By THIRSTY
George Saunders won the 2017 Man
Booker Prize for his bestselling novel, Lincoln
in the Bardo. He is also the recipient of four National Magazine Awards for
fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Malamud Award, was a finalist
for the National Book Award and is Professor of English at Syracuse University.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was honored to visit with him at his home in the
Catskills for these Five Questions about his award-winning first novel.
STAY THIRSTY: In your book, Lincoln in the Bardo, you tell an intense,
emotional story about Abraham Lincoln and the passing of his son Willie at the
age of eleven. What drew you to write your first novel about this very
personal, family tragedy that occurred less than a year after Lincoln became
President? What gave you the confidence that you could successfully get inside
Lincoln’s head in a credible way?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: It was just that I couldn’t stop thinking (for a period of over 20
years) of the core anecdote – contemporaneous newspaper accounts that said
Lincoln had been so heartbroken by the loss of his son that he went into the
crypt to view, and possibly hold, the boy’s body. And it became a novel
against my wishes, really – I kept trying to make it shorter until it finally
convinced me. As far as having confidence that I could get inside Lincoln’s
head – I never had it. I just had the fear of doing it badly. And
that can be a really powerful artistic driver, you know? The fear of
fucking it up. Because, through that fear, you’ll find all kinds of ways
to know if and when you’ve fucked it up, and then the main artistic mantra becomes,
“Well, don’t DO that.” I’ve found that a book or story that doesn’t have
some really possible fiasco lurking around behind it tends to be facile. Or,
another way of putting it – a problem is the thing that permits, or demands,
originality, and even blueprints what it’s going to have to look like. Originality
is what converts a problem into an asset. There can be a sort of MacGyver
quality to art – the book says “Disarm this nuclear weapon with a can of
shaving cream or the world blows up.” So that’s “a problem.” But if
you do it, that’s “originality.” Whereas if the book says, “Here’s a
button that says Disarm. Just press it, and all will be well” – that means your
book is going to be too simple, and small. (Houdini says, “I am entrapped
by this very thin rubber band around my wrists. Watch me escape!” Crowd
drifts away…)
STAY THIRSTY: What is the genesis of the style and format you used for Lincoln in
the Bardo and how did you think it would be received?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: At this point I have trouble remembering. I know I started a book
back in the late 1990s that was set in a graveyard and looked something like
this book, except that the identifiers were at the top of the speech, rather
than at the bottom. And then I also wrote the Lincoln story as a play for
a number of years. In a sense it was an elaborate avoidance of the more
conventional way of telling it (“Lincoln entered the frigid graveyard in an
unhappy state of mind,”) and, like a lot of smart avoidances, it opened
the door to lots of new and (to me) interesting opportunities. People
could crosstalk more easily, the physical spaces were negotiable (and didn’t
have to be constantly drawn) and so on. Often, when I look back at some
artistic decision, it seems to have taken place, gradually, on several parallel
tracks – that was the case here.
I was worried about how
it would be received but, again, that just means you have to be very vigilant
in eradicating the “easy” ways it could be rejected by your reader. If
you’re using a strange form you have to be extra-consistent and really make
sure it’s fair and efficient and will reward a good reader. It makes it
even more important not to go on autopilot. I knew I would lose some
people but engineered the book (I thought and hoped) so that most vigilant
readers would struggle, and then the book would teach them to read it, and
would then copiously reward them at the end, when the book’s strange form would
be able to deliver more than it would have been able to do if written more
conventionally.
 |
| George Saunders |
STAY THIRSTY: What role does love play in Lincoln in the Bardo? How does love
prosper in a world where everything eventually dies? Does love exist in the
graveyard?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think it does, for sure, between Abe and Willie. And I think it
gradually comes back into the hearts of the other spirits, as they watch this
interaction between father and son unfold. In the book, these spirits are
like stand-up comics who’ve been doing too many open mic nights – a little tired,
jaded, distrustful – of each other and of their earlier selves. Willie’s
presence wakes them up a little and makes them remember who they used to be and
who they used to love. But also – most of them are stuck in this bardo
zone because of love – unrequited love, love of self, of property
etc. So I guess the book is partly about loving appropriately – when to
let go and so on; how not to mistake something temporary (i.e., most things we
love) for something that will last forever, unchanged.
STAY THIRSTY: Having written about and essentially lived with ghosts while writing
this book, are you haunted by them, afraid of them or comfortable with
maneuvering through the spirit world? How did the historical background of
Lincoln’s presidency impact the spirit world in your story?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, the thing about a book is that you’re never really working with
the things themselves, but with linguistic constructions meant to represent
them. So I don’t know how I feel about real ghosts – and I was careful,
while writing, not to think of these beings as “ghosts,” exactly, because I
wanted them to be whatever they wanted to be and behave as they saw fit. The
main job was watching them closely (by revising the language out of which they
were being made) so I could learn their rules and inclinations. In real
life, I guess I do believe in ghosts, and have no affinity for seeing them, for
which I’m glad.
As far as the historical
world – mostly it was a kind of bookkeeping, really. Who lived when? What
would they have known, seen, believed? Would this spirit’s life have overlapped
with that one’s life? And then, of course, the main thing was to ask the
book to answer this question, through the writing: How do the two stories (the
death of Willie and Lincoln fighting the Civil War) intersect? If the
answer turned out to be: “They don’t” – then that’s a lesser book, or maybe not
a book at all. Another way of asking it: Did this night in the graveyard
change Lincoln as he went back out to fight the war? The book, anyway,
says that yes, it did: it made him sadder. And sadness – the kind of
grief-induced, bottoming out that I show Lincoln experiencing in the book – can
be a real wisdom- and clarity-inducer, and a bullshit-eradicator.
 |
| Abraham Lincoln (Sculptor: Augustus Saint-Gaudens) Dedicated 1887 - Lincoln Park (Chicago, IL) |
STAY THIRSTY: Do you believe that the “bardo” really exists and if so, how do you
think you will fare after your death?
GEORGE
SAUNDERS: I do think so. I think that mind
is continuous. I think our mental activity extends beyond the physical death of
the body and that time in that realm would be very flexible (i.e., a short time
could be experienced as infinite) and that it might be possible, though
terrifying, that what we bring into that realm is the same thing we have
operative in us right now – the same brain, the same fears, the same arrogance,
the same habits, etc. As to how I’ll fare: all I can say is, I’m working
on it, I’m working on it.
Link: