbated in our current reading experience, as we
deliberately look at the past to make sense of a very similar traumatic present.
As this paper is being written, in the first half of 2022, after two years of living
through the COVID-19 global pandemic, the specificities of Porter’s personal
illness narrative —even if partly fictionalized in what Bollinger describes as a
“fusion of observation and mythos” (2013: 387)— have become extraordinarily
familiar. The similarities between Porter’s autobiographical account of surviving
the influenza pandemic of 1918 and our very recent experience with COVID-19
may seem obvious now, but the immediate connection between the two epidemics
is highly paradoxical, since, as scholars have underlined in recent years, the 1918
influenza pandemic had virtually disappeared from our collective memory until the
threat of an infectious epidemic began to rise at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. It was during the threat of the swine flu in 2009 when, as Davis writes,
“scientists, epidemiologists, and government officials worldwide [looked] to the
1918 pandemic as a worst-case scenario as they developed contingency response
plans” to mitigate a potential public health disaster (2011: 55-56).

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The worst-case scenario was confirmed in the spring of 2020 when, on March 11,
the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus disease outbreak a
global pandemic. Once again, almost immediately, scientists and government
officials turned their gaze to the 1918 flu pandemic in search of answers and
strategies of containment. Very soon afterwards, in May 2020, scientists had
already noticed, in comparing our social and political response to the new
coronavirus with historical records of the 1918 flu, “coincidences both in the
general unpreparedness, in the attitudes of the population and the authorities, and
in the different strategies between central and peripheral authorities” (Franchini et
al. 2020: 249). Only two months after the outbreak was declared a pandemic, it
was clear then that our immediate response had been shaped by our looking back
over a hundred years to a deadly influenza pandemic we had almost completely
forgotten. We knew, however, that the striving to contain infection in 1918
entailed public recommendations such as wearing a mask, increasing personal
hygiene, disinfecting public spaces, closing the schools, or preventing overcrowding.
Those recommendations became our guidelines, and it was soon noted that “all
measures adopted in 2020 were the same in 1918-1919, with the same sequence
of progression, uncertainties, early loosening and hasty reversals” (249). Beyond
the scope of social measures to contain the virus, however, scientists also looked
back to the flu pandemic in search of medical information for, as Antonia Franchini
and others explain, “even from a scientific point of view all the elements had
already been understood” (249).
In th is regard, for example, it is par ticularly i llustrative to consider how Boll inger,
in 2013, analyzes the description of Miranda’s sickness and Adam’s death in
Porter’s novella as the consequence of an immune system response (2013: 380),
the ‘cytokine storm’ that unfortunately has become so well known among the
general public in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it has for a time
dominated scientific discourse and scientific journalism.1 According to historian
John Barry, cytokine storms were responsible for over half of the secondary-
infection deaths that occurred during the flu pandemic (2004: 251-252). Once
again, the interplay of meanings between Porter’s fictionalized memoir and
our contemporary reading experience is bidirectional: Porter’s narrative offers
a clear imaginative reconstruction for this invisible, life-threatening enemy of
today; and today’s scientific knowledge contributes to closing the meanings
in Porter’s enigmatic narration. Because, in fact, the uncertainties in Porter’s
novella —which will be discussed further on— eloquently express the terrifying
confusion caused by the 1918 flu, which was unusually virulent, killing young,
previously healthy people in a matter of days or hours, something that medical
science at the time could not quite explain, as medics were less knowledgeable
of the workings of the immune system (Bollinger 2013: 380). Today we know,

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as Barry explains, that “in 1918 the immune system of young adults mounted
massive responses to the virus. That immune response filled the lungs with
fluid and debris, making it impossible for the exchange of oxygen to take place.
The immune response killed” (2004: 250). Bollinger traces the symptoms
of this cytokine storm in Porter’s text through an examination of Miranda’s
headaches and fever dreams. The effect is that Miranda’s sickness resonates in
the immediate experience and imagination of contemporary readers. It offers
a familiar and visible illustration of a medical explanation for which we know
the technical term, but that remains an enigma in terms of its bodily effects for
so many who survived the devastating first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic
without suffering the sickness in their own flesh.
