THE ALMOST-FORGOTTEN FLU: K. A. PORTER'S PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER

As awareness of the pandemic nature of what the world faced in early 2020 took hold, several news media began to remind us of what they called the "forgotten flu": the 1918 Spanish flu (Wilson 2020; Jenkins 2021; Prideaux 2021; Australia story 2020; McGarvey 2020). Simultaneously, scholars of American literature found themselves at odds with these headlines, for to the readers of the modern American fiction the 1918 Spanish flu was synonymous with Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider and was thus far from forgotten but rather indelibly memorialized. Even recent medical journals have referred to Pale Horse, Pale Rider in articles that attempt to put a human face on the experience of pandemic (Bristow 2010; Potter 2013; Spinney 2017). This paper seeks to contribute to that human face by considering Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider as an instance of (1) close recall of a buried moment of war-related and post-war catastrophe, and (2) a modernist experiment in gendered mindscape and trauma survival.