I am whatever they wish to make of me: "Black Corfu" by Karen Russell

If I don't love this story, it's not Karen Russell's fault. It so happens that this past weekend, in addition to preparing to write this post on "Black Corfu," the fourteenth story in the 2018 Best American Short Stories volume, I also saw Parasite, the Korean movie directed by Bong Joon Ho that won the top award at this year's Cannes Film festival. Although Parasite is focused on class almost entirely while "Black Corfu" is about racial prejudices first and class prejudices second, they're in similar territory thematically. They even both make use of an up/down topology for the setting that dramatically and viscerally represents the psychologically different worlds the two classes inhabit. And while "Black Corfu" is a strong showing, Parasite is one of the five best movies I've ever seen. I already loved Memories of a Murder, also by Bong, and this is on that level. So it's hard for me to gush about "Black Corfu" when my heart is so full of Parasite.




The main character is an unnamed "posthumous doctor" in the early 17th century. He was a smart lad, but he has dark skin, and the social stigma associated with that means he can never be a doctor like he wants to. The "real" doctors (who are so ineffective their patients often die of pneumonia and "throat rattle") live at the top of the hill on the island of Black Corfu in the Adriatic Sea. Our hero can climb no higher than to become a "posthumous doctor," cutting the hamstrings of corpses so they don't turn into werewolves. It's not what he wanted, but he has learned a lesson that nearly all minorities who face prejudice learn: "fit yourself to your circumstances." He also dreams that if he does a really good job, the island's elders will see his valuable contributions and promote him. "Wasn't it possible that a posthumous surgeon might one day be promoted from his abyss to the upper world?" he dreams.

Alas, his dreams are not to be. After decades of never allowing a corpse to turn into a monster, he is assigned a student from another town. This student, Jure, is from the upper class, but is generally unpromising in life, so he has been assigned to learn the trade of posthumous surgeon from our protagonist. Jure is terrified by hacking at the dead, too stupid to learn the trade, and insulted when the old werewolf doctor comments that Jure also has dark skin, so Jure comes up with a scheme to get out of training with the old man: he says that the old man messed up a surgery, and now the red-headed girl he was supposed to have prevented from becoming a werewolf is roaming the island.

It's an absurd claim, but the island shows itself all too willing to believe it. His decades of "never losing a patient" mean nothing. The island swallows the boy's lies, largely because it has barely repressed its instinctive prejudices against the "moor" posthumous surgeon all these years. The "real" doctor who lives up the hill is one of those most strongly against him.

Even the old man's wife ends up believing the lies. She is willing to forgive, but this only enrages the old man, who just wants to be believed, not forgiven. He is unable to fight the "other man," the version of himself everyone thinks is the real him. This "other man" is as monstrous as the werewolves he is supposed to protect them from. "I am whatever they make of me," he observes, so impotent to fight the lies about him that even he is unable to fight the "other man" within his own mind.

Finally, the old surgeon performs the hamstringing surgery on himself, then commits suicide, hoping to prove that he would never fail in the surgery by succeeding on his own body. But his corpse rises from the grave. His werewolf wonders if he has made a mistake.

It's all a metaphor, of course, and the mistake he has made is in believing that society could ever see him as anything other than a monster. He thought he could accommodate them, assuage their fears of monsters, but he never realized that the same people afraid of monsters put him in the same class.

In one of the possibly too-on-point omniscient breaks from the limited point-of-view of most of the story, we get this tie-in to prejudice in the 21st century:

"In later centuries, new etiologies will evolve. Miasma theory will yield to germ theory, superstition to science. Yet every novel treatment breeds an equally novel genetic resilience, as only the hardiest survivors spawn. And so the cure teaches the disease how to evade it."

I'm not quite the alarmist some people are about racism in the age of Trump, but it's clear it's not dead. It's not dead in Europe, either. And those who are still hanging on to the old prejudices are dug in now, hard to get out of their foxholes. In some ways, this short story reminds me of the movie Kingdom of Heaven for the way it invites the reader to see the present alive in the past. Really, the story has a lot going for it. The use of setting and the imaginative connection between the prejudices of the past, which now seem like silly superstition as much as a Monty Python skit about witches, and the prejudices which survive today--all of it is good stuff. It's a good story.

It just isn't Parasite. In conclusion, if you get anything out of this review, it would be to make sure you see the movie Parasite.