2: Histories

PRIMARY:

• Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)
• George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)

SECONDARY:

• Robert Chodat, “That Horeb, That Kansas: Evolution and the Modernity of Marilynne Robinson”, American Literary History, 28: 2 (Summer 2016), pp. 328–361 *
• Samuel Cohen, After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Iowa UP, 2009) *
• Philip Coleman and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017)
• Alex Engebreston, Understanding Marilynne Robinson
• Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (2010) *
• Shannon L. Mariotti and Joseph H. Lane (eds.), A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson (2016)
• Robinson, What are We Doing Here? (2018)
• Rachel Sykes, “Reading for Quiet in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels”, Critique, 58:2 (2017), pp. 108-120 *

Pre-Class Notes

FYI, just seen this in the latest issue of American Literary History – useful on the intersection of the ‘post-secular’ and human rights discourse in Gilead . I’ve also found this very helpful in thinking about Lincoln in the Bardo. [MK]

With Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, I was primarily interested in the role of polyvocality in the text, and its usefulness in discussing the liminal space between the existing and the non-existent; I had encountered polyvocality primarily as a necessary tool taken up by black female writers navigating through different modes of, or rather, boundaries placed upon their identities and the different subjectivities that emerge from issues of race, class, and gender. But Saunders uses multiplicity of voices in a much more literal and formal sense; here the polyphonic text pushes the limit of the novel beyond the traditional boundaries of the narrator, text, and reader, and instead creates a space in which everyone participates in narrating, observing, and interacting with the novel, almost in time, in ways usually only reserved for stage plays. The book thus often betrays its origins as a play, clamoring with voices of confused and observant ghosts, but which allows Saunders to draw out both theatrical narration as well as intimate interior monologues from his speaker/characters. Thompson in Method Reading reasons that the mode in which Saunders writes embodies his ideas about the form of novel as a kind of spectral experience, a “fictional embodiment” , while also reflecting the way in which the ghosts in the novel are able to cohabit one another. The novel anticipates a kind of performative and active reading that forces the reader into a similar fictional inhabitation, navigating through the purgatory of the ghosts, implicated in the plot, particularly when the perspective turns into a first-person plural toward the climax. The idea of dismantling the novel’s form and its own fictional fourth wall has been a keen experiment for decades now, but I appreciated Saunders’ approach, perhaps more so for its capacity to require empathy for multitudinous voices/characters. 

Robinson’s Gilead, on the other hand, is an epistolary domestic novel; as Understanding Marilynne Robinson partly observes, the action is mostly interior, the pace only as fast as the dying pastor’s musings, and as honest or dishonest as a father’s sermon to his child might be. As someone who writes creative prose mostly in the first and second person, I found it primarily interesting to engage in the usefulness of the form of a letter/diary to young son to follow, in lieu of a conventional plot or chronological series of events, an interior train of thought and belief; It was thus refreshing to read Hungerford’s claim that “the discourse of reconciliation . . . is defined by second person address”; the second-person address gains momentum, I think, because it largely hinges on the narrator/writer’s faith that it will reach the addressee; somewhat hopeless, somewhat ungrounded, much in the same way that Ames upholds his belief, that he “must tell his congregation ‘even if no one listened or understood.’” The approach Robinson took, then, seemed apt for both its attempt to create a generational dialogue and to champion the utterly American, “vague” yet staunch Eisenhower-faith in the value of religion. [JK]

–

In an essay about the effect of polyphony in George Saunders’ short stories, Robert Wilson remarks:

‘Saunders argues that by losing oneself in a text and giving ear to the voices of the characters, one may find on’s capacity for compassion deepend: while most satire works by seeing others as “assholes,” fictions, says Saunders, “works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.”’
(Wilson, “Microdialogues and Polyphony in ‘Victory Lap’, in Coleman and Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders: Critical Essays (2017), 222.)

Following Lucas Thompson’s “Method Reading”, that configuration might more aptly become: We are Them, at least for a Day. In other words, I agree with Thompson’s assessment of performative in Lincoln in the Bardo and, to an extent, the performativity of the reading-act.

