Rabbit Rabbit #25: Karen Russell’s Dream World

Objects of grief in “Haunting Olivia”

“Fishing for Seagulls in the Year 2000”

In his 1927 essay “Dream Kitsch,” Walter Benjamin laments a decline in the presence of dreams in European culture. He cites the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen by the German poet Novalis, stating that anyone who awakes as the legendary 13th-century figure “must have overslept.” The twentieth century is well underway and no one dreams anymore– it’s a total let-down. Benjamin calls for a resurgence in surrealism as a means of deciphering truth through the interpretation of “things” rather than “the psyche.” The object, in kitsch form, unlocks the key to our dreams. It is “the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of things.”

It seems the author Karen Russell answered Benjamin’s call nearly a century later. While most of her work deals with the presence (or absence) of dreams in some way, I will focus on her short story, “Haunting Olivia,” published in 2005 in the New Yorker and later included in her masterful 2006 collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

I first encountered Russell’s writing out loud, read by Louise Erdrich as part of a conversation for the New Yorker fiction podcast. I selected the episode at random to accompany me on a solo winter walk in the woods. I pressed play, ready to observe the surrounding frozen nature and listen passively, when the story’s arresting opening paragraph instead froze me:

“My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon’s Boat Graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t see any ghosts. Instead, he slaps at the ocean with jilted fury. Curse words come piping out of his snorkel. He keeps pausing to readjust the diabolical goggles.”

Erdrich has this doomful, gravelly reading voice that makes for a sublime listen. When she says the word “snorkel,” it sounds like “snarkle.” I thought Russell must have made the word up, which, as it turns out, is a viable assumption. Her prose pulsates with atypical diction. Adjectives masquerade as verbs and children use words like “Leviathan” and “pompadour.” It’s meant to be read aloud– tongued over, masticated, and spat back out to determine where each word settles anatomically as well as emotionally, shepherding a full-body reading experience.

“On the Miami River” (1900) by Stephen Parrish

“Haunting Olivia” follows a pair of grieving brothers as they embark on a search to find their deceased younger sister, Olivia, exactly two years after her presumed accidental drowning. Set on a strange island in what appears to be a slightly-altered version of Florida (Russell was born and raised in Miami), the story is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Timothy Sparrow, the younger of the two. Abandoned by their parents, who have left for Sao Paolo and placed them under the care of their senile “Granana,” the boys creep around a local marine scrapyard looking for posthumous signs of Olivia.

For such a tragic premise, the story reads like mesmerizing middle-grade fiction. (I mean this as the highest of compliments.) It’s the literary equivalent of an elementary school lost-and-found– full of kiddish trash and weirdly magical. Per Benjamin’s request in “Dream Kitsch,” every object is rendered ridiculous and therefore meaningful. The search for Olivia is made possible by a pair of “diabolical goggles” that Wallow retrieves inside a decrepit schooner, which enable their wearer to see everything that has died in the ocean. Timothy sees dead manatees, shrimp, and string rays. Octopuses, he reports, “cartwheel by.” At first, it’s a beautiful, albeit frightening, sight. The boys paddle along the coast in a “crabsled,” meticulously constructed by a “grizzled” man named Herb from the hollowed-out exoskeleton of a giant crab: “he guts the crabs and blowtorches off the eyestalks and paints little racer stripes along the side. Then he rents them down at Pier 2, for two dollars an hour, twelve dollars for a full day.”

Such invented objects make strange Russell’s reimagined Florida. Something is a little off about them. If you think about it too hard, they’re unbelievable. But when filtered through the matter-of-fact voice of the child narrator, whose innocence deems them normal, the reader has no choice but to accept them as fact and acquire the vernacular of the story. Sink or swim. Russell’s child narrators – most of her early stories are told by children– are oddly efficient; they may go off on dreamy tangents and crack unnecessary asides (Timothy indulges in the second person and finishes sentences with qualifiers like, “you understand”) but they never hold the hand of their readers. There is an assumptive, trusting quality to their storytelling, as if their listener too might one day experience something like it. Soon enough you start genuinely wishing you could. Thus, the magical realism of her stories takes on the role of surrealism in Benjamin’s essay, plumbing the oceanic depths of consciousness for meaning. In the case of “Haunting Olivia,” it’s the meaning of grief and its testy sibling, guilt.

At one point during the search, Timothy thinks he sees “a churning clump of ghost children” underwater. To his surprise, Wallow digs up “a nasty mass of diapers and chicken gristle and whiskery red seaweed, all threaded around the plastic rings of a six-pack.” “Calm it down,” he assures Timothy. “It’s only trash.” But Timothy is not convinced. “I know what I saw,” he tells us. Erdrich reads the line at whisper level. Bone-chilling.

The tripartite of trash that Wallow fishes out is biodiverse. It encompasses human, animal, and plant life– even blending the three, for the image of “whiskery” seaweed conjures up facial features both animal and human, like Granana, who “no longer has any teeth.” As do diapers, which represent the corporeality of both babies and the elderly. The use of the word “threaded” suggests a weaving together of excrement to form a “nasty” tapestry. Perhaps that is what all of Russell’s stories are: nasty tapestries. In them, trash is indistinguishable from ghosts, like the dead are indistinguishable from the living. They all roam at once, together, in a kitschy, creepy diorama of our world.

