NOTE: This is the fifth of ten reviews of contemporary weird novels. An overview of the project can be found below.
George Saunders’ Lincoln in the
Bardo was published in 2017 by Random House, to considerable acclaim. It briefly
topped the New York Times best-seller list, and won the Man Booker Prize—another
laurel for Saunders, whose short stories, published in Haper’s, Esquire,
and The New Yorker, have won him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, and a World Fantasy Award, among others. The keepers of the keys to
literary acclaim adore him. It’s testament to his vigorously original style; no
prose feels more “of the moment.” His pastiche of corporate and advertising argot,
his tone of perpetual emergency, and the precision with which he creates a
rubbery (tough, malleable, unnatural) reality bring America English into the
twenty-first century. Reading his best stories, I get a thrill like that which
I imagine Flaubert’s or Woolf’s contemporaries to have felt. Thomas Pynchon,
the great stylist and one of the weirdest authors of our age, overcame his
notorious reticence to praise Saunders’ “astoundingly tuned voice.”
Given his status in the field of
literary production and his evident pursuit of a pure (i.e., wholly original)
style, it is odd to think of Saunders as a genre writer. Placing Lincoln in
the Bardo alongside pulpier fiction, such as LaValle’s, Langan’s, or
Cantero’s, exemplifies the approach to weirdness that I’m attempting to
articulate. Weird fiction is weird in part because it troubles the hierarchy
that developed in the modern literary field—the one that vaguely but
relentlessly distinguishes “high art” from “low,” the canonical from the
popular, the sacred from the vulgar, etc. Saunders’ stories remind us that this
distinction is particularly troubled by the genre of fantastic fiction, which
includes work by Henry James and Edith Wharton alongside H. P. Lovecraft and William
Hope Hodgson. The politics of taste is the most obvious reason why Saunders isn’t
commonly perceived as a writer of ghost stories. For example, there’s no
mention of Saunders in S. T. Joshi’s two-volume survey of supernatural horror,
even though his stories—from his first collection, Civil War Land in Bad
Decline (1996) to this recent novel–deploy supernatural and uncanny
elements, including ghosts (“Civil War Land in Bad Decline,” “Downtrodden
Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror,” and Lincoln in the Bardo), zombies (“Sea
Oak”), speculative worlds (“Bounty”), and episodes of psychosis (“Escape from
Spider-Head,” “My Chivalric Romance”). His oeuvre includes realist stories
(“Puppy,” “The Falls,” and “The Tenth of December”), but many of his tales employ
the supernatural. Yet Lincoln in the Bardo was published by Random
House, not Tor, Tartarus, or Centipede, and Saunders stories appear in The
New Yorker, rather than Apex, Shimmer, Pseudopod, or anthologies
by Ellen Datlow. (“Sea Oak,” however, was reprinted in Peter Straub’s excellent,
two-volume American Fantastic Stories, published by the Library of
America.)
Given that Saunders is unquestionably a “mainstream” writer–in a review of Lincoln in the Bardo for the London Review of Books, Robert Baird
finds that “it
would be hard to overstate his influence on American writing”—we might observe
that a great many critically acclaimed and popular contemporary writers–Toni Morrison
(RIP), Joyce Carol Oates, China Mieville, Thomas Pynchon–write ghost stories,
horror stories and about speculative worlds. Recognizing the literary value of Saunders’
weird tales may betoken the “mainstreaming” of a genre: weirdness passes from
being one kind of story to being a (negative) component of literary realism.
This dissolution of weird fiction into literature
has occurred twice before—at the birth of realism, in the early 1800s, and during
the modern moment, when the ghost or doppelganger story was taken seriously by
writers (Dostoevsky, James, Wharton, Kafka) who also took realism seriously.
The critical distinction is not solely a matter of reception.
