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Right. Nobody sees her move on her own.
I would guess he did if she didn't describe him that way. He was Irish. Red hair, freckles and green eyes. Yes, not all Irish have this, but enough to make it a probability.
THank you Spidey! That worked. I can read it!Dana Jean
This Week in Fiction
This Week in Fiction: Karen Russell on Balancing Humor and Horror
By Willing Davidson
June 13, 2016
In “The Bog Girl,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man named Cillian falls instantly in love with a two-thousand-year-old girl that he’s cut out of some peat. Cillian, who is fifteen, lives on a remote island off the coast of northern Europe. How did you start to get interested in this semi-fictional landscape, and what made you realize that it would make a good setting for a story? Was it the landscape or the apparition of a preserved woman that was the initial kernel of the story?
Setting almost always comes first for me with short stories, but here I think I might have been inspired by a conversation I had with a friend. He was describing a love story that had turned into a horror story—his horror at having successfully awakened strong feelings in someone and discovering in that moment that he did not love her back. How often do we project our fantasies onto the mask of another person’s face, then feel betrayed when they turn out to have needs and depths of their own?
Around this same time, I read that eight-thousand-year-old human remains had been discovered in a Floridian bog. Virtually nothing is known about these people—even their name, the Windover people, is merely a placeholder, the name of the site where they were exhumed by a backhoe operator. These centuries-dead bog bodies are still spawning new theories—that is the amazingly fertile property of the deep past.
On the one hand, we have increasingly sophisticated techniques to learn about these ancestors—radiocarbon dating, DNA testing. On the other hand, their inner lives remain true blanks; we have only a few material fragments to give us clues as to what their conscious experience of the world might have been. Whatever we theorize about them has got to be the most speculative fiction.
The real kernel for this story might have been a famous photograph I saw of a two-thousand-year-old body recovered from an Irish bog with the gentlest smile on his face. It was a shock to lower my eyes from this smile to the noose around his neck. He’d been strangled to death. My surface impression of him—he died at peace!—dissolved almost immediately. This is not an original reaction; many people have written about the tension between the somehow heartbreaking familiarity of this ancient man’s face, and the deep chasm into which his true history has fallen. The clear, still surface of his skin, and the invisible pain in his past that you can intuit from that noose.
I felt a little insecure writing a story about a bog girl, because I’m a huge admirer of a certain Irish poet. (His name rhymes with “famous.”) He is the author of an incredible cycle of poems about bogs, which present the bog as a living metaphor for a people’s “memory bank.” Bogs are like brains, with a savant-like memory. Votive offerings of white butter, and arrowheads from the first century have been found perfectly preserved inside them. They are strange wombs where the dead do not decay—in that sense, too, like human memory.
So I started to wonder, what if one of these bog bodies could blast us with the fullness of her life? Turn the fire hose of her interior life onto those seeking to define her from without? I pictured an ancient young woman rearing off the table, taking on dimension, shredding our assumptions, challenging our ventriloquy of her mute body.
One of my favorite short stories is Mavis Gallant’s “From the Fifteenth District.” In it, the dead are haunted by the living. One ghost complains that her widower husband keeps calling her “an angel”—she hates this bogus, patronizing word. It’s a monocular capture of her life. This got me thinking about eulogies—someone ascribing a single, static identity to you, posthumously. We do it to one another all the time, of course.
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I think the sorrow and the comedy here might be that Cillian is really making an effort with the Bog Girl, and it’s still woefully insufficient. Similarly, Gillian desperately wants to help her son, but she cannot really “see” him, not in his fullness; she feels threatened by it. At one point, studying his girlfriend’s face, Cillian starts to wonder if he’s reading her mind, or merely his own.
I wanted to set the story in a slightly altered reality, on an island that operates by its own logic but is still a recognizably contemporary place. It’s a haunted island, in a sense, but it has that in common with every other spot on the globe; here, the bogs serve as a reminder of the past that is still present with us. The Bog Girl, for most of the story, is the perfect screen onto which everyone can project his or her own needs and fears and fantasies.
I’ll bet we’ve all had some version of this experience—a familiar person becomes a stranger, in real time. What’s scariest to me about this story is also maybe what’s most exhilarating—that moment when our theories about another person (or another epoch, another culture) collapse, and we are suddenly at sea again. Then we have to redraw our maps of what is possible, and of who we are sitting across from. In an interview, Joy Williams once said, “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That sounds like something to aspire to, doesn’t it?
The story operates in two simultaneous registers: there’s the grave awe of this ancient landscape and the woman that it offers up; but there’s also the humor inherent in Cillian carrying around his undead girlfriend, and being dorkily proud of dating an older woman. Did you worry about balancing those elements, or that they’d cancel each other out? And is that a frequent consideration for you?