3. Narrating Illness in a Pandemic
Porter’s novella, then, offers an imaginative response for our contemporary
uncertainties. It provides a literary reconstruction of a pandemic that was almost
forgotten, a hidden collective trauma that was only unearthed when the threat of
a new catastrophe began to be suspected in the early 2000s, after the concatenation
of several epidemic threats. The seemingly imminent danger of various widespread
viral outbreaks caused first by the SARS virus (2002), then by avian influenza
(2005) and, finally, by the swine flu (2009), led to what Rachel Bracken has
defined as “the early-2000s flu boom”, which triggered a “pandemic turn in
literary studies” (2021: 110). It was in this moment, as collective fear pushed us to
remember the lost memories of the 1918 influenza and we decided, “suddenly,
and probably selfishly”, that we wanted to know more (Belling 2009: 57), when
critics started pondering why an event as deadly as that pandemic had fallen so
easily into oblivion until a health emergency of catastrophic dimensions forced us
to look back.
Elizabeth Outka, in her extremely timely 2020 book Viral Modernism, attempts to
investigate the literary silence around an event that “killed between 50 and 100
million people” (2020: 1). She hypothesizes that the flu was “drowned out by its
overwhelming scope, by the broader ways outbreaks of disease are often muted,
and by the way the human-inflicted violence of the time consumed cultural and
literary attention” (2). A few years earlier, Belling had argued something similar,
that “narration falters when multitudes of subjects are affected at once by painful
events that disrupt the secure frameworks of normality against which individual
suffering is usually measured” (2009: 57). In this regard, she claimed, the flu
“overwhelmed language” (57) —an argument similar to Gilmore’s hypothesis that
“cultural memory, like individual memory, develops characteristic and defensive

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amnesia with which those who have experienced trauma must contend” (2001:
31). For others, such as Davis, collective memory is subject to political agendas,
which would explain why the war’s political significance dwarfed the flu’s social
significance (2011: 63). Also, on quite a different note, the historian Alfred Crosby
argued that the pandemic was “so thoroughly forgotten” because in 1918 lethal
epidemics were not unexpected and therefore “not as impressive […] as they
would be today, at least in the technologically advanced nations” (2003: 319). At
a time when epidemics of typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, or cholera were
common, the 1918 flu simply had a larger impact, so “the contrast was one of
degree, not of kind” (319).
This last hypothesis may not be absolutely right but, while arguments such as
Belling’s shed light upon the modernist context that shaped Porter’s narration,
Crosby’s explanation offers a very eloquent insight into our present response to
Porter’s text. In 2020, the shock we were facing was one of both degree and kind.
Some of the most technologically advanced nations in the world were suddenly
brought to a stop and hundreds of millions were forced into lockdowns as they,
isolated in their homes, tried to come to terms with the devastating experience of
living through a viral catastrophe that, as of now, has caused almost five hundred
and thirty million registered cases and over six million confirmed casualties (Dong,
Du and Gardner 2020).2 As Mark Honigsbaum wrote as early as spring 2020,
while recording COVID-19 data as the outbreak was quickly spreading worldwide,
the impact of the pandemic was especially forceful in the United States and in
Europe, where the speed and severity of contagion shattered the complacency and
punctured the hubris of scientists and politicians alike, who had initially claimed
that the virus was no worse than a common flu, only to discover, when it was too
late, that the new coronavirus spread more rapidly than seasonal flu and was twenty
times more lethal, killing at the time around two per cent of confirmed cases —
approximately the same mortality rate as the 1918 influenza (2020: Chapter 10).
We were confronted with that shock while locked down at home, anguished and
confused, terrified of contagion, keeping away from friends and relatives, and
mourning the deaths of thousands who passed away in extreme loneliness and fear.