However, in light of the quote from Wilson (above), I want to propose one slight addition, or qualification, to Thompson’s suggestion that method reading produces the possibility of greater self-knowledge, in some senses self-actualization. Maybe more than the transformative, literally (or literary?) transportative power of self-knowledge, I think that Saunders’ novel is about the restorative effect of compassion. In that pre-climactic scene of mass l’occupation of the president, the whole graveyard corporeally cohabitates, some of them even wilfully changing the shape of their very (spectral) bodies to accommodate his presence.** The experience is tripartite: felt (the ghosts experience each other’s feelings), formal (the novel’s polyphony is intensified as pronouns are confused and narrations exchanged), and performative (as Thompson explains, the reader is drawn into imaginative identification). How much more literal a performance of empathy could their be?

We may extrapolate, then, that the source of the self-knowledge Thompson identifies as the final hurdle for the ghost’s release from purgatory (or, the Bardo, to use Saunder’s carefully chosen non-Christian term), is actually in the practice of compassion. For them, bodily and literarily literal; for the readers, in the performative act of reading.

If, for Saunders, the performance exists in the reading-act, for Robinson, in Gilead, the performance exists instead in the act of writing. Arguably akin to the concept of compassion (albeit likely encompassing a larger prerogative), Robinson’s conception of performance is bound closely to the experience of belief. I say this in light of Amy Hungerford’s chapter on belief in Robinson’s novels, wherein she suggests that … ‘the modern Christian practitioner in America … cannot live religiously without on occasion trying to articulate that knowledge… Articulating the knowledge is part of the practice.’ (Hungerford, “The Literary Practice of Belief,” in Postmodern Belief (2010), 112.)

In Gilead, I suggest, the insinuation is that the narrating Reverend Ames is, in fact, performing his belief in the very practice of writing about it in this letter to his son. I’m straying into speech-act theory here; the act of writing is the act of faith. In fact, Ames’ composition of this novel-length letter echoes strongly his nighttime composition of the many sermons he preached during his dark and lonely years, a period that Robinson references regularly, reinforcing his feats of devotion. Conversely, it is only when the other Reverend Ames, our narrator’s father, stops writing sermons, that is stops demonstrating his faith, that he becomes apostate, as if his only defense against his eldest son’s cosmpolitan, European atheism were the language with which he could speak his belief.

Just as Saunders uses Lincoln in the Bardo to ask us to think about what (active) position we occupy as readers, it therefore appears that Robinson is asking us to reflect on what she – or even we – might achieve by writing. That is, a demonstration of belief. In Gilead, it is Ames’ needed affirmation of belief in an omniscient God (as he moves towards death and away from his son and the wildly different world the latter will inhabit). Nevertheless, I think we might read in other writerly performances the demonstration of other, more secular, beliefs as well.

** I am out of space, but I would like to posit a parallel between the ghosts inhabiting eachother’s (spectral) bodies and the concurrence of the textual bodies of Gilead and Home, which actually directly reproduces sections of the former’s dialogue and narrative. In this way, we can start to look at the function of compassion in Robinson’s work as well, particularly as it might relate to the corporeally-grounded act of the sacrament, of partaking of another’s body, noting that Thompson also observes Saunders’ empathizing to have a sacramental quality.

[MS]

—

The first note I made on Lincoln in the Bardosimply reads ‘collaborative’. The obvious rapport between vollman and bevins iii in the opening chapter seems well-established, yet there is a sense that the ability of these narrators to enhance one another’s narratives is set against a sort of “working through” of their individual experiences. They rely on each other to remain grounded, strange though it may seem for two souls in purgatory to wish to remain grounded when a whole chapter is dedicated to the speed at which younger souls may move on. I note this initial collaboration only to note the unwinding of it that follows in as early as the third chapter, even if this unwinding is not, by this point, overt. The various descriptions of spun sugar at Lincoln’s reception are very close to one another, referring either to stars and stripes or to Lady Liberty. The overlapping patriotism of the descriptions provided allow the grandeur of the evening that each narrative (each source? each text?) purports to describe to temporarily mask the inconsistencies. It is not until Chapter V that it becomes completely obvious that these accounts are outright contradictory, which serves to cast doubt on the validity of any account presented. Hari Kunzru’s review of the text in The Guardian points to Saunders attempting ‘to show that observers can be unreliable […] and that even such questions as whether the moon shone or not on a particular night can be distorted by memory.’ However, this doubt appears to me not so much an issue of the ‘unreliable narrator’ as much as it draws attention to the fact that each narrator believes their account to be true, distorted though it may be. This set up makes for a fantastic read. The one thing I haven’t been able to get over in the novel, though, is my inability to interpret anybody who isn’t in the crypt as a character. I’m not sure if this is because I believe the rest of the voices to be purely narrators, fictionalised or not, or because of the historical element of the text. Hopefully I’ll have made some headway with this dilemma by Monday!