Saunders’ satirical humor and vernacular style, as well as a penchant for
allegory, allow his work to be labeled “experimental fiction” and “literary,”
rather than “horror fiction” and “generic.” Because he’s
a comedian, his work does not feel like horror, despite the cruelty he inflicts
upon his characters and the regular appearance of reality-rending monsters. But
as Todorov points out, there’s no reason to assume that a story’s descent into
madness or disclosure of miraculous events should be met with screams rather
than laughter. E. T. A. Hoffmann kept the hilarious and uncanny in close proximity,
and this achievement may be found in many wonderfully weird tales, including
Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and “The Imp of the Perverse,” some of Ambrose Bierce’s
stories, John Kendrick Bangs’ “Thurlow’s Christmas Story,” and Stephen King’s
“The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet.” Similarly, because Saunders’ prose is so original
(or “innovative,” as his characters would put it), it doesn’t feel like the
pseudo-Gothic prose adopted by Lovecraft or the terser, functional prose of
modern horror writers, likes Oates, King or Ramsey Campbell. (There is a kind
of curious precedent for Saunders’ style in Ray Russell’s “Sardonicus” and
“Sagittarius”–weird tales aimed at readers of Playboy in the 1960s.)
Several critics have pointed toward
the quality of Saunders’ work that I wish to describe, without quite naming it.
I haven’t found any reviews of Lincoln in the Bardo that explicitly link
Saunders to weird, fantastic, or speculative fiction, yet most critics index a strangeness
that helps to define his oeuvre. According to Baird, Saunders “has often reveled in a
sense of uncanny disorientation.” Ron Charles, writing in The Washington Post, calls Lincoln
in the Bardo “ a divisively odd
book” and “fantastical.” Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times,
describes it as “ like a weird folk art.” For
Jenny Shank, in Dallas News, “Lincoln in the Bardo is weird,
disorienting, funny and incredibly moving.” For Hari Kunzru, in The Guardian, “Lincoln in the Bardo feels like a blend of
Victorian gothic with one of the more sfx-heavy horror franchises.” In short,
there’s no question that Saunders’ work is affectively weird. The
question is: how does this strangeness comport with the genre of weird fiction,
relying upon generic tropes while testing the limits of supernatural horror?
How might we recalibrate our understanding of the genre in order to include
novels such as this one, which invites the reader to experience multiple kinds
of weirdness? Where, exactly, does the sense of uncanniness, oddity, and
queerness originate in Saunder’s prose? In this post, I hope to indicate
answers to these questions, while drawing on and clarifying the observations
made by previous reviewers.
Speculative
Fiction
Lincoln in the Bardo takes place over the night of February 25, 1862 in Oak Hill Cemetery.
President Lincoln’s son Willie has died of “fever” (most likely Typhoid) at the
age of 12 a few days before. During the night, Lincoln visits the cemetery and
cradles his son’s body. Saunders makes this historical event the occasion for
what Ron Charles calls “an extended national ghost
story”. Lincoln’s visit is witnessed by dozens of ghosts, who sleep in their
“sick beds” by day and roam the cemetery at night. These spirits exist in
something like the Buddhist bardo, confined to Oak Hill’s environs until they
accept that they are dead. As critics have noted, the central conceit echoes
Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), a collection of poetic
monologues spoken by the deceased members of a fictional Illinois town. Because
the story is written in something like dramatic form (see below), it also
suggests the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938). But as Kakutani notes,
the novel more closely resembles Masters’ poetry to the degree that “Saunders’s
extraordinary verbal energy is harnessed . . . in the service of capturing the
pathos of everyday life,” rather than its wonder or joy. Like Masters, Saunders
delights in reframing Victorian sentiment (from a modern perspective) by
drawing out its Gothic elements. In this, the novel’s characters—mostly the
grotesque ghosts, whose inability to quit the mortal plane turns them into contemporary
caricatures of Victorian sots and playboys, penitents and queers—and it’s themes—the
struggle to confront loneliness, cowardice, grief, and confusion—recall
Saunders’ earlier fiction. As Thomas Mallon observes in The New Yorker, Oak
Hill bears more than a passing resemblance to the impossible historical theme
parks described in some of Saunders’ most memorable stories, including
“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Wave Machine,” “My Chivalric Romance,” and
“Bounty.”