While I was working on this story, I happened to also be reading two extraordinary books—Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman” and Saša Stanišić’s “Before the Feast.” Each occurs in an alternate universe that nevertheless very much resembles our own; each deals with mortality and memory; and each somehow manages to be hilarious, poignant, and frightening, in shifting ratios. The humor and the horror aren’t opposed in these books—they work together to get at a core mystery. Charles Baxter calls “The Third Policeman” “a comic nightmare,” and I’d agree with him that it’s one of the funniest _and _the scariest books that I’ve ever read. “Before the Feast” derives its comedy and its pathos from the same source, a celebration in a village leaking centuries of history.
And there is hilarity inside of terror, too—a giddiness that bubbles up in the face of the unknown, a hysterical response to some monstrous truth that requires ventilation. Howls of laughter and howls of terror aren’t so far removed from one another, I don’t think. Who was it that compared human laughter to dogs barking at the night? Sartre? Louis C.K.?
Mary Gaitskill did an interview for this series a while back and gave an answer that I loved: “People say that if you talk too much about sex you take away the mystery. I say, if you’re somebody who likes to talk, talk all you want—it’s not listening. You will never take away the mystery.”
I think the same might apply to comedy and mystery, or comedy and dread. No joke is going to rob this ancient landscape of its immense power; no joke is going to make death and suffering more comprehensible. And maybe things are only truly funny if they are connected to an honest question or emotion. So if you’re somebody who likes to joke, go ahead and joke—it’s not listening.
Here is an island where the raised bogs are threatened by industrial harvesters, where nobody quite remembers the old stories, and the remaining islanders have only a staticky sense of their ancient language and history. But the landscape itself still retains this oneiric power, and a humming autonomy—that’s the sublimity of places like swamps and bogs, I think, and also of mountains and ocean trenches, landscapes that resize you, landscapes that are uncanny reminders of the brevity of a human lifespan and the vastness of geologic time.
That’s all to say, no, I don’t worry that these elements will cancel each other out. But I do worry about getting the balance right—for example, why did I just give such a dreadfully earnest answer to your question about mixing comedy and horror?
One of the things I like best in the story is its sidelong reflections on aging. The Bog Girl is two thousand years old, of course, but she makes Cillian, who’s fifteen, feel older. She makes Cillian’s mother, Gillian, who worries that she had Cillian when she was too young, feel way older. What do we learn about aging from these guys?
It’s interesting that you say Cillian and Gillian both feel older as the story progresses; I think that’s true, but I also think there’s a way in which the Bog Girl’s presence also resizes them, reminds them that in the grander scheme, they are basically children on the planet. Everybody alive today, Cillian comes to feel, must be part of an extended family—barnacles on the hull of a ship, riding through time together. By the story’s conclusion, I think that the Bog Girl’s stare has altered both mother and son, and allowed each to see hidden parts of the other.
Nobody in the story feels quite aligned with their age on a calendar—Cillian’s uncle behaves like an adolescent, and Cillian sometimes feels like his mother’s parent. The Bog Girl is two thousand, but her life was cut tragically short—she was a teen-ager herself when she was killed. My own experience is that age can be a slippery thing. In the course of a day, you can be so many different ages, ricocheting around inside your body. A friend’s grandmother once confessed to me that she still felt fourteen.
I would just add that I believe that people who survive a trauma or have a powerfully disruptive experience (so, all living people, lets assume) can often feel that a part of themselves is trapped in amber at that age, even as clock time moves relentlessly onward. The Bog Girl somehow became a way for me to think through the haunted experience of growing old in a body while simultaneously carrying the past forward with you.
And certain things—bewilderment and jealousy and fear and pain and love—we humans don’t seem to age out of them. I think Cillian gets this by the story’s end. There’s a sentence I love from a Lorrie Moore story that I copied out and reread while writing this one: “It was really the world that was one’s brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world.”
Was it the night his mom walked in? She was walking and talking in Cillian's room, but it had to be a dream. Right?
That's what I figured on an analytical level but Toby is who popped into my mind. Wes Bentley did, too. Toward the end I assumed he was more Irish ethnicity.
I didn't think he was dreaming. But we may be thinking about two different incidents. I'm talking about the denouement.
The scene was towards the end and bog girl is a living moving thing for him in that moment.
Yes, I think the photo I show above is a "bog" man from Florida.
Yes, when she was hopping like a chick toward him. That unusual movement combined with her voice was freaky.
Okay nope. I think this was a picture of Lindow man from England.
I like when Cillian takes the ferry to the mainland to see the bog men at the museum. It's brief but described how it looks in pic you shared.