Kunzru also describes Lincoln in the Bardoas Victorian Gothic, but it is Gilead that felt oddly Gothic to me – its representation of time and memory is uncanny. I think this is in part due to the continuous revisiting and enhancing of the same memories and in part due to the fact that John is not only reminding some assumed version of his son of memories that the two of them share, but imparting his own memories to a person who did not experience them alongside him. For John’s son, reading this letter will not be a recall of a past but an imagination taking place in the present; something familiar will become something that cannot be fully comprehended and fully experienced. (Thinking in the mode of the uncanny I referred then to John’s memories as homely – I’m not sure this is completely true, and so I’ve settled on ‘familiar’ for now.) In this way Gilead creates the same sense of the unattainable truth as we find in Lincoln in the Bardo.  [RF]

———-

As Spencer Morrison relates, Gilead functions as a “proleptic Bildungsroman” which “leaves that maturation [his son] to be imagined, probing instead its conditions of possibility” (461). With Ames’ direct paternal role permanently deferred, the novel develops around Ames as he contemplates how he can engage with this unrealizable future, which takes the form of an extended epistolary narrative addressed to his son. Yet, the most interesting thing about his letter is its scope; instead of projecting any clear directive or recommendation to his son–which might better serve as a “responsibility to protect” his son from the “wilderness” referred to on page 135 of Gilead–Ames leave a series of loose stories that deal mainly with Ames’ self-reflection (Morrison 462).  It is at this point of self-reflection I think Morrison’s discussion intersects with Rachael Sykes in an important way; namely, why in the face of not being able to participate in his son’s life does Ames forgo a more action oriented speech (to “shout,” per say), opting for the “quiet” introspective and passive model Sykes thinks is indicative of the novel’s style. What this model inevitably leaves for his son is a sense of the world that is “radically limited (Robinson 163).” An “epistemological uncertainty” in both religious and secular claims which Morrison thinks is symptomatic of the post-secular age in Gilead (459). Albeit recording a sense of how the child’s father might have thought, which I find to be the beauty of the novel (the only way the son might actually capture his father’s essence), the quiet’s inaction excludes the main “actions” of the novel: the racial politics in the town, as well as understanding Ames’ grandfather’s actions–the “political quietism […] rarely expresses discomfort at the social, economic, and racial inequality he witnesses,” an analysis I think that carefully conjoins quiet with quietism (Sykes 116). It is that striking dilemma within this novel which upholds the beauty of a private hermeneutic of various, isolated events while simultaneously showing the inability to interpret the most important afflictions of race in America. In that sense, the “protection” Ames’ provides becomes sadly synonymous with suppression. I also mentioned the role of the grandfather, mainly because I think he provides the counterpart to Ames. The grandfather is the unquiet character who’s act of will left the life of contemplation, and perhaps this is the reason Ames is so unable to interpret him (I still need to think more on this). At least in terms of the American “now,” Gilead brings forth the quiet and quietism, specifically its effect on the human spirit (contrary to the “white noise” of media consumption writers have mentioned to be indicative of the age), as an important topic to discuss in literature for the 21st century. 

Although I have little to say about this idea now, I will mention it nonetheless, and I will hopefully develop the idea further over the next few days: Both these novels occur in times very far from the present, but both were written contemporaneously, and we read them in the present. I guess the question goes: in what ways is this past more present than we think? Nostalgia comes to mind?

