[In the following essay, Gernes explores the autobiographical nature of the death sequence in Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider.]

“It's a true story …” Katherine Anne Porter responded to an interviewer's question about her short novel, Pale Horse, Pale Rider. “It seems to me true that I died then, I died once, and I never have feared death since. …”¹ Porter's experience of “dying” took place in 1918 in the influenza epidemic that claimed more lives than the war that was coming to an end in Europe. She assigned the experience to her autobiographical protagonist, Miranda Rhea, in the short novel written in the later 1930s, and she told a Denver Post reporter in 1956 that she and not simply her character had “died once.” The death sequence from Pale Horse, Pale Rider has long been regarded as a remarkably skillful allegory or set of symbols for what no one has ever been able to both experience and record: physical death. The sequence is made even more remarkable, however, by research done in the past five years on persons who have been clinically “dead” and have been resuscitated. Miranda's story [and therefore Porter's, if the story is “true”] fits almost perfectly the pattern of “death experiences” traced by Raymond A. Moody Jr. in his study Life After Life,² and reaffirmed in the research of Elizabeth Kubler Ross. What Porter has given us in Pale Horse, Pale Rider may, in fact, be less of an allegory than a rare subjective experience, recorded long before current research on the subject, of what it is like to “die.”

In Life After Life, Moody constructs a composite experience of “death” based on one hundred and fifty interviews he conducted with persons who had been clinically “dead” or near death. He stresses that no individual subject experienced all the elements described below, nor did the elements necessarily occur in this order:

A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from this unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.

After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body,” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving, warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him along by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet, he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.

Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life.³

Porter admittedly had trouble recreating the “indescribable” experience of physical death,⁴ and there is no question that she turned to symbol to detail the ineffable, just as she drew on the symbols of both biblical and folk belief in the dream Miranda has of death riding a pale horse at the beginning of the story. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that the death sequence, written almost twenty years after her own experience of “death,” should contain so many of the elements of Moody's composite experience. Of the fifteen “stages” or facets that Moody enumerates, Miranda experiences eleven in some form, a better average than most of Moody's informants. She does not hear herself pronounced dead, and she does not hear any loud noises as she slips from her body (although in an earlier, delirious dream of death, she is in “an angry, dangerous wood full of inhuman concealed voices singing sharply like the whine of arrows,” pp. 151–52). Nor does she experience an instantaneous review of the events of her life. Since Porter ends the story with Miranda's reemergence into the world of the living, it is impossible to assess the effect her “death” will have on her subsequent life in the way that Moody assesses the lives of his informants. Porter says of herself, however, that she has never “feared death since.”

Of the eight “stages” that Miranda does experience, one of the earliest is an equivalent of Moody's “dark tunnel” or “the sensation of being pulled very rapidly through a dark space of some kind.” As her mind struggles to retain a kind of rationality in her delirium, she grapples with a definition or image of the extinction she is experiencing:

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. Silenced, she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life. …⁵

Once at this “bottom of life,” she experiences the peace and quiet that many of Moody's informants record:

… knowing herself to be blind, dead, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her. …

The “out of body” stage which Moody cites as part of the death experience commonly takes the form of a physical separation which allows the subject to view his or her body from a distance as a spectator. This is clearly not the case with Miranda. Moody, however, cites variations on the experience:

[A subject] may be out of his body for some time, desperately trying to sort out all the things that are happening to him and that are racing through his mind, before he realizes that he is dying, or even dead. … A man states that the thought came to him, “This must be what they call ‘death’.” Even when this realization comes, it may be accompanied by bafflement and even a certain refusal to accept one's state.

