Unease and Interruption in Lincoln in the Bardo
At its opening, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders feels disjointed, its many voices cutting in on one another, as if they’re keeping the reader from focusing on the promised tragedy, its comic interludes, and the story that has already taken flight. Then you realize it’s meant to feel this way.
You think, there’s a story here if I just relax and let it wash over me. Then, if this listening is the only way you have read this book (it was for me) you begin to see. The strange sensory fracturing adds to the paranormality.
The story takes place in a brief span of time, its central event the death of young Willie Lincoln. But the ghostly voices sounding in a graveyard near the crypt where Willie is interred—they are the real story. The cast of talkative characters inhabit the bardo, a concept lifted from Tibetan Buddhism. It’s an intermediate stage between successive lives. Think purgatory minus the guilt and with the inevitability of rebirth yet to come. Their voices range from earnest to cynical with plenty in between along with lashings of irreverence. And what voices they are: 166 of them, including Julianne Moore, David Sedaris, Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon, Saunders himself, his parents, two of his high school teachers, and more, more, more.
The bardo is a reality peopled by ghosts, their perspective obscured by the limitations of their lives and unawareness at their own deaths. It’s a premise admirably suited to an audio reading where you can let the words through without scanning them on the page. Scraps of research make their way into the story along with other commentary of the period, cited as if they’ were impeccably sourced, yet entirely fictional. Some of the voices are tragic, some chilly and precise; others comical in how they straddle the boundary between life and death. Sometimes, in the oddly affected idiom of the book, they seem like ghostly garments, “thinnish things,” yet at other times they feel every bit like “waves that have crashed upon the shore.”
By the time I reached the end, I thought, this works like history doesn’t it? It works the way that history filters down to us, in scraps of narrative from different points of view. Jangling, clashing, fighting for space. And we, who live in our own now, are often oblivious to the fact that what we hold to be true is likewise a mishmash of memory and of narratives true, false, and imagined. All chiming in, calling to be heard, yet freed by the passage of time of any imperatives to listen to one another.
It helps to know what Saunders has to say about how writers write:
Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.
You can almost feel that process, circling back upon itself as the voices weave in and out over and under each other, ribald and earnest, yearning and mocking, each with its own unresolved path—until it falls to Willie to draw the final line. These voices, like all of ours, will end with their stories unfinished. They are a perfect artifice, part of a scripted story built around a history that is very real, that is still being told and retold..
I was at once exhausted by the end of this book, and unable to let it leave my mind—the crypt, the father, the witnesses, the dear, dead boy, reports historical and fictional, and the spaces in between all of them, and between them and me.
