SOURCE: “One Singer Left to Mourn: Death and Discourse in Porter's ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider,’” in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter, 1996, pp. 55–76.

[In the following essay, Ciuba analyzes the roles of mourning and death in Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.]

Like all of Katherine Anne Porter's fiction, Pale 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 the spiritual that provides the title for the short novel. “‘Pale horse, pale rider, done taken my lover away …’” Miranda whispers hoarsely to Adam, the beloved who will eventually be taken away from her by the apocalyptic horseman of the lament. “‘Do you know that song?’” (240) As they together try to recall its stanzas, Adam remembers that in the spiritual's over-forty verses “‘the rider done taken away mammy, pappy, brother, sister, the whole family besides the lover.’” “‘But not the singer, not yet,’” Miranda adds. “‘Death always leaves one singer to mourn.’” Death does spare Miranda at the end of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, but unlike Porter, she fails to create for her own life the equivalent of the 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 the actuality of loss, gradually withdraws libidinal connections from the departed, and finally transfers those affections to a new object of desire (154, 159). Songs of lament, like the spiritual that Miranda and Adam seek to remember, may advance and express this movement by acknowledging deprivation and serving as a form of imaginative consolation. Peter Sacks sees this turn from absence to artifice as finding mythic expression in the metamorphoses of Daphne and Syrinx into the poet's laurel tree and the mournful panpipes:

the lost object seems to enter or become inscribed in the substitute, in this case the found sign or art. Of course only the object as lost, and not the object itself, enters into the substitutive sign, and the latter is accepted only by turning away from the actual identity of what was lost.

(6)

The elegiac work of art repeats the displacement and replacement in the work of mourning by turning away from the departed and turning toward a surrogate, a sign of departure.

The spiritual Pale Horse, Pale Rider works at mourning precisely through such redirection. Its lyrics acknowledge the “behest of reality” (154) in the way that Freud found essential for mourning: it gives up the dead for dead. The personification of death as the ghastly outrider from Revelation 6: 7–8 affirms the mortality that the bereaved might easily like to deny. The intensified participle of the refrain admits the utter finality of her deprivation by repeating how lover and kin have been “done taken away.” The insistent catalogue of the song's more-than-forty verses enumerates the extent of the desolation. However, the dirge does more than just toll a litany of loss. While acknowledging absence, the self-reflexive spiritual offers its own singing as an aesthetic alternative to absence, as a “found sign” that substitutes for the “lost object.” The repetitions of the stanzas create a sense of artistic order amid the disorder of death. The ever-expanding necrology of the verses absorbs what may seem like the singular destitution of the lover into the pattern of mortality common to the entire human family.¹ Having “done taken away” virtually all else, death has left behind the singer to find herself in and through her very song. Mourning becomes her, and she becomes herself by mourning.

Miranda cannot duplicate the achievement of her elegiac counterpart because she finds problematic the dual bases for such song—death and representation—each of which seems to imply the other. If the loss caused by death gives rise to the quest for representation, portrayals of death “often serve as metatropes for the process of representation itself” (Bronfen and Goodwin 4). Miranda's inability to come to terms with death reflects her corresponding ambivalence about the extent to which words represent the world. She cannot simply accept the spiritual once heard in Texas cotton fields and oil fields because it is founded on a transcendent view of language and death that no longer seems possible in the waste land of 1918.² However, she cannot create a contemporary alternative because she is ultimately discontent with the immanence that defines the modernist understanding of mortality and rhetoric.

Adam and Miranda suggest the transcendent vision that underlies the song Pale Horse, Pale Rider and their entire Southern heritage by recalling the hymn while trying to remember other attempts to confront the sacred through language—Sunday school lessons, traditional Christian prayers, even an invocation to Apollo. As the very name of its genre indicates, the spiritual expresses the kind of metaphysical view of art that George Steiner has elegized in Real Presences. Steiner discovers aesthetic transcendence in the experience of felt otherness, of meaningful form, so compellingly present and substantial that reception of the work of art is akin to entertaining a guest in one's house. Like the bison paintings at Lascaux, art seeks to “draw the opaque and brute force of the ‘thereness’ of the non-human into the luminous ambush of representation and understanding” (139). Steiner views mortality as providing art with its greatest challenge. Since death makes “the intractable constancy of the other, of that on which we have no purchase” most keenly felt, “poetics seeks to elucidate the incommunicado of our meetings with death” (140, 141). The hymn Pale Horse, Pale Rider is spiritual not simply because it views death as part of the devastation described in the Book of Revelation. Rather, in Steiner's terms, it is spiritual because it voices an encounter with the radical and alien presence of mortality itself.