The uncanny funhouses in these stories are Saunders’ portal
into speculative fiction. In popular discourse, “speculative fiction” is
treated as an umbrella term for a wide range of supernatural and fantastic
stories, but in my taxonomy it is a recently popularized sub-genre of weird
fiction—one that combines the “world-building” associated with science fiction
or fantasy with a disfigured realism. Because of its laborious negotiation with
historical accuracy, speculative fiction is best associated with dystopian
literature and what Poe calls “tales of ratiocination.” It’s an intellectual
genre, full of explanation and/or exemplification of its alternative reality—a
world that our world might (have) become. Speculative fiction insists upon an
intellectual rigor that is easily (joyfully) disregarded by “classic” fantasy
and science fiction. It’s rigorous / rigid adherence to the real world maintains
the affective charge of rational curiosity, preventing a drift into the purely fantastic—the
impact of “if it were so,” rather than “what if.” The most important works of
post-war speculative fiction include Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle (1962) and many of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories in Artifices
(1944), The Aleph (1949), and Dr. Brodie’s Report (1970), as well
as more recent works, such as Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
(2008), and Mieville’s The City & the City (2009). In these stories,
the impossible thing is history as such—impossible because it might always have
gone otherwise. Mallon alludes to this aspect of Saunders’ work when he
describes his oeuvre as “a half-dozen books of
accomplished, high-concept short fiction.” Speculative fiction depends upon the
“high concept” and a willingness to “accomplish” a vision of this altered
reality. Saunders’ ridiculous theme parks are slightly alternative dystopian
realities, filtered through the self-serving perspectives of management and
labor in a world where symbolic labor is paramount.
In this regard, Lincoln in the
Bardo creates a surrealist cemetery funhouse by crossing historically based
accounts of Victorian sentimentality with a loosely constructed version of a
partially non-Western afterlife. As Kunzru explains, “This is not a straightforwardly Tibetan bardo, in which souls
are destined for release or rebirth. It is a sort of syncretic limbo which has
much in common with the Catholic purgatory, and at one point we are treated to
a Technicolor vision of judgment that seems to be drawn from popular
19th-century Protestantism…” The most important literary precedent for
this deliberately confusing and often “technicolor” other world may be found in
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush
of Ghosts (1954). The salient difference is that in Tutuola’s novels the
highly energetic, hybridized, and dreamlike world is coextensive with our own
and engulfs the future. Saunders’ bardo, like his theme parks, is an island of
insanity (in this case, the size of the cemetery) surrounded by a more rational
order and securely located in the national past.
Ghosts
As in Tutuola’s stories (and, for
example, Mielville’s New Crobuzon), the pleasure of discovery is paramount;
Saunders’ funhouse is full of monstrous creatures. As Charles
puts it, “a ghoulish gallery of desiccated lives, minds dehydrated until all
that remains are the central anxieties and preoccupations of their lives above
ground.” Kakutani offers a similarly accurate portrayal of these creatures,
describing them as “Edward Gorey-style ghosts, skittering across the landscape
— at once menacing, comical and slightly tongue-in-cheek.” The ghosts
“manifest” in neurotic forms, their bodies misshapen or experiencing various
degrees of corporeality depending upon their anxieties (and they are nothing
but anxieties). For example, “The crowd, having suspended its perversities,
stood gaping at Mr. Bevins, who had acquired . . . such a bounty of extra eyes,
ears, noses, hands, etc., that he now resembled some overstuffed fleshly
bouquet” (141). They are weirdest when their bodies dissolve into scenarios or
mutate rapidly: “The Traynor girl lay as usual, trapped against, and part of,
the fence, manifesting at the moment as a sort of horrid blackened furnace. . .
The girl was silent. The door of the furnace she was at that moment only
opened, then closed, affording us a brief glimpse of the terrible orange place
of heart within. . . She rapidly transmuted into the fallen bridge, the
vulture, the large dog, the terrible hag gorging on black cake, the stand of
flood-ravaged corn, the umbrella ripped open by a wind we could not feel”
(36-7). This is a “high-concept” ghost; its shimmering takes the form of
surrealistically displaced symbolic objects that fluctuate with personal and cultural
significance.
