The Lone Singer

Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

It is the year 1918, four years after the death of Franz Ferdinand. Russia ends its participation in the war, the United States wins Battle of Cantigny, and a deadly strain of influenza quietly sweeps across the globe infecting a third of the world’s population and claiming approximately 50 million lives. Katherine Anne Porter survives this pandemic. She had been working as a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News during the height of the virus in Denver, Colorado while also seeing a young soldier who was about to be deployed overseas. After she falls ill, the soldier nurses her until her editor manages to squeeze her into a hospital. The hospital is so overcrowded that she is left lying on a gurney running a forty-degree fever for nine days. After her miraculous recovery she finds out that the young soldier she had been seeing died because of the virus weeks ago. So it goes. Pale Horse Pale Rider is therefore a testimony to Porter’s own unique experience caught between both one of the deadliest wars and one of the deadliest plagues in history.

The Motor Corps of St. Louis chapter of the Red Cross on ambulance duty during the influenza epidemic, October 1918.

It is easy to see how Porter’s personal encounter with the virus shapes the way the story is told. The entire novella is written as a fever-dream, full of vivid and almost surreal iconography but disjointed in its sense of time and place. The story opens for instance with a dream within a dream, emphasizing the delirious nature of our protagonist, perhaps emulating for the reader what it is like to feel influenza first-hand.  She also incorporates language of memory — “remember”, “forget”, “remind”, ”forgotten”–  throughout the piece, frequently moving in and out of flashbacks between strings of monologue and moments of lucidity. Through her writing, Porter aims to reflect on Miranda’s psychological reaction to tragedy and how the plague and war changed her. The story becomes about how Miranda is meant to process trauma, loss, and confront her own mortality. Porter said of the pandemic in a 1963 interview:

It simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, really. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really “alienated,” in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I really had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the “beatific vision,” and the Greeks called the “happy day,” the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.

Katherine Anne Porter (Interview)

The eponymous Pale Horse and Pale Rider is, of course, a reference to the Biblical Book of Revelations. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in Revelations are Conqueror on a white horse, War on a red horse, Famine on a black horse, and Death on a white horse. In this way, Pale Horse, Pale Rider is also a story about the end of things, a combination of factors that lead to great tragedy.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, an 1887 painting by Viktor Vasnetsov. From left to right are Death, Famine, War, and Conquest; the Lamb is at the top.

The theme of war is pervasive throughout Pale Horse, Pale Rider. It pervades every facet of the characters’ lives, and furthermore seems to divide society into the “combatants” and the “noncombatants”: those who actively fight in the war and those who are the “stay-at-homes” (171), encouraged to “do their share” by purchasing Liberty Bonds (147). While patriotism is severely emphasized by both combatants and non-combatants alike, whether that be direct or performative, Miranda herself views the war as more of a harbinger of death. Especially in regard to her relationship with Adam, Miranda sees the war as something that merely send these soldiers— these “sacrificial lambs” (177) — out to die. 

In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, however, these themes of war and death are further complicated by the simultaneous unfolding of a plague. Throughout the novella, the language of contagion and militarism seem to overlap to the point where it becomes difficult to separate the war and the plague from one another. Adam, for example, says to Miranda that “the men are dying like flies out there, anyway. This funny new disease. Simply knocks you into a cocked hat” (158). In many ways this statement is unclear on whether Adam is referring to the war or the plague, as both in their own right are claiming lives. Another example would be the ways in which Porter describes the nature of the two through the character of Miranda. Miranda, for instance, describes the war as such: 

“The worst of the war is the fear and suspicion and the awful expression in all the eyes you meet…. It frightens me; I live in fear too, and no one should have to live in fear. It’s the skulking about, and the lying. It’s what war does to the mind and the heart, Adam, and you can’t separate these two— what it does to them is worse than what it can do to the body” .

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (176-177)

These notions of mind, heart, and body also come into play throughout the time Miranda falls ill to the influenza. What seems to weaken Miranda is not necessarily her physically ailing body, but her deteriorating mental state. Her claim to fighting the illness is not through her body but through her mind, where “a clear line of communication… between her and the receding world” is considered her “small hold” on her life (194). The parallels in language imply that war and the plague can be seen as one and the same thing. 

Another key theme that Porter focuses on are the ideas of mortality, asking what does it mean to live and to die? Particularly for Miranda, the decision to live seems to be made for her: “…,the whole humane conviction and custom of society, conspired to pull her inseparable rack of bones and waster flesh to its feet…” (204). Her wanting to die and feeling empty as a result is not well accepted. The story ends on a melancholy but conflicting note: “…the dead cold light of tomorrow. Now there will be time for everything” (208). What does she mean by ‘everything’?

