One Singer Left to Mourn: Death and Discourse in Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider"

Abstract

LIKE ALL OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTER'S FICTION, Horse, Pale Rider is underwritten by bereavement. As Miranda Rhea, Porter's quasi-autobiographical surrogate, lies dying, she voices this pervasive grief when she fitfully remembers spiritual that provides title for short novel. 'Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away...' Miranda whispers hoarsely to Adam, beloved who will eventually be taken away from her by apocalyptic horseman of lament. 'Do you know that song?' (240) As they together try to recall its stanzas, Adam remembers that in spiritual's over-forty verses 'the rider done taken away mammy, pappy, brother, sister, whole family besides lover.' 'But not singer, not yet,' Miranda adds. 'Death always leaves one singer to mourn.' Death does spare Miranda at end of Horse, Pale Rider, but unlike Porter, she fails to create for her own life equivalent of half-forgotten spiritual, a work of mourning. Freud viewed the absorbing work of mourning (155) as a process of detachment and reattachment. The survivor confronts actuality of loss, gradually withdraws libidinal connections from departed, and finally transfers those affections to a new object of desire (154, 159). Songs of lament, like spiritual that Miranda and Adam seek to remember, may advance and express this movement by acknowledging deprivation and serv-