Interview with George Saunders

The folks over at BOMBblog (the blog site for BOMB Magazine) recently posted this two-part interview with fiction writer George Saunders, who will visit JSC in April of 2012 to read from his work.  In the interview, conducted by Patrick Darcey, Saunders discusses "growth as a writer, the place of the writing workshop (including a visit from a drunken Hemingway), and whether man can ever experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head."

Below is an excerpt from the interview that was also reprinted in the new issue of Harper's Magazine.

PD You mentioned earlier about things you keep attempting to do, to see that you can’t do them, though feel compelled to keep trying. And I doubt you’re alone. Are there specific instances of this that loom large?

GS Well, it’s funny—you sent me this question yesterday and I’ve been wrestling with it ever since. It isn’t the case that I have this 300-page sincere novel off to the side. Rather, I think it’s more of a tendency I have to swerve away from certain material or ideas or notions, year after year, and then occasionally look back at the body of work that’s built up, and think: Huh, you still haven’t started on the Big Stuff yet. (I feel especially remiss when I think in terms of scale: where is my epic? Why all of this obsessing on small canvases? This is probably the expected midlife crisis for someone who learned early that if my writing was going to have any power, I was going to have to radically concern myself with the lapidary.) Now, in some cases, this swerving is a good thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought: “You know, what I’d like to do, is write a really big book about some really big city, and my themes would be, just, you know everything, and my main idea stylistically would be, uh, like: All is Allowed!” That has the feeling of something that, in order to avoid becoming a sinkhole, might benefit from a little more, uh. . . .specificity.

But let me tell you a little anecdote, and with apologies, because I’ve been telling this one on the road a bit lately—but it’s somehow central (in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet) to this whole issue for me.

A few years ago I was cutting through Rockefeller Center, and I glanced up and found myself in front of that really nice chocolate shop down there—can’t remember the name of it. But it was early December and they had the window all X-mas-tricked-out, and I got this involuntary thrill of the exact variety I used to get as a kid when I realized X-mas vacation was looming: kind of this presents-are-coming, freedom-is-approaching, life-is-so-beautiful leaping of the heart that felt both totally familiar and entirely fresh. It was corny, it was all Currier & Ives—but the feeling was as real as the pigeons over there on Fifth or that scrap of paper right there, you know? Just a little split-second thrill, really, with that kind of associated imagistic mind-nostalgia burst (pinesmellgoldenpapercookiesnowman) that, again, is as real as more familiar mind-states, like, say, anxiety, or dizziness. So as I was walking away I thought, as us writers are wont to do: “Hey, I wonder if I could use that in a story?” I felt that, yes, I probably could use it—that is, I could probably find a way to generate some text that would convey that sense, make it real, or some pleasure-giving exaggerated version of it—and that was exciting. But then I felt this blowback sense of discomfort, almost dread, that had to do with this feeling of: Well, O.K. butthen what? Or, put more precisely: I was feeling a little insecure with the notion of letting that moment of positive energy just stand there, without some sort of ironic caveat. My first instinct, having written this little vignette (middle-aged man has a mini-burst of happiness), would be, you know, to make an icicle come down and impale him through the head. Or, maybe if I could locate him in some ironic place (a theme park, say (!)) I’d be able to “get away with it.” Which was weird: Dickens would have let it stand. Ditto Tolstoy. If they had to complicate it (i.e., show that this feeling might have repercussions, or might be just part of who this man was, i.e., was not him in his totality) they would have had have the confidence to wait a few hundred pages to do so.

So I’ve seen doing a lot of thinking about that: why do I always feel the need for what we might call the obligatory-edgy.

Now, this gets complicated. Because I first discovered the obligatory-edgy (and the happy effect it had on the energy of my prose) when my work was dying of complete boredom for want of it. So excising this thing (if it is, in fact, “a thing”), at least in theory, can feel like a step backwards. (And I’ve done this a few times over the years, in individual stories that then didn’t fly, at which time I learned the whole lesson over again—I remember one in particular, set in an Episcopal church, that included all sorts of straightforward, precisely rendered, internal monologue bits that represented exactly the theological questions that were tormenting me at the time, and this story was a very nice, sincere, smiling bird, sans wings.)

So edginess can be a way of introducing energy, and/or an appropriate overtone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life. Are there fields of beautiful tulips in the world, through which two well-matched lovers stroll? You bet. But is the world an endless sequence of such fields? Ha. So, to underscore this, maybe we have a crop-duster fly over the tulip-field, and the pilot is listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

In terms of the above (Rockefeller Center) example, that falling icicle has the effect of saying: yes, well, this dude is happy, but there are others out there who are not, and this kind of “I am happy, therefore life must be good and fair” mentality that he is enjoying is not without consequences for the rest of the world, etc., etc., and furthermore, his feeling of happiness is not permanent, since, for example, any minute now something bad might—oops. Icicle. That is, there’s a reason to have that icicle come down through that guy’s head, and that’s to puncture his smugness. (Although that can devolve into, God help us, Moral Fiction—preachy, joyless, over-determined, unhinged from the very real pleasures of living.) But I think one of the problems with the obligatory-edgy is that it is a little impatient: it fails to account for the fact that this is an individual guy, not an emblem of something—there’s time and space in his life for him to be a lot of things. So maybe, today, he’s happy. . .

Also, the obligatory edgy component can also be just that: obligatory, i.e., a tic.

Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean that we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc., etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures, adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness? Beyond that, are we taking as much pleasure in the sensual as we should be: in, for example, the weird ways our towns and cities have accreted, the endless interesting American geographies (a line of U-Hauls 20 feet away from the pioneer graveyard, etc., etc)? Is there joy enough in what we’re doing, because God knows, life is short, and if we don’t learn, by the end, to regard all of this mess with joy, it seems to me we haven’t done our work properly.

Well, speaking of things “devolving,” this is now devolving into the literary equivalent of some middle-aged uncle at a party, ranting about how disappointing all of Creation has become, just in the last few years, especially that a-hole down at the parking garage. And I really don’t mean the above to be anything more than a representation of the kinds of swamp I find myself wallowing in, in order to keep my writing interesting, to me and hopefully to others—more of a gut-check than a manifesto.

And of course, in the end, all of the talk notwithstanding, you go in there and write the scene, and if the icicle version is more interesting than the sincere non-icicle version, you better go with it. Our hero strides away from the Rockefeller Center chocolate shop, visions of sugar-plums dancing in his head—and then you, the writer, look to see where that earlier-mentioned Frisbee is coming from, and do your best to catch it.


Read the rest of the interview here. . . .