(Moody, pp. 41–2)

Miranda has already given an abstract level to her experience: “Look, she told herself, there it is, that is death and there is nothing to fear.” (p. 158) She now experiences a reduction of self to a single point of consciousness that is less baffled than it is obstinate in its refusal to accept what has already been perceived as death:

… there remained of her a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

(p. 158)

Moody comments:

In one or two cases I have studied, dying persons whose souls, minds, consciousness (or whatever you want to call them) were released from their bodies say that they didn't feel that, after release, they were in any kind of “body” at all. They felt as though they were “pure” consciousness. One relates that during his experience he felt as though he were ‘able to see everything around me—including my whole body as it lay on the bed—without occupying any space,’ that is, as if he were a point of consciousness.

(p. 42; italics are mine)

Curiously, Miranda does seem to have a body of the usual size and shape, capable of such movements as running and lying with its arms under its head as her experience continues. The hard, unwinking point of light which she has identified as the will to live or the indestructible consciousness metamorphoses:

At once it grew, flattened, thinned to a fine radiance, spread like a great fan and curved out into a rainbow through which Miranda, enchanted, altogether believing, looked upon a deep clear landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glistening with transparencies of blue. Why, of course, said Miranda, without surprise but with serene rapture as if some promise made to her had been kept long after she had ceased to hope for it.

(p. 158)

This is the closet Miranda comes to experiencing what Moody describes in the following passage as “the being of light”:

Typically, at its first appearance this light is dim, but it rapidly gets brighter until it reaches an unearthly brilliance. Yet, even though this light (usually said to be white or “clear”) is of an indescribable brilliance, many make the specific point that it does not in any way hurt their eyes, or dazzle them, or keep them from seeing other things around them. … Not only that, it is a personal being. It has a very definite personality. The love and the warmth which emanate from this being to the dying person are utterly without words, and he feels completely surrounded by it and taken up in it, completely at ease and accepted in the presence of this being. He senses an irresistible magnetic attraction to this light. He is ineluctably drawn to it.

(pp. 58–59)

In no way does Miranda identify the light as a “being.” She does, however, watch its expansion over a clear landscape, she experiences rapture as though some old promise has been kept, and she is drawn immediately into the world which the light illuminates: “She rose from her narrow ledge and ran lightly through the tall portals of the great bow that arched in its splendor over the burning blue of the sea and the cool green of the meadow on either hand” (p. 158).

Significantly, Miranda has passed through a “portal” or border of some kind. On the other side, in a world in which she has a vivid sense of sight but apparently no sense of hearing (“… the grasses flurried before a breeze that made no sound”), Miranda meets other beings. According to Moody, such beings were often present to his subjects, apparently to ease their transition into death. As Miranda sees them:

Moving towards her leisurely as clouds through the shimmering air came a great company of human beings, and Miranda saw in an amazement of joy that they were all the living she had known. Their faces were transfigured, each in its own beauty, beyond what she remembered of them, their eyes were clear and untroubled as good weather, and they cast no shadows. They were pure identities and she knew then every one according to their names or remembering what relation she bore them.

(p. 159)

These transfigured beings lead Miranda to a sea (another kind of crossing-over) which she contemplates ecstatically but does not enter:

They surrounded her smoothly on silent feet, then turned their entranced faces again towards the sea, and she moved among them easily as a wave among waves. The drifting circle widened, separated, and each figure was alone but not solitary; Miranda, alone too, questioning nothing, desiring nothing, in the quietude of her ecstasy stayed where she was, eyes fixed on the overwhelming deep sky where it was always morning.

(p. 159; italics mine)

In this phase of her experience, Miranda closely resembles Moody's typical informant: “At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life” (p. 22). “This has taken the form, in various accounts, of a body of water, a gray mist, a door, a fence across a field, or simply a line” (p. 73). “Yet, he finds that he must go back to earth, that the time for his death has not yet come” (p. 22). Miranda also finds that she cannot remain in this paradise:

Lying at ease, arms under her head, in the prodigal warmth which flowed evenly from sea and sky and meadow, within touch but not touching the serenely smiling familiar beings about her, Miranda felt without warning a vague tremor of apprehension, some small flick of distrust in her joy; a thin frost touched the eyes of this confident tranquillity. …

(p. 159)

Moody's informants give varying reasons for their return from the blissfully lit world of death, but a common theme is that they have left something unfinished; they have responsibilities or relationships which necessitate their return. Miranda, in the lines which follow those quoted immediately above, realizes the cause of her flicker of apprehension: “… something, somebody, was missing, she had lost something, she had left something valuable in another country, oh, what could it be? There are no trees, no trees here, she said in fright. I have left something unfinished” (p. 159). (Italics are mine.)

