Category: Uncategorized

Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo

You probably know a few things about George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo already: it’s the historical account of Lincoln cradling his son’s body in the graveyard, half told from the perspective of its ghosts. There’s a lot of beautiful stuff in this book. But it leans on two really ambitious concepts: first, to dramatize the inner lives of the dead through some kind of metaphysical action in the graveyard; and second, to tell everything through a chorus. In the end, I appreciate what he’s trying to do, but its a vastly ambitious set of concepts that, for me, underwhelm on execution.
On the mechanics of ghostworld: The action of the book hinged a great deal on the mechanics of ghostworld — which ghost is being eaten alive by roots and why, or is stuck in a burning train car that can only be blown up by a matterlightbloom phenomenon, or remembers or forgets aspects of themselves, or psychically projects themselves with a four foot dick — even whether one can influence Lincoln by stepping into his body and thinking loud thoughts. A lot of this was intended to be about projecting the psychological state of the characters out into the environment — and that’s great in concept. The most meaningful fantasy/speculative elements are about projecting psychic/social conflicts out into the environment, where it can play out on another level for us — making the immaterial in our world more material — offering us a different kind of insight into it.
But for me, the mechanics of ghostworld felt less insightful into character than simply there to serve other aspects of the story — the other ghosts need something to do, and Lincoln’s boy needs to be delayed, so let’s make them fight a root monster. The four foot dick thing sounds funny, and we need some humor here. The ghosts need to want to interact with Lincoln for this to be a story, let’s make them step into his body to try and influence his thoughts. The most insightful moments into the characters were just the characters telling you who they were, which was great. The mechanics of ghostworld and all the little action sequences they went through in between didn’t really shed any more light on them for me, which is to say, I saw them as devices while they were happening, and wasn’t that invested in them.
On the chorus effect: Creating a chorus of the living from history books and a chorus of the dead from all his ghosts, Saunders tries to offer us a big subjectivist philosophical statement about how we experience our world, and finally ourselves. Our world is composed of a thousand perspectives — they conflict, they make noise, they self-contradict with the fashion, yet this is all we have to assemble truth out of — and the most impoverished among us are the ones who are stuck clinging to one slender frame of perspective — their minds winnowing, becoming simpler and simpler, losing all other focus but one that keeps them riveted to their sick boxes, waiting to get better so they can return to fix that one stupid insignificant thing back in their lives.
It’s a really strong concept — and the historical voices worked marvelously, having strong disagreements, tones, and a surprising literary quality. But the execution of the ghost-chorus didn’t thrill me. In Saunders’ ghost-chorus, the lines of text often felt like a third person narrative that had just been cut up, some pronouns adjusted, to fit into the mouths of all his ghosts and subscribe to the given form. It’s a very modernist, Joycean kind of ambition, this polyphonic subjectivist thing. There’s a high bar. And when I read most of it, there’s too much text that isn’t really expanded by coming from the mouths of many rather than the mouth of the author. The perspectives of Vollman, Bevins, Thomas, etc. occasionally conflict or offer their own nuance that deepens what’s going on, but too often they just seem to be handing off a script between them to keep up the form. It doesn’t self-justify.
It’s not that any of this made it an unpleasant book — it’s beautiful, and easy to read if you get the concept — but it didn’t seem to know what to do with its tools. Brought a gun to a knife fight and came out at a draw. I.e., left a lot on the table. And for the humbler scale of its ambition, it might have been just as well leaving some of its more ambitious tools in the toolbox.

The Tree and the Worktable

Many thanks to Jason Jordan, I have a new flash piece of parable out today at decomP magazine, “The Tree and the Worktable.”

I have a rule that if something is ever stuck in your head, you should probably just write it. This began as a little moral argument I was having in my head, walking across town. And I had this self-rejoinder, well, as you all know from the famous parable about uh … well uh …. and it felt like something about moral relativism that we should have in the vocabulary as shorthand, but I didn’t know what I was reaching for. So I sat down and wrote one.

The Ruin of Kasch: A Real Mess of a Marvel

The most difficult book I read in 2018, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, I picked up at the donation table disbursing the personal library of a dead poet to his semblables around Montreal in a dark bar before a reading. It had everything you look for in a fascination: quotes from Italo Calvino and The New Yorker, a scarcely comprehensible synopsis about history, art, philosophy, civilization, unrecognizable classical art on the cover and bits like “establishes a genre all its own” on the sleeve.

And I found it all of that, to be sure. Moving (not even effortlessly, but with a total disregard for the constraints of form) between diligently reported history, direct quotes, bits of historical fiction, free verse, theory, and philosophy, it was a marvelous network of free association, an indeterminate literary feast.

So let’s focus on the good points first.

Spanning centuries, continents, cultures, and languages, The Ruin of Kasch still has, I hope, a core idea about the glue of civilization that it wants to build around. Calasso centers his view of history around a formative myth, the ancient civilization of Kasch, located somewhere in Eastern Africa or the Middle East. In the myth, the kingdom of Kasch was effectively ruled by its priests, who performed ritual sacrifices of kings and other select in accordance with their religious order, which divined the future from the stars. One such select was a great storyteller, who had a plan to avoid his own sacrifice. The storyteller made a practice of telling stories all night that were so irresistible that eventually even the priests had to stop to listen, neglecting their duties of monitoring the stars. As the priests slipped in their abilities to uphold the old order and the storyteller tightened his grip on the rest of the city, he eventually told a story that incited the populace to bloodshed against the priest class, effectuating a revolution that led to the storyteller being crowned king. In the myth, the storyteller’s new order was only able to stretch his natural life, after which the kingdom fell to ruin.

