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Reading

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.

Of course, this isn’t a new one – Lincoln in the Bardo was Saunders’s first novel, published in 2017, by which time he was already hailed as a master of the short story. It won the Booker in 2017, and it was listed for the Golden Booker in 2018 (a kind of super Booker covering five decades of winners). Propitious credentials if there ever were any.

Mainly, this is about the death of eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln; he dies shortly after a infamously lavish reception at the Lincoln household, occurring during the civil war, and finds himself in a ‘bardo’ – an intermediary state between life and death. Saunders’s bardo, however, is characteristically weirder than traditional Tibetan Buddhist depictions – the spirits within it are marked by their flaws or causes of death; one character, for example, who died just before consummating his marriage, roams the graveyard with a huge permanently throbbing nob.

That covers the basic story stuff, but it doesn’t give a very good representation of the actual novel, about which the interesting thing is, of course, the form.

The dust jacket reviews claim, that with Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders has invented ‘a new kind of novel.’ This is lofty, though possibly fair. But it’s obviously very difficult to say what constitutes ‘a new kind of novel;’ what level of formal innovation is sufficient?

I’d argue that the basic form here is pastiche – lots of bits from different places stuck together as sheets in papier-mâché – which is not in itself new, if very postmodern. But it is also a sort of radio play. The story alternates between the dialogue of the characters and, I suppose we could say, the dialogue of history – the accounts of contemporary and historical scholars, firsthand witnesses and so on. There is no narration in the strict sense, insofar as every act of narrating is attributed either to a character, facing the audience and smashing the 4th wall, or to one of the commentators, whose text we also imagine as speech. It is all about speech, really, and I’m sure literary critics have been delighted by the opportunity to use the adjective ‘polyphonic.’ Perhaps the most interesting result of all this is how close Saunders has brought prose fiction to drama.

The only real weak point of the novel is a bit at the end, related to giving an in-world reason for Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. That part is a bit didactic for my liking.

For me, this was one of those books which I’d known about for ages but took ages to actually read. Anyone who’s done a Creative Writing degree, or encountered someone who’s done a Creative Writing degree, is familiar with Saunders. This is mainly because of his writing guide (though it feels diminutive to call it that), A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, and because of his related Substack. He’s sort of the patron saint of Creative Writing MAs/MFAs. I had one tutor describe him as ‘everyone’s kindly writing grandfather.’

But I was resistant to picking up Lincoln in the Bardo. I didn’t read it until a friend forced her copy on me and informed me that I had stop halfway through My Struggle vol. 4, finish Lincoln, and give it back to her before she went away. (As usual she had excellent taste and this was sound instruction). I was resistant because, given the Willie Lincoln of it all, I expected it to be very sad.

Is it very sad?

Well, yes, in parts. Not as much as I expected. It’s Saunders – so it’s also very funny. What I appreciated was that it was sad without being gratuitously so.

Reflection

Tragedy in literature and film.

I’d say the thing I hate most in all literature and film is gratuitous sadness. What do I mean by ‘gratuitous sadness?’

Mainly, tragic events that are tacked on for a lazy pathos appeal without being central to the story, or that serve only as unconvincing and avoidable beats in the plot (usually a hero’s journey). Examples include: virtually all deaths in all Disney/Pixar films. I hate events like that because they make me sad whilst also making me angry about being sad.

That’s not to say I’m against sadness in art, not at all, most of my favourite novels probably count as tragedies. But I’m against pointless sadness. I’ve been wondering, though, if there’s a meaningful and defensible position here, rather than just a personal bugbear.

In search of self justification, I turned to James Joyce’s notebooks. I don’t know that they necessarily justified me but they were very interesting.

In particular, I had a look at what I remembered as his Paris and Pola notebooks, though, it has since been figured out by the scholars that there was only one notebook, now known as his Commonplace notebook.

The relevant passage begins (quoting from Ellmann’s The critical writings of James Joyce):

‘Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror.’

He goes on to argue that pity and terror are essentially different from loathing, because the former feelings urge us towards ‘rest’ and the latter away from it.

This ‘rest’ is so important, he says, because it is ‘necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful.’

So we might summarise his position, that the proper feelings of art are only those which prompt aesthetic contemplation. This is fair enough if somewhat high-blown – he was twenty-one after all, but, then again, he was a twenty-one year old James Joyce – but I find his particular choice of feelings to be strange, at least to our modern understanding of the terms.

The fear caused by a cheap horror film, for instance, if not quite terror – is that not an aversive feeling? Of course, Paranormal Activity 3 is by no means a tragedy in the way that Hamlet is a tragedy.

But I suspect that the term ‘loathing’ might be misleading here. I don’t think ‘loathing,’ in our current understanding of the term, is an especially common emotional current in novels and films.

Question

Related to the above: why do we delight in tragic events when they occur in art, when, if those same events occur in real life, they are obviously tragic?

The classical position, I guess, is about catharsis – that art gives us a method of processing emotions at a level of aesthetic remove and without a real stimulus, without jeopardy.

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Blake