The unmagical magical realism of Karen Russell: "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"

"When discussing book ideas with an editor, it's good (for a novelist) to mention that the story is either magical realism or surrealism. That way, the editor will start thinking about the story according to their own designs, and pretty soon, they end up liking the idea." -Kim Young-ha, "Corn and me" (translation mine)

"The unicorn kept changing as she walked toward me." Karen Russell, "The Cloud Lake Unicorn"

Seems like a lot of these short story anthologies I read and sometimes blog through really, really want me to read Karen Russell. This will be the fourth time I've blogged on one of her stories, to go along with at least two other times I've come across her from back before I used to write about reading Best American Short Stories, Pushcart, etc. (First time, second time, third time, and she also had "Madame Bovary's Greyhound" in the 2014 BASS and "The Prospectors" in the 2016 BASS.) I also went and read her novel Swamplanida! a few years ago.

One of the reasons I took the time to read Swamplandia! is that Russell always makes me unsure of myself as a critic. Everyone seems to love her. I can certainly see why people enjoy her work, but the level of devotion she inspires is hard for me to understand. There is obvious, raw talent in every page. Her stories, though, have the feeling to me of a Netflix original movie: each feels as though it was written by a team of bright professionals who have studied what makes for a successful story and included all of these things without quite managing to fully give life to their creations. A solid 6/10 nearly every time, with enough moments to make you finish it, but nothing you're going to remember for years afterwards. A Karen Russell short story feels to me like what we'll get in a few years when we ask ChatGPT to write a magical realist short story with a monster in it. 

There are people out there,though, who gush about Russell like she's near the pinnacle of American literature at the moment. This guy is a good example; he says she's not only a good writer, but that her work has "truly and deeply impacted" his life. Impacted his life? Truly and deeply? Those are big words. I can point to precious few writers who have done that for me. There are many writers I enjoy, but few who have made me actually change the course of what I do and how I think about core issues. I'm curious how Russell has done this for this critic. As I read the piece, though, I began to suspect that she hadn't really impacted his life. She'd just impacted his understanding of literature by opening his "eyes, as a budding college student, to the wondrous world of magical realism."

Oh. Is that all she did? Taught him that a genre of literature exists in which the fabulous is combined with the realistic? (Also, Russell did that? Not the hundred years or so of writers doing it before her? Even Russell found out about Gabriel Garcia Marquez at a young age, she says in that same interview. I feel like few people would ever read Russell who weren't already serious about literature, so it's hard to guess how she was someone's first taste of magical realism. But I digress.) 

The critic goes on to also say her stories "...took me to worlds I hadn’t yet known. They taught me about guilt, love, loss, and, mostly, what home was—and could (and can) be." I find this hard to believe. Those are just phrases you throw out to overly praise a work. Those are blurbs, not what actually happened in his life. It's rather like when people claim Jesus or Gandhi as a role model. Really? In what way would you say you're living a life that adopts theirs as a model? I don't believe this critic really thinks differently about, say, what home means as a result of reading Russell. I think he read work that he enjoyed, saw material in it that referred to the meaning of home, and then chose that subject as a good thing to list to make it seem like she has affected his psyche on a deeper level. 

Yes, I'm aware of how "problematic" Perez is. I follow him on Twitter. Sometimes, I think he's a parody of himself, because he's now decided he's an outlaw and he takes his outlaw persona too seriously. Other times, like with this tweet, he's really insightful and pithy. I'm willing to take the mix, which is why I follow him.

Theme and subject

There is a frequent tendency among people who talk about literature to confuse theme and subject. Subject is what comes up in a narrative. Theme is an attitude toward what comes up. For a very long time in Western literature, the dual purpose of narrative was assumed to be "to delight and instruct." This meant that authors often wanted to make sure their audiences understood the theme by making it explicit. Aesop's fables are of course one example, but even in epics like the Iliad we were told at the opening what the poem was really "about." Medieval morality plays made sure to drive their point home, but many of Shakespeare's plays also made sure we got what the point was with a prologue or epilogue that made it explicit. Driving the point home was the norm. 

