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• “We live below sea level”: Layered Ecologies and Regional Gothic in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!
• Patrick Whitmarsh (bio)

The swamp is like the true uncanny. It’s neither land nor water. You can’t get your bearings there.

—Karen Russell, in conversation with David Naimon¹

“This whole swamp is haunted”: Reading the Ecogothic in Swamplandia!

In Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), the underworld is not a distant realm of myth but a spectral world emerging in the wetlands of South Florida. The novel depicts the trials and tribulations of the gator-wrestling Bigtree family after the death of their matriarch, Hilola. Through the experiences of the family’s youngest member, Ava Bigtree, Russell gives her readers a mesmerizing, enchanting, and often deeply unsettling tour through southwest Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands, located in Collier and Monroe Counties (rendered as the fictional Loomis County in the novel). Swamplandia! can comprehensively be described as a bildungsroman, exploring the ruination of childhood fantasies as the Bigtree siblings struggle to find meaning and mooring after their mother’s death and father’s subsequent abandonment; yet this categorization is also slightly reductive. Although she deploys components of the bildungsroman, Russell complicates the novel’s coming-of-age narrative with flourishes of less realist storytelling modes: environmental weirdness, wisps of magical realism, and a feverish, sticky swamp-gothic in which the landscape conceals treacherous histories and nonhuman dangers. Drawing together details of a specific locale with a dark inflection, Swamplandia! undercuts the linearity of [End Page 143] the traditional bildungsroman, muddying the stream of human growth with eddies of ecological complexity in the recalcitrant depths of the Florida swamp.

The presence of subsurface worlds is a theme that recurs in much of Russell’s fiction. In “Bog Girl: A Romance” (2016), protagonist Cillian Eddowis unearths and falls in love with a woman preserved in a peat bog on an island in Europe. In “The Bad Graft” (2014), a couple treks into Joshua Tree National Park, witnessing mirages of “evaporated civilizations, dissolved castles that lay buried under the desert.”² And in “The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis” (2010), a group of teenagers who meet in a New Jersey park toss an uncanny scarecrow into an eroded ravine, perplexed as its limbs begin to disappear mysteriously. In Russell’s distinctly twenty-first-century brand of gothic fiction, in which characters are beset or otherwise affected by the repercussions of twentieth-century industrialization, the earth below our feet mobilizes an ecological perspective. It directs readers toward the often unnoticed dynamics that dissolve the boundaries between the surface world of social interactions and institutions and the disorienting, subterranean gulf of planetary time.

I refer to this dynamic between the surface and the submerged as a layered ecology, embodied in the figure of Florida’s expansive marshlands. Swamplandia!’s distinctive gothic quality derives from its treatment of this figure, which appears, as Eric Gary Anderson writes in his description of gothic undeadness, “crosshatched by deep intercultural histories, and propelled by the departures and returns of specters, memories, and stories.”³ In the novel, the swamp acts as a tissue between the human and nonhuman worlds, a mediator by which the surface seems to slip precariously into the invisible depths. It is a space of overlaid ambiguity in which reforged landscapes and layered temporalities find new textures. The swamp offers a formal complement to Russell’s novel, mirroring the accumulation of literary layers that comprise Swamplandia!’s Gothic genealogy. Like the dark tarn of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), or the Shimmering Sands of Wilkie Collins’s detective-gothic classic, The Moonstone (1868), Russell’s swamp intimates that it may hold secrets of a largely forgotten past, both human and nonhuman. These nineteenth-century touchstones offer glimpses of an ecological perspective that emerges full-blown in Swamplandia!’s boggy environs, highlighted as much by its author’s prose as by its place in a post-World War II literary tradition that includes Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy (1941–1955) and Silent Spring (1962), Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature (1989), Elizabeth Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and...