A pandemic can be thought of as a collection of millions of personal traumas and explorations of mortality occurring simultaneously. This personal and psychological account is able to shed light into individual decisions and actions more deeply. Adam was supposed to die because of war, but most probably Miranda ended up giving him the flu that killed him. To what extent is she responsible for Adam’s death? How does she consolidate the guilt if at all?

Finally, mortality is presented as a war against time and the body. Throughout the text, Miranda is running out of time and she is constantly calling attention to this. Why is time almost a third main character? Additionally, as she ‘fights’ the flu, what parallels exist between the language of war and the war against a pathogen within the body?

There are ways in which this story reminds us of our situation today. It is not new to see the media and governments using war metaphors when discussing pandemics, given how convenient it can be. It can be an easy way of evoking emotional response and a sense of urgency, both of which make people more accepting to make sacrifices.

Soldiers fighting in the front lines of the First World War are today’s social workers combating the pandemic. Trying to provide care for patients in the face of failing institutions and lacking infrastructure is most likely a war of its own and both have their lives put at risk in trying to fight. There is even glory in going out to fight, shown more through the bitterness of Chuck who, unable to go, does not care about “how it started or how it ends” (170).

Of course, sacrifices are still made away from the front lines as well. However, Miranda is skeptical of the ones made in her home front. She acknowledges that “it wasn’t so much her fifty dollars that was going to make any difference” (147) and that much of actions of their part “keep[s] them busy and make[s] them feel useful.” (171) COVID revealed the importance of the actions of everyone involved in preventing the spread, though many proved either equally as skeptical or incompetent. 

3 Comments

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  1. The moment the text, ‘Pale Horse Pale Rider,’ was given to me, and throughout the process of reading it, I was constantly reminded of a painting by an American artist, Albert Pinkham Ryder, titled ‘The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse),’ made between 1896 and 1908. (No jokes intended but notice how his last name is Ryder, pronounced in the same way as a rider…). While Ryder’s art about a race was quite literally inspired by a horse race that took place in 1888 in New York, there seemed to be a parallel between the story of Miranda and that which is related to the painting. Weirdly similar in number, although having one more zero at the end, Ryder’s friend bet $500 on the race and killed himself after the horse failed to win, which made me wonder if it was solely for the sum of the money that prompted his suicide, just as Miranda’s hatred toward Liberty Bonds was not solely from her incapability to afford $50 but also from her disagreement with the performance of patriotism that is enabled by a sheet of paper. The fact that Ryder dwelled on the creation of the painting for years and was not easily able to either call it finished or exhibit it reminded me of how Miranda was reluctant to let go of her awareness of the impending doom for both herself and Adam, together with her quite extended distaste towards the mentions of Liberty Bonds or the bonds themselves from the start of the story.

    (Link to the painting: https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1928.8)

  2. Thank you for this conveners post!

    I really appreciate how you begin this post by retelling the story of Katherine Anne Porter and her experiences with the influenza. As mentioned by one of the conveners in class, Anne Porter with Pale Horse, Pale Rider reminded me of Sylvia Plath and her novel The Bell Jar.

    This also reminded me of the long debate we had, both in class and in our first conveners post, (http://www.bryanwaterman.org/contagion/posts/defoe-spilling-the-tea-since-1723-conveners-post/) about the reliability of narrators (we spoke particularly of Daniel Defoe in the Journal of the Plague Year). This had me situating Anne Porter within that same question; do we think that she is a reliable narrator in historically documenting the occurrences of the influenza and the Great War? What can we learn from Pale Horse, Pale Rider that we can situate within history? Furthermore, what do we think about Miranda, and her reliability as a character in this story, especially given that we’ve mostly witnessed her living a fever-dream almost throughout the entire story?

  3. I loved our discussion in class regarding the language of war employed often in plague narratives. I did some readings to see what other people have thought of this issue and ended up on this article: (https://theconversation.com/stop-calling-coronavirus-pandemic-a-war-135486) What is interesting is that not only does the article discusses the issue of the language of war used for the pandemic, but also that the language of biomedicine and epidemiology being heavily militarized. The author of the article writes, by using the language of war, “[i]nstead of seeing the whole of humanity rising to the challenge together and observing the multi-layered outpouring of mutual aid, our imagination is restricted into encasing this in military language.”
    When discussing this topic of what language to use, it reminded me of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and how Defoe specifically used the first-person narrative in the Journal to persuade the public into preparing themselves for the upcoming epidemic. Whether it be the militarized words describing the plague or Defoe’s first-person narrative, they both have their own intentions on the specific choice of language. What is the best choice/combination to use in a pandemic? What implications do these choices of language have?

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