The world of Pale Horse, Pale Rider has lost such an awareness of transcendence. It is appropriate that Miranda works as a writer for the Blue Mountain News because her profession typifies for Steiner the cult of immanence in the twentieth century. Journalism articulates “an epistemology and ethics of spurious temporality” (26). Everything—from stories about World War I and the influenza epidemic to Chuck's sports coverage, Towney's gossip column, and Miranda's theatre reviews—is of similar and fleeting importance, all new for a day, immediate and imperative, and then discarded in favor of tomorrow's news. As its origins imply, journalism is the writing of everydayness. It celebrates what is here and at hand rather than what is elsewhere and enduring.

Miranda faces the utter immanence that Steiner sees exemplified in her profession when an aged hoofer whom she has panned in the morning's paper brings in the reviews of a decade ago to prove his talent.³ Danny Dickerson's querulous song-and-dance stages a poignant protest against the oblivion that journalism requires each day if it is always to be up-to-date. Since the oldtimer claims that Miranda's unfavorable article will discourage future bookings from agencies in the east, he implies that she has actually written his death sentence as an entertainer. Hardly having time to talk to the showman, Miranda hurriedly objects that her opinion really does not matter. The ephemerality of journalism turns what is so momentous to the performer into what is only momentary for the journalist.

Although Miranda dismisses the has-been too quickly, she is deeply disturbed by this paradigm of mortality. If her review records his decline over a decade, her very position as a reviewer seems to be a way of daily writing herself to death. At the end of Old Mortality, Miranda rejected her family's romantic and anti-romantic views of the past and dedicated herself to the search for personal truth, for what George Cheatham views as a typically modernist faith in “the freedom of the unconnected present, the here and now of her own experience, of herself and her own world, apparently including death” (“Death and Repetition” 620). As a theatre critic she makes that quest into her livelihood by her candid assessments of a stage that is dying long before its buildings are finally closed by the spread of influenza. Having lost the transcendent grandeur that thrilled Miranda in the plays of her youth, the theatre of the plague-year also lacks the kind of feverish imagination that Antonin Artaud celebrated in “Theatre and the Plague.”⁴ It offers neither old-time ecstasy nor modernist iconoclasm but only works that Miranda finds terminally monotonous and dreary. Reviewing such a theatre is itself an occupation fraught with fatality. Miranda's habits at work—her odd hours, excessive smoking, and random meals in unclean restaurants have exhausted her flesh. As she stays up late to complete her reviews before the deadline, she lives out her dream of racing against the pale horseman of death. Mortality is inscribed in every sentence that she rushes to write.

In an age defined by the ethos of journalism, both death and language have become as immanent as the daily newspaper. As Ronald Schleifer has argued, the twentieth century has materialized both the fate of the flesh and the work of the word, so that they no longer have meaning in the context of some otherness beyond them. Both seemed different in the generations of Miranda's parents and grandparents. In Old Mortality Porter showed how the ancestral past made death and elegiac discourse so spiritualized that they became ethereal. Since Miranda's family believed in “a life beyond a life in this world, as well as in the next” (14), Uncle Gabriel could write a gravestone tribute to Aunt Amy that sentimentalized his spirited wife as a “singing angel” who “forgets / The griefs of old mortality” (17). When Miranda's sister asked if her aunt could “‘really sing,’” her father replied, “‘Now what has that to do with it? … It's a poem’” (17). Having nothing “to do with” the world at hand, Uncle Gabriel's language of mourning rewrote mortality so that it became the forgotten entryway to immortality.

Miranda had begun to question this romanticized revisionism even in her youth. Indeed, her family's fondness for the sublime actually contributed to the modernist loss of transcendence that the older Miranda confronts in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The more her forebears found the sole reference point for language and death in some other world, the more they actually turned both speaking and dying into utterly material facts. It is fitting that Miranda's elders cherished the supernal beauties of Poe, for his work typifies how immanence is only accentuated when transcendence is pursued with such exclusive passion. Poe's idealism made him see death as a horrid spectacle of the flesh. And his quest for a poetry that would sound like music, as Richard Wilbur has contended (64–66), deliberately undermined the referential function of words so that they appealed to the ear as pure but virtually meaningless sound. Seeking to escape the body, Poe foregrounded the role of the body in death and language. Miranda is the daughter of a South raised too long on “Annabel Lee.” She finds death and language pointing not to some real presence but to real absence and emptied materialism.

In Pale Horse, Pale Rider death does not deliver the soul into the angelic song of Miranda's southern past. Nor does it serve as that meeting-place with mystery that for Steiner generates the “lucid intensity” of aesthetic forms (141). Rather, the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse has been unseated from his exalted position, for the modernist age views mortality as “uninhabited by any transcendental understanding that could answer its terrible facticity” (Schleifer 3). Although Miranda recalls that her ancestors welcomed death, she races away from a slightly genteel version of this rider in her opening dream. His look—blank, malicious, and meaningless—accurately reveals the face of death in Miranda's waking world. The casualties of World War I and of the influenza epidemic in Pale Horse, Pale Rider seem completely a matter of the flesh. Constantly attentive to her makeup and clothes, Miranda detects the signs of her own eschaton in her aches and fever; she glimpses Adam's mortality as a momentary darkening of his typically golden good looks. When Miranda is finally hospitalized, her surreal confinement only confirms her view of death as sensual and senseless. She beholds the shadows of two men silently wrapping a third speechless figure for burial and then wheeling the corpse away with a mattress on top. She overhears an old and shabby patient protesting his absolute innocence while being escorted by two orderlies to what seems like his execution. Although Miranda's vision of heavenly life later challenges this purely corporeal understanding of death, Miranda once again perceives the absolute materiality of her end when she regains consciousness and recognizes “the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus” (255). In the utterly mundane world of Pale Horse, Pale Rider, mortality seems a signifier that has lost its former transcendent significance.