For Saunders I am sure many people will write and discuss the cemetery chapters, but I’m particularly interested in the citational chapters; mainly because it’s such an original style. I think Saunders problematizes historical writing much to his own advantage. In Chapter V we are presented with the contradictory accounts of the moon, which is to say that history itself becomes interpretative and opens the floodgates for the imagination Saunders adds to his citational excavation. It is similar in ways to the imaginative liberty that Egan takes with developing a literature based on a sympathy towards the Other—to the Sashas, Dollys, and Jules of the world. [BJS]

---

Lincoln in the Bardo seems one of the strangest novels I’ve read in significant while – and that stands as a distinct compliment. Franzen wrote that Saunders ‘makes the all-but-impossible look effortless’, and indeed one of the most impressive aspects for me was how easily the novel read: how fast, compelling and compassionate the style while that style is itself achieving remarkable things. The chapters which play out as melange of historical quotations were, often, the most moving of the lot – and what does it say to have a writer, and one so often lauded for his linguistic idiosyncrasy, his very individual verbal brio, who achieves such spell of emotion in words which are not his own?  

It interrogates, in part, the nature of composition. The quotations become Saunders’ own, ‘own’ in the chapter-by-chapter, whole-story sense, by the nature of his selection and combination of the material. In a sense, it’s an almost classic modernist collage aesthetic, particularly in combination with those frenzied, half-parodic polyphonies we get in the other chapters – the more chaotic of which are very reminiscent of the ‘Circe’ episode in Ulysses (the dramatic form in/as the novel, the similar style of humour, the similar emphasis on dialect / vocal oddities). But in the utter literalism of that collaging – not a word changed, and the references directly annotated in good academic fashion – it’s a very bold, naked take on that method. It draws attention to the author as, perhaps, a unifying temperament / compassion rather than a unifying pen / keyboard. His importance to the text is in how he pieces together the many contingent stories and possibilities that history may give us. 

There are inevitably many perspectives on any event of such drama/public consciousness as Willie Lincoln’s death, many accounts of many different tones – these are the materials from which any writer of historical fiction will construct their own narrative. In doing so, they’re choosing an individual ideological perspective, they’re deciding – by the very nature of what they use – a possible meaning of that history out of an almost infinite variety. It is, in a sense, an important ethical question, if only because this idea of selection, with exclusion as the ideological flip-side, is a necessity of fiction. The writer-as-god, as tyrant-over-history, exploiter of life/character, etc. The bravery or intrigue of Saunder’s use of all these direct quotations is that he lays this process open. He shows the disjuncts of the possible material out there, and what the writer of historical fiction has to choose between: Lincoln was ugly/sad-looking/handsome, the moon was shining/obscured/mysterious, there was/wasn’t a storm, etc. Saunders highlights the machinery of selection, he highlights the potentially monopolising, invariably excluding ways in which we read history. This, I think, is very important. All these details build a perspective of things which can easily become enshrined as a reality of things. That Lincoln was ugly/nobly-morose here is a narrative choice which is invariably part of other, wider narratives: e.g. politically, the civil war was good/bad; in relation to Willie’s death, life is/isn’t tragic. 

Fiction’s ethical importance lies partly, perhaps, in its ability to be subtle – to be discriminating in an open-minded, rangingly sympathetic, constantly sensitive way. It has to take account of the mass of narrative possibilities, and in building its own it has the ability to do so in more or less crude ways. The more sensitive, the more compassionate, the more human, the deeper the ideological perspective. Differences of sensitivity are the differences, in part, between cant and good fiction. By highlighting, in experimental, naked fashion, this process, and not flattening out the dissonances (he quotes those saying Lincoln was ugly and sad and noble and handsome), Saunders in part transplants this necessity of choice and measurement upon the reader, and shows them the game of composition that any story of history must inevitably be.  [MBW]

—–

I am very interested in Robinson’s assertion of the novel providing and working from an alternative ‘data’, in opposition to Darwinism’s conception of kinship, in order to reassert human sympathy (Chodat). I found both Lincoln in the Bardo and Gilead to be strangely disorientating to read, I think predominantly because they make such us of the notions of transcendence and the universality of human experience, and their depiction of faith in (or in Saunders’ case the actual depiction of) the human soul as separate from the material body. It is clear in Gilead that for Robinson the notion of the soul is intrinsically linked to an idealist metaphysics by which knowledge through literature, and literary language, of the soul enables glimpses of a greater unity, of the nature of reality. Seeing the moon, John Ames reflects:

‘Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for something. [. . .]