At a time like this, turning our gaze to Porter’s illness narrative of suffering and
surviving a similar tragedy may open for the reader an invaluable source of
meaning, because it allows access to an empathetic memory of a shared trauma. As
Davis argues, Porter’s fictionalized autopathography3 —“essentially the urtext of
1918-1919 influenza pandemic” (Bracken 2021: 109)— “bridges the separation
between memory and history, acting both as a personal document recording the
event and as an imaginative proxy for the reader” (Davis 2011: 66). As a result,
Porter’s novella solves the problem explained by Belling (2009: 57) of narration
faltering when a multitude of subjects are affected by a tragedy that disrupts their

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framework of normalcy and leaves them with no alternative but silence as a
response to collective trauma. We as readers are facing that silence now, and Pale
Horse, Pale Rider fills it by constructing a narration that demarcates the experience
of illness so that we can imagine it against our old framework of normalcy.
In practical terms, to properly understand how illness is re-imagined in Porter’s
semi-autobiographical narrative, Outka’s very recent study is particularly useful, as
she guides the process of reading by clearly dividing the novella in four
distinguishable parts that facilitate critical examination. As delineated by Outka,
Porter divides her story into four parts: a hallucinatory opening that suggests how
the pandemic disrupted temporal and spatial realities and the sense of a coherent
self; a realist section that depicts life at a city newspaper and the relationship of one
of the young reporters —Miranda— and her soldier boyfriend, Adam, who is about
to go off to the war; a delirium-infused section describing Miranda’s battle with the
virus; and a grim return to realism as the Armistice arrives and the plague persists.
(2020: 52-53)
It is clearly observable that these four parts oscillate between the conventions of
realist fiction, which are generally used to depict the conditions of health, and an
anti-realist style —more easily identifiable with the experimental narrative
techniques of modernist prose— that Outka describes as “hallucinatory” and
“delirium-infused”, and which seems to better express the experience of this illness
(2020: 52-53). This circumstance seems to corroborate Belling’s statement that
“modernism gave the disease […] its language” (2009: 64). Yet, it is no less true
that revisiting Porter’s short novel from our own pandemic reality entails an
interest in both narrative outlooks. Confronting disease from the outside
perspective of the healthy allows a clearer view of the social, political, and cultural
impact of the pandemic, which might allow us to better confront our own fear of
infection and to process the overwhelming shock of such a worldwide catastrophe.
On the other hand, the immersive reading process of a first-person narration of
bodily suffering —Miranda’s delirious monologues, despite their nightmarish
nature, are also “recognizably embedded in the corporeal experiences of fever and
infection” (65)— might also contribute to an empathetic understanding of
pandemic bodies. It allows a more profound imaginative involvement with the
victims, which itself connects the survivors and the dead, the sick and the well, and
the individual suffering to the collective distress experienced by the whole
community. Of course, the delimitations between narrating the experience of the
sick and the experience of the well are not —perhaps cannot be— completely clear-
cut in a living witness narrative about surviving a pandemic, which makes the
hallucinatory dream that opens Porter’s narrative particularly interesting from the
point of view of understanding this shared experience of living through a plague.

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According to Outka, this “disorienting dream sequence” (2020: 53) unsettles the
demarcations of place and time (52), which, for us, beyond illustrating the
debilitating bodily experience of suffering fever dreams, also provides imaginative
insight into the unfamiliar and overwhelming reality of enduring months of
lockdowns and quarantines. But also, the episode in Porter’s text reconstructs
both personal and collective trauma. It introduces a female sleeper lying on a bed
that is both her own and a different bed from the one on which she had lain down
a few hours before. With her heart turned to stone and “lying upon her breast
outside of her” (Porter 2011: 314), this third-person character —“she knew that
something strange was going to happen” (314)— quickly adopts the position of a
first-person narrator: “Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet” (314).
