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GEORGE SAUNDERS - PART 2The Vice Interview
Do you remember writing your first short story? How old were you? I think I wrote one in third grade in Chicago, about a third-grade kid in Chicago who, in the face of an extreme manpower shortage, gets drafted by the Marines and goes to fight in WWII. This story had the memorable and sensitive last line: “He had killed an amazing 50 Japs!!!” Have you seen much reality television? I ask because in your new story, “Brad Carrigan, American,” you describe a show called Final Twist. In it, some college-age fellows dupe a buddy into an Italian meal, only to reveal to him that his mom is dead, which then morphs into more twists, culminating in the revelation that all the men have not eaten an Italian meal but their own grilled mothers (all of which happens in less words than I probably took to describe it). It feels like this country thrives more and more on its humiliation and embarrassment of friends and loved ones for entertainment. I’m not even thinking of Punk’d per se. Even a lot of pornography is ending up this way, and it is all seen as normal. Nothing is truly entertaining unless someone is in pain. Do you agree, or am I being kind of shrill? No, I’ve noticed the same thing. And I truly don’t know what it’s about, but I think it’s not trivial. For me, the interesting part is that the entities that are producing and promoting these things are corporate entities: the networks and their sponsors. There, my analytical faculty kind of stalls out—I can’t quite understand why this type of product would be so compelling to a corporation. I mean, I think meanness and exploitation and gossip are all pretty natural to human beings, and we’ve been enjoying these things forever. But when corporations get involved, with their built-in superchargers, it gets interesting and, who knows, maybe even dangerous. What happens to our basic (and I would say natural, and instinctive) kindness in the face of such an onslaught? We get numbed-out? My guess is, we find it easier to excuse indifference, rudeness, and cruelty. These shows are modeling relationships for thousands and thousands of people, so I don’t know… I met this young kid on a plane who was on his way back to Iraq, a very nervous, damaged guy. He kept wanting to confess things to me, à la the Ancient Mariner. But the weird thing was, when he confessed things, he did so in exactly the tone and diction used in those “confession boxes” they have on, say, Survivor. The culture, I would say, had damaged his ability to report—those shows and his exposure to them had undermined his very language and his ability to heal himself via storytelling. That sounds like one of your stories. Do you ever use stuff like that, or stuff from your life? I think all story writing is mythological. At least mine is. I’m not really trying to represent what was, but to use what was to gain access to a kind of deeper, more primal, world. I don’t see fiction writing as an attempt to represent the world as it is, but to make another world, totally alternate, that, if we’re lucky, has a moral/spiritual resonance with the “actual” world. For example, a Philip Glass symphony is not an attempt to recreate ambient sound. It is understood to be a highly stylized, patterned thing-in-itself, and when we expose ourselves to it, something happens to our heart, and that thing that happens somehow, mysteriously, makes it more pleasurable to be in the world and, I would say, makes us more passionate, aware, and maybe even more kind. Art can then be seen as a kind of inoculation, designed to make our being in the world more rich, if you know what I mean. Seen this way, the “real world” stuff a story builds up is just the means to an end. Who is the first person you show a story to? My wife. She has great judgment and honesty and, of course, knows me completely, all my tricks and falsenesses. And she has a brilliant impatience with the Merely Artsy—she wants stories to do very high-level moral work (as do I) and she reminds me of this, and forces me to go back this higher-ground when I’m feeling tired and self-satisfied too early. When do you find time to write your own stuff? I don’t imagine that you get done teaching, come home, throw your feet up on the ottoman and turn on the TV while devouring some popcorn. What is a typical day for you like during a semester? The above is exactly what I do. Have you been spying on me? I’m not sure we technically have an “ottoman.” I think he’s actually Albanian. But why quibble? I try to write in the morning, and longer on days when I’m not teaching. We have kids, and have tried to make a decent and normal life for them. When I was younger I think I imagined a more artsy, wild, dysfunctional, Kerouac-ian life. But when we had kids, well, you love them so much and they are all the adventure you could ever wish for. And the great side-benefit of living a relatively normal life is that you get to immerse yourself in the life that is actually being lived by your peers, in the actual country. And that is very rich. INTERVIEW BY JEFF JOHNSON GEORGE SAUNDERS | 1 | 2 | See all articles by this contributor
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