中文翻译：

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“我们生活在海平面以下”：凯伦·拉塞尔的沼泽地的分层生态和区域哥特式！

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• “我们生活在海平面以下”：凯伦·拉塞尔的沼泽地中的分层生态和区域哥特式！
• 帕特里克·惠特马什（简介）

沼泽就像真正的神秘。它既不是土地也不是水。你无法在那里找到方向。

——凯伦·拉塞尔，对话大卫·奈蒙¹

“整个沼泽都闹鬼”：阅读《沼泽地》中的生态哥特式！

在凯伦·拉塞尔的沼泽地！（2011）中，地下世界并不是遥远的神话王国，而是出现在南佛罗里达湿地的幽灵世界。小说描述了与鳄鱼摔跤的比格特里家族在女族长希洛拉去世后所经历的考验和磨难。通过家庭中最年轻的成员艾娃·比格特里的经历，拉塞尔为她的读者带来了一次令人着迷、迷人但常常令人深感不安的佛罗里达州西南部万岛之旅，这些岛屿位于科利尔县和门罗县（在小说中被描绘为虚构的卢米斯县） 。沼泽地！可以全面地描述为一部成长小说，探索童年幻想的破灭，因为大树兄弟姐妹在母亲去世和父亲随后被遗弃后努力寻找意义和锚定；但这种分类也稍微简化了。尽管罗素运用了成长小说的成分，但她却用大量不那么现实主义的叙事模式使小说的成长叙事复杂化：怪异的环境、魔幻现实主义的缕缕，以及狂热、粘稠的沼泽哥特式，其中的风景隐藏着危险的历史和非人类的危险。将特定地点的细节与黑暗的变形结合在一起，沼泽地！削弱了[完第143页]传统成长小说的线性，使人类成长的河流与佛罗里达沼泽顽固深处生态复杂性的漩涡混为一谈。

地下世界的存在是罗素大部分小说中反复出现的主题。在《沼泽女孩：浪漫史》（2016）中，主角希里安·艾多维斯 (Cillian Eddowis) 发现并爱上了一位保存在欧洲岛屿泥炭沼泽中的女子。在《坏嫁接》（2014）中，一对夫妇长途跋涉进入约书亚树国家公园，目睹了“消失的文明，溶解的城堡埋在沙漠下”的海市蜃楼。²在《埃里克·穆蒂斯的无墓娃娃》（2010）中，一群青少年在新泽西州的一个公园里相遇，他们将一个不可思议的稻草人扔进了被侵蚀的峡谷，困惑的是它的四肢开始神秘消失。在罗素独特的二十一世纪哥特式小说中，人物受到二十世纪工业化影响的困扰或影响，我们脚下的地球激发了一种生态视角。它引导读者了解那些经常被忽视的动态，这些动态消除了社会互动和机构的表面世界与令人迷失方向的行星时间的地下鸿沟之间的界限。

我将地表和水下之间的这种动态称为分层生态，体现在佛罗里达州广阔的沼泽地中。沼泽地！独特的哥特式品质源于它对这个人物的处理，正如埃里克·加里·安德森（Eric Gary Anderson）在他对哥特式不死性的描述中所写的那样，“它被深刻的跨文化历史所交叉，并被幽灵、记忆和故事的离开和回归所推动。” ” ³在小说中，沼泽充当了人类世界和非人类世界之间的组织，是表面似乎危险地滑入看不见的深处的中介。这是一个重叠的模糊空间，其中重塑的景观和分层的时间性找到了新的纹理。沼泽为拉塞尔的小说提供了正式的补充，反映了构成《沼泽地》的文学层次的积累！的哥特式家谱。就像埃德加·爱伦·坡的《厄舍屋的倒塌》（1839 年）中的黑暗塔恩，或者威尔基·柯林斯的侦探哥特式经典《月光石》（1868 年）中的闪闪发光的沙子一样，罗素的沼泽暗示着它可能蕴藏着大量的秘密。被遗忘的过去，无论是人类还是非人类。这些 19 世纪的试金石让我们得以一睹沼泽地中成熟的生态视角！其作者的散文以及其在二战后文学传统中的地位，包括雷切尔·卡森的《海洋三部曲》（1941-1955）和《寂静的春天》（1962）、比尔·麦基本的《自然的终结》（ 1989），伊丽莎白·科尔伯特的《一场灾难的田野笔记：人、自然和……》