What Miranda has left unfinished is her relationship with Adam, a young soldier she has come to love. This is made clear in the next-to-last paragraph of the novel when Miranda, now almost fully recovered, must face life without the lover who has died, during her recovery, of the disease from which she escaped: “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?” (p. 165). Her concern with the fact that there are no trees in the land of the dead seems to refer to a dream she had earlier in the illness in which she and Adam wander through a green wood where Adam is killed by arrows which pass harmlessly through her own body. She has other unfinished business as well: there is a war on, and she has been reminded, even hounded, earlier in the story about her responsibilities to the war effort, the war wounded and the war dead. As her vision of paradise begins to fade:

A thought struggled at the back of her mind, came clearly as a voice in her ear. Where are the dead? We have forgotten the dead, oh, the dead, where are they? At once as if a curtain had fallen, the bright landscape faded, she was alone in a strange stony place of bitter cold, picking her way along a steep path of slippery snow, calling out, Oh, I must go back! But in what direction?

(p. 159)

Almost instantaneous with her recognition of responsibility is Miranda's re-entry into the world of the living and the world of the physical body:

Pain returned, a terrible compelling pain running through her veins like a heavy fire, the stench of corruption filled her nostrils, the sweetish sickening smell of rotting flesh and pus; she opened her eyes and saw pale light through a coarse white cloth over her face, knew that the smell of death was in her own body, and struggled to lift her hand.

(pp. 159–160)

The “coarse white cloth” which covers Miranda's face is a curious detail. While it may have been part of a treatment procedure (e.g. a wet compress to reduce fever), that seems unlikely. A cloth drawn over a face indicates a corpse, the recognition of physical death. If this is true, the cloth seems to form the objective corroboration of Miranda's subjective perceptions that she has experienced death. It is the only detail in the story which parallels Moody's element of corroboration. In this age of more sophisticated medical technology, a large number of Moody's 150 informants were actually pronounced clinically “dead.” In addition, several of them offer further substantiation of their “deaths” by their ability to describe precisely what went on while they were “dead” or, in a few cases, to repeat conversations between relatives in other rooms which occurred during the ‘’death” experience. Moody is careful to insist that these constitute corroboration of the informant's experience rather than proof. No corroboration of the latter type exists in the Porter story.

Miranda's return to the world of the living is coupled not only with physical pain, but with emotional distress and depression. As Moody says of his informants: “Once the dying person reaches a certain depth in his experience, he does not want to come back, and he may even resist the return to the body” (p. 77–78). He quotes one subject as saying: “After I came back, I cried off and on for about a week because I had to live in this world after seeing that one. I didn't want to come back.” Although Miranda's return seems to be linked both to her earlier determination to live and to her sense of responsibility toward Adam and her society, her life among the living is tarnished and lackluster compared to the radiant light she has known:

The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there? Is it possible I can ever accustom myself to this place? she asked herself. The human faces around her seemed dulled and tired, with no radiance of skin and eyes as Miranda remembered radiance; the once white walls of her room were now a soiled gray. Breathing slowly, falling asleep and waking again, feeling the splash of water on her flesh, taking food, talking in bare phrases with Dr. Hildesheim and Miss Tanner, Miranda looked about her with the covertly hostile eyes of an alien who does not like the country in which he finds himself, does not understand the language nor wish to learn it, does not mean to live there and yet is helpless, unable to leave it at his will.