The cartoonish, “tongue-in-cheek” quality emerges at the
expense of the more “traditional” or sentimental ghosts, such as Mrs. Ellis, “a
stately, regal woman, always surrounded by three gelatinous orbs floating about
her person, each containing a likeness of one of her daughters” (78). After a
detailed description of a sentimental drama in which Mrs. Ellis tries to mother
her daughters, we are told “On other days, everyone she met manifested as a
giant mustache with legs” (79). The joke uses Monty-Pythonesque surrealism to
undercut the melodrama. A similar kind
of humor occurs when we are introduced to Eddy and Betsy Baron, impoverished
drunkards who can’t give up debauchery. Their pastiche of the morality tale is
undercut by relentlessly blasphemy, removed from the text as though by a
Victorian censor. Here’s Eddie Baron on his children: “F—- them! Those
f—-ing ingrate snakes have no G——-ed right to blame us for a f—-ing
thing until they walk a f—-ing mile in our G——ed shoes and neither
f—-ing one of the little s—-heads has walked even a s—-ing half-mile in
our f—-ing shoes.” The modern reader guffaws at this across the gulf of
historical time—we laugh at our own assumptions that pre-Civil War ghosts
weren’t quite so foul-mouthed. The same humor animates the script of Deadwood,
for example.
At the heart of these depictions is an odd sort of literary Naturalism:
Saunders holds his characters in the kind of loving contempt that Stephen Crane
deploys, while revealing humans to be creatures of nakedly gross appetites,
such as one finds in Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, Flannery O’Connor, or Irish
Murdoch. But all of the tenets of Naturalism have been turned inside out.
Redemption is possible; the moral order can be restored, and the path toward
restitution is leavened by absurdity. Thus, for example, Trevor Williams, a
minor ghost, is a
former hunter, seated before the tremendous heap of all the
animals he had dispatched in his time: hundreds of deer, thirty-two black bear,
three bear cubs, innumerable coons, lynx, foxes, mink, chipmunks, wild turkeys,
woodchucks, and cougars; scores of mice and rats, a positive tumble of snakes,
hundreds of cows and calves, one pony (carriage-struck), twenty thousand or so
insects, each of which he must briefly hold, with loving attention, for a
period ranging from several hours to several months, depending on the quality
of loving attention he could muster and the state of fear the beast happened to
have been in at the time of its passing (127).
As it did for the Beats (Ginsberg in particular), Buddhist
compassion provides a mode of buffering and forgiveness for colonial and
capitalistic devaluing of life in the national past. We meet racist ghosts
(Lieutenant Cecil Stone), property-loving ghosts (Percival “Dash” Collier), and
numerous ghosts (like our tour guides, Hans Vollman and Rogers Bevins III) who
remain entangled in lust. All of these “too human” traits get sorted in the
bardo, where they are caricatured until their “fleshly bouquet” manifests
itself: an absurdity that finds forgiveness in laughter. Lincoln’s visit to the
cemetery ultimately results in a wave of transubstantiation, suggesting that
his presidency be regarded as a moment of national redemption. Lincoln’s love
is literally enlightening—this is where the novel caresses allegory.
It touches upon horror at two
points—one in the “real” world of Lincoln’s grief, the other in the funhouse
afterlife. The episode of grief feels contrived. The ghosts enter Lincoln’s
consciousness and experience his sorrow. With their help, he experiences the
transitory nature of all things: “Two passing temporarinesses developed
feelings for one another. / Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond” (244).
These thoughts help him to let Willie go, and in that act the ghosts encounter
their own loss, which allows them to give up their burdens. For a moment each
ghost puts aside their individualized lusts and collective prejudices. For our
chief narrator, Bevins, this kindness is an act of democracy. Upon entering
Lincoln, he glimpses the Civil War: “Across the sea fat kings watched and were
gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South
similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails . . . well, it would be
said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself. / Well, the rabble
could. The rabble would. / He would lead the rabble in managing. / This thing
would be won” (308). The real-world grief sustains the national allegory, but
as a result the sensation of grief is hollowed out.
The other moment of horror is much
more powerful. It occurs near the center of the novel, when Reverend Everly
Thomas delivers the book’s longest monologue. He is stuck in the bardo not
because of his attachment to earthly pleasures, but because of his fear of
Christ’s judgment. His story is among the best sequences Saunders has written:
a fantastic satire on that strand of the American Gothic we associate with
Jonathan Edwards’ sermons. Thomas waits in line to be admitted through the
pearly gates. It is quite a bit like the line at airport security. He watches
as St.Peter and some angels screen those ahead of him:
Quick
check, said Christ’s emissary from his seat at the diamond table.
The being
on the right held the mirror up before the red-beared fellow. The being on the
left reached into the red-beared man’s chest and, with a deft and somehow apologetic
movement, extracted the man’s heart, and placed it on the scale.
