George Saunders: Critical Essays

299 Pages·2017·2.655 MB·English

by  Philip Coleman, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (eds.)

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
GTeiotlreg eT iStlaeu Tnidtleers
Critical Essays
EDITED BY PHILIP COLEMAN,
STEVE GRONERT ELLERHOFF
American Literature Readings
in the 21st Century
Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Aim of the Series
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14765
Philip Coleman • Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
Editors
George Saunders
Critical Essays
Editors
Philip Coleman Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
School of English Independent Scholar
Trinity College Dublin Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Dublin, Ireland
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
ISBN 978-3-319-49931-4 ISBN 978-3-319-49932-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49932-1
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P
reface
“The story is talking back to you,” George Saunders says in an interview
conducted especially for this volume, “and then you have to sort of start
serving it.” This point of view, in which a story is numinous—practically
conscious as it is being written—places short fiction in a realm of mystery.
What happens when we consider a piece of writing as being sentient or at
least bearing an intelligence and relatability all its own? Saunders is a writer
with faith in the form, one who places trust and reverence in a literary art
that he serves well. For him, a story knows what it wants, possibly before
the author knows what that is, and his or her duty is to do what can be
done to provide that. Other writers will disagree. Jonathan Franzen, for
instance, aligns himself with Vladimir Nabokov when it comes to exerting
complete control over writing.1 For Franzen, if we believe what he has to
tell us, characters behave the way they do because that is what he makes
them do. Saunders, who often refers to himself as a control freak, exerts a
different kind of power over his fiction; drafting, redrafting, and revising,
over and over, he practices a discipline that honors his stories as having
autochthonous origins. Far more trusting of intuition, he excavates and
compresses language as he works layer by layer to create through sedimen-
tary means a piece of writing possessing that recognizable quality Susan
Lohafer has termed “storyness.”2
It may be appropriate to relate to Saunders’s work in geological terms,
seeing as he was first educated and employed as a geophysicist. Leaving
engineering for creative writing, he became part of the MFA lineage at
Syracuse University, being taught by Tobias Wolff, who was taught by
Raymond Carver. Like them he would find his short stories published in
v
vi PREFACE
The New Yorker and other major publications, but not before marriage,
fatherhood, and nearly a decade making ends meet as a technical writer had
passed. Following the publication of his first collection, CivilWarLand in
Bad Decline (1996), Syracuse invited him to return as an instructor in the
MFA program that had fostered him, and he has taught there ever since.
Three more collections of stories have followed, including Pastoralia
(2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013).
He has also written a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
(2000), and a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005).
GQ Magazine hired him to write a series of travel pieces, and he has taken
opportunities to write non-fiction as they have arisen, many of those essays
being collected in The Braindead Megaphone (2007). After his commence-
ment address to Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2013 went viral
online, thanks to The New York Times, it was published in a small gift book
edition titled Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. In
2015, he finished drafting a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, to be published in
the United States on St Valentine’s Day, 2017. Lincoln in the Bardo is not
considered in this volume. Rather, George Saunders’s contribution to the
development of the short story is the central focus of the essays gathered
here. In terms of his output as a short story writer alone, Saunders counts
as one of the most significant and influential practitioners of the form in
recent memory.
Saunders’s journey to bestseller lists and guest spots on Stephen
Colbert’s television shows through his work as a short story writer took
twenty years from the advent of his first publication in The New Yorker.
His numerous literary honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship
(2001), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant
(2006). Among those awards given for his latest collection, Tenth of
December, are the Story Prize (2013) and the Folio Prize (2014), secur-
ing his respect as a global writer of Anglophone literature. Along with
other prizes, his work has caught the attention of literary scholars. In July
2014, for example, at the 13th International Conference of the Society
for the Study of the Short Story in English, held in Vienna, Austria, a
panel on Saunders’s short fiction was held. The present volume grew
out of that panel. To date, no single monograph or collection of critical
essays on Saunders has appeared. The editors and contributors to this
volume, who come from six different countries, hereby represent the
first extended critical study of an author who is currently being appreci-
ated and studied internationally as much as other American short fiction
PREFACE vii
writers beside whom he is often cited, such as Flannery O’Connor, Kurt
Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, T.C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, Lydia
Davis, and many others.
It might be said, too, that along with metaphysical concerns for the
place of short fiction in readers’ and writers’ lives, George Saunders writes
with a strong sense of the moral agency of literature. Like John Gardner
and Vonnegut before him, he aims to appeal to conscience while tumbling
his characters through traumas that run the gamut of disturbing to wacky.
His stories, without simply moralizing, often affirm certain moral posi-
tions that can be troublingly ambiguous. One thing Saunders is unam-
biguous about in his speaking engagements is the necessity for goodwill
in people’s relations with one another. If O’Connor, with her canon of
grotesques, zealots, and racists, is remembered for her “mystery and man-
ners,” Saunders might be distinguished in terms of mystery and kindness.
This aspect of his project coincides with growing interdisciplinary inter-
est and research into the phenomenon of empathy and how—and even
why—it is achieved.
In the present volume, Michael Basseler broaches the concept of narra-
tive empathy, identifying elements in Saunders’s fiction that reveal his eth-
ics of compassion. Clare Hayes-Brady, distilling the linguistics of The Brief
and Frightening Reign of Phil, examines the ways that Saunders draws