To Calasso, this myth encapsulates the key functions of every society: it engages in sacrifice in order to maintain a given state of social order (isn’t the rule of law always undergirded by violence). But from time to time, a great storyteller or revolutionary or what-have-you will convince society to sacrifice its sacrificers, embrace a new order. The irony for Calasso is that society never removes the element of sacrifice from its social order. It is sacrifice that makes social order possible. It merely substitutes one mode of sacrifice for another. In the end, if the kingdom attempts to eschew sacrifice altogether (the storyteller’s reign), it will only sacrifice itself.

For Calasso, the truly wise may be able to see this transference for what it is. Calasso spends the first hundred pages or so of the text picking apart Talleyrand, a French minister under the Ancien Regime, the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration. Though many regard him a serial traitor, Calasso treats Talleyrand with a reverence that suggests his infinite flexibility to amend himself to the times was a genius, seeing the transference of power and the recasting of stories like legitimacy for what they were – revolutions in the selfsame order of sacrifice.

I’m simplifying what is a very long, tangential, metaphorically and mythically dense work – almost beyond forgiveness. But it’s an overbearing text, to be frank, and for folks like me it helps to break it down to its core.

In the ripples from this argument, Calasso’s daunting knowledge of history and philosophy ornament the tree in a dozen fascinating ways. From his views of capitalism –

wherein reducing everything to an exchange value, a kind of digitality, allows the old priests of sacrifice to be replaced by new priests of continual economic experimentation, and ultimately destruction –

to Freud —

wherein sacrifice and psychological substitution are effectively the same, so as Freud observes the power of any inanely repetitive process to fill the human psyche with a kind of uncanny dread, forcing us to try to numb ourselves (further “sacrifice” or render insensate some aspect of the psyche) in order to protect ourselves, until we at last cannot, which process of repetition, substitution, and sacrifice revolting the psyche is analogized on a civilizational scale to how the old order always eventually overwhelms and repulses its followers –

to Polybius —

who saw forms of government as a cycle, running from monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before starting over, and in which Calasso sees sacrifice as the common element greasing the gears —

you get the idea. The whole of history is on the table. There are no borders to the argument, and it its worst, it feels as though it could care less for structure, either.

At risk of being the ignoramus who exposes himself when all he had to do was act nice and pet the book, I’ll go ahead and say that, at a macro level, the book often loses thematic coherence, and often buries its sense in a self-indulgent web of names and intellectual ballyhoosiery that one is often tempted to suspect there is not nearly so much sense there as pretended at.

Consider how seriously opaque it can make itself (and pity the reader who picked it up before Wikipedia was available):

“Just as Benjamin viewed Baroque tragic drama through the window of the Expressionist morgue, so Schmitt saw wars of religion in terms of Rathenau’s bloodstained fur coat, the incursions of von Salomon’s outlaws, and the carts loaded with banknotes during the Weimar Republic’s inflation.”

Which is the first sentence of a section that is preceded and followed by no real explanation of those names or references.

Or how abstruse:

“(… to listen to a story that is a person, time changed into space, a space that expands and coils in time, resting on a false present, a radiant hollow facing an echoing past; not knowing where your feet are sinking, but surrounded by noble architectural remnants, no more solid than a filmy layer covering other surfaces, whose enamel no one will mar; traversing them, we once again find ourselves on contemporary soil, brimming with ephemeral, overlapping memories – but like visitors this time, alien to this and every other ground.”

If you just had a mental sensation akin to trying to sneeze so hard that your whole brain squished forward half an inch and then went nowhere, that’s correct.

Or, lest you fear that he’s simply too smart to follow at all:

“What are the dead for us, if not – first and foremost – books? Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet these two forms of belief converge. Concretized as portable objects that accompany us – our parasites, persecutors, comforters – the dead have settled on the written page. Their power has never diminished, even though it has been wondrously transformed.”

Which is to say, the dead live on in books. *Mindblown.gif*

And that’s just picking from the last few pages, when I started saying to myself, wish I’d highlighted some of the nonsense, though.

So my TL;DR boils down to this: it’s a visionary text in the sense that blending history, historical fiction, poetry, philosophy and theory all into one freeform package gives Calasso the liberty to make associations by poetic logic between disciplines that frankly feel magical sometimes, lighting an obscurity just enough for its murky dimensions to feel divine, and he uses his freedom to light some profound ideas at the heart of this book, and make whole threads of history seem to leap into coherence.

And yet, in so vastly indulging himself, he has also lost a great deal of the necessary discipline to build a real arc in the work, to make it mean something through each juncture of its outline, and so cheats that squinting reader who is dead sure there is something buried in that impenetrable web of sense and helps himself to an often undeserved portion of their attention for many meandering pages at a time.

Behold, and take caution.