The being
on the right checked the mirror. The being on the left checked the scale. (190)
To one screened passenger, the gates
of heaven open—to another, hell. By the time you are at the checkpoint, it’s
too late to escape judgment. Thomas flees not because he is afraid of the
outcome, but of the mercilessness of the act of judgement. It’s an Althusserian
Christ: the hailing is the horror. That’s not to say that the hell we glimpse
isn’t horrific—but I’ll leave that for the reader to discover.
For now, I draw two conclusions.
First, like E. T. A. Hoffmann or Shirley Jackson, Saunders is a weird comedian,
rather than, like Lovecraft or Wharton, a tragedian. Second, that his comedy
reverses the “cosmic indifference” associated with Lovecraft’s racist existentialism.
In Saunders’ world, caring is everything. The impossible thing is God. This
realization, in the words of Lincoln, as reported by an African-American ghost,
so neatly reverses the politics of Cthulhu, I can’t help but think that its
intentional: “We must see God not as a Him (some linear rewarding fellow)
but an IT, a great beast beyond our understanding, who wants something from us,
and we must give it, and all we may control is the spirit in which we give it .
. . What IT wants, it seems, for now, is blood, more blood, and to alter things
from what they are, to what IT wills they should be…” (310).
Here the horror demanded by the inhuman god is waged in the name of black
liberation. Lincoln the Emancipator, Saunders wages, is born in this moment of
eldritch torment.
As Metafiction
Its fantastic afterlife is only one of
the novel’s weird aspects. It also enjoys considerable formal weirdness. As
I’ve been arguing throughout these reviews, since Don Quixote, weird
fiction is notable for a genre-confounding (yet genre-defining) metafictional
playfulness. The weirdness of fiction is frequently evoked by texts that
confound the normative forms of “mainstream” realist novels. Among the most
prominent examples are Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr,
with its alternating chapters of human and cat narratives; Poe’s The
Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pym, which claims to be a true account of
Antarctic exploration; Verne’s The Sphinx of the Ice-Realm, which treats
Pym as though it were real; Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which
masquerades as a textual exegesis; and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and
the End of the World, in which alternating chapters occur in different
genres (detective sci/fi and fantasy). Another contemporary novel that fits
this category, Michael Cisco’s Unlangauge, will be discussed in a later
post. Lincoln in the Bardo juxtaposes a factual world, composed of
actual and imaginary excerpts from histories of Lincoln, with a fantasy world (the
cemetery at night) which takes the form of an awkward script. Alternating
chapters immerse us in either the world of historical verities or the world of
fantastic drama. As Charles puts it, the book “confounds
our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like.” Kakutani explains
how “Saunders intercuts facts and semi-facts (culled from books and news
accounts) in a collage-like narrative.”
The collage of observations lifted
from historical texts is strange and edifying. At least since “CivilWarLand in Bad
Decline,” which is narrated by a “verisimilitude inspector,” Saunders has been
fascinated by earnest absurdity of historical reconstruction; this element of
the novel immerses us fully within the experience his previous work evokes. Saunders
begins the novel by undermining factual reconstructions of the Lincoln
household. He does this by juxtaposing minute observations from competing
accounts of the night that Willie Lincoln died. Chapter V begins with six
statements about the moon, presumably gleaned from letters, diaries, and other
credible historical accounts:
Many guests especially recalled the
beautiful moon that shone that evening. –In “A Season of War and Loss,” by Ann
Brighney.
In several accounts of the evening,
the brilliance of the moon is remarked upon. – In “Long Road to Glory,” by
Edward Holt.
A common feature of these narratives
is the gold moon, hanging quaintly above the scene. – In “White House Soirees:
An Anthology,” by Bernadette Evon.
There was no moon that night and the
sky was heavy with clouds. –Wickett, op. cit.
A fat green crescent hung above the
mad scene like a stolid judge, inured to all human folly. –In “My Life,” by
Dolores P. Leventrop.
The full moon that night was
yellow-red, as if reflecting the light of some earthly fire. –Sloane, op. cit.
