George Saunders is a MacArthur Genius Fellow and is considered to be one of the most inventive writers in the English language today. Darkly funny and surreal, his stories frequently unfold in quirky, dystopian settings; his heroes and heroines belong to the wide strata of the American unsung; and his fictional world (like the real world) might chew you up and spit you out, but you will laugh while it happens, and you will wonder. Tenth of December, his most recent collection of stories, won the Folio Prize. Excerpts from an interview:
Some writers have remarked that your stories are so good they want to hit themselves while reading them. How do you reconcile these violent reactions with your essentially non-violent Buddhist tendencies?
Well, I suppose it would only be anti-Buddhist if my stories made me want to hit someone. Which, mostly, they don’t.
Tishani Doshi While writing, do you ever think, ‘Oh, this sounds too much like a George Saunders story!’ I mean, are you ever in danger of parodying yourself?
Yes, weirdly. But when that happens, it just means I’m coasting — I have my eye on “sounding a certain way” rather than trying to really interrogate the fictive moment. And “coasting” is actually the same space we all go into when imitating someone else. So I guess I see the moment of writing like every other moment in life — a chance to either be authentic, or coast — but with a more easily observable result.
I just re-read your essay, The Brain-dead Megaphone, which seems more ominous now given the looming spectacle of Donald J. Trump in the American political arena.Do you have personal views on Trump possibly becoming the next President of your country?
Yes: nausea. I honestly don’t think it will happen. For all of our faults, Americans do not like anyone who takes himself too seriously, or is mean, or is fuelled primarily by anger. At some critical moment (I am hoping and praying), the national psyche will err in favour of someone at least superficially affable. Even our last, aggressive, fearful president — Bush — was known as a “nice guy” in person, and had a legitimately compassionate side. But Trump, in his public presentation, just seems mean. Humourless. Self-worshipping. A bully. And I think that, in the final analysis, Americans don’t go for that set of traits (I hope, I hope).
To what extent do you think it’s important for writers to engage politically in their poetry or fiction?
Well, I think we have to be careful. Propaganda is not literature. The primary stance of the artist, in my view, is one of curiosity and openness — not just “deciding” on an issue and then “demonstrating” it. So my approach is to try to feel my stories deeply — to come (through revision) to really care about the people in my stories, and wish the best for them (even if they are stinkers) and, in this way, try to generate some moral-ethical heft.
Are you generally an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the future of human beings?
Seems to me that both ways of thinking are caused by our (very natural) human desire to stop thinking and go on auto-pilot. If we can say, “Life is great, always!” — that’s one form of auto-pilot. If we say, “Life is terrible, reliably” — that’s another form. But how much harder it is, to abide within the notion that life is both great and terrible, every day, depending on one’s location (physically and psychologically and materially). That’s how I feel about it theoretically. In reality, I tend to be a pessimist in my speech (lots of teasing and making fun of things) and an optimist in my body (usually wake up pretty happy to be alive) and am maybe splitting the difference in my mind…You wouldn’t want to have me in a leadership position — lots of neurotic vacillating.
Some of your characters seem to be beset by a terrific loneliness.Is there a loneliness in America unique from other kinds of lonelinesses in the world?
Yes, I think there is, and it’s a loneliness particularly inspired by how harshly we punish anyone who is not “making it” financially. People work so hard and tend to get very task-obsessed. We are generally a pretty affluent country, lots of opportunity — but our ethos means that if you do fail or falter, it is a very long drop to a very hard surface. So our sense of community suffers, I think. Americans tend to feel alone. Hence (maybe) all the shooting.
But also, ultimately, I think life is lonely. Lonely in the sense that we, many of us feel, deep down, that we are not good enough, not essentially loveable…Also, we are suffering all of the time… so that makes for a sort of existential loneliness. I hope my stories are about that type of loneliness too — a type of loneliness that is exacerbated by the kinds of competition that capitalism inspires and requires.
For a large part of your adult life you lived in a house with three women — your wife and two daughters. Has that changed the kind of person you are, and has any of that worked its way into your writing?
Oh, yes. I was raised in a working-class neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago, back in the 1970s and was, I’d say, sort of low-level, reflexively male, if you know what I mean. Not a misogynist, exactly, I don’t think, but “factory equipped” with the usual lazy male notions of our own assumed superiority. … Well, so then I married an amazing and intelligent and accomplished woman and we had two wonderful daughters, and it struck me, with great force, how terrible and anti-human that privileging of the male was — how bad it was for everybody. Not just for the women but for the men too, who had to uphold those dopy notions, dominate, be strong, etc.… So I guess I’d say that having a wife and daughters instructed me in the virtues of what we might call “feminine wisdom” (although I think it abides in men too, of course): the sense that things are workable, without recourse to anger or violence; the sense that the relations between people don’t have to be so power-laced; the sense that there is power, true power, in tenderness and patience and compassion.
And finally, this might be cheesy, but do you think writing helps you become a better person? Does it allow you to combat some of the terrible things you’re writing about — big pharma, big corporations, big bullies?
I think it can, yes, and your question isn’t cheesy at all. For me, the act of writing and rewriting a piece of fiction is a moral act. Why? Well, your early drafts are flawed: cartoonish, undetailed, intention-laced, agenda-ridden. You have some idea you are trying to export. As you revise, though, the world comes into focus. My fictive worlds tend to get faster, funnier, more specific and (and this is odd) more compassionate. Kinder, let’s say. That happens because, in the rewriting, I am trying to increase the beauty, which requires increasing specificity and truth. So the whole ship moves towards the port called Fairness. Or: Bigness of Heart. In a sense, then, writing can be seen as compassion training-wheels: we slow things down and re-imagine and, in the process, develop the habit of what I’d call “on-the-other-hand thinking.”…There’s that Buddhist idea that we can’t carpet the entire earth but we can equip ourselves with soft shoes — that is, there will never, alas, be a world free of trouble but if our minds can be worked with (and I think writing is a very good way of working with the mind) well, then the “bumps” will be less, and we will, in turn, be in a better position to make such decisions and take such actions as are needed.