Not all of Shakespeare's plays did that, though. Arguably, the one play of his that continues to speak most profoundly to "the human condition" is Hamlet. Hamlet stands out for how ambiguous it is, relative to other literature of the time, about what its "instruction" is. It's the most modern of his plays. The Romantics saw in it an example of "negative capacity," the ability to imbue characters with ideas without the narrative becoming fully identifiable with those ideas. Modern fiction theory loves the notion of negative capacity.

I certainly wouldn't want to read fables that wrapped up with a two-sentence explanation of the moral of the story. Thematic ambiguity is fine. It's okay that I'll never be able to state the theme of Hamlet in a fully satisfying way. But I at least have some kind of sense about what the subject I should be looking to attach a theme to is. I know the area code of the theme in a great work, even if I don't know the address. In Hamlet, it's something about how weird and fleeting life is and what the point of it is and how we can ever know anything definitely and how difficult it is, if you really think about anything, to determine one's course of action. I know that's what the play is ultimately about, even if I can't quite say exactly what it is saying about those ideas. 

Back to Russell

With Russell, though, I really can't tell where the center of the story I'm supposed to be digging to find is. Partly, I think that Russell is a victim of her own talent for observation here. She'll be writing along, and something appears in the story, and she's got a bit she comes up with on this thing, which is great, but it's so powerful, it blows the whole trajectory of the story off course. The density of some of these passages exerts a gravitational pull on the overall narrative that's so strong, the center keeps veering all over the place. I first noticed this in "The Tornado Auction," but it's also very apparent when reading "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," which is in this year's Pushcart Anthology.

The story opens with neighbors hauling trash out. Russell riffs on the dual meanings of "refuse," both verb and noun. Russell often deals with ecological stress in her work, so I figured we might be getting some kind of statement on consumption here. We don't even get through the opening two pages before there are three different themes on the subject of "refuse" emerging:

 

1. Trash/consumption as a reason for ecological disaster. The "Cloud Lake" of the title is gone now, a victim, perhaps, of urban sprawl or climate change. The mist of its ghost is a hinted-at but never-arriving monster. 
2. Trash pickup as a religious ceremony. The narrator, Mauve, calls hauling trash to the curb a "secular ceremony of reckoning and forgetting." She later calls the trip to the curb a "pilgrimage." 
3. Trash as a record of human consumption. "The curb is like the diary where we record our hungers." One thinks of future civilizations performing archaeological studies of us through our buried trash heaps, making guesses about what our lives were like and what mattered to us. 

Any of these is fertile ground for a thematic foundation to build a story on, but the three are pulling in somewhat different directions. In one, trash is a sin that harms the Earth. In another, it's a quasi-religious ceremony in which we are absolved of our past foolish consumption choices. That is, it's not a sin so much as absolution from sin. In the third thematic possibility, trash is instead a record of human activity. 

There's nothing necessarily wrong with these differing meanings of refuse being at war with each other. In fact, the whole story could have unfolded as a meditation on the tension between these meanings. When Mauve reveals that she is pregnant, she goes to a drug store she is nearly certain is a mob front. Already, the theme of consumption as a sin seems to be striving for primacy over the others. After Mauve learns she is pregnant, she throws the pregnancy test stick in the trash. I found this interesting, because Mrs. Heretic and I still have the pregnancy stick from when we learned we were having our son. It's our "diary" of our "hunger" for a child. Mauve doesn't want the record, though, although we soon learn that it isn't because she doesn't want the child she thought she could never have. Rather, a "violent desire" to have the child comes over her. The "refuses" the record of wanting the child while still wanting to keep the child herself. There's a great setup here for a tension that could continue.

Instead, a fucking unicorn shows up and the whole thing goes off the rails. The unicorn is the kind of thing people rave about in Russell. To me, though, the magic in her magical realism is usually what makes the whole framework of her narratives wobbly. 

What is the unicorn?

