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.