This confusion of personhood, of being simultaneously inside and outside one’s
own consciousness, mirrors the coalescence of life and death that characterizes the
woman’s alertness, on the one hand, and the stony heart lying lifeless atop her
chest, on the other. This discontinuation forces an awkward but inextricable
attachment between the delirious mind and the seriously ill body, as the sleeper
dreams of outrunning “that lank greenish stranger” that was welcomed by “my
grandfather, my great-aunt, my five times removed cousin, my decrepit hound and
my silver kitten” (314). He is the pale rider of the title, who has killed many
before; a mythical construction of the pandemic that, as well-established by
Porter’s critics, alludes to the fourth horse of the Apocalypse, ridden by Death,
and described in the Book of Revelation (Bollinger 2013: 370). The sleeper
valiantly confronts the rider, shouting: “I’m not going with you this time —ride
on” (Porter 2011: 315). The stranger obeys and, as the sleeper approaches
wakefulness, she struggles to reconnect her unbridled consciousness and her ailing
body, the hallucinatory dream evaporating slowly as it merges with the first physical
symptoms of her disease: “[Her horse’s] ribs heaved under her, her own ribs rose
and fell, Oh, why am I so tired, I must wake up” (315).
In Outka’s analysis, this opening scene expresses “the sense of dislocation and
body estrangement the virus caused”, at the same time as it encapsulates “some of
the iconic features of pandemic deathbed scenes […]: the hallucinatory experience
of delirium, the disruption of place and time, the domestic space as the arena for
death, and a twilight atmosphere where life and death blur together” (2020: 53-
54). Such an iconic representation of a near-death experience allows us to
comprehend the imagined experience of an individual’s sickness. Like the myth of
the pale rider, it connects personal experience with our collective imagination,
which makes it familiar and relatable. Yet, the dreamlike passage also illustrates the
collective experience of living through a pandemic and connects us to the whole of
the affected community. As she is lying in bed, the sleeper reflects that “too many
have died in this bed already, there are far too many ancestral bones propped up on

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the mantelpieces” (Porter 2011: 314). Too many have died, and the sleeper is
connected to all of them. Outka notices that the emphasis on how death stalks the
domestic space and the sweeping feeling of grief that assaults the character in this
moment express how loss, in the context of a pandemic, is experienced through
grief and fear (2020: 54). Porter’s illness narrative, then, permits a sympathetic
understanding of the individual experience of sickness for the healthy, but it also
enables a connection with a shared experience of collective trauma that transcends
the reader’s individuality. The character’s individual suffering is described through
references that are charged with meaning through a contemporary experience of
communal loss and collective fear. For Davis, Porter’s story functions as what
Alison Landsberg has termed “prosthetic memory”, that is, a form of memory that
“emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the
past” (2004: 2). Davis argues that a prosthetic memory can only simulate the
experience of an event in a limited way, yet is very ef fective to transmit an experience
between subjects (2011: 66). In 2020, Porter’s prosthetic memory, that is, her
simulation of the pandemic event, became increasingly real as readers were living
through an equally traumatizing situation. The transmission of the experience
between subjects inevitably reached then a point of high intensity that was optimal
for assigning and completing meanings in Porter’s narration.