My blogging friend Karen Carlson accused me of "taking the fun out of musicals and the magic out of magical realism" last year when I was commenting on Yohanca Delgado's "The Widow from the Capital." Seriously. It was savage what she wrote. Our friendship may never recover. Here's what I said: 

Whenever I encounter magical realism, I like to think of the bits of magic sort of like the songs in a musical. In a musical, characters are going along talking to each other like normal people, and then suddenly, they burst out into song and a choreographed dance number. Which--I don't know what your life is like, but the people I know don't do this.

Unless the song is diegetic, you're not supposed to think that the people in the story are really singing and dancing. It's a dramatic and lyrical expression of the feeling a character or characters would be having at the point in the story, or it's a way to establish a feeling to a plot point, rather than just having it happen It's the same thing with soliloquies in plays. In real life, people don't talk to themselves out loud in poetry while other people fade into the background. You're meant to think of this as an opening into the psyche of the character by means other than action and normal dialogue.

When something that doesn't happen in the real world happens in a story where most things do happen in the real world, then, I look at it like a song in a musical. It's not about the thing, it's about what the thing signifies. The women aren't afraid of being cursed by a voodoo doll; they're afraid that the little widow's lack of concern for their faces means they aren't really that important. The "we" is facing a threat from the "them." 

I might add mockumentary-format shows like The Office, too. As much as "The Office" attempted at the end to make the whole documentary format make sense by putting together an in-universe movie based on the hijinks at Dunder-Mifflin, it really never made sense that a camera crew was interviewing the people in this office for so long. Same with Modern Family. Instead, the cutaway scenes are just a means to get into the interior mental landscape of the characters, to get their inner thoughts, without having to do a voiceover of those thoughts, like in Dexter, or an aside to the audience as in many plays.

That doesn't mean you can't still love the music or come away from a night watching Les Miserables feeling full of hope and humming a tune. It doesn't mean that the magic can't still be magical; it does mean, though, that the magic has to fit the world, just as the songs have to fit their world. If the Jets busted out in a funk tune in the middle of a jazzy West Side Story, it wouldn't be right. Similarly, you can't just throw a unicorn in somewhere that it doesn't belong. 

So what is the unicorn in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn," and does it fit its world? It's many things:

1. It's an immortal being, and therefore a representative of a different way of experiencing time. The opening lines of the story refer to "extraordinary time," and the notion of the unicorn's special relationship to time is mentioned again, but not sustained.  Mauve worries when she first sees the unicorn that she will chase the animal "out of time and back into eternity," for example. Time is a very powerful subject, and so this is one of those centers of gravity that pulls the story in another direction from the main one. It's a false passage the the maze of the narrative. 
2. The unicorn is the reward of God/nature to the pure. The unicorn first comes to Mauve when she is hauling the parts of a cherry tree she's pruned to the curb. Mauve's landlord/roommate Edie has left the tree's health in the hands of God by hanging rosaries on it, but Mauve has "stepped in for God" by taking care of the tree. Is the unicorn, then, like a dryad, a spirit of the tree or of nature, come to Mauve because Mauve is pure of heart and cares for nature? Is Mauve's trash somehow a purer offering to the secular god than that of others? 
3. The unicorn is a symbol of hope in a world that seems like it's mostly dying. If there is a passage in "The Cloud Lake Unicorn" that sort of announces, "This is what the story is about," it's this: "Hope can be agonizing...But you have to keep hoping." The unicorn is haggard and beaten down by eternity, just as we are haggard and beaten down my time, but she ultimately gives birth alongside Mauve, the two sharing a "powerful lifewish in common." Having another child means another consumer, another producer of trash. It might be a stupid thing to do, but Mauve has one anyway, which is an act of foolhardy optimism. 

