George Saunders’ new ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ brilliantly parts the veil
“These young ones are not meant to tarry.”
So ominously intones one of the many ghosts who narrates George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo” upon observing the young new tenant in the graveyard. There are many spirits in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery: a portly man, recently married; a heartbroken lover; a reverend; a mother of three; a foulmouthed pair of drunkards; dozens more. They form a veritable American chorus of pain in the Bardo, a Tibetan term for “transitional state.”
These ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts. They were hurt in some way, cut down at some critical juncture that manifests as loss and regret. All await some cure or revelation that will free them from their “sick-boxes” and reunite them with the world they so dearly miss.
The boy knows none of this; only that he must wait for his father, who said he would come back for him. His father, President Abraham Lincoln. It’s almost unbearably sad. Then Saunders throws in a fart joke. “My tendency is to sometimes be very serious and morbid and earnest, and other times just to be a goofball,” said Saunders, 58, from Houston, a stop on his nationwide tour with the novel, his first after decades of short stories. “Life is both of those things at once, often in the same instance. A really sad person can fart in an elevator.”
It’s a trademark of Saunders’, that harmonious marriage of dark humor and warm humanism as he explores themes of guilt, mortality and the sublime absurdity of human existence – like Kurt Vonnegut, but if he were a Buddhist with an M.A. in creative writing. That inclination has been evident since his earliest published collection of short stories, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (1996).
“The humor and the seriousness, they’re co-enabling in a way, and the reason you want to do that is so that you can get into the deep truths of both of those states,” Saunders said. “It’s true in life… It’s such a riot to be here, and it’s so terrifying to be here.”
The idea for “Bardo” came nearly two decades ago, when Saunders heard the story of President Lincoln’s dead son, William Wallace “Willie” Lincoln, who was felled by typhoid fever at age 11. While the bloody Civil War raged all around, the story goes, the President visited his son’s crypt at night to hold the child’s body.
Saunders got this image that was like a melding of the Pietà and the Lincoln Memorial.
“Trap. Horrible trap,” thinks Lincoln in “Bardo.” “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.”
How does he – how do any of us – forge on with that awareness?
“The thing that I’m struck by,” said Saunders, “is that in that period of obscene duress, which would break any normal person, not only does (Lincoln) not break, he seemed to get bigger. His love actually expanded.”
Through Lincoln, Saunders tries to answer that impossible question: How is love possible in a world with death? Gradually, light begins to shine through the cracks. Ghosts run amok, scatological humor flies, a great man weeps, and underneath all the philosophical musing and gleeful buffoonery, something huge and true pulses.
“What we’re always looking for in life is some little glimpse of the sacred,” Saunders said. “The role of religion and church, the role of art, is to just for a moment to take that curtain down.”
That it succeeds in shining even a little of its light on one of life’s great questions makes “Bardo” as much a timeless spiritual text as it does a mind-blowing modern novel.