4. Finding Meaning for a Pandemic
One of the reasons why reading Porter’s novella feels uncanny —in the sense of “a
peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle 2003: 1)— has to do
with how the text carefully observes the nature of the flu, as Porter “traces with
all-but-scientific precision the flu’s impact on the human body” (Bollinger 2013:
379). The narrative traces the course of Miranda’s sickness from the fever dreams
that open the story to the suffering of headaches, pains and shortness of breath
that carry Miranda to the ominous realization that “something terrible is going to
happen to me” (Porter 2011: 335). Soon after Miranda accepts that she has
contracted influenza, the text descends into the illusive depiction of Miranda’s
delirious suffering, but once again Porter’s fictionalized recollection of her
experience with the flu does not allow a clear demarcation that separates individual
disease and collective trauma. Run-on sentences express a confusion between
memory and delirium as Miranda remembers a landscape of warmth from her past,
when suddenly a sailing ship and a jungle materialize at the foot of her bed:
[…] her memory turned and roved after another place she had known first and loved
best, that now she could see only in drifting fragments of palm and cedar, dark
shadows and a sky that warmed without dazzling […] The walls shelved away in one

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deliberate silent movement on either side, and a tall sailing ship was moored nearby
[…] Back of the ship was jungle, and even as it appeared before her, she knew it was
all she had ever read or had been told or felt or thought about jungles; a writhing
terribly alive and secret place of death, creeping with tangles of spotted serpents,
rainbow-colored birds with malign eyes, leopards with humanly wise faces and
extravagantly crested lions; screaming long-armed monkeys tumbling among broad
fleshy leaves that glowed with sulphur-colored light and exuded the ichor of death,
and rotting trunks of unfamiliar trees sprawled in crawling slime. (Porter 2011: 344)
Miranda’s feverish delirium transforms conscious memory —“Oh, no, I must have
warmth” (Porter 2011: 344)— into an unconscious nightmare not shaped, as
memory, from fragments of her experience, but from pieces of knowledge acquired
through a linguistic, that is, symbolic construction of reality: she dreams up the
jungle as she has read it, or been told about it. Her feelings and thoughts of what
this mythological jungle looks like come from learned information, from collective
imagination, which transforms Miranda’s personal experience of being sick into an
easily identifiable cultural icon, a myth, a cultural fabrication shared by character
and readers. As Belling notes, we assume that Porter’s account of surviving the flu
is autobiographical because we know she suffered the disease, but “this cannot
mean that she has simply recorded, as a self-witness, her own unmediated
experience” because “we all learn our discourses, even down to the voice in which
we offer our most private testimonies” (2009: 67). The passage of the mythological
jungle clearly demonstrates Belling’s point that, in a biocultural dialectic, “texts
and illness construct each other” and thus the layers of memory that construct
Pale Horse, Pale Rider are memories not only of being ill but also “of reading
about being ill” (67). As she elaborates, narrative can never “reproduce the
subjective habitation of the past —and especially the perpetually deflected
habitation of trauma— as factual material”, so instead “it works by displacing the
inexpressible into the texture of writing” (67). Hence language, in shaping a
textual, mythical configuration of the jungle, constructs the bridge between
Porter’s autobiographical narrative and the readers’ empathetic understanding of
the story. It offers a familiar text, a relatable construction of meaning, which
demonstrates Gilmore’s point about the importance of fiction to autobiography
(2001: 24). As she argues, invention and imagination make self-representation
possible, while “the assertion of creativity” overcomes the silence imposed by
trauma (24). An autobiographical narrative such as Porter’s, modelled against the
structures and references of myth, constitutes then a “limit-case” autobiographical
account where “the constitutive vagaries of memory and trauma are asserted”
(43). However, the familiar meanings that shape Porter’s memoir ultimately
collapse because, if modernism provides a kind of language that may better express
the conditions of illness, it is undeniable that Pale Horse, Pale Rider also expresses

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inevitable concerns of modernism: indeterminacy and suspicion with regards to
the reliability of language as a tool to know and understand reality. As will be
addressed, this circumstance becomes especially relevant when Miranda imagines
the mythological jungle, because that mythical space configures “a secret place of
death” (Porter 2011: 344).
In relation to this, it is crucial to consider the title of the novella, which comes
from an old spiritual that Miranda and Adam sing as she lies sick in bed, and he
nurses her. She begins to sing, “Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away
[…]” (Porter 2011: 349), and asks Adam if he knows the next line. He replies that
there is much more to it, about forty verses, in which “the rider done taken away
mammy, pappy, brother, sister, the whole family besides the lover—” (349).