attention to the idea that the language we use controls the way we think
in stories such as “I CAN SPEAK!™” and “Victory Lap.” Inner dialogue
and Saunders’s use of what he terms third-person ventriloquism form the
crux of Cameron Wilson’s essay on “Victory Lap,” in which he employs
Bakhtin’s notions of microdialogues and polyphony to explore how the
author puts readers in the heads of his characters. For Gillian Moore, then,
Saunders is a political author whose modes of storytelling—even wind-
ing up on the side of Chipotle fast food to-go bags—imperfectly exploit
a corporate paradigm in an attempt to raise social awareness and a sense
of hope. Her readings of “Bounty” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” sug-
gest his characters often uphold the fantasies of American exceptional-
ism. Adam Kelly, also concerned with the politics of language, mines from
“The Falls” and “Escape from Spiderhead” a neoliberal ore that places
Saunders in the literary movement Kelly and others have termed the New
Sincerity. Kelly’s reading of Saunders extracts the limits of expressive sub-
jectivity, ethical consciousness, and aesthetic spectatorship, insisting that
these raise questions readers must answer themselves. Dana Del George,
meanwhile, addressing Saunders in the context of magic realism, finds in
viii PREFACE
his ghosts and amusement parks a mode of storytelling that is above all
empathetic.
Taking a different tack, Jurrit Daalder argues that the travails suffered by
Saunders’s characters—and inflicted vicariously upon his readers—equate
authorial cruelty. He finds in “Sea Oak” a story redeemed not by sincer-
ity but rather the range of metafeelings that ironic doubling can evoke.
Richard Lee, in his contribution, focuses not on Saunders-as-manipulative
but rather Saunders-as-cryptic, withholding from readers for years that his
Four Institutional Monologues, first published in McSweeney’s, are a medi-
tation on how modern America would go about bureaucratizing geno-
cide. Also highlighting Saunders’s cautions against the power of corporate
America, David Huebert’s essay examines the biopolitics of “Pastoralia”
and the problems of human-on-human spectatorship. Panning out from
human to holy spectatorship, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce presents a Lutheran
reading of “Brad Carrigan, American,” “Isabelle,” and “Jon.” Here, the
unknowability of God is ground for revelatory searches experienced by
Saunders’s characters in crisis. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff undertakes the
oneiric quest for narrative in a post-Jungian reading of “The Semplica Girl
Diaries,” a story born in dream that took Saunders thirteen years to finish.
Michael Trussler, then, undertaking the dead with Giorgio Agamben and
Theodor Adorno as pallbearers, exhumes the zombies populating “Sea
Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American.” Trussler’s account, vouching for
the hope of something better, shows that Saunders’s irony ensures that
the nothingness of death cannot be assuaged. Last but by no means least,
the first essay in the present volume, by Kasia Boddy, ponders Saunders’s
serendipitous working life, its effects on his fictional representations of the
American workplace, and how these shape our consideration of him as
a writer. Establishing a strong understanding of where George Saunders
came from—and where that has taken his career in writing fiction—
Boddy’s analysis is the best place to begin the first book-length contribu-
tion to the field in studying his major contribution to the development of
narrative art in the early twenty-first century.
In the final sections of this book, readers will also find a new interview
with George Saunders, conducted via e-mail by Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
especially for the present volume, as well as the first effort to build a com-
prehensive, chronological bibliography of Saunders’s publications to date,
compiled by the editors with the assistance of Emily Bourke. This list of
primary and secondary sources includes the author’s short fiction, non-
fiction, story collections, interviews, reviews, and scholarly articles written
PREFACE ix
about his work up until the end of 2016. This bibliography will inevitably
grow in the years to come, and it is offered at this point with the intention
of serving the critical reader well in her engagement with Saunders’s work.
Taken together, the essays in this volume do not provide a conclusive or
closed statement about the value of Saunders’s writing. Rather, they issue
an invitation to further critical engagement with an astonishingly original
contemporary author whose work is by no means finished.
In fact, the publication of this volume coincides with the release of
George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is sure to spring
forth further articles and new considerations of Saunders’s work that may
advance and complement but also complicate the readings offered here.
Alternating chapters of conversation attributed to ghosts with extracts
from actual historical accounts, Saunders, facing “the technical challenges
of the book,”3 has achieved an original form in his first novel that reads
simply despite its complexity. “At this stage of one’s career it’s kind of the
perfect thing to do,” he has explained, “something that’s not quite natural
but feels like it would make you grow.”4 Taking as the germ of inspiration
a newspaper report from 1862 of President Lincoln’s Pietà moments when
visiting the crypt where his son Willie’s body was interred, Saunders offers
up voices of the imagined past with paranormal phantasmagoria. The result
is a tender romp that comes out part As I Lay Dying, part Our Town, and
part Beetlejuice. Running with the common motif of ghosts having unfin-
ished business, the novel is an adventure of the spirit, presenting a mythic
account of Willie Lincoln’s soul escaping limbo. “I had been reading some
Tibetan Buddhist stuff about what they call the bardo state, from the Bardo
of the title,” Saunders says, “and that is just everything that happens from
the time that you die till you’re reborn. And in the Buddhist epistemology,
as in Christian ones, it can be quite vivid and quite terrifying, wonderful.”5
Those dallying in Oak Hill Cemetery are not the only phantoms present
in the novel; those who wrote the histories, extracted and collaged for
descriptive effect in developing character and setting, are by and large dead
now, making theirs the voices of ghosts as well. History—especially that
of personal-level traumas of the American Civil War—emerges as a collec-
tive specter looming over the United States of today, a country undergo-
ing new inflections of old divisions concerning war, race, and politics. The
appropriately sentimental problem propelling the book, however, is more
fundamentally human: what are human beings, in this or any time, to do
when it comes to the experience of a parent grieving the death of a child—
and what happens to us and our loved ones when we die?