Miranda recognizes that language, like death, has been emptied of its once-considerable import. She hears the “sense of meaninglessness, nothingness, nonsense” that Schleifer has described as a typically modernist effect of discourse (4). For Steiner, this death in language originates in the breaking of the “covenant between word and object.” Whereas an order based on the Logos presumes “that being is, to a workable degree, ‘sayable’” (90), the modernist time of the “after-Word” believes that “To ascribe to words a correspondence to ‘things out there,’ to see and use them as somehow representational of ‘reality’ in the world, is not only a vulgar illusion. It makes of language a lie.” Bereft of such otherness, the word becomes “a wholly arbitrary phonetic marker, an empty sign” (95). Although the logocentric discourse in the Book of Revelation finds its guarantee in the mouth of God (1:16; 22:18–19), language in the modernist apocalypse of Pale Horse, Pale Rider seems devoid of transcendent reference. The dying Miranda tries to remember the spiritual that gives the novel its title not as an expression of religious faith but as an exercise of the memory to keep herself from lapsing into unconsciousness. The lyrics gain their power to ward off death from their childhood familiarity rather than from any inherently sacred significance. In other words, the words only matter as matter.

Miranda hears the emptiness of language in Pale Horse, Pale Rider as if she were practicing the kind of Sprachkritik that Steiner considers as having contributed to the modernist loss of faith in the logocentric order (110–13). Such critique searches out the bombast and banalities, jargon and misnomers, cant and clichés that have emptied the language used in law, politics, science, academia, journalism, and the arts. And it regards all such linguistic evasions and inflations from an eschatological perspective so that they seem both the cause and sign of impending catastrophe. Sprachkritik demonstrated that far from embodying transcendental truth, language is fatally flawed. As Karl Kraus, one of the movement's foremost practitioners, observed, “a civilization literally ‘talks itself’ to sordid death” (Steiner 112).

In the last year of World War I, Miranda detects this linguistic corruption most obviously in the talk about what seemed to threaten the death of western civilization—war. War is the first word in Miranda's mind when she awakes at the beginning of the novel, and the rhetoric of war dominates all discourse in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Having borrowed their identities from the war effort, the once-nondescript promoters of the Liberty Bond campaign turn every speech into an opportunity for overkill. They regularly use inflammatory epithets like “the Huns” and “the Boche,” jingoistic truisms (“Everybody was suffering, naturally. Everybody had to do his share”), flagwaving sentimentality (“our American boys fighting and dying in Belleau Wood,” “A pledge of good faith that she was a loyal American doing her duty”), and arm-twisting deception (“You're the only one in this whole newspaper office that hasn't come in”) (186, 187). The topoi of war have become so repetitiously familiar that when Miranda hears yet another advertisement for Liberty Bonds while at the theatre, Porter records the salestalk in telegraphed phrases—“These vile Huns—glorious Belleau Wood—our keyword is Sacrifice—Martyred Belgium—give till it hurts—our noble boys Over There—Big Berthas—the death of civilization—the Boche—” that reduce patriotism to a compendium of absurd and endlessly rearranged commonplaces (221).

The patriotic fervor of such deadly and deadened rhetoric hides the way that the speakers protect themselves from the very war that they promote. The hectoring of the pitchmen is undermined by Miranda's silent response: “‘Suppose I were not a coward, but said what I really thought? Suppose I said to hell with this filthy war? Suppose I asked that little thug, What's the matter with you, why aren't you rotting in Belleau Wood? I wish you were …’” (186). Although the society ladies who visit the wounded soldiers in hospitals gush about “the brave boys who already, you might very well say, had fallen in defense of their country,” the cooing of such do-gooders is finally undercut by their own self-interest: “I'll dance with them, every dumbbell who asks me, but I will NOT talk to them, I said, even if there is a war” (190, 191). Such constant hyperbole and hypocrisy challenge the traditional assumption that words represent reality. It “makes of language a lie” (Steiner 95).