Adam’s words recall Miranda’s first dream, when she reflected that too many had
died already in the bed where she lay, in a house full of ancestral bones. In this
moment, individual suffering is once again inextricable from the collective trauma
of a pandemic, and Miranda’s much considered reflection that the rider has not yet
taken the singer, because “Death always leaves one singer to mourn” (349),
conveys with great eloquence the functionality —and limitations— of Porter’s
illness story as a tool for communal remembrance and healing. As the sole survivor,
the singer/Miranda will become the mourner of those who perished; her purpose
will be to complete the song that will serve as a memento for the tragedy. But as
Gary Ciuba notes, Miranda —and Porter— cannot replicate in their own terms the
old spiritual once heard in the Texas cotton fields, because such a mourning song
“is founded on a transcendent view of language and death that no longer seems
possible in the waste land of 1918” (1996: 57). This means to say that Miranda
—and Porter— cannot easily create a meaningful song of mourning and memory,
because they inhabit “the immanence that defines the modernist understanding of
mortality and rhetoric” (57). Miranda, by surviving, embodies the singer of the
spiritual that provides a frame of reference for Porter’s narrative, and insofar as
Miranda stands in as Porter’s fictional alter ego, the novella itself stands as a
mourner’s song, as evidence that, as Gilmore argues, “autobiographical and
literary texts can and do constitute public mourning, expand the limits of what it
means to acknowledge and grieve the losses of history, and offer a traumatic
witness capable not only of injury but also of speech” (2011: 83). Yet the
overarching mythical paradigm that offers a solid meaning for the old spiritual,
that is, the Book of Revelation, biblical allusion, and, finally, the possibility of
accessing sacred meaning through language, inevitably collapses in Porter’s post-
traumatic speech. It happens precisely through what Bollinger defines as a “fusion
of the personal and the mythic” that “cannot offer a reconciliation that creates
meaning”, opening instead a gap of significance that reveals “the inability of the
mythic to offer meaning in the modern world” (2013: 386).

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For Bollinger, the fusion of autobiography and fiction in Pale Horse, Pale Rider
creates a gap of meaning precisely because of how the personal experience of illness
replaces (and cannot adopt) the preset structures of meaning contained in myth,
which are, instead, contradicted. As she argues, Porter’s careful observation of the
flu, its symptoms, and its social impact “precludes the comfort and certainty her
apocalyptic vision might otherwise have offered, bringing into tension the
meaning-making function of narrative and the more accidental quality of lived
experience” (Bollinger 2013: 379). After Miranda’s near-death experience, she is
left feeling numb and depressed. Her thoughts are captured in the words that close
the novella: “no more war, no more plague, only the dazed silence that follows the
ceasing of the heavy guns; noiseless houses with the shades drawn, empty streets,
the dead cold light of tomorrow” (Porter 2011: 363). The expectations of
transcendence derived from the religious configuration of her fever dreams is here
thwarted, which is explained by the evidence that, as Barry demonstrates, the
influenza virus affected the brain, causing serious mental disturbances and
psychoses, as was immediately noted by contemporary observers (2004: 378). As
Crosby points out, the story of Miranda’s illness and survival ends “with an
expression of the emptiness of victory over the Germans and over disease”, which
is “an evocation of the crushing depression that so often followed Spanish
influenza” (2003: 318). Apocalyptic revelation, expected after the set of mythical
allusions that give shape to Porter’s text, dissolves into a clinical representation of
one more flu symptom: one more example in which the personal experience of
disease tears down the mythical architecture of the text. But also, as is worth
exploring, the textual shape of reference and allusion in the novella contributes
itself to the dismantling of such mythical certainty.