                  It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language.’ (p.136)

I think that Lucas Thompson’s theory of ‘Method Reading’, and his reading of Lincoln, is extremely relevant to my own experience of reading Gilead. As an atheist who tends to shy away from overtly theological texts, I was initially alienated by the character of Ames and by such unashamedly devout language. Yet being immersed in Ames’s thoughts forces the reader to take such musings at his quiet pace, and in relation to a web of human relationships which demand emotional understanding. The address to the son who takes so little a part in the novel imbues the text with a tone of love, and the knowledge of certain loss and separation. Once the reader begins to understand this tone, the sermonic forms of allegory, typology and metaphor, which link everyday experience back to a Christian god, become something quite comprehensible:

‘your mother could not love you more of take greater pride in you. She has watched every moment of your life, almost, and she loves you as God does, to the marrow of your bones. So that is the honouring of the child. You see how it is godlike to love the being of someone. Your existence is a delight to us.’ (p.155)

I admire the prioritising of ‘compassionate imagination’ over the question of what ‘being’ exactly entails, that ‘you can assert the existence of something – Being – having not the slightest notion of what it is’ (p. 203).

It perhaps goes without saying that I found parts of Lincoln in the Bardo incredibly poignant – almost agonising to read. But I suspect that the value of this awareness of Lincoln’s pain comes particularly in the final incursion into his mind by roger bevens iii and hans vollman, in which the two spirits speak Lincoln’s thoughts on suffering and premature death:

‘Did the thing merit it. Merit the killing. On the surface it was a technicality (mere Union) but seen deeper, it was something more. How should men live? How could men live? […]               roger bevins iii’ (p. 307)

The at-times bizarre world of the graveyard bardo Saunders creates becomes a frame in which the loss of Willie comes to represent by synecdoche the sons of America lost in the Civil War. As with Robinson’s tendency towards metaphor, this unashamed use of a grand narrative links moral decision making to the experience of individual love and loss, through the ability of the human mind to imaginatively generalise this pain. The sharing of bodies and minds allows the chaotic heteroglossia of the graveyard to be crystallized into one illustration of human pain in an image resembling the pieta. [Rhona Jamieson, RJ]

Post-Class Notes

– Gilead

This week, our discussion started with the question of time. Whereas last week, both Franzen and Egan’s texts were clearly rooted in contemporary concerns, Robinson and Saunders are both dealing with (a fictionalised version of) the past. 

However, as Michael pointed out in his presentation, it seems as if Gileadcould have been written at any point in time. More specifically, he argued, drawing on James Wood’s New Yorker review,Gileadis a novel that exists “outside of time”. To support this argument, Michael pointed out that there are almost no dates mentioned to situate the novel, apart from the year our narrator was born (‘I, John Ames, was born in the Year of Our Lord 1880 in the state of Kansas’, Robinson p. 10).

Simultaneously, political events that would date the novel remain on the periphery. This moved our discussion to political quietism in the novel, drawing on Sykes’ essay. Michael rightly pointed out that in Gilead, questions of race, slavery, and violence are incorporated only in their absence. Although Ames himself acknowledges that ‘to do nothing is to do great harm,’ he remains passive. As Sykes argues, he ‘rarely expresses discomfort at the social, economic, and racial inequality he witnesses’ (Sykes, p. 116). There are several examples of this – for one, Ames describes the arson that drove away Gilead’s black community as ‘only a small fire’ with ‘very little damage’ (Robinson p. 171). However, Michael argued (drawing on William Deresiewicz) that when Jack is finally forced to leave Gilead, Robinson is offering a ‘damning indictment of Gilead’s – and, by implication, America’s – moral decline’ (Deresiewicz, p. 28). For a quiet novel, this speaks volumes.