The rhetoric of war is so insidiously potent that it vitiates not only public discourse in the novel. As Steiner might have predicted, its “contagion has spread to the nerve centres of private saying” (111). It contaminates every conversation by making conformity to a national ideal more important than the risk of self-revelation. Miranda worries that war makes people “ready to leap if you make one gesture or say one word they do not understand instantly” (224). Although she and a fellow-visitor to a military hospital confess to hating their charity work, they both quickly temper their frankness with cautious qualification so that they do not seem unpatriotic. Towney, the gossip columnist, rebels at being Pured to buy bonds, but she later proposes that everyone in the office should volunteer for Hut Service. Amid the crowds at the theatre, Miranda wonders at how ordinary conversations can have so little relation to the private agony of their speakers.

What did I ever know about them? There must be a great many of them here who think as I do, and we dare not say a word to each other of our desperation, we are speechless animals letting ourselves be destroyed, and why? Does anybody here believe the things we say to each other?

(218–19)

Although a persistently trenchant critic of the speech misused by others in the novel, Miranda herself occasionally seems tainted by the prevailing rhetoric. She admits to Adam doubts about her journalistic advocacy of women's sacrifices to win the war, but she conceals her disdain for the way such charity work has been used to control and condescend to women. After being saved by Dr. Hildesheim from the influenza epidemic, the deluded Miranda imagines her physician as a German officer carrying an infant impaled on his bayonet and howls, “Hildesheim is a Boche, a spy, a Hun, kill him, kill him before he kills you” (250). As the violence of her illness vents itself in the virulence of her language, Miranda becomes the double of the chauvinists whose discourse she once detested.

Since the commonly-used speech seems so devalued by the war, Miranda's circle has developed an insouciant counter-style that seeks to be more honest by refusing to glorify bloodshed. This anti-rhetorical rhetoric has its own look—the knowing smile—and its own body language—the unserious shrug, even its own sophisticated, slightly detached way of referring to the war, “C'est la guerre” (185). Armed with such jauntily stoic nonchalance, Miranda can laugh until she cries at the “‘funny war’” (204), the manly Adam can justify what he considers the effeminate practice of wearing a wrist watch as an army-mandated response to the “‘horrors of war’” (197), and both can joke about their singing Pale Horse, Pale Rider while Miranda gets closer to death: perhaps they should form an act to entertain the troops abroad. To speak so coolly before catastrophe seems a less corrupted form of discourse than the pathos-filled poetry of Miranda's southern youth or the patriotic oratory of the homefront crusade. In particular, this reticence becomes for Miranda, as for many of Porter's women according to Janis P. Stout, “a strategy for asserting self-will in the face of a powerful and threatening male hegemony” (185). Yet the tendency to ironic understatement can gradually lose some of its freshness and become merely studied, a matter of achieving “the right tone” and of repeating “the kind of patter going the rounds” (201, 197). This affectation makes the speech of the smart set as superficial as the rhetoric of Miranda's family tradition or of the wartime propagandists. Miranda and Adam seek refuge in the kind of “small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper surface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once” (198) without threatening their romance. Miranda wants to tell Adam about the pains in her head and heart; she longs to warn him about how age and war may endanger her prelapsarian beloved. But Miranda consistently keeps this elegiac awareness to herself, as if incapable of expressing her knowledge of the pale horseman in language of such formulaic glibness.

When Miranda herself lies dying, she confronts the very limits of Porter's exploration of death and discourse: she faces the end of her life in terms of the emptiness of language. Miranda at first turns away from the immanence of modernism by seeking recourse to the traditional view that language and mortality look beyond themselves to a transcendent point of reference. “[F]eeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable” (251), Miranda assumes the congruence between logos and cosmos that modernism has challenged. She believes so completely that “there ‘is something in what we say’” (Steiner 121) that she recalls such comforting substantives as “oblivion” and “eternity” as if they were actually substantial. Miranda tries further to suggest the presence of these quasi-tangible nouns by defining them in sensate images. She sees “oblivion” as a grey whirlpool spinning for eternity, and she imagines “eternity” as farther than the farthest star. Such a reassuring understanding of words seems to provide the kind of safety that Miranda remembers from a childhood fantasy. It acts like a granite wall that prevents the language-user from slipping over a ledge to a deathly pit.

Although Miranda tries to take refuge in a vision of language as solidly representational, her dream leads her ever closer to the nothingness of the pit. The abyss gapes with the felt absence behind all of her palpable figures. It is an image for the end of the images that verify her words, for language emptied of transcendent significance. As Miranda gets nearer to death in fact, death in language becomes so hollowed out that she can simply point at it in the barest linguistic gesture: “There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all. … Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear” (252). Such a rhetoric of the deictic does not try to disclose the essence of mortality, as if language were ultimately revelatory. Rather, at this ground zero, speech seems to concede its once-assumed power of correspondence. It veils only a profound emptiness.