As argued so far, Porter turns to the mythic to encase her fictionalized, limit-case
autopathography within the framework of biblical allusion, shaping the central
imagery of her story as a counterpart to the old spiritual that Adam and Miranda
recall. This circumstance should provide for the survivor’s tale a source of meaning
and structure, which in turn would serve the author (and the protagonist) as a tool
for processing trauma, operating in consequence for the reader as a mechanism
that, through familiarity, facilitates empathy and understanding. However, as
discussed, myth as a stable source of meaning fails when confronted with the
protagonist’s first-person experience of illness. But it also collapses through a
complex system of crossed references that, as typically found in the modernist
zeitgeist, challenge straightforward representation. The pale rider of the title, the
fourth horse of the Apocalypse, described as ridden by Death in the Book of
Revelation, refers to the rider that appears in Miranda’s dream at the beginning of
the novella, but he is also alluded to, in a double-layered —or tripled-layered—
system of references, through the old hymn that Miranda and Adam sing and

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through the title of the story, which offers a set framework for the novella itself as
Porter’s own song of mourning. Mythical allusion thus multiplies. It is intradiegetic,
extradiegetic, structural, symbolic, and even paratextual. Successive references to
the biblical source are superimposed, which separates the sacred meaning of the
scriptures from the narrative, drawing attention to the crossed references
themselves, that is, to the textual matter of Porter’s text. Words are disconnected
from a sacred meaning they can no longer incarnate. They are tangled in a closed
network of interrelated references that conveys, in Bollinger’s terms, “the resistance
to […] meaning implicit in the world view of the modern era [Porter]
commemorates” (2013: 379).
Ciuba notes that, as Miranda attempts to remember the lyrics of the spiritual, she
does not do so as an expression of religious faith, but as an exercise of memory, as
she tries to keep herself from falling unconscious (1996: 61). She clings to the words
for their familiarity, not for their sacred significance, which, for Ciuba, certifies that,
in the story, “words only matter as matter” (61). This becomes obvious as Miranda
faces death, a moment of (un)consciousness that is presented, precisely, as an
awareness of the “emptiness of language” (64). In what Ciuba defines as “a vision of
language as solidly representational”, Miranda imagines death in spatial terms,
defining words as ‘oblivion’ and ‘eternity’ through “sensate images” (64). ‘Oblivion’
is described as a “whirlpool of gray water” and ‘eternity’ as “more than the distance
to the farthest star” (Porter 2011: 356). Miranda envisions herself “on a narrow
ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless”, as “she strained back against a
reassuring wall of granite at her shoulders” (356). In that moment, as she
comprehends that “soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains
hung before nothing at all” (356), she understands that “that is death” (356). Ciuba
explains this understanding of death as “an image for the end of the images that
verify her words, for language emptied of transcendence significance” (1996: 64-
65). If, as Belling observes, narrative necessarily displaces memory into the “texture
of writing” (2009: 67), that is, into the words as matter, Miranda’s moment of
revelation exposes an emptiness of transcendence that removes the possibility of
finding a solid and unified meaning in Porter’s song of mourning.
Revelation results then, in a lack of meaning, which exacerbates the traumatic
experience and coheres with Miranda’s pathological depression at the end of the
story. For the imagined reader, confronted with the familiar indeterminacy of
modernist prose, meaning remains open and incomplete. In the times of
COVID-19, however, the contemporary reader partakes in the collective trauma
that amplifies and confounds Miranda’s individual experience, which offers a new
path for revelation. In Miranda’s fever dreams, as memories of warmth turn to
myth to imagine an archetypical jungle as a “secret place of death”, her unconscious

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cannot escape the collective nature of her own trauma: “the air trembled with the
shattering scream and the hoarse bellow of voices all crying together, rolling and
colliding above her like ragged stormclouds, and the words became two words
only rising and falling and clamoring about her head Danger, danger, danger, the
voices said, and War, war, war” (Porter 2011: 344-345). Once again, the
significance of Miranda’s experience of illness relies on self-referential words that
offer no certain meaning. But for the present reader, the closeness of Miranda’s
experience presents an alternative. She is “both present and elsewhere” (Belling
2009: 66) as her feverish dreams coalesce with the conscious apprehension of her
surroundings, and the social impact of the pandemic interferes with her delirium
as Miranda’s landlady threatens to evict her: “I tell you, they must come for her
now, or I’ll put her on the sidewalk… I tell you, this is a plague” (Porter 2011:
345). The reader of today has no trouble empathizing in this moment and can
fully participate in Porter’s exercise of remembrance, as Adam promises that help
will come for Miranda the following day, explaining that at the time “they can’t get
an ambulance […] and there aren’t any beds. And we can’t find a doctor or a
nurse. They’re all busy” (345). In our pandemic times, the familiarity of Porter’s
tale brings a chill to the bone, quite evidently when, soon afterwards, Adam
informs Miranda that “it’s as bad as anything can be […] all the theatres and nearly
all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals
all day and ambulances all night” (345). Our very recent fears echo loudly when
Miranda replies: “But not one for me” (345).