Too many thematic centers of gravity

These three different meanings of the unicorn aren't like the three possible meanings of "refuse." There isn't a natural tension between them; instead, they occupy three totally different spheres. They don't have enough to do with each other that all of them can be introduced into the story and still keep the narrative moving toward a solitary purpose. The moment one of them becomes the center of the story, the others recede into the background. I can see a critic reading some of the material referring to an alternate time and thinking therefore that this is somehow a central motif in the story or that the story has something profound to say about different ways of experiencing time. It doesn't, though, and the opening line of the story, "Before I started living on extraordinary time, I used to set my watch by Garbage Thursday," contains not one, but two red herrings. A gushing critic would praise the story for its "examination of the subjectivity of time" or something like that, but in fact, the story doesn't do that at all. It refers to this notion--an oft-examined idea in literary criticism and one literary readers would be familiar with--and then relies on the readers to fill in the blanks if they so choose. The magic in a story like this isn't in the story itself. The readers are filling in the lack of magic with their own meaning. 

This is why Caro is in the story, attempting to resolve all these imbalances by insisting any sort of symbolic reasoning is wrong. "You think everything has to mean something," she chides Maude. "But you're not the addressee on the envelope here, OK? Mostly the world is talking to itself." Fine, except the world throughout the story clearly is trying to talk to us, and we are desperately trying to talk back to it. Caro doesn't resolve the tension, then. 

I tend to think the genesis of this "too muchness" in Russell's work is her own outsized talent for observation. A story like this is bursting with moments of keen observation. Mauve is like a skilled comedian; anything that comes across her path is grist for her wit. She looks at the positive pregnancy test and muses, "What a strange way to take the temperature of your future." She riffs on how all pregnancy calendars compare fetus sizes to fruit, then ends with this beauty: "At week forty, the fruit bowl of metaphor abruptly disappeared, and the analogy sutured itself into a circle, beautifully tautological: your baby is the size of a baby." There's a whole schtick about how "perform" is a disconcerting word to hear attached to surgery. All of these individual passages are delightful, but after too many of these, the reader begins to suspect the narrator. This isn't a narrator's voice; it's the voice of an author who sees too many things and can't help herself from pointing them out. I eventually started feeling like Elaine in one episode of Seinfeld:

 

A Russell story is full of brilliant moments that feel like bits, like an observant, witty person is sharing the stored-up observations in her treasure chest. Like a comic's set, though, these often don't have a unifying grand scheme. There's five minutes here on using public bathrooms, then a quick pivot and we're off to the travails of air travel. Occasionally, a very skilled comic can create an entire performance with a unifying theme, but it's rare. Most comedians instead opt for the illusion of unity by ending on a callback joke. The surface unity in a story like this is often nothing more than a good callback joke. 

The unicorn is such a callback joke. So are most of the monsters that appear in Russell's fiction. They're attempts to make a story that is held together in general only by the force of the narrative intellect appear as if its whole is organic. Critics who are only paying attention to surface phenomena see them and think they're reading something that explodes with meaning, when instead, I tend to see stories that are merely pregnant with potential meaning. I mean, they're pregnant as fuck, as in this story that is literally about a pregnancy, but there is sometimes too little urgency to answer a central question and too much joy chasing issues around the center to get to the birth. I don't feel like the story got its start with a burning question about the universe. I don't sense urgency. Instead, I feel like it started with a writer who is good at writing and so she does that. 

My favorite story from Russell was "Madame Bovary's Greyhound," which appeared in the 2014 BASS and which has no magical creatures. In fact, other than its movement into the POV of a dog, there is nothing magical in it at all. It is also the most focused story I've read of Russell's in terms of arriving at a central theme. In this case, the greyhound learns the importance of becoming her own master, which is something her own former owner failed to understand. It has a great last line that feels perfect and earned and complete. Much of her other work feels to me like a symphony with eleven movements. 

I'm certainly not saying Russell is some kind of hack. I won't argue with Karen Carlson for liking the story. I liked a lot of its parts, too. I'm more saying that the author is not being served well by a critical community that seems incapable of seeing magical creatures and finding them anything but, well, magical. Russell's work deserves the reading it gets, but it also deserves serious consideration, which seems to be lacking. Criticism often seems to boil down to either allowing someone into the circle of admired writers or not allowing them in. It seldom offers much in the way of explaining why one should be excluded or what might still be lacking in those approved. Russell is a hugely talented writer, but the iron of criticism that should sharpen the iron of her talent is nowhere to be found.