In her opening dream Miranda had accepted this nothingness as “beautiful” and “all mine” (180). She only falls into the pit, only dies in language and to her belief in language as transcendent, when she rediscovers this vacancy by abandoning the images that she had associated with mortality. She comes to accept death as a bare self-reflexive assertion that marks the limits of imaginative expression. “Granite walls, whirlpools, stars are things. None of them is death, nor the image of it. Death is death, said Miranda, and for the dead it has no attributes” (252). After having listened to the hollowness of language throughout the novel, Miranda hears the linguistic void in a single word. Death is emptied of its accumulated memories and connotations, until it no longer races as the pale rider of Miranda's dream but is faced in all of its utter facticity. Since any representation of death really seeks to make present an absence (Goodwin and Bronfen 7), Miranda discovers the loss at the heart of mortality when she beholds the loss implicit in language. Stripped of substantives, unmediated by images, death is as empty as death.

After writing Miranda's death, Porter deferred further work on Pale Horse, Pale Rider for a year because she did not know how to portray Miranda's vision of the afterlife. The artistic impasse points to how far she had pursued Miranda's rejection of transcendent meaning in language. Porter had approached so closely the point at which language seemed to say nothing else but itself, nothing else but its own nothingness, that she could not get beyond the nullity of defining death by means of death. Glenway Wescott encouraged his friend to admit her inability in the text by acknowledging that Miranda's vision of life after death was beyond description (37). However, Porter rejected such artful elusiveness. Since Miranda lives after the apparent finality of death, Porter recommitted her writing to the “attributes” perceived by the living. Miranda enjoys her afterlife as mediated by the very images that she once renounced. Although Porter's description of Miranda's paradisal bliss has been admired (Wescott 38, Nance 151), its vision of sea, sand, and meadow seems fairly conventional after her linguistic daring in presenting Miranda's death as her ultimate encounter with the immanence of modernist discourse. Such ordinary imagery makes Porter's own “soft carefully shaped words” seem like merely “curtains hung before nothing at all” (252). Only when Miranda is assumed into a great host of all whom she had ever known does Porter risk suggesting the mystery of life beyond death as life beyond language: “They were pure identities and she knew them everyone without calling their names or remembering what relation she bore to them” (254). Since Western philosophy has traditionally regarded humans as “mortal” and “speaking” (Agamben xii), Miranda experiences immortality as if it were no longer necessary to speak.

When Miranda returns to the sadly ordinary world at hand after her vision of heavenly beatitude, she finds it almost impossible to live in the kind of hollowed-out language that Steiner regards as characterizing the “time of the ‘after-Word’” (94). Deprived of the transcendence that she briefly glimpsed, she cannot bring her encounter with mortality into speech; she cannot do what the pale rider has left her to do: she cannot sing of mourning. Since she finds herself in a foreign country where she “does not understand the language nor wish to learn it” (257–58), she simply weeps “in pity for herself and her lost rapture” (259). At best, she speaks only “bare phrases” to her doctor and nurse (257). Having witnessed the afterlife as if her “personal interpretation of the apocalyptical revelation alluded to in the title” (Youngblood 137), Miranda lacks in this diurnal life a concomitant sense of language. Perhaps only what Steiner imagines as messianic communication (113), where the word is luminously congruent with the world, would enable Miranda to express her grief in all of its purity. Earthly speech will simply implicate her in the sorrowful world of old mortality. As friends rally to comfort her, Miranda hears an unspoken lament in their deluded consolations. They prate of life while she who once was so gloriously alive knows how much they are bereft of true vitality. Miranda approaches what Steiner views as the culminating gesture of Sprachkritik for many modernists: a preference for silence over speech (111–14).

Miranda finally manages to converse with her self-deceived visitors only by becoming a savvy collaborator with the death in their discourse. After listening to Chuck and Towney talk about work, Miranda “smiled and told them how gay and what a pleasant surprise it was to find herself alive. For it will not do to betray the conspiracy and tamper with the courage of the living; there is nothing better than to be alive, everyone has agreed on that; it is past argument, and who attempts to deny it is justly outlawed” (260). Even as she mouths the blithe assumptions about living that her wellwishers expect, Miranda distances herself from the rhetoric of mortality by the forced earnestness with which she submits to such indisputable propriety. Writing seems just as deadly as speaking, for its very enthusiasm celebrates what Miranda alone understands as death-in-life. Ignoring the mail that her friends have brought, she thinks, “‘They will be telling me again how good it is to be alive, they will say again they love me, they are glad I am living too, and what can I answer to that?’” (261). Miranda has been left to mourn, but she postpones anything like elegy for ironic acquiescence in the fatuous discourse of her comforters.