(19)
The moon, of course, is the perfect choice for prying open
the Pandora’s box of historical facticity. It is both the symbol of
inconstancy, the harbinger of illusion, and the most obvious natural nocturnal
phenomenon—an event that should be capable of verification. By emphasizing the
historical divergences from a singular narrative, Saunders invites us to put all
the documentary sections under scrutiny. This is a move worthy of Poe, for it
achieves an effect that is quite the opposite of its initial appearance. When,
later in the novel, we are given several glimpses of Lincoln on his way to and
from the cemetery—eyewitness accounts that testify to the “fact” of the
President’s midnight visit to his son’s sepulcher—we are prepared to accept
their fallibility—which makes it all the more credible.
Unfortunately, the ghostly drama is presented using the same
technique: we are given a text and then its author. In my excerpts so far, I
have omitted this aspect of the novel, but I will now provide a passage. Here,
Bevins, Vollman and Thomas bear witness to a moment when the pleasures of the
world are breaking through:
The happy mob of children gathered about a tremendous vat of
boiling chocolate, and dear Miss Bent, stirring it, making fond noises at us,
as if we were kittens. –roger begins iii
My God, what a thing! To fine oneself thus expanded! –hans
vollman
How had we forgotten? All those happy occasions? –the
reverend everly thomas
To stay, one must deeply and continuously dwell upon one’s
primary reason for staying; een to the exclusion of all else.—roger bevins iii
One must be constantly looking for opportunities to tell
one’s story. –hans vollman
(If not permitted to tell it, one must think it and think
it.) –the reverend everly Thomas (255)
The goal, I suppose, is to present a fully “dialogic”
novel—one in which every event is gleaned partially through multiple
eyewitnesses, and therefore can only be understood by deciphering the
observations of competing discourses. This is the most avant-garde
aspect of Saunders weirdness, since it attempts to deconstruct the first-person
or focalized omniscient narrative of more conventional novels: shades of Woolf,
Joyce, Faulkner (not to mention “The Sandman”). The dialogic quality can be
wonderful—the shimmery instability of speech acts—especially as they contort to
appease a presumed interlocuter–has always been Saunders’ forte. But the
inscriptions are awkward and exhausting; the reader soon wearies of waiting to
the end of each utterance to find out who is speaking. I found myself
constantly performing a little eye scan motion to pick up the name listed at
the end of the speech before reading it: a problem easily solved by the
typographic conventions of the stage play, long since in existence. And the cemetery
scenes are unquestionably dramatic. But although each character speaks, often
to the other characters, because it is a novel, they must also narrate what the
other characters are doing. It’s like a play in which several characters are
tasked with telling us what is happening on stage. I applaud the originality of
this mode, but it generates a peculiar tedium–like that which one encounters
when reading (not watching) Ionesco.
Saunders’ Weird Style
The advantage of the novel-script
hybridity is the priority it gives to Saunders’ odd and sometimes marvelous
style. The notably original style I evoked at the beginning emerges from
countless utterance in which Saunders’ characters, deeply embedded within particular
situations, try to provide their presumptive auditors with observations and
insights that strain their discursive capabilities. They are always, within
their own multitude of possible life worlds, experiencing weirdness. This is
what their speech acts reflect. Expressions of jargon-inflected, earnest
befuddlement and hyper-specific characterizations are the dramatic and
novelistic pillars on which the Saunders brand is built. His characters
constantly tax syntax and invent neologisms in order to describe phenomena beyond
their control and / or comprehension. The ghosts in this story are constantly
trying to explain their own impossible situation; “walk-skimming” is the most
memorable phrase, as though a ghost couldn’t quite account for its own floating.
In a rather damning review in the Atlantic (March
2017) Caleb Crain observes this penchant for “a hypercolloquial idiolect”
and argues that “sadism and sentimentality” compete
in Saunders’ prose, resulting in an “antic pastiche” that
“rivals the Victorians at death kitsch.” Mallon
offers a kinder observation, noting that the novelist “likes to create
desperate people trying their best to be dignified and gentle.” Sanders observes “a mutually reinforced cognitive
dissonance.” Each of these phrases helps to triangulate the singular
quality of Saunders’ prose.
At its root, it’s
satirical. In The Fantastic, Todorov has good reason to draw a boundary
between the affect-laden realism of fantasy and the intellectual operations of
allegory. Satire manifests in the uncertain margins between these modes.
