“The question at the heart of the matter, I think, is pretty simple,” said George Saunders in 2017, when he accepted the Man Booker Prize for his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. “Do we respond to fear with exclusion and negative projection and violence, or do we take that ancient, great leap of faith and do our best to respond with love — and with faith in the idea that what seems other is actually not other at all, but just us on a different day?”
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The United States was one year into the Trump presidency, and like many artists at the time, Saunders was using his platform to address mounting concerns of intolerance and fanaticism. But even then, he did so with an inimitable spark of empathy. While accepting the award for a book that was essentially a celebration of our shared humanity, he asked us to question the very notion of the “other” — that figurehead of hate and fear that had cast its shadow on everything we knew. As deftly as the writer turns his characters from caricatures into complex beings, he reminded the world that the “other” was far more like ourselves than we realised.
The strength of short stories
Five years, a pandemic and a presidency later, Lincoln in the Bardo remains Saunders’ sole novel to date. Despite his first foray into long-form fiction being validated by one of the highest accolades of the literary world, the Pastoralia author chose to make his long-awaited return to fiction this year with another anthology of short stories, Liberation Day. “For me, short stories allow for a multiplicity of views,” he says over a Zoom call. “There are a lot of different stances within the book, and that feels truthful to the moment. Here in the States we can’t even agree on what is true any more, so that sort of kaleidoscopic effect needs to be represented.”
It is clear that the years have not dulled his fascination for the short story. If the nine stories in Liberation Day are any indication, the author is still in love with the possibilities of the form. “No matter where a writer starts from — a political intention, a purely aesthetic intention, or the intention to write about their unique experience in the world — it all starts with sentences arranged chronologically on the page,” he says. “That is why I keep writing short stories; because they keep eluding me. At 63 years old, I am still fascinated by them.”
Liberation Day is arguably Saunders’ most overtly political work of fiction to date. In fact, most critics have noticed a shift in mood (some not entirely complimentary — Colin Barrett described it as “more muted and uncertain” for The New York Times) that starkly contrasts the wild absurdity of his previous anthology, Tenth of December. While the titular story of the collection displays some of the fantastical whimsy that Saunders is known for, it also includes a heated exchange about imperialism, oppression and complicity that resonates sharply in the real world.
In the third story, ‘Love Letter’, the veil of fiction drops almost entirely: A guy comes into a dinner party, takes a dump on the rug in the living room. The guests get excited, yell out in protest. He takes a second dump. The guests feel, ‘Well, yelling didn’t help…’ He takes a third dump on the table, and still no one throws him out. At that point, the sky has become the limit in terms of future dumps.
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“In the United States, politics is very front-of-mind for everybody, mainly because it is becoming catastrophic,” adds Saunders, “There are forces that have been loosened that I didn’t really think were present in our country. My approach is very intuitive, but if I am trying to make a real person on the page, then anything that is happening in the world will find a way into the story.”
When books are like horns
Saunders hopes that in times like these, fiction might become a tool that motivates readers to be bold, and act with purpose in the world. In the political chaos of the day, fiction is like a horn, blaring to alert pedestrians that they are in the path of a runaway truck. “The correct response is not nuance or ambiguity, but to jump out of the way,” he insists, before softening, “It is complicated. Honestly, at this point in my life, I see myself as a bit of an ascetic. I am just confused, and agitated, and so I retreat to my writing room, just to get my mind a little bit under control, and infuse a little bit of joy back into my daily life.”
Therein lies the strength of Saunders’ prose. Even as he contends with insoluble questions of politics and faith, right and wrong, and even when his language betrays an urgent call for action — or at the very least, attention — he does so with an unrelenting sense of empathy. His in media res openings throw his readers into a sense of dismay, equal parts confusing and compelling, before he gently guides them through to a place of tenderness. “A story often starts with an initial easy judgment, where you feel a little above the character and separate from her, and works towards a complexification of that judgment, where even if she isn’t a wonderful person, you start to have more tender feelings for her,” he says. “I think that’s really important work.”
This is the sympathetic activism of Saunders. The ability to acknowledge the things we don’t know, and to allow the not knowing to inspire curiosity and conversation, rather than confusion, is a difficult ideal to live up to, but Saunders makes it easier. In his world, it is a joy to watch the strangeness and the absurdity slowly become familiar. The catalyst of this new perspective, Saunders suggests, is craft.
Helping the ‘other’ be seen
“There is a sense that literature is political, which it is and it should be, and that literature is about identity, which again it is and it should be,” he says. “But it is also about technical questions.” As an example, Saunders references Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Nose, which he teaches in his Master of Fine Arts workshop and further examined in his book of essays, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. He recalls how a student pointed out that the story was sexist, and when prompted further, identified that it was because the male character was offered the privilege of an internal monologue while the female character was not.
“If you feel a story is sexist, it probably is,” he concedes. “Sexism or racism or misogyny is always a temporary manifestation of a larger human fault. If you have a sexist story, it just indicates that someone is failing to see somebody else fully; it is simultaneously a moral smudge and also a technical misstep.”
The exercise is eye-opening, allowing us to consider moral failings not as markers of good or evil, but simply as a consequence of people not realising what they haven’t yet realised. Saunders, for his part, is generously optimistic. “I am sure if Gogol was sitting there, he might have been on our side, and said, thanks for telling me that!”
Saunders also recalls how, when he himself was a student, there was a strong yet unconscious bias towards American realism — one that he now realises might have shut out other modes of storytelling. “It would certainly be wonderful to see that there are many different ways of telling stories. So in my workshop, the goal is to interrogate our own approach. We have a writer who is from overseas, and just yesterday, in the middle of a critique, one of the students said, ‘Wait a minute, are we imposing a sort of American bias on this story?’ I could see that the writer felt seen by that.”
Perhaps, in this way, Saunders is upholding fiction to its noblest purpose: to create a space for communion and understanding at a time when newsfeeds threaten to polarise the world beyond repair. “If I write a story, and you read it and you enjoy it, that’s actually kind of a profound thing,” he says. “What it says is, these two human beings from completely different cultures, are huddling together over this invented person, and both of us are kind of in a sense practising our powers of empathy.”
The freelance writer and playwright is based in Mumbai.