The letter telling of Adam's death compels Miranda to go beyond her expressions of feigned pleasure in life. After recovering from the shock of the news, she voices her grief in language that borders on evoking presence and acknowledging absence: “Adam, she said, now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here; I wish you had come back, what do you think I came back for, Adam, to be deceived like this?” (264) Miranda enters that period of mourning that often follows the initial numbness—a time of calling for the deceased and searching for signs of what has been lost (Bowlby 86–93). Earlier Miranda recognized that although Adam had spoken her name only occasionally during their brief romance, she had used his quite frequently (223). Miranda's address now to her stricken beloved is her most creative use of language in the novel because it mediates between both the transcendent and immanent views of death and discourse. Miranda figures her loss by prosopopeia, the rhetorical device that de Man describes as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter's reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (75–76). Her cry to Adam recovers the encounter with otherness that Steiner mourns as lost in modernist understandings of language. Indeed, Derrida regards the vocative as supremely respectful of alterity. Whereas the accusative case seeks to turn the Other into an object, the vocative is not “a case of speech, but, rather the bursting forth, the very raising up of speech” that avoids the thematic categories by which the Other is often overlooked (Writing and Difference 103). Miranda's apostrophe honors Adam so completely that it exerts rare rhetorical power. Having herself been brought back to life by injections in the hospital, Miranda brings back Adam to life by the name that breaks from her lips. She immediately feels her lover in the room with her, a ghost more intensely alive than its supplicant who dwells among the living dead.

Yet if Miranda's address seems to make Adam come back in his name, it also avoids the assumed correspondence between word and world that modernism has challenged. Her call personifies the lover “done taken” away, not the living; it brings back not Adam but his shade, the presence of his absence. Schleifer suggests the limits of such prosopopeia in evoking the dead. Noting how Derrida endlessly repeats the name of his deceased friend in Memoires for Paul de Man, as if the sheer invocation could stage a resurrection, Schleifer recognizes how such a return to life is purely a spectacle of language: “In mourning it is not the object of discourse, or even the Other who is addressed that is substantified. Rather, the very rhetoric of discourse—the material raising up (the ‘staging’) of speech and the ability of that speech to produce ‘effects’—is substantified” (222). Having written out her life in reviewing plays and vaudeville acts, Miranda stages her own coup de théâtre in raising Adam from the dead by raising her voice. The ghost is a special “effect” of language, and language is the ghost of a world given over to mortality.

Miranda's linguistic ghost thus lives in a realm between her Southern tradition of language as full of the world and her modernist perception of language as lacking such plenitude. Summoned by the name that represents it, the spirit demonstrates what both Sarah Kofman (121–62) and Elisabeth Bronfen mean when they view the revenant as an analog to representation. “Both hover uncannily in a liminal zone, neither living nor dead, neither absent nor present; both stage a duplicitous presence, at once sign of an absence and of an inaccessible other scene, of a Beyond” (Bronfen 117). Precisely because of such indeterminacy, Miranda's prosopopeia has recovered the elegiac function of speech that Freud observed in his grandson's fort-da game.⁵ The child conjured up his own ghostlike representations as a way of dealing with bereavement. When the eighteen-month-old responded to his mother's leaving the room by throwing away and then reclaiming a wooden reel while uttering sounds that Freud interpreted as markers of departure and return, he performed the mourner's task in letting speech say what is lost as well as what is found in its place. The child learned “to represent absence, and to make the absent present, by means of a substitutive figure accompanied by an elementary language” (Sacks 11). Both speaking and grieving are ways of acknowledging loss and of seeking compensation through turning toward a surrogate. Miranda's prosopopeia voices the possibility that she may grieve through speech. She may learn to use language as a way of expressing sorrow at mortality and of finding consolation in the name that, for Derrida, is always “in memory of” (Memoires 54).

Although Miranda moves toward imitating the singer in the spiritual Pale Horse, Pale Rider, she never completes her own song of sorrow because she cannot accept the way that both language and mourning must forego what is lost. She would act out the root meaning of prosopopeia, the conferral of a mask or face, by seeking to turn a figure of speech into a figure for sight: “if I could see your ghost I would say, I believe …‘I believe,’ she said aloud. ‘Oh, let me see you once more’” (264). As doubting Miranda suggests by her Thomas-like prayer that she may see in order to believe, she is not content with Adam's wraithlike return in language but dreams of the kind of spectre that she might have read about as a girl in the gothic laments of Poe (Old Mortality 12). Prosopopeia implies such visibility; as de Man writes, “Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face” (76). However, Miranda cannot accept that such an assumption grants a face in rhetoric only through the effacement of the actual person. She does not have sufficient faith in the otherness implied by her address but would spatialize discourse by having voice realize itself in vision. Miranda longs for language to provide her with the substantial solace of its referential function, even if “Adam” conjures up no more than the sight of his insubstantial spirit. Porter's elegist manqué wants to literalize a metaphor by turning the ghostliness of language into an actual ghost.

Just as Miranda cannot give Adam up to the memorial function of language, she cannot give her beloved up to the role that memory must play in the process of mourning. Her desire for a supernatural apparition disregards Derrida's caution that

the being ‘in us’ of the other, in bereaved memory, can be neither the so-called resurrection of the other himself (the other is dead and nothing can save him from this death, nor can anyone save us from it), nor the simple inclusion of a narcissistic fantasy in a subjectivity that is closed upon itself or even identical to itself.