As well as the political and moral failings of Ames, we spoke about the role – and failure – of language in the novel. Michael helpfully drew our attention to the section in which Ames is ‘thinking about the word “just.” […] There is something real signified by that word “just” that proper language won’t acknowledge.’ (Robinson p. 32). Our discussion centred on this tension: Ames wants to describe something as “just”, but using that word doesn’t do it justice. In other words, we need language to perform our faith, but language is insufficient to express it. However, as Rachel rightly pointed out, language is crucial – in fact, religion islanguage, and without it, you can’t express it. Ames’ mediation on the failure (or limits) of language led me to think of theBiblical Tower of Babel, and the fall of language. For a character so spiritual, and a writer so rooted in Christianity, I believe this connection is extremely important.

In fact, the whole novel is, I would argue, intimately interwoven with Ames’ (and thereby Robinson’s) attempt to teach us how to see the world through Ames’ eyes: with the beauty of his faith. As Thompson suggests in a footnote of his essay on “Method Reading”: ‘let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it’ (Thompson, p. 320, footnote 34. Reference to Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), p. 10). In other words, let the novel teach you how to read it. 

Lincoln in the Bardo

From the quiet narrative voice of Ames’ solitary epistolary, we moved onto the cacophony of Lincoln in the Bardo. In her pre-class note, Jane mentioned the concept of polyvocality– something which proliferates throughout Saunders’ novel. 

As readers, we must adjust to the multiplicity of narrators in Saunders’ ghost chapters, as well as a multitude of overlapping, and often contradicting, “historical” sources. Seemingly small details (Did the moon shine? Was Lincoln’s hair black or grey? Was he handsome?) suddenly become very important, and are debated at great length in the novel (and in our class). What this polyvocality shows us is that all history is fiction; that there’s a polyphony to history; and that polyphony is a kind of history in itself. Thus, Saunders’ historical chapters become not only a postmodernist pastiche, but also a commentary on what we deem “historical”.

Soon, however, our discussion moved to the ghosts, and the liminal spaces they occupy. In her presentation, Mehvish pointed out that the ghosts don’t believe they are dead – in fact they avoid the word entirely, using euphemisms such as “sick box” (coffin) or “the previous place” (life before death). Rather than occupying a space in the world, they inhabit a space in-between. As Jane perceptively noted: in the Bardo, liminality becomes the default state of being – and these characters only ever exist in a liminal space.

(A short aside: I found it strange (and interesting) that Saunders chose the Bardo, the relatively unknown Tibetan version of limbo, as the setting for his novel, rather than leaning on the traditional Biblical purgatory figured in the tradition of Dante and Milton. I would be interested in finding more examples where authors draw on alternative spiritual or mythological liminal spaces in their writing.)

Mehvish also called attention to Heidegger’s theory of the “meta-sign”: the ghosts (or people, characters, signs) only exist in relationship to each other. We frequently see that they finish each other’s sentences; and we have the sense that the only thing getting them through their time in the Bardo is each other. Here, Mo drew a comparison to Sartre’s No Exit: while his conclusion is that “Hell is other people”, in the Bardo, the only thing that keeps the ghosts going is exactly other people.

Something I really wanted to explore, but didn’t get to flesh out (no pun intended), is the idea of futurity in both novels. For example, the epistolary is always an address to an imagined future. In Gilead, Morrison argues that the son’s ‘unimaginable future’ is what gives the book narrative energy. Rather than following the traditional pattern of the Bildungsroman, in which we follow the son to maturity, in Morrison’s ‘proleptic Bildungsroman’ the maturation is left ‘to be imagined, probing instead its conditions of possibility.’ (Morrison, p. 461).

Bringing the two texts together

In Ames’ letter, writing becomes a place where the past, present, and future meet. Similarly, asMehvish pointed out in her presentation, the “bodies” of the ghosts become sites where the past, present and future can exist simultaneously. While reading, I noticed that during the “matter-lightblooming phenomenon”, we see the ghost’s past, present, and future selves all at once. To me, this indicates a kind of spectral potentiality. 