(p. 161)

Miss Tanner tells look to Miranda at the sunshine which has been specially ordered for her, but Miranda cannot see it as sunshine:

There was no light, there might never be light again, compared as it must always be with the light she had seen beside the blue sea that lay so tranquilly along the shore of her paradise. … Closing her eyes she would rest for a moment remembering that bliss which had repaid all the pain of the journey to reach it; opening them again she saw with a new anguish the dull world to which she was condemned, where the light seemed filmed over with cobwebs, all the bright surfaces corroded, the sharp planes melted and formless, all objects and being meaningless, ah, dead and withered things that believed themselves alive!

(p. 162)

Miranda makes no attempt to tell anyone either among the medical staff or among her friends of her experience. This, according to Moody, is typical. Although his informants were convinced of the reality of their experiences, (and Moody maintains that they were well-balanced personalities capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy or dream), most of them choose either to remain silent or to reveal their experiences only to a very close relative. They feared being rebuffed, being greeted with skepticism, or being thought mentally unstable. In many cases, they found their experiences so ineffable, so beyond the bounds of human language and symbol that they simply did not know how to express them. When Miranda's newspaper friends, Mary and Chuck, come to visit and celebrate her survival, Miranda makes no attempt to share either her “death” or the grief she feels on being deprived of the blissful meadow:

For ten minutes 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.

(p. 163)

Miranda realizes the ineffability of the world she has known so briefly; she has no way of explaining to the living that it is better than the world to which they are welcoming her back. Therefore, she avoids opening her letters: “They will all 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?”

Porter herself recognized the ineffability of her 1918 experience with the Spanish influenza, and the difficulty of communicating it even in a fictional framework. She told Robert Van Gelder in an interview that “it is true that the moment of death holds something like revelation,” and that the novel was her attempt “to record that experience.”⁶ In Images of Truth, Glenway Wescott reports that Porter had trouble with the passage in Pale Horse, Pale Rider in which Miranda was to see heaven: “She told me that she herself, at the end of World War I, had experienced this part of what she had created this heroine to experience and to make manifest; and because, no doubt, it was really heaven, she found herself unable to re-see it with her lively, healthy eyes.”⁷ Wescott urged her not to try because heaven is “the indescribable, the defeat of literature, the end of empiricism” (p. 37). Porter, despite his advice, finished the novel about a year later.

The sense of frustration Porter expressed at not being able to convey rightly and fully her experience of death, coupled with the fact that Pale Horse, Pale Rider is, without question, a fictional work in which she was free to take liberties with fact, makes even more remarkable the correspondence between Miranda's experience and the experiences of Moody's informants. This is not to suggest that either work partakes of the empiricism to which Wescott refers. Moody takes great care to point out that his research does not constitute empirical evidence, nor does it “prove” that there is life after death. He presents his case studies as a body of data which is significant in helping to understand one of the most basic and feared experiences of humankind. Similarly, Katherine Anne Porter's short novel adds nothing empirical to Moody's research, nor to the scientific evidence that has been compiled about the fact of death. It is not, in fact, a novel about death; it is a novel about the human experience of dying. It attempts, in a manner that parallels Moody's more recent accounts, to push the boundaries of language back far enough to encompass and convey the boundaries of life. It operates on the premise that one human's experience may be of significance to others. “That's one of the reasons we have art, isn't it?” poet Theodore Roethke asked, “—that man can experience other men's experiences?”⁸

Notes

1. Charles Mercer, “Tragic Story of Denver Writer on ‘Climax,’” The Denver Post, 22 March 1956, p. 29, col. 2–4.

2. Life After Life, 2nd ed., (1975; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1976).

3. Life After Life, pp. 21–23. All further references to this work appear in the text.

4. Glenway Prescott, Images of Truth (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 37.

5. Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 2nd ed., (1939; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1967), p. 158. All further references to this work appear in the text.

6. Writers and Writing (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), p. 44.

7. Prescott, p. 37.

8. Theodore Roethke in a University of Washington film, In a Dark Time.