(Memoires 21–22)

Miranda longs for an Adam that is too objective, and so her mourning risks becoming too subjective. Because she wants a lover in body, she nearly creates one in her own perfervid imagination.

Miranda may have some justification for desiring the kind of resurrection that Derrida rejects. As George Cheatham has argued (“Fall and Redemption” 401–05), Adam has seemed to fulfill Miranda's hope for a dying and rising god who will save her from death.⁶ He loses his own life while trying to save Miranda's, and he returns in a scene that recalls the appearance of the risen Jesus to Thomas. But the gospel parallel only points to how there is no “resurrection of the other himself” in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. Whereas Thomas placed his fingers into the wounds of the once-dead Jesus, Miranda loses her awareness of Adam's presence as soon as she cries out to see his ghost. It is “struck away by the sudden violence of her rising and speaking aloud” (264). The Christ of the gospels does not rise in rhetoric but in visible, palpable flesh; however, Adam's spirit depends so completely on the evocation of language that it disappears when Miranda compels it to live apart from language. Just as Miranda is not the twin of Thomas who sees and believes, neither is she one of those blessed who believe without seeing (John 20:29). Her longing to behold Adam once again makes her nearly succumb to a “narcissistic fantasy” (Derrida, Memoires 22) As Freud recognized, the struggle to sever attachments to the dead “can be so intense that a turning away from reality ensues, the object being clung to through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis” (154). If sensing the shade of Adam is “the last intolerable cheat of her heart … the unpardonable lie of her bitter desire” (264), actually seeing it would be pure delusion. For de Man, such prosopopeia is a “fiction” (75), but for Miranda it almost becomes a desperate self-deception.

Miranda wisely turns away from desiring such visions of the dead. “Oh, no, that is not the way, I must never do that, she warned herself” (264). Such radical identification with the deceased, according to Freud, leads to melancholia, not to mourning (159). To avoid such perilous self-absorption, Miranda at first cultivates a promisingly self-conscious theatricality. She orders grey accessories and a silver walking cane as parts of her new costume, and she ponders an array of cosmetics as if an actress deciding on her make-up for a part. “Still no one need pity this corpse if we look properly to the art of the thing,” Miranda reasons about the deliberately-chosen stylization that seems to move her beyond despair and toward the redefinition of self that John Bowlby regards as essential to the process of mourning (94–96). The artifice, however, will make the rest of her life a cadaverous masquerade. Although her return to the dullness of the ordinary world requires what John Edward Hardy describes as a “hard faith” in the will to survive (88), the newly-arisen Miranda ultimately lacks the defiant strength to sustain the kind of postmodern showmanship that empowers Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus. Knowing that soon the imitation will seem like actuality, she foresees her rhetorical complicity in the greyish routine of everyday life.⁷ Miranda anticipates a time when she will visit others who have escaped from death “and help them dress and tell them how lucky they are, and how lucky I am still to have them” (263). Her cheerful consolations to the convalescent will repeat the same truisms that now seem so suffused with sadness to her, but the real sorrow will be that Miranda will not even recognize the resonances of mortality that from the beginning she has heard behind every sorrowful word.

Only in “The Grave,” the last of Porter's Miranda stories, does the deprivation accepted at the end of Pale Horse, Pale Rider get quickened into life through successfully completing the work of mourning.⁸ While traveling in a foreign country, an enervated Miranda recovers “the being ‘in us’ of the other, in bereaved memory” when she suddenly remembers the face of another absent loved one (Derrida, Memoires 21). It is not Adam's but her brother's as he stood almost twenty years earlier, turning over a screw-head for a coffin that he had discovered in an abandoned cemetery; “as if she looked through a frame upon a scene that had not stirred nor changed since the moment it happened, the episode of that far-off day leaped from its burial place before her mind's eye” (The Leaning Tower 78). No longer yearning to see a ghost, Miranda witnesses recollection as if it were resurrection. She recalls what had been buried deep within the grave of her own self and regains it as if a framed work of art. As Robert Brinkmeyer writes, “Miranda's vision of Paul celebrates the victory of the individual, and of the artist, to forge wholeness, order, and beauty from the secrets of memory” (180). In this salutary visitation, mourning finds its creative consummation when imagination brings back to life the remembered tableau of one who had departed so that it enriches and clarifies the present.