5. Conclusion
As argued so far, reading Pale Horse, Pale Rider today brings the strangeness of
Miranda’s feverish, mysterious narrative to uncannily familiar territory. In general
terms, literary testimony about surviving disease during a pandemic encourages
readers’ empathetic response to trauma narratives by enabling them to participate,
imaginatively, in the experience (Davis 2011: 71). But, specifically, in the current
pandemic context, a sympathetic understanding of the overwhelming deterioration
of body, mind and morale caused by a widespread viral infection offers not simply
a connection with the dead, or with the sick of the past. It holds up a mirror that
offers hopes of survival and connection through remembrance. The last words of
the novel famously claim that “now there [will] be time for everything”, but only
in “the dead cold light of tomorrow” (Porter 2011: 362). Such a numb emotional
state, which reproduces the clinical “crushing depression” that often followed the
flu (Crosby 2003: 319), expressively denotes that Porter’s structural turn to the
mythic in the novella cannot offer a reassuring meaning for trauma (Bollinger

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2013: 386). Despite the mystical imagery of her near-death visions, Porter’s song
concludes with a sense of loss and emptiness (2011: 383). In Bollinger’s words,
the narrative turns to biblical allusion and apocalyptic archetypes “to give shape
and presumably meaning to [Porter’s] experiences” (2013: 370). This statement
replicates the author’s own expression in an interview in which she argued that the
work of the artist was to take the “handfuls of confusion” that shape human life
and “put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning”
(in Bollinger 2013: 371). These words by Porter, resounding in the echo chamber
of modernism, recall T.S. Eliot’s formulation of his famous mythical method,
which argued that the use of myth in modernism was “simply a way of controlling,
of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history […] a step toward making the
modern world possible for art” (1952: 426).
Pale Horse, Pale Rider partakes in modernist mythopoeia, which turns to myth as
a frame of reference for order and significance, but which ultimately expresses an
inescapable suspicion of those comforting certainties traditionally found in
mythical narratives. As Michael Bell has claimed, myth was once “foundational,
holistic and inarguable” (2009: 12), but in modernism, after this had been revealed
as objectively untrue, it made “simultaneous reference to belief and to falsehood”
(3). Mythopoeia became then a useful vehicle to encapsulate the paradoxes and
indeterminacies of the modern world view, refuting the possibility of monolithic,
transcendental meanings. In the case of Porter’s narrative, the expectation of a
mythical revelation is confronted with the aestheticization of an individual’s
pathological distress. However, even when the certainties of apocalyptic narratives
—that is, the unveiling of a transcendental meaning, of a divine power that can
ultimately explain human suffering (Bollinger 2013: 386)— are lost in Porter’s
acute recollection of personal and collective trauma, the tale allows, for the reader
of today, the possibility of sharing and accepting uncertainty. It offers through
recognition and imaginative sympathy a new chance for meaning and recovery.
Because, as Davis notes, aestheticizing the experience of the pandemic means
ensuring that the pandemic will not be forgotten (2011: 71), and recuperating
that almost lost cultural memory of the 1918 influenza means recovering the
survivors’ group identity and in consequence restoring a collective memory that
connects survivors to one another (60). Porter’s novella may not offer a solid,
archetypal meaning for trauma or illness, but it does offer, in the present experience
of reading, an opportunity for collective healing. It presents a chance for rebuilding
our recently disturbed communal identity through self-recognition in the
memories of others. This circumstance, in turn, opens a newfound path towards
healing, towards a physical, mental, and social recuperation achieved through
connection and understanding in a terrible time of distance and isolation.

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Notes
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Received: 26/01/2022
Accepted: 20/07/2022
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License