I was similarly drawn to the potentiality of ‘l’occupation’ in Lincoln and the Bardo: here, the ghosts can simultaneously occupy and be occupied (by the other ghosts) – an experience which is not dissimilar to becoming occupied with other people’s ideas through the act of reading.

In Thompson’s “Method Reading” essay, he presents the idea that we “project” ourselves onto the characters we’re reading, and we emerge transformed: ‘the reader does not merely identify with, develop sympathies for, or even recognize herself in a fictional character, but actually performs assomeone else’ (Thompson, p. 295). 

For Robinson’s Ames, writing is a solitary pursuit (something which he does alone in his room) – however, it is also in the process of writing his letter that he feels he has been ‘drawn back into this world’. In other words, writing offers him some connection to the world. This reminded me of Thompson’s argument that‘the liberating appeal of literature’ is that it ‘promises a temporary release from the solitude of the self’ (Thompson, p. 298).

When looking at Lincoln in the Bardo, however, strange things happen when the ghosts occupy each other – especially on a linguistic level. For example, when bevins iii and vollman both inhabit Lincoln simultaneously (see Saunders p. 171-176), they initially speak ‘as coherent selves who are momentarily occupying another “I”’; but later, ‘the objective “he” slips into a subjective “we”’ (Thompson, p. 301). 

I was particularly struck by Thompson’s idea that in the act of reading this section, ‘there are in fact four of us inhabiting one body. Five, if you also count Saunders. Infinitely more, if you count all the other readers who have made and will make their way through the scene’ (Thompson, p. 301-302). 

It’s a trippy image, definitely – but strangely compelling, an almost utopian ideal of the postmodern reading experience, in which the lone, solitary reader (such as Robinson’s John Ames) becomes part of a network of readers – a polyvocality of voices. “Reading” each other in this way offers a window of connection. As the ghost of Havens says, as rides inside Lincoln towards the end of the novel: “He was an open book. An openingbook.” (Saunders, p. 312)

A joint reading of Saunders and Robinson, to me, suggests that there is a certain potentiality inherent the act of reading and writing – but it can only be achieved by identifying with other people (characters, ghosts, or future selves).  [Caroline Koktvedgaard, CK]

—

Caroline has given a wonderful summary of our ‘polyvocal’ though never cacophonous discussion on Monday. I’ll just share a couple further thoughts. 

I was a little nervous about pairing these texts because, on the face of it, they seem so different: it would be easy to think of Lincoln as the stylistically ‘experimental’ novel and of Gilead as simply ‘conservative’. But we discussed how both novels share a preoccupation with voice that complicates this. They’re both, at a formal level, interested in the texture or even architecture of narrative voice (I realise that I’m thinking about architecture because of the references in Gilead to George Herbert’s wonderful poetry),  and with the the kinds of intimacy that voice can create (something the Thompson essay explored). Saunders on voice:

‘The prime quality of literary prose – that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it) – is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy’. 

Caroline mentions the place of futurity in historical fiction,  and this is something I’ve also been wondering about: I’m thinking back also to The Corrections and to Enid, for whom life begins at 75, or the intersecting dystopian futurity and 70s nostalgia in Goon Squad. What kinds of future are imaginable in the present, in the novel today? 

Finally, one thing I brought up near the end of class, and which I’ve been thinking more about since – partly because I’m trying to write something about the idea of the ‘Obama Novel’ – is the concept of presidentialism and Lincoln’s role in the novel. We touched on how we might think of the bardo as a kind of metaphor for or image of the body politic, and that the mass occupation of Lincoln at the end is the final manifestation of this. One thing these novel teach us (to return to the great Cavell quote), or at least try to engage us in, is thinking about how to cultivate certain kinds of attachments within the novel-space – to ‘identify’ with characters, or to ’embody’, in Thompson’s terms, views that aren’t our own – and that this training in attachment has a civic dimension and application. And Saunders in particular seems interested in how we already do a version of this ‘inhabiting’ in public life through the symbolic figure of the president. It’s interesting in this regard to read the novel alongside Saunders’ New Yorker piece about the 2016 election. [MK]