Porter herself founded her fictional works of mourning on precisely the prosopopeia—the giving of face—that Miranda silently realizes in “The Grave” but takes too literally in Pale Horse, Pale Rider.⁹ Derrida virtually describes the imaginative process behind her short stories and novels when he explains how mourning may lead to art by taking the other into the self as an embodied memory. “This mimetic interiorization is not fictive; it is the origin of fiction, of apocryphal figuration. It takes place in a body. Or rather, it makes a place for a body, a voice, and a soul which, although ‘ours,’ did not exist and had no meaning before this possibility that one must always begin by remembering, and whose trace must be followed” (Memoires 34–35). The artist creates a figure—a voice and face and body—out of the necessity of remembering. Pale Horse, Pale Rider completes its author's work of mourning by figuring memory through just such a prosopopeia. Since Porter claimed that it was inspired by her love for the soldier who died of influenza after he nursed her through the same illness, the novelistic memoir is a sustained attempt to call up the dead. It is appropriate that the figure who answers that summons in the story—the highly idealized Adam—always seems slightly unreal, as if he truly were the mere shade of a character. Yet if the work is fiction as elegy, it is also elegy as fiction. Joan Givner contends that the character of Adam so controlled Porter's imagination that it reshaped her memories of his actual counterpart (129). Possibly named Alexander Barclay, the soldier came to live for Porter most completely through the prosopopeia that embodied his spirit as Adam Barclay.

In Pale Horse, Pale Rider Porter was not just trying to bring back to life the one man whom she claimed she could have loved (Givner 128). If prosopopeia is also “the trope of autobiography by which one's name … is made as intelligible and memorable as a face” (de Man 76), Porter was evoking her own self as if in memoriam.¹⁰ She needed to call up her image from among the dead because she had confronted her own version of the novel's title in 1918. During the flu epidemic Porter had virtually died—at least in the way that matters most to writers: in print. The Rocky Mountain News, the paper for which she worked, had already set her obituary in type (Givner 128–29). Although premature, the notice was not entirely presumptuous. “I really had participated in death,” Porter admitted, “… I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it.”¹¹ This knowledge “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, ready” to become a writer (Conversations 85).

Porter's encounter with mortality reversed the direction of Steiner's observations about art and endings. If “in their terminal structure, narrations are rehearsals for death” (141), Porter found near-death the necessary preparation for the lapidary writing that constantly turned remembered life into the remarkably chiseled craftsmanship of her epitaphic stories. The very finality of dying gave the would-be author the ultimate authority of viewing her life from its end. As Walter Benjamin explains, “not only a man's knowledge or wisdom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are made of—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. … Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell” (94). And the glimpse of a life more final than death made the artist-as-survivor feel ever more acutely the loss of such blessedness on this side of the grave. From the grief-filled vengeance of “María Conceptíon,” her first published story, to the deathward course of her final Ship of Fools, Porter eyed the same moribund world that Miranda saw upon returning from the dead. She died only to find herself a singer left to mourn. Making elegiac fiction out of prosopopeia, out of “the fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave” (de Man 77), Porter rediviva imagined in Pale Horse, Pale Rider the origins of her own ghostwriting, the moment that she began to learn how to speak post-mortem.

Notes

1. Sacks notes both of these strategies as typical of elegies (23–24).

2. Porter worked on Pale Horse, Pale Rider between 1932 and 1936. See DeMouy, 159–61, for how it evokes the atmosphere of the postwar waste land.

3. As a theatre critic, Miranda would fall under Steiner's censure against those purveyors of the secondary that gratify the modern desire to avoid confronting real presence: “We seek the immunities of indirection. In the agency of the critic, reviewer or mandarin commentator, we welcome those who can domesticate, who can secularize the mystery and summons of creation” (39).

4. The young Miranda loved “that world of personages taller than human beings, who swept upon the scene and invested it with their presences, their more than human voices, their gestures of gods and goddesses ruling a universe” (Old Mortality 13). Porter's own drama criticism indicates the kind of theatre that Miranda reviewed in 1918. Assuming a new “moral earnestness” after she recovered from influenza, it faulted the stage's trivial subjects, weak plots, sentimental optimism, and stereotypical characters (Givner 132–35).

5. See Schleifer, 221–22, on how Freud's “work of mourning” gets articulated in the “rhetoric of mourning.”

6. Cheatham finds Adam a much more problematic savior in a later article, “Death and Repetition.”

7. Unrue views Miranda as achieving “the transcendent state that unifies both life and death” (157), but her victory seems like the kind of sad accommodation that C. S. Lewis wondered about after the death of his wife: “Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?” (41) Porter might have been describing Miranda's self-deception when she discussed her own recovery from nearly fatal influenza. “I made the mistake of thinking I was quite like anybody else, of trying to live like other people” (Conversations 85).

8. Although published in 1934, two years before Porter completed Pale Horse, Pale Rider, “The Grave” ends with Miranda at her oldest, about twenty-nine.

9. Schorer also sees a connection between Miranda and Porter as writers, but he views the returned Miranda not as an unsuccessful artist but as a figure for Porter herself, now gifted with the knowledge of past, present, and future (273). Walsh notes that Porter, like Miranda, “conceived herself as the courageous survivor, the one singer left to mourn” (182); however, he suggests that both may have adopted their heroic defiance to mask a fear of love.

10. Derrida hears the elegy implicit in lifestory: “Funerary speech and writing do not follow upon death, they work upon life in what we call autobiography” (Memoires 22).

11. Gernes explores the parallels between Porter's depiction of Miranda's death and Raymond A. Moody's research into life-after-death experiences.

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