Obviously, given the fantastic nature of the creature from which its name derives,
satire has always entwined closely with weirdness. From Rabelais, Voltaire,
Sterne and Swift to Lewis Carol, Ambrose Bierce, Nikolai Gogol, Flannery
O’Connor, Roald Dahl, or Poppy Z. Brite, the peculiar and absurd, the monstrous
and miraculous, has been a resource for satirists. But it works against itself,
as such. Satire sublimates the visceral quality of “cosmic horror,” turning
terror into scorn, the gasp of an encounter with the impossible into a knowing
laugh.
In Lincoln in the Bardo,
the style is driven by two forms of humor. The first is a the subtle, “high”
comedy that results from grandiloquence. Hans Vollmann is particularly
susceptible: “It would be difficult to overstate the vivifying effect this
visitation had on our community” (66) he says at one point—a phrase that enacts
what it describes. A similar kind of comedy occurs when the narrative finds
occasion to laugh at its own efforts at transubstantiation. An angel tells
Betsy Baron, “You are a wave that has crashed upon the shore”; “See, I don’t
get that,” Betsy replies.
The other, less subtle
mode is verbal vaudeville, as in this banter between the besotted Barons; note
that I’ve taken the liberty called for by the text and treated it as a script:
Betsy Baron: Remember that time we left little Eddie at the
Parade Ground?
Eddie Baron: After the Polk watdoyoucallit.
Betsy: We’d had a few.
Eddie: Didn’t hurt him.
Betsy: Might’ve helped
him.
Eddie: Made him tougher.
Betsy: If a horse steps on
you, you do not die.
Eddie: You might limp a
bit.
Betsy: And after that be
scared of horses.
Eddie: And dogs.
Betsy: But wandering
around in a crowd for five hours? Does not kill you.
Eddie: What I think? I
think it helps you. Because then you know how to wander around in a crowd for
five hours without crying or panicking.
Betsy: Well, he cred and
panicked a little. Once he got home. (85-6)
This is Saunders the
working-class satirist at his best. Shades of Gilbert and Sullivan, Abbot and
Costello, Didi and Gogo, Lucy and Ricky, Cheech and Chong. “These were the
Barons,” Roger Bevins tells us a few lines later, sounding exactly like a
vaudeville mc asking for applause.
Kakutani’s right to
observe that “The supernatural chatter can grow
tedious at times”; this is Saunders[MR1] ’ first
novel; at times it feels premature. It doesn’t have a novel’s scope, despite
its grand themes. It feels like a novella that’s been puffed up (Saunders’ best
novella is “Bounty,” and his long short stories often share a breadth and tempo
with Gogol’s). It deserves its length when the antics are brought to earth. Bevins,
Saunders’ chief narrator, is the true protagonist. He’s an aesthetician, in the
sense meant by Hoffmann; his spirit (dis)embodies democracy. He articulates a
modernist sublime that finds expression in the “stuff” of ordinary life. Unlike
the other characters, who can’t give up some singular wish or desire, Bevins
can’t give up multiplicity. Life, in its endless particularity, its
embeddedness within itself, is the pleasure that keeps him from heaven. He won’t
forgo “Such things as, for example:
two fresh-shorn lambs bleat in a new-mown field; four
parallel blind-cast linear shadows creep across a sleeping tabby’s midday
flank; down a bleached-slate roof and into a patch of wilting heather bounce
nine gut-loosened acorns; up past a shaving fellow wafts the smell of a warming
griddle (and early morning pot-clang and kitchen-girl chatter); in a nearby
harbor a mansion-sized schooner tilts to port, sent so by a flag-rippling,
chime-inciting breeze that cause, in a port-side schoolyard, a chorus of
childish squeals and the mad barking of what sounds like a dozen—
Saunders’ realization that this list may only be interrupted is
credit to a keen perception of the multitude. It is this speech that causes
Bevins to become a “fleshly bouquet” of sensory organs. The grotesque beauty of
multiplicity is his sublime. In this, his work resembles that of Hoffmann’s, Poe’s,
Wharton’s, Joan Lindsay’s, Mielville’s, or VandeerMeer’s. It is unquestionably
weird.
NEXT: At halftime we interrupt this
broadcast to review a previously unscheduled weird novel: Jon Bassoff’s The
Drive-Thru Crematorium (2019), published by Eraserhead press.
[MR1]