“The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last Berth to be broken up” (1839) by J.M.W. Turner

When I was six, I almost drowned in the ocean. It was August and my family had just arrived on Nantucket, where we would spend a week. My dad and I decided to walk down to the beach. We stuck our toes in the water. I remember the prickly sea spray on my upper lip seconds before a freak wave knocked me over and sent me into excruciating involuntary acrobatics untethered by mechanical time. I didn’t have any thoughts, except maybe the kid version of, “Please free me from this nauseating washing machine!” Each time I was spat out onto the sand, gasping for air, the undertow swallowed me back in. It was hungry for more until it wasn’t, and it decided to gift my dad a lull and a chance to yank me to safety. My mom was pretty confused when we returned and I had seaweed in my hair. “I thought they were just going for a walk,” she probably thought as we breathlessly crept up the path.

The incident, as it turned out, didn’t traumatize me. I spent the rest of the week in the waves and years thereafter at home in all bodies of water. But I still think about it. It is, after all, the closest I’ve come to death. What if I’d died then, in 2006? (For starters, I’d have missed the publication of St. Lucy’s… by a month.) If my body sank, which surely it would have, would my spirit – or soul, or ghost – have stayed on the island forever, or eventually drifted out to sea, traversed the Atlantic, and washed up on some alien shore?

I was reminded of my brush with aquatic oblivion when I heard Erdrich read the final passage of “Haunting Olivia.” In it, Timothy and Wallow have made it to the Glow Worm Grotto, a cove on the western side of the island brought to their attention by a message from a fleet of ghost shrimp Timothy sees with the diabolical goggles, who eerily spell out its name. Coincidentally, the Glow Worm Grotto was a place frequently drawn by the ever-imaginative Olivia, so Wallow assumes her spirit must lay there, in hiding or waiting. Timothy braves the tight quarters of the grotto and dives under:

“I look for my sister, but it’s hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can’t tell the living from the dead. It’s all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.”

It’s an abrupt ending that leaves the reader salivating. Why might Russell choose to rive her careful narrative here, amidst an epiphanic moment? What does Timothy’s revelation in this paragraph suggest about the relationship between the living and the dead?

Speaking of. One is reminded of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” another gut-punch of a short story ending. Joyce describes snow coming down all over Ireland one January night:

“It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

“Tarpon Springs” (1930) by Winfield Scott Clime

“The Dead” and “Haunting Olivia” both end with a beginning– an epiphany made possible by the power of the natural world over objects. In “The Dead,” it’s snow, frozen and blanketing the earth in one equalizing layer, obscuring the manmade gravestones. It has a calming effect on Gabriel Conroy, who sympathizes with his wife’s grief over a past lover, similar to the effect of the diabolical goggles on Timothy. The goggles insert a filter over the underwater world, ushering in surprise and a subsequent perspective shift that forces a reckoning with death. Russell’s phrase “I can’t tell the living from the dead” directly mirrors Joyce’s last line, “upon all the living and the dead.” Moreover, “it’s all just blurry light, light smeared” harkens to Joyce’s famous line, “he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling.” This rhythmic repetition of words and phrases evokes the singsong quality of children’s nursery rhymes or lyrical poems. In death we return to the earth, newborn.

Here, then, is a conversation across literary time, across the short story continuum– yes, Russell seems to assure Joyce. We are still all becoming shades, and we are still writing about it. There is something freeing about accepting death, both writers argue through the realizations that befall their protagonists. The “lantern-bright” underwater light that blinds Timothy recalls Olivia’s presumed death by drowning. “It’s probable that her lungs filled up with buckets of tarry black water and she sank,” he admits early on. His realization draws upon accounts of near-death experiences, where people claim to see bright, beckoning light. It is as if he, too, might be dying. At the very least, he is dreaming, like Benjamin wished, and mining his dream for truth.

Russell does not end her story with a description, trapping Timothy in some distanced, painterly tableau. Instead, she offers us his direct epiphany, “Olivia could be everywhere.” It’s in the conditional tense, offering an alternative possibility. That Timothy decides Olivia “could be” everywhere as opposed to Olivia “is” everywhere indicates his growth over the course of their search. Olivia’s death will never be final; her body was never recovered. Her crabsled was found “halfway to Cuba and empty.” It’s devastating for the family and has irrevocably fractured them. But rather than fight against this fact with a forced sense of closure, Russell reveals a conduit of hope– the child’s imagination born anew, rendered more powerful by the idea of Olivia existing “everywhere” instead of “anywhere.” In other words, the brothers have already found her. Where before the image of her pervasiveness was haunting – “Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world”– now, it’s comforting.

All nasty tapestries must end somewhere. As in life, nobody knows what happens next. We don’t know what Wallow will say when Timothy surfaces in the grotto. Maybe he will send him around the island repeatedly for the rest of their adolescence. Or maybe he will finally get to say he’s sorry to his “sis,” so Timothy can “go back to playing video games and feeling dry and blameless.” Whatever happens, in this moment, there is peace for the first time in twenty-four new moons.

Two years after the undertow incident, my family returned to that same Nantucket beach. I was eight, like Olivia. I scrawled a message in a bottle, filled it with some rocks, and hucked it into the ocean. Eighteen days later, I received a letter in the mail from a couple on Long Island. My bottle had traveled over 100 nautical miles and washed up on their shore. Trash become treasure. I don’t need diabolical goggles to know it was magic.

“Eternity” (c. 1865-1869) by Gustave Courbet

Recs: This sobering and urgent piece by Kaveh Akbar for The Nation (I am halfway through his novel Martyr! which is excellent, as everyone has said), Amanda Petrusich’s astute profile of Lucy Dacus for the New Yorker (loving the corresponding new album, “Forever is a Feeling”), and this short art21 video featuring Miranda July on her creative process (her recently-launched Substack is also an utter delight.)