March 2018: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

March's meeting took place at Hazel's house in Horsham to discuss the Booker prize winner.

Rather than just the questions, I have added my notes this time. Feel free to add or challenge!

I was totally hooked by the opening chapter with this charming story of slow blossoming love between hans vollman and his young wife, with its brutally ironic conclusion prior to the consummation of their marriage - even though I didn't really have a clue what was going on and it took me a little while to work out what the ‘sick box’ must be. It took some time to process the idea that ‘fresh’ means freshly dead, and the tensing up and mildly toxic feelings must be rigor mortis. So, on the one hand, death is mild, so much so that the dead aren't even aware, initially, and feel that their state must be temporary (which, in many ways, it is). There is humour in the delicacy with which they discuss their predicament, a delightful ironic euphemism (given that the characters are already dead, so there should be no real way of avoiding that taboo) in phrases like ‘that wild-onion stench the young exude when tarrying’ (p33).

And this is all set against the backdrop of the civil war where death is all around, so that one private grief played out in public is pitted against the immeasurable loss of war, exposing the futility of, well, everything. At times it seems a real existential novel. ‘Everyone laboured under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact;’ (p303)

I doubted the veracity of the accounts in the next seven chapters, initially, and had to check that they were all real. Once I had established that then I really enjoyed the way they were put together in both supporting and contradictory ways to recount the experiences in the Lincoln household in the last few days of Willie Lincoln’s life. The contrast of the ‘loaned tomb’ and the idea that ‘nothing could be more peaceful or beautiful’.

roger bevins III (homosexual suicide) has a propensity to drift off into recollections of the sublime - in nature primarily, but also ‘coloured shirts dancing in the wind’ or ‘a waft of beef broth’; it represents the perfect literary justification for purple prose as he waxes lyrical about all earthly pleasures which are now denied him. So overblown that several times (p141 for example) feel like a reference to Under Milk Wood.

What connects them is their unreadiness to die - hans because he was about to consummate his marriage and roger bevins as he changed his mind about slitting his wrists and killing himself at the last minute.

The names of the dead are not capitalised when those of the living are, perhaps to indicated their non-status. And this would also explain the layout on the page, where the speaker is only identified after the fact. Since these are dead characters they cannot have lines like in a conventional script, and in fact are barely perceptible as people. It is also entirely revolutionary stylistically since it is not just dialogue, they narrate and report each other's speech, so that the ‘world’ as such, is built collectively between characters. It is only possible to discern who has spoken after they have said it. Italics when they are inhabiting someone else, as happens on several occasions to Abraham Lincoln, so that we are also able to have the thoughts of the living, and some of the most profoundly honest thoughts of all, ‘Trap, horrible trap. At one’s birth it is sprung. Some last day must arrive when you will need to get out of this body. Bad enough. Then we bring a baby here. The terms of the trap are compounded. That baby also must depart. All pleasures should be tainted by that knowledge. But hopeful dear us, we forget.’ (P155-156) A technique which allows them to exist simultaneously in one another's minds so that they know each other more completely than one could ever no another, walking in someone else's shoes in a manner reminiscent of Atticus's lessons in To Kill A Mockingbird.

Willie, freshly arrived, sees them as multiples of aspects of themselves, rather than human bodies - hands, eyes, rather than distinct. They are ‘little bit scary’. 

Saunders manages to belittle anything earthly we might hold dear. How ridiculous is A. G. Coombs, for example, who is heard repeatedly to say, ‘Do you know who I am, Sir? They hold me a table at Binlay’s!’ p102. Or professor edmund bloomer who laments his burned research, or lawrence t. decroix his lost pickle factory. And the dead are mocked in other ways, too. Like hans voller’s ‘tremendous member’ which reappears regularly in the narrative so that we are not allowed to forget it. ‘Strange, isn't it? To have dedicated one’s life to a certain venture, neglecting other aspects of one’s life, only to have that venture, in the end, amount to nothing at all, the product of one’s labours utterly forgotten?’ (210)

In order to maintain this status of ‘eternal enslavement’ (104), inhabitants of the bardo must overcome many obstacles. They are ‘much preoccupied with the challenges of staying’ (113) like the temptations, luring them by taking on the guise of loved ones, to follow. The tendrils before they surrender, succumb or capitulate - all verbs which suggest a weakness.

This is a novel about race, class, slavery, life, love and death. Lincoln’s experience in the bardo changes the course of the Civil War; and, significantly, the last voice is that of a slave who has inhabited him.